Chapter 42
Promises
Margaret tries to run from the looming car. Her left high-heel twists and she catapults forward. Her bleeding palms, outflung, catch the frail old man in the small of the back, propelling him out of the path of the suddenly swerving car. In a split-second she sees him staggering into safe downfall, straw hat and spectacles and dentures flying and then she’s down herself, sprawling, and replacing him in the fatal spot. It could easily be taken for a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, instead of the result of a defective heel.
The black car is upon her.
But then past her as though some merciful force had levitated it. She picks herself up unscathed.
Second miracle, the old man too is back on his feet, holding his black-ribboned straw-hat, his spectacles and dentures back in place, white suit strangely impeccable again. His hair, moustache and beard bristle electrically, like a multitude of rays, enlarging his face into a stern white-hot sun as he stares thunderously at the car.
It veers and smashes into a clothing shop window: a massacre and dismemberment of pink dummies. One of them is thrust against the splintered windshield. With her long lashes and simpering bow-lips she’s like a soliciting streetwalker poorly equipped for her profession, armless, devoid of nipples and smooth-crotched. But the bloody broken-faced driver is poorly equipped to respond. A crowd gathers.
The old man is suddenly drained of power. He trembles and pants as though he’d undertaken some strenuous task that outstripped his strength. Margaret, deeply grateful for his state, seizes the long-sought opportunity to exercise charity. Maybe he can tell her where Jean’s street is. She links her arm in the old man’s and guides him to a sidewalk café table. He’s paper-light, like a dried-out mummy.
“Please, quickly, a glass of mineral water!” she begs the bald waiter standing on tiptoe next to their table for a better view of the accident. He ignores her, probably doesn’t understand English. She begs again, with even greater urgency. He goes on ignoring her.
“Two double-cognacs, four-star Hennessy, VSOP forty years of age immediately!” the old man commands, in English.
The waiter jerks violently as though visited by twenty thousand volts. With fantastic rapidity, like a fast-motion film, he’s gone and back again with the two cognacs. He resumes his tiptoed neck-craned position, taking in the shop-window shambles and the growing crowd.
Another waiter trots back from it. “The driver must have had a heart attack,” he says to his colleague. “Looked pretty dead to me.”
“Of course he is dead,” the old man croaks vindictively. “Dead and burning.” He starts cackling. He seems to have recovered.
Both waiters look back at the glass-strewn car halfway through the shop-window. There are no flames or smoke.
Now the old man addresses Margaret. His lips are motionless but his voice resounds in her head: “Your act of self-sacrifice, woman, although perfectly superfluous, will be rewarded. You shall witness the glory of My Creation, a spectacle vouchsafed to few.”
Behind his thick lenses his eyes enlarge into revolving spiral galaxies of blinding radiance. She squeezes shut her eyes and loses consciousness.
Margaret awakens, eyes still shut, to exultant music coming from all quarters. The volume swells. Breakers of sound assault her. Thousands of trumpets puncture her eardrums. Her bones vibrate to massed trombones. Cellos wrench her bowels. A million-throated angelic choir bursts forth:
T h e h e a v e n s r e l a t e
t h e g l o r y o f G o d .
A n d t h e f i r m a m e n t s h o w s f o r t h
H i s h a n d i w o r k.
Margaret keeps her eyes tightly shut in fear of the dazzle of the announced splendor, the visual equivalent of the deafening jubilation. She imagines the furnace of creation, luminous light-years of gas pregnant with stars and worlds; galactic whirlpools of fire; multitudes of suns glowing ruby-red, topaz-yellow and diamond-blue like an immensely enlarged jeweler’s window-display.
The celestial music breaks off. She opens her eyes on black void.
Slowly Margaret makes out a low dim smear of light and a poor scattering of dim stars overhead. Their faint light shows that she is seated uncomfortably on a rocky plain. What has happened to the glory of God? Where is His handiwork? Where is He? Margaret casts herself down in a prayerful attitude. Volcanic cinder lacerates her knees. She implores the Most High to listen and reply to her supplications.
The Most High too would like to know what has become of His Glory and Handiwork, what has happened, since His last visit, to the most impressive spot in His universe. Where are those hosts of stars, those illuminated Nebulas, those pulsing Cepheid variables, those clusters and super clusters of Island-Universes with their lovely outflung spiral arms? Now where multitudes of galaxies rejoiced, reigns near void.
He demands an explanation of the solitary elliptical galaxy, M39871. She bewails:
O Most High however they may lie and their infamy deny
They have cruelly flown leaving me in grief alone
To sigh and to moan to weep and to groan.
On all sides receding my pleas unheeding
Though reddening with shame me they dared blame
For flight
Crying till out of sight:
Quit us not
O reddening hot
Galaxy M39871 dot.
Disgruntled, the Most High understands that they’ve burdened Him with yet another radical cosmological definition. That early cozy cosmic egg hadn’t been good enough for them. So they’d enlarged His area of activities (manageable though) with the earth-centered universe bounded by star-studded crystalline musical spheres. Couldn’t let good enough alone, so revision into their new-fangled fatiguing solar system, pious faggots couldn’t dissuade them. Then worse: their Milky Way with its two hundred billion stars and eighty-three million-odd inhabited planets to manage. And then far far worse: inhuman enlargement with their billions of other galaxies. Now, all of it expanding in Doppler red shift, diluting Him even further.
The Most High’s cogitations (should He try to herd the errant galaxies back here or return to the Great Good Place and deserved slumber?) are interrupted by a tiny indistinct voice.
Who is that female mumbling on the Class IV planetoid? Of course, the girl. Kneeling. Wants reward, of course, for her self-sacrificing gesture. But what’s she saying? Can’t make her out. Mumble, mumble. People mumble more and more as time goes on. Time was anywhere in the universe one could hear the last chirp of a dying sparrow. Can’t make her out. Seems to want a yes or no answer. They never take no for an answer. Reward her with yes, then.
But the Most High has no time to hear her out for He has decided to pursue the errant galaxies immediately. He makes a great effort and leaves a replicate of Himself in AAAM (Automatic Affirmative Answer Mode), a rare privilege for the beneficiaries. With the general decline of His vital forces He had lost the precious power of efficient ubiquity. How many World-Islands with countless billions of inhabited worlds, each containing billions of anguished individuals of wildly variable shapes, implore answers from non-AAAM replicas which, deaf and dumb, are devoid of the capacity of reply to prayers?
And so Margaret Williams at long last receives pre-programmed answers to great questions that she has rehearsed for decades. Only the answer to the first of those questions is a disappointment, a bitter disappointment:
“Oh Lord, must I return to the Prefecture?” She has to repeat the question twice before the great voice conquers void and replies in thunder: “YES!”
Margaret masters a sob and poses her second question, a supplication:
“O Lord, if I dance for the Prefect, but perhaps more, will I be transferred and be able to do good, save Jean Haussier from the sin of suicide, take the veil as Sister Margaret and minister to the poor little monsters, O Lord, will I be transferred and be able to do all those good things, and so many many more, if I dance, but perhaps more, for the Prefect
, O Lord?”
In thunder: “YES!”
“And, oh Lord, if I say yes to the Prefect will not only I but also Seymour Stein be transferred and reunited with Marie-Claude I-forget-her-last-name?”
“YES!”
“And Helen Ricchi be transferred and reunited with Richard?”
“YES!”
“And Louis Forster be transferred and reunited with Louise I-don’t-know-her-last-name?”
“YES!”
“And Max Pilsudski be transferred to Las Vegas and reunited with Bess and give her the dachshund pup and also oh, please, please, a little sweet baby girl?”
“YES!”
With that thunderous assent and before Margaret Williams, heart brimming with gratitude, can thank the Most High, she finds herself back, for the last time, in the Prefecture, standing on the threshold of the ruined men’s room, her heart filled with pity and joy for the poor recumbent figures who are unaware of the marvelous future that awaits them.
In the Avenue Mozart café the bald waiter comes over with the bill for two double cognacs and finds the table empty and the glasses empty too.
“He forgets all the time,” the bald waiter says to his colleague who is new on the job. “Look at this too.” He points to a pair of high-buttoned shoes under the table. “Does that all the time. Then he comes back an hour later in his stocking feet for them. He’ll pay up then, don’t worry. Really belongs in an institution.”
Time goes by. Galaxy M39871 and the Class IV planetoid and the faint stars dwindle and finally vanish. The replicate AAAM goes on proclaiming assent to the absolute void.