“It’s not often a short story collection makes you want to reread William Blake, but Michael Bryson’s Only a Lower Paradise does just that. While Blake presides over the entire work, it is in the longer title story that Bryson’s imaginative use of the great poet’s work reaps high dividends.” – Quill & Quire
“The book’s prose is succinct, Bryson’s imagination is loosey-goosey, and his insights on human behaviour are varied, apt, intelligent but never sanctimonious. Bryson is a writer confidently finding his stride; a new voice with much poise and promise.” – Front & Centre Magazine
“Highly influenced by the works of William Blake, Kurt Vonnegut and Northrop Frye, Bryson makes literary and pop cultural references throughout the collection. Mixing them up like a well-educated bartender, the mythology of our origins is served up with Beatles’ songs.” – Word
* * * * *
ONLY A LOWER PARADISE:
A STORY OF FALLEN ANGELS
AND CONFUSION ON PLANET EARTH
by
Michael Bryson
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PUBLISHED BY:
Only A Lower Paradise:
A Story of Fallen Angels and Confusion on Planet Earth
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Bryson
Cover image © 2011 by Kate O'Rourke
ISBN 978-0-9866206-1-4
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ONLY A LOWER PARADISE:
A STORY OF FALLEN ANGELS AND CONFUSION ON PLANET EARTH
Love and wonder, then, are stages in an imaginative expansion: they establish a permanent unity of subject and object, and they lift us from a world of subject and object to a world of lover and beloved. Yet they afford us only a lower Paradise after all . . . The highest possible state, therefore, is not the union of lover and beloved, but of creator and creature, of energy and form. This latter is the state for which Blake reserves the name Eden.
— Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz.: a Body & asoul.
2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
— William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
* * * * *
CHAPTER 1
Late one fateful day, the sun sinking but still warm in the sky, Martha, my guardian angel, was late. God was dead, and Heaven was in a tizzy. One of Lucifer’s agents had broken the news, uncovering a vast conspiracy at the highest levels of the cosmic order. For three hundred, possibly four hundred years God’s death had been kept a secret. Gabriel was said to be a ringleader, closely aligned with the Holy Ghost. Who had led the coverup was a major source of rumour, though Richard Nixon was sure to be named. It was uncertain at that time whether Jesus would be implicated. The Galactic Times reported he had been away for the past half-century on a fact-finding mission to another dimension, and had not yet returned.
Now that I think about it, the previous time I had seen Martha she had seemed distracted, which was strange, since angels were supposed to be perfect. I remember she told me about the problems she was having finding a set of replacement wings and how her halo had started to fade.
I had a hard time imagining Martha with a halo and wings since she always showed up in my bedroom wearing trackpants and a tanktop. She certainly was perfect, though. Once when we went walking along Venice Beach we were stopped by this guy who said he was a photographer for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. He begged Martha to let him photograph her in the surf, but Martha pulled a used copy of The Second Sex out of her handbag and told him to do some reading. That’s how Martha dealt with problems: she pulled the solution out of her handbag. I’ve seen more than a dozen genuine miracles, a million times more impressive than that book episode, emerge out of that tattered piece of cotton cloth.
The week before she was late she visited me after attending a meeting on the natural re-alignment of the cosmos — an event that took place every twenty billion years. She said I was lucky to be alive, though most of the action was taking place on the other side of the universe. All that would happen on Earth is the stars would probably twinkle about fifty per cent brighter for approximately a week, which in retrospect is an incredibly general statement for an angel to make. They are very keen on numbers, and they are supposedly never wrong. This is why God decided to break the barrier that had existed between Heaven and Earth since the beginning of time, sending angels to the surface of the planet to meddle directly in human affairs. Things had gotten out of control. Things needed to be straightened out. And since angels were perfect . . . but I suppose it wasn’t God who had broken the cosmic membrane. Besides, things weren’t really any worse than they had ever been.
It was ten years ago, right after that whole Y2K fixation, when the first angel appeared openly on Earth. A being calling himself Extreme, complete with twenty-foot wings and a glowing aura, materialized over a crowd of screaming adolescents packed into Madison Square Garden to see aging pop star Madonna’s “Middle-Aged and Frisky” Reunion Tour. The pop star was in the middle of her simulated “Like a Virgin” masturbation sequence when Extreme boomed, “THE WALLS ARE COMING DOWN,” and exploded in a flash of light and rubber, spraying lubricated condoms across the floor and into the first and second sections of the stands. Madonna credited her special effects crew, who denied all knowledge of the event. Two days later, Elijah and Moses walked into the Vatican and demanded an audience with the Pope. They told his Holiness that Extreme was Satan’s agent. The opening of the cosmic membrane had yet to be fine-tuned to prevent the Devil from taking advantage of it. The Pope thanked them, and after posing for photographs with the two members of the Old Testament Hall of Fame, he was spirited off to Heaven for a tête-à-tête with the Commander-in-Chief.
Apparently though, that meeting never took place, since the Pope had yet to return and God, we were told, was dead.
The day Martha was late, she materialized in my closet — her favorite place for materializing — walked over to my bed, and curled up into a shivering ball. She pulled her knees to her chest, dropped her head into her lap, and began trembling. I offered her a blanket, but she refused it and motioned for me to fetch her a coffee.
When I returned with a steaming cup of cappuccino, she was in the shower, singing the Twenty-third Psalm.
A note was on the bed.
MEMORANDUM
To:Guardian Angels
From:Supreme Cosmic Command
Re:Cosmic Re-organization
Date:July 12, 2012
The purpose of this memo is to inform you that the time has come to involve your clients in the cosmic re-organization.
As you are in no doubt aware, the cosmic re-organization is a primary objective of the Supreme Cosmic Command. The role your clients will play is of the utmost importance. You must begin securing your objectives within the next three Earth days. All objectives must be secured within the month.
We understand that as a result of recent announcements made in the cosmic press and information leaked by certain underworld authorities, many of you have had a more difficult than usual time dealing with your caseloads. We are sympathetic to your concerns, but we must also stress that the future of the cosmos depends on the success of this operation.
If we can help you in any way to secure the eternal freedom of the universe, please let us know.
“Jonathan, you shouldn’t be reading that,” Martha scolded.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What does it look like?”
“What does it mean, clients?”
“It means you, silly.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“Oh, sure. That, too.”
Martha pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her Bag of Miracles, lit one, lifted her head to look at me, and let out a long, deep sigh.
“Martha, what’s going on?” I asked.
Martha ignored me and stared at the ceiling.
When she first began visiting me, Martha told me everything. She told me why the sky was blue, why the world was round, why the geo-political realities of the twenty-first century had necessitated an unprecedented break in the cosmic continuum. It was an exciting time. The possibilities seemed endless. But then, as it always happens, patterns began to form, and we became a little bored with each other, then a little more bored, then, in the end, really, really bored. That’s when we began asking the “significant questions.” We began discussing the rumours that there was trouble inside the Cosmic Palace, and how God was preparing a shakedown of Heaven’s high-ranking officials. Martha told me everything she knew about Heaven, and I told her everything I knew about Earth. Together we realized we knew very little, since we could always think of questions the other couldn’t answer. Lately, however, we were not making any progress in our question-and-answer game.
“What’s the memo about, Martha?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t understand what the memo means by objectives.”
“Things you need to achieve.”
“They told us the cosmic re-alignment was a natural phenomena; it would happen as a matter of consequence. At first, we weren’t supposed to do anything more than inform people that it was taking place — to allow them to understand another small part of the mysteries of the cosmos. Then, all of a sudden, it was a political priority, and what had been a re-alignment became a re-organization.”
Martha began pacing the room.
“I don’t think I want to be an angel anymore,” she said. “I don’t think I like being an angel.”
“Martha!”
“I’m so tired, Jon. I’m so sick and tired of being someone the cosmic planners move around like a checker piece across the board; except checker pieces have more freedom than angels. Angels are robots, conformists, reactionaries. I never knew anything about doubt until I met you, Jon. I never knew anything about betrayal until they announced God was dead. Then I began to wonder what I had been doing with myself since the beginning of time. For all of eternity, I’ve been someone else’s tool. Now I want to do something for myself. I want to be free.”
It was at this moment that I suddenly realized Martha was less than perfect. Uncertainty was a distinctly human trait. Maybe she didn’t know everything about Heaven, but I had always thought she understood how things fit together, the order and the hierarchy of existence. I suddenly understood Martha was as close to the ultimate cosmic design as I was to the Oval Office. I used to think angels knew everything. I had thought they understood the purpose of every speck of dust, every grain of sand. I thought every grain of sand had a purpose. There had been a very large and successful movement at the end of the twentieth century to prove the idea of purpose was anachronistic. Purpose was something people gave themselves. Anything meaningful was circumstantial. If every grain of sand had a purpose, it was because people gave the grains that purpose — not because the sand had any purpose essential to itself. This is the sort of thing the angels had originally come to dispute, refute, and destroy: to cure the existential angst that had settled over the populous.
The first time I met Martha I was half-way through watching my copy of Wrestlemania XVI when she interrupted the television circuit to inform me I was about to become a privileged member of a Priority One experiment of the Supreme Cosmic Command. I would be receiving counselling from an angel. Her name was Martha. She would help me sort out all my metaphysical problems — and a couple of physical ones as well. I was to expect my first visitation within the next thirty seconds. Please put some coffee on.
Well, I thought. There’s something new.
And then, after I poured the water into the coffee maker and settled back into my chair to watch the grand finale, there she was, in trackpants, sandals, and tanktop, her blond hair held back with an elastic, her high cheek bones, flushed face, and sparkling blue eyes fully exposed in all their brilliance.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Martha.”
“Right.”
From there we built a relationship that has been by far the most significant in my life. Martha showed me life can be meaningful, if you have the right approach, and I did my best to show her that things are not always what they seem.
“Jon,” she said, almost crying. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s only one thing to do,” I said. “Go on the road.”
Martha looked at me blankly.
“I’ll call Robert. We’ll be in Denver by the weekend, New York by the middle of next week. If we don’t get messed up with something in between, that is.”
Robert used to be my neighbor in Venice Beach before he moved to San Francisco. He was my buddy in college. We used to drink to excess together, tell each other our fantasies, cheat on each other while playing poker. Robert was excellent at marking cards. Two years ago, Robert married Che-Maria, a Spanish woman he had met at the race track. Robert was there to place a couple of hundred dollars on a horse in the fifth race. Che-Maria was there to pick the patron’s pockets. She was an illegal immigrant and picking pockets was her only means of gainful employment. When she tried to pick Robert’s pocket, Robert’s pet mouse, Herbert, bit her, and she had to be rushed to hospital. On the way there, in the back of the ambulance, Robert and Che-Maria fell in love.
“But Jon,” Martha wondered. “What about the Supreme Cosmic Command? If they find out I’ve deserted, they’ll banish me to Hell. And they’ll kill you and banish your soul there, too.”
“We’re all going to die someday,” I said.
“This is something I have never experienced,” Martha replied.
So I called Robert, and he said he would be at my front door first thing the next day, his van loaded down with a three-week supply of canned goods, toilet paper, and bug repellant. I told him we wanted to go on a camping trip. Robert loved to camp, and he was anxious to meet Martha, he said, though he didn’t know she was an angel.
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