Before him, in the pearly, glowing cocoon, sat another figure, huge and skulking, its back presented, obviously piloting the smooth-bored, instrumentless rocket. Even without tapping one shoulder and asking to see a face, Joe knew with whom he was dealing: those wings he’d have recognized anywhere.
Not so much bitterly as bewilderedly, Joe exclaimed, “You again!”
Without turning, Lorin said, “Yes. But this time, Joe, it’s for reals. That sure was a dumb move you pulled down there.”
Joe’s recollection had a blank space: “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember?”
“My head feels funny, like there’s a hole in my memory.”
“And well there should be.”
“How so?”
“That’s where the bullet entered.”
“Bullet?”
“When you pointed the little gun at them, they killed you, Joe. With one shot. Right in the middle of your forehead.”
“Who’s they? And where am I?”
“The ‘cops,’ I believe you call them. They arrived shortly after you tried to rob the bank. I must say, the whole thing was very messy. As for your whereabouts, you’re with me, and we’re taking a trip. Your immortal soul, Joe, is all that remains, and we’re off to train it a bit before selecting your next body.”
“Oh Christ. You’re kidding!”
“Not me. Honesty is our most important product.”
“There’s no such thing as an afterlife.”
“Tut tut, my friend. The proof is in the custard.”
“‘Pudding.’”
“Beg pardon?”
“The expression is ‘The proof is in the pudding.’”
“Oh yes, of course.”
Incredulously, Joe peered earthward. Spread out below him lay Chamisaville. Lights had blazed on at the Pueblo’s dog-racing track; the green-and-white Tennis Heaven bubble glowed eerily. Most automobiles sluggishly negotiating the town’s clogged arteries had turned on headlamps as the dusk thickened. An excruciatingly poignant sadness struck Joe’s heart as he viewed the scene: My God, I don’t want to leave! Good-bye, earth; good-bye, Michael and Heather, I love you; good-bye, Heidi, I’m sorry.…
“I’m too young,” he murmured aloud.
Lorin cocked his head knowingly, like a New York cabby: “That’s what they all say. You should have listened to Nancy Ryan.”
“Why? What would I have learned?”
“That a trip like this is more fun when you’re still alive. Not only that, but you could have learned things enabling you to inhabit your earthbound body for a longer and more enjoyable spell than you seemed to have managed as a raving agnostic.”
“I really dislike your superior airs.” Joe spoke guardedly, wondering if he now had any leverage with the offensive feathered creep.
“Feeling is mutual, Joe, I assure you. This has been a positively stinko assignment. In fact, after the orientation period, I hope they send you back as a newt or as an untouchable from Calcutta.”
“I thought angels weren’t supposed to be vindictive.”
“Since when do you—an atheist, a Communist, and an adulterer—know anything about the rules governing angels?”
“Well, whatever happened to Christian charity?”
“Such as that which launched the crusades or tosses hand grenades into the streets of Belfast?”
Joe said, “I can’t believe I’m sitting here, having a conversation with a frigging … It’s not real! How long until we get where we’re going?”
“Time? What’s that, a human concept? We’re no longer dealing with such phenomena.”
“But it’s growing dark down there; the world is turning; clocks keep ticking.”
“Where we’re headed there’s no nighttime, Joe. A wonderful white light infuses everything always.”
“Stop this whateveritis, I need to get off!”
“Sorry, fella. We’re on a Direct Current to the Source.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“In layman’s terms? We’ll soon lock on to a beam guiding us home. You might say we’ll be on automatic pilot. I’m just here to keep you company. They call me a Guide, so to speak, but you haven’t taken very well to guidance, lately. I thought your experience at the bank might forge some humility, but I can see I underestimated your ego. You sure got an ugly soul, Joe. What makes it so heinous is that you often fooled everybody with your patina of humanistic respectability. Yet underneath your heart was sooooo black.”
“Thanks for the pep talk. What is this preparation for, suicide?”
“Suicide occurs down there, friend—not up here. And anyway, you already committed it.”
Joe said, “I want out of this predicament immediately.”
“Tant pis. No dice. Against the rules, I’m afraid.”
“Rules, shmools, I got rights.”
“Rights, shmights.” Lorin sighed heavily. “Sometimes I wish souls weren’t immortal. I’m tired of fussing with ingrates.”
They banked again; once more Joe studied the land below. In the gathering darkness, Chamisaville seemed like a city of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. Bright bulbs and soft beacons, streetlamps and headlights. Aluminum TV-glares marked every house, fell across countless lawns. Spring tree leaves—of cottonwoods and chinese elms—caught the last metallic daylight echo and, from on high, resembled burnished pompoms, remote and reminiscent of innocence. Viewed objectively, it seemed like a harmless and pretty civilization. White, flea-sized bodies of bikinied women paddled through the turquoise water of illuminated swimming pools. North of town, colorful Christmas-tree baubles at the Dynamite Shrine’s outdoor dance pavilion twinkled merrily—Japanese lanterns, Joe knew: there would be old-fashioned music to which geriatrics could fox-trot.
Ay, those safe and lackluster suburbs! Floodlit kids in Bermuda shorts played basketball on driveway cement slabs. Two hundred cars in the General Custer Drive-In Movie waited for a picture to roll. Traffic lights blinked green, yellow, and red. Neon lights fitzed, sputtered, and bap-a-dapped on the plaza, along the strip. Little groups of crimson flares flickered at countless construction sites. And white tipi cones reflected faint seven o’clock glimmers. Christmas, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days per annum.
Joe said, “Listen, wherever we’re headed, count me out.”
“You have no choice in the matter, Joe. It’s all inevitable.”
“Oh yeah?” Reaching forward, Joe slipped his right arm around Lorin’s neck, and quickly locked his forearm against the angel’s throat by grabbing the right wrist in his left hand.
Lorin squawked. “Hey! Ouch! What are you doing?”
“I’m gonna get violent,” Joe hissed threateningly. “Unless you change our destination.”
The second Lorin tried to struggle, Joe clamped down on his windpipe, hissing “No tricks, featherbrain!” Lorin sagged. Weakly, he cried, “Ease up a little, for pete’s sake, you’re choking me!”
“I’ll kill you unless you do what I ask!”
“You can’t ‘kill’ angels, Joe. And anyway, I’ve been ‘dead’ since 1723.”
“I’ll beat you up. I’ll create absolute mayhem. I’ll rip all the feathers from your wings.”
“Not the wings!” Lorin pleaded. “You’ve already made me look horribly tatty. Ouch! Don’t press so hard! You’ll leave a mark.”
“I’ll do more than leave a mark,” Joe growled menacingly. “I’ll crush your windpipe, I’ll tear your ears off with my teeth, I’ll crumble your feathers in my fist, I’ll kick in your bloated tummy—”
“Stop!” Lorin squealed. “What do you want?”
“Fly me to Cuba.”
The angel gasped. “Oh no. I can’t do that!”
Joe jerked his forearm viciously against Lorin’s throat. “I’ll make it hell for you if you don’t.”
“But you misunderstand. I can’t fly over a Communist country.”
“Wh
o says?”
“We’ll disintegrate.”
“Bullshit. Why?”
“They don’t believe. Ouch, you’re hurting me!”
“What has belief got to do with it?”
“For starters, I don’t exist if you don’t believe in me.”
“Hogwash. I never believed in angels, but you’re here.”
“Correction. You thought you didn’t believe in angels.”
Joe said, “I don’t feel like arguing the semantics of bourgeois philosophy right now. Just shuttup and steer toward Cuba.”
“What do you plan to do when we get there?”
“Jump clear of this thing. Does it have a door? Are there any parachutes on board?”
“Not necessary, Joe—you’ll float. But you’ll never reach the jungle, I guarantee.”
“How come?”
“You’ll evaporate as soon as you float within their cerebral ionosphere.”
“You’re lying.” Joe yanked back a little.
“Urgb! Stop!” Lorin twitched and gurgled; his ham hands fluttered uselessly at Joe’s forearm.
“Take it back then, and steer us for Cuba—am I communicating?”
“Okay.” Lorin coughed painfully and Joe released his pressure a little. “Whatever you say, just don’t hurt me anymore, please. I’ll get in dutch, but so what? You’re the most recalcitrant case I’ve meddled with in a decade. When I return I’m putting in for rotation to a more civilized nation, like Nepal.”
All through the long night they hummed across America in their pearly blue cocoon. To forestall any monkey business, Joe maintained a loose stranglehold on Lorin’s throat. He expected to grow drowsy and fatigued, yet such weakness never materialized—not even the urge to yawn. His body seemed composed of fleshlike substances, yet an internal equilibrium tempered everything. No ringing annoyed his ears. His sinuses remained absolutely clear, unaffected either by airborne dust or by their altitude. At thirty thousand feet it must have been chilly outside, yet he suffered no shivers. And although his mouth was chalky and held no saliva, he experienced zero discomfort. As for accumulating pressure on his bladder to take a leak—none existed. Apparently, he was composed of a lifelike material which nevertheless functioned outside the pale of mundane bodily demands.
On several occasions Lorin attempted conversation, but Joe quashed his efforts. “I’ve had enough babble,” he snapped. “I’m up to my ears in pink clouds, Eckankar, est, and E-meters. So keep your cotton-pickin’ angelic proselytizing to yourself.”
“You’ll be sorry,” Lorin couldn’t resist saying, and Joe squeezed until the feathered goody-goody shut up.
America. With his eyes trained forlornly on the vast continent below, Joe sometimes experienced a dramatic despair. Those feelings, at least, remained to him. No heart beat in his chest, yet all the heavy ruminations attributable to the human ticker hovered at his beck and call. Chagrin clouded his spirit. For several hours he castigated himself with Might-Have-Beens. Basically, he could have, and should have, been a better human being. Why oh why had he been unable to articulate a revolutionary consciousness, dying, if he had to croak so young, as a valuable martyr to compassionate causes? Instead, what little memory of him endured on earth would be tainted by the foolishness of his final days, the irresponsibility of his slipshod sexual quest, the absurdity inherent in that last defiant gesture of robbing the bank.
Sobbing might have offered relief, but Joe could command no tears. Nothing wet existed inside the all-new Joe Miniver. If he cut himself, no doubt he would not even bleed. Instead, a colorful sort of dust, like thousands of tiny time pills from a gelatinous cold-capsule, would trickle weightlessly from the slit, drifting off imperturbably on the insular airwaves of his current purgatory.
All night long they floated across the Capital of Capitalism. In Kansas, the high moon shone ghostily upon amber waves of grain. Then rolling Ozark foothills, like dear breasts, cast silver shadows upon each other. Eventually, the busy twinkle of city lights took over the South. Silver arteries of channelized rivers crisscrossed a tumultuous geography in all-too-geometric patterns. And vast scraggly lakes mirrored the luminescent sky. Finally, toward dawn, they reached the jagged edge of landscape and hailed the vast green sea.
Lorin said, “You can release me now, Joe. We’re almost there.”
“Not yet, bro. Where’s the door I’m jumping out of?”
“No doors, Joe. You don’t need them.”
“Meaning?”
“You exit through the wall.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Try it. Stick out your hand.”
Tentatively, Joe touched an index finger against the curved wall of their chrysalis: it seemed tactile, strong, impenetrable.
“Just make up your mind to sail through, and it won’t impede you,” the angel groused.
Joe made up his mind. With that, his hand slipped through the silken fiber as easily as a hot knife sank into yogurt.
“I’ll be damned.…”
“Now will you let me go?” Lorin pleaded.
“Not until we’re exactly over Cuba.”
“There it is,” Lorin whined. “Aren’t we close enough?”
Ay dios!—Joe spotted the unmistakable shape of the island. His nonexistent heart gave a flutter. Still, he had no wish to leap prematurely. “If I jump now, I’ll get soaked. When we’re passing directly over Cuba, then I’ll let go of you and bail out. But not until.”
“Don’t forget—within ten thousand feet you’ll disintegrate.”
“That’s up for grabs.”
“You won’t find any bodies down there to inhabit.”
Joe crunched Lorin’s windpipe one more time: “That’s the chance I’ll have to take.”
Abruptly, they hit turbulence: their silver cocoon jounced and bucked. Joe learned instantly that all his fear cells, juices, and hormones were still intact.
“What are you doing?” he huffed breathlessly, clamping tightly on the angel’s Adam’s apple. “Is this a trick?”
“You asked for it,” Lorin rasped feebly. “This is a Communist country.”
“I don’t follow.”
“We just hit the outer limits of their Cerebral Ionosphere. You better hang on to your hat. The Mental Propaganda Belt over Communist countries can buffet you like a hurricane. We’ll be lucky if negative anti-Christ forces don’t blow us apart!”
They rolled, pitched, dropped a hundred feet in atheist pockets, floundered through invisible shockwaves caused by the outer atmospheric aura of Socialism, and shivered and stewed as if under the onslaught of invisible lightning bolts.
Lorin pleaded with Joe: “If you’re going to jump, for pete’s sake, man, go! Have pity on me! I don’t want to die!”
“Die?” Joe cocked his head curiously. “How can you die, you’re immortal.”
“Under some conditions, yes. Under others, no. Oh please, have a heart.”
Joe had lost his fear. In fact, despite their topsy-turvy progress, an almost beatific calm had settled into his soul. With great consideration for his fellow traveler, he disengaged the throatlock. Lorin slumped forward, rubbing his neck. “My God,” he whimpered petulantly, “you’re such a brute.”
“I’m going, now. Thanks for the ride.” With that, Joe plucked a single cream-colored souvenir feather from Lorin’s wing, then eased himself erect and leisurely propelled himself through the shiny fabric of the cocoon. Expecting to be clobbered by a blast, Joe doubled up into a tuck position, arms flung across his face. But he tumbled into blue sunny space as effortlessly as any astronaut indulging a zero-gravity walk, buoyed by the myriad tugs of opposing stars.
Through a crack in his arms, Joe caught sight of the silver, tearshaped husk that had carried him this far. It whisked away, diminishing quickly, like a wind-borne autumn leaf, becoming invisible against the ultramarine-blue sky and the verdant, expansive sea.
Unfolding, Joe turned his rapt attention to Cuba, stretching his arms wide in
a flying position as he had seen in sky-diver photographs … beneath him lay the entire island.
Oh how the sweetness of a fresh and real start infused his spectral protoplasm! Tiny serene cloud puffs polka-dotted that sliver of green set in the brilliant emerald ocean. The shadows of her forested sierras, the white ribbons of her unspoiled beaches made him ache for the Garden of Eden, Socialist style. Granted, he was floating toward a myth, completely ignorant of what might lie in store. Could Lorin possibly be correct? When he entered a concentrated Communist oosphere, would the power of atheist ions cause him to crumble?
No matter. If the soul had an eternal power, then he would land upon the courageous territory below, locate the body of anything from a butterfly to an aged cane cutter in need of animation, and try to be more worthy this time around, aided by his proximity to a more compassionate historical reality.
And if it developed that his presence on the airwaves was at best a bourgeois hype … so what? If this sensitive phantom he seemed to be was nothing more than a brief, vital minute about to burn out, or a complex death dream taking place during those moments between the bullet’s entry and his brain’s total demise … well, not to worry.
For his reveries at this instant in time were so full of hope he wanted to shout “Hallelujah!”
A soaring albatross, its wings set, its beautiful eyes searching lazily, glided by.
In his fist, Lorin’s wing-feather began to disintegrate. The barbs came apart slowly, sprinkling into the air like pepper, evaporating. Very shortly, all that remained in his fingers was a hollow quill. Then it too crumbled, became dust, and trickled away into eternity.
Yet Joe remained intact, and continued falling toward the green hills and succulent valleys of a Communist country.
Books by John Nichols
Fiction
The Sterile Cuckoo
The Wizard of Loneliness
A Ghost in the Music
American Blood
An Elegy for September
Conjugal Bliss
THE NEW MEXICO TRILOGY
The Milagro Beanfield War
The Magic Journey
The Nirvana Blues
Nonfiction
If Mountains Die
(with William Davis)