Dear God, you and I must talk.
CHAPTER 9
Prayer
God stopped talking to people, by my reckoning, between twenty-two and twenty-five hundred years ago, during the heyday of the Hebrew prophets. Humankind, though they could not have known it at the time, would embark on a new phase.
Here is the difference between men and angels: Angels know everything and can do nothing about it; men know nothing and can do whatever they want. Absolute certainty about anything is anathema to the human condition; free will is unknown to the angelic.
Jeremiah was one of the last prophets of whom we know who actually had conversations—arguments sometimes—with God. The first one came when Jeremiah was just twenty-one years old. Jeremiah tried to convince God that he was too young and callow for the burden of prophecy. And God said that He had known Jeremiah since before he was a glimmer in his parents’ eye, that God had grown and fashioned Jeremiah to this mission the way an artist fits a shape to its landscape. I do not know of an instance when Jeremiah won an argument with God, but I suspect that the experience of verbal combat with His creations was one that the Deity did not relish. The prospect of losing the debate—especially given God’s plans, at the time, for the human race—loomed.
Maybe He does talk to us once in a while. People say they hear from Him, and we dismiss them as deluded or we ascribe ill intentions to them for saying so. Maybe on a rare occasion He does say something here and there, but because of the rarity we cannot be sure, even if He does, and perhaps that is the point.
If we knew for a certainty that God was looking down over our shoulder, how could we be other than perfect? How could we make decisions, moment to moment, on grounds other than that they were right to make? How could we decide to be good if such a decision were foregone? And how would we know whether we were doing good for the light within us or out of respect and fear for the Light peering over our shoulder? How could we grow?
We would all be doomed to be angels.
If God were to come down and say, in that stentorian voice of my imagination, “Norman McCay!” I think that alone would make my day. Even if He had no more to say than that, I would be delighted. Even if He said it in a squeaky off-key voice. In a cracking adolescent voice. I could go with that for a while. I still would be unsure, even self-doubting, the way I was when Wesley’s visions first began to assault my sensibilities. But if God were to talk to me, and I could know it was He, I would willingly, happily go mad for the remainder of my days and wish them to be long.
Meanwhile, I must content myself with our ongoing one-way conversation.
*
“I’m very angry with You, You know. Of course You know.
“I apologize for being angry. Which is not to say I’m not angry still; I am. But I apologize for being angry, and when I stop, if I stop, I’ll probably apologize for having been angry. I know it isn’t a healthy or productive emotion. I have come, over the years, to look upon health and productivity as admirable things and always supposed You did as well.
“Then there came the imminent end of the world—whatever that means—and we stopped talking for a little while. That is, I stopped talking. I stopped talking when You took Ellen, but I started again soon. I stopped talking when I was a kid and my little dog ran off to do whatever it was You wanted her to do instead of make my life fuller, and I started again after a while. Now I’m talking again and I hope You’ve noticed. This doesn’t mean I think things are any better; they’re not. I just didn’t want the world to end while we weren’t on speaking terms, so this is only on a contingency basis. I hope You’ve noticed anyway.
“Listen: I’d appreciate it if the world didn’t end. I know it’s a stretch to change Your plans. All the retooling and rethinking and paperwork. Well, maybe You don’t do paperwork, but there must be something like paperwork involved or else You wouldn’t plan in such long terms.
“Your lackey the Spectre told me that the course is set and it’s just a question of placing blame, and all I’ve got to do is figure out whose fault it is and let him take care of the rest. He was unclear, by the way, whether it was You or he who decided this would be my job. I’m not sure how closely You micromanage his performance. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the fact that You—or even he—saw fit to make me a part of all this. I still wonder why me, but I won’t quibble.
“What I wonder, and I don’t expect You to tell me now, especially while I’m still a little angry—make that really angry, since I can’t see a reason yet to be less angry than I was when I first heard about all this stuff—what I wonder is whether You could see Your way clear to give me a little more flexibility here. The way You did for Ishmael’s mother.
“You remember Ishmael’s mom, Hagar, right? To appease his jealous wife, Abraham sent Hagar and little Ishmael into the desert to fend for themselves. To die, it seemed. And at some point when things looked bleakest, You opened her eyes so she could see a well full of water. I read that carefully, and found it was worded very precisely. You didn’t plant a well there or crack a rock open to create a spring, or say, ‘Let there be water,’ and there was water. You caused her to see, is all the book says.
“No retooling. No rethinking. Probably a minimum of paperwork; maybe just a requisition form or something.
“What I’m asking You to do, if You would, is—when the time comes—just to open my eyes. Okay? No big miracles. No abrogation of Your laws of physics or chemistry. Just if there’s a way through it—the narrowest way through it—and nobody else sees it or thinks to go there, just open my eyes. Give me the sight. Give me the magic words. Give me the desperation, whatever it takes. Just open my eyes. Please.
“I know I said I was angry with You, and I probably am, but I love You.
“And Ellen, too, she should know.
“Amen.”
*
I was sitting in the church. It was dark. There was no heat on. I was in the front pew facing the altar, and, for all I knew, no one had set foot in this place since I left with the Spectre, however long ago that was.
Huddled in my sweater and hunched over in my seat, I finished my prayer, such as it was, unloaded my head from my right hand, and opened my eyes as I rose to my feet.
“I am told to ask you again to accompany me,” the voice from the back of the room said as softly as such a voice could say anything.
The tall white figure wrapped in the green cloak and hood stood slightly bent at the shoulders. Was that humility I saw in his stance? No, Norman, I told myself, don’t ascribe human habits to the divine—or even to the minor functionaries of the divine.
“I have reconsidered my decision, yes,” I said.
I walked purposefully up the aisle and, like Scrooge accommodating the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, grabbed up a swatch of that thick robe in my hand. It felt like the curtain of the Aurora must have felt.
“Let’s go,” I said, and we were off.
CHAPTER 10
Seven Angels
“Where have you taken me? I no longer have any sense of time or place.”
“Time has little meaning where we walk, Norman McCay. We move freely from moment to moment. Guided by your visions I show you only that which we must see. You are disoriented?”
“Enormously. I wasn’t really asleep, but I saw the man in the flag and the eagle rising in the sky. I was dreaming again.”
“Were you?”
*
“America’s not as big as it used to be,” the man in the red-white-and-blue paraphernalia hollered from the crown of the Statue that symbolized liberty to the world. “For Heaven’s sake, Kansas is gone.”
The big blue-vested caricature of a man with the golden eagle collar and mask called himself the Americommando. He declaimed from two hundred feet over the heads of the huddled masses assembled on the little island in the harbor. To either side of him stood the colorfully costumed, heavily armed figures of his handful of allies, those he called his Minutemen.
He spoke of himself in the third person.
“For long years the Americommando and his Minutemen have protected these shores from the threat of foreign powers. In our zeal, we have overlooked the most insidious foreign threat of all.”
Until not long ago, the United Nations had stood in its great vaulted complex in New York City. But given the clandestine terrorism in those days, both from within and without, the danger there came to be too great. Years ago there had been a great explosion at the UN when someone—no one ever had figured out who, though it was probably someone who’d died that day as well—had driven a rented station wagon off an elevated sidewalk through a hurricane fence and smashed the car nose-first onto an ill-patrolled courtyard. Windows had flown from the surrounding buildings and walls had cracked, killing and maiming people. The New United Nations headquarters was a fortified complex on the east side of the fabled city of Metropolis where, at the time the international community had chosen the site, superhuman heroes used to keep their home safe. Now the threat was no longer clandestine; it came plunging through the skies in colorful costumes.
The Americommando vaulted the rail of that weathered crown, tumbling downward toward the crowd.
The Statue, the gift of a foreign ally, had deteriorated to a shadow of her former self. The tines of her crown were broken and ragged. A hole gaped through the penny-thin copper of her chest. The old hairline fracture of her right arm now collected tributaries that looked like swollen capillaries. The sheet metal walls of her relatively new torch were riddled with pinholes, and at night the light glared through in blinding specks. Impact dents and handprints punctuated all of her features. She was first a convenient meeting point for superhuman business, and then a frequent flashpoint for rumbles. Scaffolding for repairs reached only to her waistline and toppled with regularity. It was a wonder that this sacred lady was recognizable at all these days.
In light of this little harbor island’s diminished status as a tourist destination, President Capper had the admirable idea of organizing an immigration checkpoint in the Statue’s base: a barracks in Metropolis Harbor for East Coast immigrants, to function the way Ellis Island once had done. She appointed a new Undersecretary of the Interior to retool the facility, and the project grew into an ambitious ongoing plan to restore the neglected historical sites and national monuments all over the country.
On this day, at the foot of the Statue, masses of would-be Americans teemed, yearning to breathe free. They were of every hue from ebony to sun-sheltered pale. They wore all manner of clothing that any of them might have considered suitable for a long sea or air journey and still consistent with a respectful appearance at the desk of a Department of the Interior intake official. All of them lost and caught again a breath and a heartbeat when first they saw the embattled lady who loomed over the harbor. In her latest guise of a tempest-tossed ancient ruin, she still imposed.
There were too many of them, it is true. Always there were more of them than anyone expected. As a boy I’d learned that in the enormous wave of immigration from 1850 to 1920, the number of people annually seeking a nesting place in the American family topped a million for a few years. I recall a seventh-grade social studies teacher laughing, saying that certainly we could never reach such a figure again. Before my middle age, a new tide brought twice that many every year as a matter of course. Through feast and famine, through peace and war, through serenity and dislocation, through the wiping away and redefinition and abandonment and substitution of one structure of values and politics and sociology after another, they came. Sometimes they said it was for religious freedom. Sometimes for political asylum. Sometimes for economic opportunity. Sometimes just for safety. Lately, with the demise of governments across the globe, they’d come less to avoid the excesses of their rulers than to evade the ineffectiveness of those rulers. The only reason they ever really came was the reason my great-grandfather had given to his son—my grandfather—the first McCay of our line to be born an American: for a home where their daughters and sons could feel free to stay, no more and no less.
In this most unlikely of American moments, these hopeful antecedents crammed waist-to-elbow around the pedestal from whose heights this sacred lady had greeted each sunrise for a century and a half. And a madman, wrapped in nativist misapprehension and wielding an automatic weapon, hurtled into their orderly spiraling line.
“Today the Americommando declares war on the wretched refuse!” he declared as his star-festooned jackboots hit a cleared patch of premium ground and made it shudder. “We can’t house you now. We can’t feed you now. Still, you force yourselves upon us.”
Dozens of the refugees—some because they could understand English, and others because they had seen the body language of tyrants and killers before—took his words as a cue to pitch themselves and their children into the harbor in desperate search of sanctuary.
“At the command of the Braintrust,” the Americommando ordered, “my Minutemen will cleanse America’s shores.”
And at a hidden signal, one presumes from whatever “Braintrust” to which the maniac referred, the others on the crown leapt over its parapets and opened fire, along with their leader below, on the crowd at the Statue’s base.
It got worse.
Out of the southern sky came flashes of light and pellets of flaming energy and an amplified voice:
“The defense of these shores is our responsibility, Americommando! Not yours!”
A trio of paratroopers covered in body suits—one scarlet, one silver, one sapphire—dropped their hokey selves toward the island. They moved stiffly, like automatons, loosing the report of shoulder arms at a rapid clip to intercept and vaporize the fire of the Americommando and his Minutemen.
Nobody on the ground caught any fire at that moment, but the panic into which the crowd flew was vicious. For the most part, I had left off complaining to my companion about the excesses of these problem children or his inaction with regard to them. This example, however, was too appalling.
“They’re tearing through a crowd of humanity competing for the privilege of wiping them out,” I insisted.
“Yes,” the Spectre bothered to say, as impassive as the battered Statue who stood above it all.
“These aren’t heroes,” I croaked. “They’re madmen.”
My ghostly companion had responded already to my previous obvious assertion. It seemed he would rather be silent than redundant.
“Look at this. They battle over territory and presumed authority without any care for who gets caught between them.”
Nothing came from the Spectre as, with uncaring abandon, the forces of chaos put innocents in the path of a riot on this hallowed ground.
Who knew who all these tumblers were or where they’d come from? Who knew how they heard there was a rumble on the wind? Who knew how they ever knew? Nonetheless, they always came out of the ceramics looking for a fight. This time, through whatever means talk of these things circulated within the metahuman community, the word had gotten out to the Old Guard as well.
“Someone should do something!” The words trumpeted from my mouth as from Gabriel’s horn.
Quietly the Spectre deigned to answer: “Indeed.”
And with a ripple in the space above us and a shudder in the history around us, seven graying titans of old descended from the sky.
Superman floated toward the fray, slowly enough so that even the nearly sightless could discern that unmistakable figure as he flashed beams of heat from his eyes to divert danger from the innocent.
Wonder Woman, ageless for all her years, rode the currents of the air in a decaying orbit to the shoreline.
Green Lantern, in a strapless mask framed by thin white hair, wore armor and a green flapping cape and held a great emerald lance before him like a trapeze artist balancing down the air. It glowed almost golden in the sun.
Hawkman, with his spear and ancient mace, braced against the thermals and crowed his battle cry.
Power Woman, ever
imposing and hot of blood, rode feetfirst into the chaos.
The Ray traveled beams of light from the sun, gathering energy to himself to expel surgically in imposition of order.
The Flash, the Fastest Man Alive, blinking in and out of temporal perception, navigated simultaneously through multiple planes and dimensions of reality, holding himself in check to coordinate his entrance with those of his colleagues.
Superman was returned, and thus he drew from seclusion the titans of yesteryear, their emerald flashes and scarlet strobes lighting the darkness of the day. The conflict ended before they reached the ground.
Through whatever arcane means, the Spectre opened my perceptions to all the corners of this little island, its skies, its buildings, the intentions of its occupants, its accosters, and its defenders. I felt the minds and souls of those on and above the island. And the mind and soul that overburned all the others belonged to Superman. He arced through the sky in a sharp descending curve directly to intersect the Americommando. The Man of Steel extended both arms as he approached…
… and whisked by him—never even touching him—with such speed and mass that the sweep of air and its friction tore off the maniac’s breastplate and mask and twisted his face into paroxysms of pain like the face of a pilot-in-training spinning in a runaway centrifuge. Americommando’s weapon fell in shattered pieces of metal to the ground and his armor clattered about him.
Green Lantern and Power Woman went after the innocent victims of the fear that these invaders had engendered. The seven thundering angels arrived before there was any inflicted bloodshed but there were dozens of people in the harbor, fighting to keep afloat in waters as wild as the open sea. The Lantern flew with a green glowing lance in his hands, and I saw then that it was a perpetual manifestation of his power. It was not so much a weapon as a symbol, like the emblem on his chest of the battery—the lantern—from which he derived his power. As he held out his right hand the lance became an extension of his arm, its hilt extended straight and its tip a lengthening beam of light. The beam came down, a green cascade, and widened into the shape of a shovel that scooped up a dozen or more frightened innocents out of the breakwater. If anything, they were more frightened at rising through the air on a platform whose floor now dropped into the shape of a bowl and in which there appeared little holes like those of a colander, draining water. They were scared, but safe.
Kingdom Come Page 11
