Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Tears were streaming down his face. He thought he would die of so much beauty. Then the waterfall became dimmer and slowly faded away.

  He was back in the railroad carriage, sobbing in his guardian angel’s arms.

  “Are you all right, Jackie Jim?” she asked anxiously.

  “Sure___” He searched for his voice. “It was real nice, kind of

  like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.”

  “Brat.” She released him.

  “It was the real you, Gaby,” he said softly. “I’m happy to meet you.”

  “I’m glad you liked me.”

  No doubt about it, Seano, you’re in for it now. You’re bound to that one forever. It’ll be nothing but trouble.

  So what happens next?

  “I’ll leave you two to your laureates’ conversation.” Gaby placed her sherry glass on the stained antique table in John Hasting’s “digs” and stood up. “I’ll drift around town, look at the Cam River in the dark and do all the things a tourist in Cambridge is supposed to do.”

  “Must you really leave, my dear?” Hastings was being polite. It had been made clear that Dr. light was invited to the lecture of course (as was anyone who might walk in off the streets of Cambridge), and to a glass of sherry with Professor Hastings beforehand, but that Hastings expected some time alone with Professor Desmond before the lecture and that high table was for Professor Desmond alone.

  “I really must.” Gaby blew a kiss at Sean. “I’ll see you both at the lecture. Remember to stand up straight.”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  She rolled her eyes, which in this case meant that, no, since she had touched his shoulder, he had no choice at all. It would take years of effort to recover his old familiar slouch.

  They both watched through Hastings’ first-floor window as

  Gaby, hands jammed into her jacket pockets, sauntered off into the early dusk.

  “Heh-heh, a remarkably attractive woman.” Hastings devoured her with the privilege of the old.

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Sean had discovered that “matter of fact” was a fashionable English academic buzz-phrase, especially when uttered in a tone of surprise, indicating that one was “quite astonished” (another approved colloquialism) to discover something that was apparently obvious to others. “Quite intelligent too. One of the finest of her generation. Great future.”

  “Naked, heh-heh, she would, I think, look like a Rubens nude.”

  Sean had also discovered that there was no way to explain Gaby. If he insisted that he was not sleeping with her, he would be accorded the same credibility as if he had told the truth—that she was a guardian angel and, arguably, a seraph. One of those who stood before the face of God.

  Lucky God, he thought, marking the cautious renewal of diplomatic relations between him and the Deity, a renewal which had yet to generate any signs of delight on the part of the Deity.

  “Not quite as much flab,” he said thoughtfully, “but then Rubens models didn’t have torture instruments such as the Nautilus available for conditioning.”

  “Quite.” Hastings sighed.

  Doesn’t know what the Nautilus is, Sean decided.

  “How old is she?” Hastings did not want to change the subject even though Gaby had by now disappeared into the gloom.

  “Older than she would seem, actually,” which was as true as anything he ever said. “Still and all,” he added even more truth, “she’s useful to have around.”

  Hastings was a nice old man and very clever. Sean didn’t mind anyone admiring his Gabriella. Nonetheless, unlike his Jewish or WASP colleagues from the university, he was neither charmed nor awed by the ceremony of the great Oxbridge colleges. If this place had really good claret, as it was alleged, he would certainly drink it. Beyond that, his latent Irish nationalism was rubbed the wrong way by the stuffy, fusty antique gentility of the college. Moreover, he suspected that his Irish origins made him the object of very subtle patronizing; no, he hoped that he was being patronized, so that he could be both offended and outrageous.

  “There is no need,” Gaby had instructed him when they left their guest room at the corner of the inner quadrangle of the college, “to play the role of the militant Irish nationalist with these people.”

  “Sure there is,” he replied.

  “Save it for Stockholm,” she ordered.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  They laughed together. Sean was sure that the epiphany on the train would never be mentioned again. Their relationship had entered into a new phase of casual trust that required very little discussion.

  “And try not to spill any of Professor Hastings’ sherry on your dinner jacket; you don’t want these people to think you are a shanty-Irish drunk.”

  “Hide the truth at all costs.”

  They laughed in chorus again.

  He had been offended by the room—twin beds for Doctors light and Desmond.

  “What if I wasn’t sleeping with you?”

  “You’re not,” she said with a giggle.

  “I know that, but they don’t. And if I were, twin beds?”

  “Strange people, the English,” she agreed.

  “How can you stay warm in twin beds without central heating,” he demanded.

  “Bring a guardian angel”—she pulled a brown beret out of her shoulder bag and adjusted it on her head in front of the cracked mirror—“who can modify the energy waves.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  They had laughed all the way to Hastings’ “digs.”

  “Wonderful breasts,” the old man said, sighing as he replenished Sean’s sherry glass. “Heh-heh, marvelous.”

  They probably drank as much as they did around a place like this to stay warm.

  “Pretty good ass too,” he added. And you should see her when she does her solid gold waterfall act.

  “Well, I suppose we must talk a little serious business before we face the rest of the college?”

  The schedule allotted a certain amount of time to womanly anatomy, and then it demanded more serious conversation.

  “I think Gabriella is serious business,” Sean said, breaking one

  of the rules and loving it, “but of course I am very interested at the present in your reaction to my work.”

  “My dear boy,” the old man purred, “it is simply brilliant. I’ve spoken with Hawkings, the physicist, you know. He will be present tonight. Hard to understand him because of his affliction, but he thinks that you’re about the same sort of work he is.”

  “High praise indeed, but we’re a long way from a unified field theory in biology.”

  “Of course, of course, but it is the mystery of purpose you see. Both you and Hawkings have been driven to it by your theories and your findings; that’s why everyone is so excited with your work. My generation had—foolishly and prematurely, it now appears—written off purpose, and now your generation has recaptured it.”

  “Directionality isn’t quite purpose.” Sean sipped his sherry. It was too good to gulp, though he was tempted to be a bog Irishman and do just that.

  “But it is the next best thing, my boy, the next best thing.” “It seems to me that much of the interest—which, candidly, astonishes me—in my work is based on interpretations that go far beyond where I am prepared to go.” How about that for mock humility!

  “That’s true old chap”—the man’s bleary brown eyes twinkled momentarily—“of any good work. There are, as I’m sure you see, two levels of reaction to your work. Among serious scientists you have touched a sensitive nerve: the feeling, if I may say so, that we have been too busy, heh-heh, with the trees to see the forest. You appear at just the right time, when we were almost prepared to consider that possibility, and then with elegance and grace, heh-heh, you force us to do so. Ten years ago no one would have listened to you. Ten years from now no one will believe that your work was not self-evident.”

  “Wonderful, I think.” He wished Gaby were back. He mi
ssed her.

  “On another level,” the old man rambled on, making much sense as he raved, “you appeal to a more popular concern, which in its worst moments is represented by this occult and mystical nonsense but in its better moments also seeks desperately for purpose, although it is not likely to be found, is it?”

  “And then there is Project Archangel,” Sean said the name eas-ily as if he were quite familiar with the project.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Hastings sputtered. “Damnable nonsense, I would add. I’m surprised”—the old man’s eyes, suddenly sharp and penetrating—“that you’d have anything to do with them.”

  “I certainly don’t,” Sean replied heatedly. “Even if there were alien intelligences among us, what reason is there to think that we could force them against their will to do our bidding for us?”

  “And for private enterprise, at that. I’m Labour of course, but even the Tories around here are shocked at the audacity of the scheme. I’m not surprised they’re interested in you, however. Your name is a big attraction and your theory does provide some remote grounds for their plans.”

  Let me see, there’s our side and the other side, and now the private sector. The guys in the hotel were the other side, the two nerds at Kennedy Airport were our side. Was the guy in the shower yesterday the private sector? How can you tell the players without a program?

  “Only very remotely, sir.” He cradled the sherry glass in his hands. “I have discovered punctuation points in evolution, times of great leaps; my bacteria, under controlled conditions—well, reasonably controlled conditions—leap forward at these points like Homo sapiens did perhaps a hundred thousand years ago when suddenly and apparently without warning men with fully developed voice boxes appeared on the scene and soon dominated the world, after four or five million years of our ancestors communicating with various kinds of grunts and snarls and clicks. To say that the next leap or perhaps the ninth or tenth next leap down the line will produce creatures like the aliens that are postulated, for no very good reason I can see, to be among us, is to go far, far beyond the data. Moreover, I think that any attempt to constrain more developed species to do our bidding is foolish and insane.”

  “Bravo!” The old man applauded. “And I beg you, heh-heh, to say the same thing tonight during the question period and at high table.”

  “The next thing such fools will try to do,” he repeated the thought he had in Chicago after watching Stacey’s experiments, “is to constrain God to enlist in their intelligence services. The whole idea of attempting to dominate superior species is blasphemous.”

  “I wouldn’t, heh-heh, use that word at high table, if I were you.”

  “Naturallv not.”

  It’s all absolutely true and I don’t believe a word of it. I’m going to come out foursquare for angels in Stockholm. Moreover, I may be the only one on this planet, but I have empirical data to support my theory.

  What empirical data!

  And I miss her!

  “And if there were invisible and intelligent beings on the loose,” Sean continued heatedly, “to try to mess around with them ... excuse my American slang, sir ... to try to turn them into our slaves would make Prometheus look like a hidebound conservative!”

  “Bravo again! Come now, we must finish this bottle of sherry. It will go to waste if we don’t. Waste not, want not, as my mother used to say.” He filled Sean’s glass again, carefully leaving the dregs in the bottom of the bottle. “The difficulty, as you and I both know well, is that it is very likely that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe and not totally out of the question that some of them may be from worlds rather proximate to ours.”

  “Possible, of course, sir, but the odds are very small.” I’ll be drunk when I talk, but what the hell, I have a manuscript.

  “I for one think your man Sagan goes too far, but if we agree with Hawkings and others that the raw stuff of life emerged”— Hastings folded his hands and began to talk like an old Anglican bishop, at least the way Sean imagined an old Anglican bishop would talk—“in the tiniest minisecond of the singularity’s explosion and that these raw elements of life seemed even to demand rationality”—he shrugged—“and like you I don’t believe in God or any of that rubbish—it seems quite gratuitous to suppose that we are the only life process evolving or even the most advanced.”

  “What do you think the chances are that the life forms would be like us—reflectivity, sexual differentiation, that sort of thing?”

  “Don’t quote me”—the old man looked around uneasily— “but I very much doubt that the other forms would be all that different from us. None of your vegetables with antennae, heh-heh, if you follow me. If the biopolymers are the same, I would say that there would be a bell curve—that seems to be a constant in the galaxy—with a very narrow standard deviation. I’m not altogether sure that those who say we would not recognize Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in a business suit have the best of the argument. But if one of your alien intelligences should appear, I think he

  would be quite easily recognizable as, well, perhaps one should say a cousin?”

  The old man had pretty well figured it out. Had the Project Archangel folks tried to sign him on?

  “With or without a business suit.” In or out of a brown suede jacket and expensive leather slacks. “This is all interesting speculation, sir, but even if they could perhaps travel close to the speed of light, the difficulty with all such speculation is that these other beings are not likely to exist in our part of the universe, much less lurking around earth where we can eavesdrop on their conversations with sensitive tape recorders.”

  And surely not likely to appear gloriously naked in the showers of the Grosvenor swimming pool. Right?

  Right.

  “Bravo! Again I say bravo! Well, we must toddle off to the Great Hall. Can’t keep the audience waiting, can we? Your admirers await you. Heh-heh.”

  Hastings was in the chair for the talk. Two more junior men, Clark and Morely, were the respondents. A young woman, Arden Devoy, was to give the “vote of thanks” at the end. More creepy English ceremony.

  Arden Devoy was not creepy, however, Sean concluded as Hastings rambled through an introduction that was supposed to be clever and witty but was actually close to senile. His “heh-heh” produced responses of the same dry, rasping noise from men of his generation in the audience, not unlike the “oh yeah”s at Baptist religious ceremonies.

  She was in her late twenties, thin and tiny, with a striking oval face, jet black hair piled on top of her head, and a hint of great sexual energy in her tense body.

  It had been too long, he told himself, since he had had a woman, and he wanted this one. From the first second of their introduction, he sensed that she responded in kind.

  We could make a lot of money with this act.

  Then they were in the richest ballroom in all the world with a mighty symphony orchestra and scores of dancing couples. Vienna. Franz Joseph. Johann Strauss. Except that the waltz was both wilder and more comic than Strauss, the setting richer than the Hapsburgs at their most powerful could have produced, and the instruments sweeter and more melodic than any instruments known to humankind.

  Gaby appeared in a free-flowing white gown, shoulders bare, and took center stage, bowing modestly to all around. Then she began her own waltz, part respectable eighteenth-century dance and part madcap acrobatic display in which her long white legs, skirt spinning and billowing around her, cut across the dance floor like thoroughbreds racing down the homestretch.

  Sean began to lose his breath. It was too much, too fast, too crazy.

  Next he was carried off to an ice cap in the arctic where she did a pas de deux to Stravinsky-like sound with a charming and polite polar bear, perhaps fourteen feet tall. The bear was soon joined by a chorus line of his fellows, all tap dancing behind the lead duo. Bob Fosse would have loved it, though he probably would never be able to find the polar bears.

  This is all for
me, Sean thought. She wants to calm me down for tomorrow.

  Don’t kid yourself: she loves every second of it. From a larger-than-life Vienna, he was carried back to their parlor at the Grand Hotel, a parlor flooded with misty, multicolored lights. The other dances had been modulations in space across which Gabriella’s body had moved. Now, there was not space, only her body, most likely nude, pirouetting gracefully in the dense mists. No Istar or Salome, Gaby’s fluid movements displayed the dignity and the charm of human body (female) in motion, ‘whirling and spiraling, bending and stretching, sweeping and mesmerizing in the rapidly changing lights as flutelike music urged her on.

  I’m dizzy, he thought, why doesn’t she stop? Stop she did, as the flute was replaced by a mechanical sound, melodic and yet harsh. Modern dance now—Gabriella in factory work clothes leaping wildly from smokestack to smokestack, charging up and down assembly lines, plunging dizzily into coal mines, clinging to the caboose of a railroad train, hanging on to the tail of a 747.

  Not bad, not bad at all.

  Then the lights went on and they were back in their parlor at the Grand, Gaby in her dress from the ball. She reached out her hand to Sean, inviting him to dance.

  “No, thank you,” he responded. “No way, Jose.” You don’t say no to an angel.

  They whirled off into space, dancing across the cosmos, slid-‘ ing down the tails of comets, tapping on asteroids, skipping from spoke to spoke of galaxy wheels, drinking in the Milky Way, doing the polka on the moon, riding up on solar winds, frolicking on the rings of Saturn, waltzing across the canals of Mars, Jitterbugging in the fog of Venus. Time to stop.

  No, not quite. The last act was a merry prance across the blue waters of Lake Michigan on a quiet summer day to music that sounded like Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

  Only, Gaby seemed to be singing “Lord of the Dance.” When they came to the line, “They cut me down and I jumped up high!” the two of them skipped up to the sky and then bounced down on the Oak Street Beach.

  Somehow he thought they may have passed a cemetery on the way down.