Only A Lower Paradise

by Michael Bryson

CHAPTER 5

  “Nuts!” Robert shouted, pushing past Che-Maria, shotgun in hand.

  “Hey!” Che-Maria stumbled after him, warning him to watch for the Frisbee darts. I followed them both, though I sensed my participation in the event was going to be limited — as usual — to a passive acceptance of the consequences.

  Out on the beach, I picked up a rock to hurl after the retreating van, but before I could turn my body to throw it, Robert unloaded the gun on them, so I just as quickly dropped it. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to act. When I was a kid, I used to get into street fights at the slightest provocation, like someone calling my dad a Republican, or saying my mother slept with Madonna. “Who hasn’t?” I would yell at my teasers before bloodying their faces. I was quite a terror, actually. It wasn’t until I reached my middle teen years that I mellowed out and became obsessively introverted. One day I suddenly realized I wasn’t acting, only re-acting. I was fighting against things, but never for anything. This didn’t seem like such a good idea to me. Logically extended, there would eventually be nothing left. So I tried to think of positive, creative, and constructive changes I could make. I wanted to help build the “New World Order” George Bush had promised so long ago, but which had somehow never materialized. Like Roosevelt’s New Deal, the New World Order had a habit of falling apart.

  The van was already in the trees when Robert’s blast shook the beach, starting the frogs off on a horrendous croaking spree and shaking a horde of birds out of the trees. He missed his target. The van continued to bounce out of sight.

  That first night back at my place in Venice Beach, Martha and I had discussed the possibility of such an event as this. She never wanted to leave me, she had said. She wanted us to be together forever. In fact, one day she wanted to marry me — one day — when I had finally resolved all my problems and she had landed a new occupation. If we ever did get separated — we had promised back in my bedroom — we would devote our full existence to search for the other.

  Martha, of course, had the supreme advantage in such an eventuality, with all her angel powers of perception and control over time and space. If she disappeared, there wasn’t much I could do, except cross my fingers and pretend to pray. There wasn’t anyone in Heaven to pray to, anyway. At least there wasn’t anyone there who would be sympathetic enough to help a runaway angel.

  Robert pointed towards the van, and we all rushed towards it. “Get in! Get in!” Robert jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It roared for a second, then died.

  “Nuts!” he yelled. “My van’s been sabotaged!”

  He tried again, without luck. I stood in the sand beside Che-Maria, staring with her into the trees that had swallowed the kidnappers. She picked up Sid’s frying pan, which was lying nearby, and hurled it towards the void that had taken Martha. It landed with a thud twenty yards beyond us.

  She turned to me, crying, and I held her. Robert sat slouched in the driver’s seat, banging his head lightly against the steering wheel.

  “Jon,” said Che-Maria. “This is not good.”

  “No,” I said.

  “We must do something.”

  “Yes.”

  Robert stepped out of the van and began pacing back and forth on the beach with long, heavy strides.

  Che-Maria and I followed.

  “We must pray,” said Che-Maria.

  I said: “I think not.”

  The wind picked up and a sandstorm engulfed us. We moved around the other side of the van to get away from the blowing sand, and I saw then, lying on the beach half-buried, Martha’s beautiful torn and tattered patched Bag of Miracles.

  What a stroke of luck! Whoever it was that had taken Martha had left us with the best possible device for tracking her down, if only we could figure out how to use it.

  Whenever I was with Martha and we found ourselves in a sticky situation, all she had to do was reach into the bag and the answer produced itself.

  I picked up the bag, slung it over my shoulder, and reached inside. It contained an envelope, addressed “To whom it may concern.” I showed it to Robert, who immediately ripped it open.

  Dear Friend,

  Fate has spun its untimely web, and we are all but caught in its trap unless we are quick and wily enough to dart and evade it.

  By the time this letter reaches you, however, it may already be too late. You must act as if it is not. There are strange stirrings afoot in the land, and we must all learn to play our parts.

  Peace and harmony are in jeopardy. Evil and discord have grown to set foot where they have never been before. Only the actions of friends are to be trusted. Appearances in these trying times are easily deceptive. Beware!

  The act you must perform, and you must do this with great haste, taking every precaution because the performing of it will be anticipated by our enemies, is to meet with our regional agent at the Royal Oaks Inn in Pipsquin, California, between the hours of 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. any weekday ASAP.

  He will know you. Come alone.

  For the freedom of the universe, be strong!

  Sincerely,

  (signed) Your Pal

  Robert looked up from the letter and stared at me.

  “Say what?” he puzzled.

  All the time I had known Martha, I had never known the handbag to contain a letter, but apparently one of its functions was to act as a sort of cosmic fax machine, transporting cosmic directives about the universe. All the times I had seen Martha use her magical sack, devices had emerged from the bag, devices that could be used right at the moment of crisis, like that used copy of The Second Sex.

  There wasn’t much the letter could do to help us get Martha back. It offered no magic spell we could cast to reverse time or pull back the hippies. I took the letter from Robert and read it over. The letter, surely, was meant for Martha, but what did it mean? “Fate has spun its untimely web.” That’s obvious, I thought: chaos reigns supreme. But “Your Pal”? Huh?

  The letter lacked the formality of the memo to Martha from the Supreme Cosmic Command I had read earlier in the week. That communiqué was formal, professional, and cool; this was warm, personal and, well, mystic, like something out of J.R.R. Tolkein. It had a Middle-Earth quality, and a certain magic.

  Then I knew. I got it. I felt at that moment what Robert must have felt when he had picked up that piece of paper in the Special Services mail room, scared and exhilarated. But whereas Robert couldn’t see any meaning behind his action, for me patterns were beginning to emerge. Events were beginning to fall into place. Pieces of previously discontinuous information were stringing themselves together, haunting me, pushing me to new limits of understanding. I was certain that before things were over we would be given a full explanation, that Martha was right, life did have meaning, but we would have to hold up our end of the bargain, plug ourselves into the system and connect with whomever this person was that Martha was supposed to meet.

  Robert had said he had picked up the message and hadn’t understood why, but there hadn’t been a reason in any sense Robert would have understood. The reason was in the action; simply acting had been reason enough. By acting, Robert had shaken off his lethargy and produced, through a disruption within his normally unconscious-subconscious self, meaning, a relation of events — the event as it happened, his picking up of the message, and the event as he thought it ought to have happened. He had created an ethical crisis, probably the first in his life, and he had stood up on the side he perceived as truth and justice. Voila! Meaning!

  Reading the letter, I experienced a similar disruption. My first reaction was to ignore it, pass it on to someone else, but there was no one else to pass it on to. Neither Robert nor Che-Maria could be expected to deal with the complexity of a cosmic disorganization they knew nothing about, and Martha was gone. The future of the universe rests with me, I thought. No time for thinking about thinking. There was only time for action.

  I folded the letter and put it ba
ck in its envelope. It didn’t seem the time or place right then to let Robert and Che-Maria in on the secret of Martha being an angel and all, though I knew the moment was fast approaching. “The freedom of the universe” would need everyone’s co-operation, and, after all, Martha had said Robert was special. I was sorry Martha hadn’t said the same of Che-Maria, but Martha’s angel perception couldn’t have been working at peak capacity if she didn’t see she was about to be kidnapped by a group of wandering hippies. Maybe Che-Maria would play an even bigger part than Robert. It seemed likely. She was far more spiritual. I was sure to have a part to play as well, and I was beginning to see what it might be. I was beginning to understand I couldn’t always wait for an answer before acting. I was beginning to believe in spontaneity. And I knew these things. I didn’t think I knew them!

  “Get in the van,” I said. “Where’s Pipsquin?”

  “Just down the road,” Robert answered. “But — ”

  “Just get in,” I said. “We have miles to go before we sleep.”

  And when I leapt into the van and turned the key, the engine instantly roared to life. Robert and Che-Maria jumped in. I pointed the van through the trees, smashed it through the underbrush. Robert and Che-Maria gripped each other as the bumps bounced them about in the passenger seat beside me, Robert reading the letter again, fumbling to understand. He kept opening and closing his mouth, searching for a question, but he knew nothing and, therefore, had no place to begin.

  “I still don’t get it,” he said, finally.

  “Which part?” I asked, turning out onto the highway, the sun burning in our faces.

  “All of it.”

  Che-Maria asked, “What does this have to do with Martha?”

  “Everything,” I said, and then I started at the beginning and told them the whole story, finishing with us in the van just as we drove into Pipsquin’s town limits, right in the middle of rush hour and the town’s annual homecoming parade.