The Dirty Streets of Heaven

  “Wow, Bobby, are you okay?” he asked when he picked up. “What happened? I saw The Compasses…!”

  “Yeah, yeah, it was all very exciting. Most fun I’ve had since Grampa Dollar confused the gasoline and the corn liquor. Are you at home?”

  “Um, yeah. I mean, I will be in a few minutes. I was just at a restaurant. My roommates are out tonight.”

  I had no idea what that meant. “I was just in a fine dining establishment myself, but I didn’t eat anything but breadsticks so I may pick something up on the way. I’ll see you in about half an hour.”

  “But…!”

  I hung up before he wasted my time trying to talk me out of it.

  Cruising across town in the Benz was less than exciting. I’ve never liked diesels. They root and snort like Fatback looking for a truffle, and they’re about as fast to respond as the complaints department of a major corporation. Still, it beat the hell out of walking, so I rolled down the windows and did my best to enjoy the evening. I grabbed a couple of tacos at a fast food drive-through and ate them as I drove, dropping bits of tortilla shell and tomato into my lap and onto Orban’s floorboards. I wondered where the ghallu was now—was it hunting for me this moment, or did it only go where it was sent?

  As I headed up Whipple toward Brittan Heights I passed the angled white bulk of Sequoia Hospital and thought about Sam lying there in emergency, stuck full of tubes and with nothing to do (if he was conscious) except listen to Jimmy the Table’s boring stories about the good old days in Spanishtown, when Jimmy had first been an advocate back in the seventies. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, let alone my poor buddy who couldn’t even get up and walk away, and for a moment I was strongly tempted to pay Sam a surprise visit. The temptation only lasted a moment, though: I was feeling pretty good because my bluff had worked on Howlingfell, but I also knew I really shouldn’t push my luck.

  I had previously dropped Clarence off in front of the big house up in the heights, but this time I had to get out and look for the front door, which was harder to find than you’d have guessed. I finally found a door, and after I’d been knocking for a while Clarence showed up.

  “Wow, so…you’re here.” He was wearing gray, old-fashioned sweats, like he’d been working out, and white running shoes. I’d rather die than wear white running shoes. In fact, it might even be what killed me in the first place. Maybe I’m an angel today because the white running shoe mafia bumped me off.

  “Is this your tribute to Rocky Balboa?” I asked him.

  He looked down at his clothes. “I guess. Come on in.”

  He didn’t have any beer, but he got me a soft drink out of a refrigerator that was almost as big as my apartment. The house was huge too, one of those Frank Lloyd Wright-ish things, all wood and tile and concrete, mostly open plan so you could see from one room into a couple of others without moving. One of the bigger rooms was even open to the sky, although you could close it off with sliding doors in bad weather and make it into an interior courtyard. I wondered again about Clarence’s roommates. They must be rich valley kids with high-paying jobs, but they also must have a maid service because the place was quite clean.

  We sat in the kitchen, and I told him about everything that happened right up until I crawled out of the Redwood River and called Caz, because that was obviously not only my own business but totally against the rules and thus not the kind of thing I was going to discuss with a new and almost unknown quantity like this kid. I still sort of liked him, though, even though I didn’t trust him, which was a fairly familiar situation for me. (Because I don’t really trust anyone, get it?)

  “I saw Chico’s gun one other time,” Clarence said as I rehashed the Gunfight at the Compasses Corral. “That machine-gun thing. Wow.” He sounded like Piglet talking about Christopher Robin’s blue braces. “He asked me to take a tray of drinks off him while he answered the phone, and I saw it stashed behind the bar. That thing is huge!”

  “And it still barely slowed that bastard of a ghallu down,” I said. “So I’m having to rethink the whole thing. Meanwhile, I need your help with something.”

  A certain trapped-animal look crossed his face. “Really? Like…like what?” I could see he was imagining being deputized and dragged into a new shootout with the Nightmare from Nineveh. “Because I…I’ve got a lot of stuff to…”

  “Shut up, you have nothing. I talked to Alice and made sure you have the night off. We’re going to upstairs.”

  He involuntarily looked toward the staircase.

  “Not that upstairs, Clarence. To the Big House on the Hill. Headquarters. Heaven.” A noise from the other side of the room made me grab for my piece, but before I got it out Junior leaped out of his chair and skittered between me and whoever was coming in the side door. (I found out later it led in from the driveway.) A nicely dressed Caucasian couple of a little past retirement age stopped in the doorway.

  “Oh, hello, Harrison,” the woman said to Junior. She was handsome in a slightly hippie-chic way, an old Northern California liberal with money. “We didn’t mean to startle you and your friend. The movie was terrible and Burt had a headache.”

  “The movie gave me a headache,” said the man, presumably Burt. “It was the kind of thing that Sheila likes, but it leaves me cold. Subtitles, people staring, nothing happens at the end.”

  “We didn’t see the end, so how do you know?” Sheila asked pointedly, then smiled at us to show they were acting out old, familiar roles.

  “I saw enough of it. I know.” He headed across the kitchen. “I’m going upstairs. You coming, Sheil?”

  She looked at us. “He was right,” she said in a stage whisper. “It wasn’t very good. But he always thinks foreign films are going to be bad, so I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.” Out loud, she said, “Yes, Burt, I’m coming.” She turned in the doorway. “Oh, when I was at the store today I saw some of that cereal you like, Harrison—the one with the grain and nuts and dried fruit. So I got a couple of boxes.”

  “Thanks, Sheila,” said Clarence, looking as though he wanted to slide through the floor and disappear.

  “Well, I remember you liked it,” she said brightly. “Help yourself to anything, boys. Goodnight!”

  He was still watching the door long after she’d disappeared, probably because he didn’t want to see the expression of incredulity on my face. “You’re kidding me,” I said. “Those are your roommates?”

  “What? They’re nice people.”

  “Did you go out shopping for a mom and dad? Or did you answer an advertisement? ‘Wanted, surrogate child for older couple’?”

  He colored very impressively. “Lay off, Dollar. You’re not funny.”

  I started laughing. It took me a while to stop. “Okay, sorry. Nevermind. I’ve got more important things to do with you than argue about your weird domestic arrangements.” I leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder in my chummiest manner. “After all, we’re going to have a slumber party tonight.”

  “Slumber…”

  “In other words, I’m sleeping over and we’re going to Heaven together.”

  “Ssshhhh!” He looked absolutely panicked. “Jeez, what if they hear you? Can you imagine how that would sound?”

  I chortled again. “Pretty funny, now that you mention it. And it’s going to get worse, too, because I’m going to bunk down in your room. Just find me a spare blanket and a pillow. Maybe we’ll even tell ghost stories.”

  “You’re going to sleep in my room? Isn’t that…kind of gay?”

  “No. If I suggested we play Twister in our underpants, that would be kind of gay. Now shut up and find me a blanket and lead me to your room. You do have your own room, don’t you? You don’t sleep in a crib at the foot of Sheila and Burt’s bed or anything?” I know I was being a bit nasty to the kid, but I still didn’t trust him and I was interested see if I could get him riled up past his haplessness act.

  He only stared morosely. “You think you’re funny, Bobby, but you’r
e not.”

  “I do like to see a junior angel sulk,” I told him. “It smells like victory. Now drink up all your milk and then let’s get to bed. Little Clarence has a busy night ahead of him.”

  twenty-five

  misremembered

  THE KID and I met up in the Fields of Glory. Clarence was late and appeared over the brow of a green Elysian hill, waving his hands like a semaphore nostalgist. I wasn’t happy about the delay. It wasn’t so much the waiting, it was just that it left me thinking time, and thinking time meant thinking about Caz. I didn’t want to do that just at the moment, not least because I already missed her fiercely. The subject was simply too confusing, and it also made the miserable handful of options I had suddenly seem ten times worse. Either I had betrayed Heaven or I had fallen in love with someone so impossible for me that she made Dante’s untouchable Beatrice look like a Vegas street hooker.

  “Sorry!” the kid said. “I had trouble falling asleep!”

  “We’ve got a long walk. You’ve been here before?”

  He straightened in indignation. “Of course! More than once!”

  I was amused in spite of myself. It really was like dealing with a kid. He might be a complete and total traitor for all I knew, dropped into the Whole Sick Choir by my superiors to report back my every anti-Heaven grumble, but if his earnest goofiness was a complete front it was a very good one. I kept wanting to like him, and I couldn’t help wondering what kind of trouble that was going to get me into. Had Caesar enjoyed teasing Brutus right up until his best pal stabbed him?

  We set out together through the brilliant green fields beneath the invisible sun that warmed everything in Heaven. One thing I did like about Clarence was that he asked as many questions as I did. The thing I didn’t like is that he asked them all out loud. He was curious, as always, about how things operated behind the scenes for our angelic business on Earth. He even asked me how the Zippers and Outside work, which is kind of like asking a Juggalo to explain magnetism.

  “Okay, you don’t know how they work,” he persisted, “but can anyone do it besides an advocate? And what if someone closed it behind you? Would you be stuck there?”

  “Any angel can do it—even you. Hasn’t Sam showed you how yet?”

  “He said he would, but he hasn’t got around to it.”

  Probably trying to minimize the trouble you can cause, I thought but didn’t say. “I’m sure he will.”

  “I hope he’s okay. He looked terrible! Tubes up his nose and down his throat…”

  I felt more than a bit guilty that I hadn’t visited Sam in the hospital, even though I’d been told not to show up. “As far as getting trapped Outside—no, it can’t happen, not without causing an interafter incident. The rules are very strict. They must have spent a huge part of the Convention just arguing about how all that had to be regulated.”

  “Inter…after?”

  I smiled. The phrase had been one of Leo’s. “Friend of mine made that up—he was a friend of Sam’s, too. Inter-afterlife. Between them and us.”

  “And when you say ‘Convention,’ you mean the Tartarean Convention, right? Where we got together with the Opposition back in the beginning and made up the rules?”

  “Yeah. Once it was clear that the Highest was banishing Satan’s crew but not destroying them, then everybody had to agree how the game was going to play out.” I remembered something. “You can’t force anybody to go Outside, either, or take them there against their will. That actually saved my life recently.”

  “I know. With Eligor, in his office.”

  I squinted at him. “How did you know that?”

  “Because you told me, remember? Come on, Bobby, you’re getting paranoid. When we were getting coffee that time with Sam?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” But it knocked me back a little, and so we continued for a while in silence.

  I’ve been glossing over the journey through the Fields, but I really shouldn’t because it’s quite an experience. I mean, believe me, mortals would line up for miles and pay Disneyland prices just to stroll for a few hundred yards. The most amazing thing is the colors, the way they glow and snap and sparkle. People who have experienced peyote or magic mushrooms or LSD might have some inkling of how, when you’re tripping, the colors of everything seem to intensify, almost to throb with inner light. The difference with Heaven is that there’s never the harshness that happens with psychedelic drugs, let alone the potential for a bad trip. In fact, a hike through the hills and meadows that surround the Celestial City is pretty much by definition the opposite of a bad trip.

  Now, of course I don’t know anything about peyote or any of those others myself. After all, I’m an angel, and even an angel who was stuck in a desert training camp with a bunch of other bored angels wearing human bodies for the first time would never experiment with drinking and illegal drugs and other such bad human habits. It just wouldn’t happen. You see that, don’t you?

  Anyway, since I had decided to be a little more reticent with Clarence, I had time to appreciate again the peculiar beauty of the Fields, as well as the parts that were just plain peculiar. For one thing, although there were people all around—the Blessed, perhaps, certainly the souls of the happy departed—it was very hard to reach any of them. The Fields were dreamlike, as was the Celestial City itself, but the nature of this particular dream was that it was easy to reach things, like a shady grove or invitingly grassy hillock, but people were always farther away than they seemed: You could get to them, but if they appeared to be a few hundred feet away to begin with it might take what felt in Earthly terms like a quarter of an hour to do it. I don’t know whether that was just the unique physics of Heaven or because the Highest didn’t want people’s afterlives interrupted too easily. Not that you ever got much out of people when you talked to them in the Fields, anyway. They often seemed half-asleep, cheerful and willing to answer you, but lost in memories of the lives they had lived or the afterlife they were currently living, and only capable of paying partial attention. Sometimes, in the early days, when I was still asking my questions out loud, I would leave the Fields of Heaven feeling like a creepy grownup who’d been hanging around a children’s playground.

  But the rest of the Fields offer themselves up much more easily than the inhabitants do. The sun shines all the time, but—again, like a dream—if you walk into the darker places, the shadowed corners and forested glens, you quickly find that it’s much like night in some trustworthy, beautiful, and benign nature spot. You discover places that seem to be right out of your own fondest memories, although of course, if you’re someone like me or Clarence, you have no memories to match them with, just that feeling. Everywhere you go it’s like that: unfamiliar but unthreatening, or familiar but still mysterious, as if déjà vu was in the very air you breathed. And like the City, being in the Fields of Heaven feels right. It feels good. Every time I pass through I tell myself, I need to see more of this. I need to learn more. Maybe I could be happy here. Maybe.

  But all things come to an end, even the endless Fields. Eventually you reach a high place where you can discern the shimmering walls of the City in the distance. For most people this would be the highlight of any trip, but for me it always comes with the smallest internal shiver of disquiet. I’ve never really felt like I belonged in Heaven. Every time I come here, even when summoned by high authorities, even on those rare occasions when I’ve been praised, I still feel as though I’m in danger of being found out.

  Found out about what? I don’t know. I wish I did.

  “So why did you want me to come with you?” Clarence asked as we made our way through the great gate and into the murmuring flow of angelic inhabitants that always crowd the streets. (By the way, although the streets are not really all paved in gold, there are certainly parts that seem to be, but it’s a gold that’s pleasant to the touch, yielding as firm earth, with few of the real qualities of gold except beauty.) “Is it something about Sam?”

  “Why would you think
that?”

  He shrugged. He was already acting a little distracted, caught up in the infectious good cheer of Heaven. I could feel it myself but I was struggling hard to hold onto my sense of purpose, as I always did when I went back. I’ve found that if I go about it in the same way that a drunk undertakes a complicated task—concentrate, concentrate, concentrate—I can just about manage. Then I pass under a tree full of blossoms, each one shining from within like a fairy subdivision, and I have to start over.

  “Why? I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because Sam’s in the hospital ‘cause he got hurt helping you against that ghallu thing. And because Sam’s kind of my boss.”

  “Not a bad guess. But no, not really. I wanted you because you used to work in the Records Hall, right?”

  For the first time since we entered the City his cheerful calm retreated a bit. He wrinkled his forehead as though I had just spoken the name of a particularly unpleasant ex-girlfriend of his—not that I believed he’d had many of those, unpleasant or otherwise. “Really?” he said. “But, I haven’t worked there for a while….”

  “Not too far back, really. A few weeks, Earth time, plus your stretch in training before they sent you down—which obviously wasn’t long, at least, based on how little you know.”

  He blushed. I’d never seen anyone blush in Heaven. It was charming in a pathetic sort of way. “Am I really that bad?”

  “You know how nature makes babies helpless so we don’t want to eat them? Well, even Eligor’s horned monster would probably just pick you up and ruffle your hair and play a game of got-your-nose.” He looked so shamefaced I almost felt bad, but I was determined to test him. “But there’s plenty you can do to help out, and this is one of them. Let’s head over to Records and I’ll tell you.”