Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-two: sad and beautiful music

ACTUALLY, I still don’t know why I didn’t wind up back in Anaita’s museum office, especially with Sam in the kind of condition he was in. Maybe there’s more kindness to the universe than I ever guessed. Maybe instead of being one of the world’s unluckiest angels, I’ve actually been a bit more fortunate than I realize sometimes. Whatever the case, Sam’s God-Glove doorway didn’t drop me into the middle of the Anaita-versus-jamblob death match, for which I can only be grateful. Extremely grateful.

• • •

Back in the way old days, when people believed (or wanted to believe) that the Sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, one of those old Greek guys proclaimed that the universe had built-in music, that the very existence of everything was underlined by cosmic sounds, and that even distances like the Earth to the Moon were measures of this “music of the spheres,” the musica universalis.

Later on, that kind of fell apart, especially when Galileo was all, “The Earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around,” and then the Vatican was all, “We’re about to go seriously Inquisition on your ass if you don’t shut up,” and Galileo was like, “Okay, you win,” but under his breath he was all, “But it still totally revolves around the sun. Dicks.”

Anyway, I give you this short history update to prepare you for what I heard when I stepped back into the door of light Sam opened, which was either the actual music of the spheres or an extremely convincing simulation.

I was surrounded by, or maybe engulfed in, what seemed not just white light, but different kinds of white light—not different colors, just different intensities. And as I tried to make sense of my surroundings, I heard something I’ll never forget.

Now, mind you, I’m a guy who’s heard the singing of the celestial choirs in Heaven, and screams wafting up from the deepest pits of Hell. I’m no rookie. But what I heard when I crossed back through, what surrounded me like the breathing of some immense creature the size of a galaxy, was unlike anything else I’d experienced. It was as different from any other sound I’d heard as day is different from night. It was deeper than the deepest rumble, but it had edges—harmonics, I guess a musician might say—that stretched beyond my ability to hear or even perceive, and yet somehow I could still feel them. I was in the heart of the greatest living thing that could ever be, as if I were only a cell in that body—no, as if I were a single electrical impulse in the endless nerves of the Highest, God Himself. The sound, the music, the vibration, whatever you call it, it was all around me and everywhere. I was nowhere at all, but I was also everywhere, and that was right where I needed to be.

This all washed across me in far less subjective time than it takes to describe, then my rational mind (no jokes, please) finally showed up, took my mental hand, and kindly led me back to current reality.

It was literally a sobering experience. The beautiful chaos hardened into something less diffuse, and the different tones of light resolved into a three-dimensional structure of sorts. I stood in an endless white corridor of glowing motes, like billions of tiny bubbles, but each one different, each one shining with its own tiny white fire, some brighter than others, but none of them dark. Everything around me, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, was made of these shining white cells, like the packing material out of the box the cosmos had been shipped in.

I sat up, and in doing so I realized that I was wearing my Earth body, and that until I made it move again it had been lying in a crumpled heap. Also, close by me, somebody was crying.

I turned, the white scintillations around me smearing into streaks, and saw Oxana, just as I had last seen her, her face buried in Halyna’s red hair. Halyna was just as pale and lifeless as she had been when I carried her in my arms.

“Oxana?”

She jumped, or at least she tried to, but the cellular glow around us was nothing so simple as a floor: when she moved she seemed to be swimming in something viscous, and a scatter of tiny lights drifted up around her like startled fish.

“Oh, what is . . . ?” In the midst of so much sparkling brightness, Oxana’s eyes were muddy holes. “Ja ne rozumiju. Don’t understand. You are alive, Bobby?” A tiny glint of hope crept into her stare, but when she looked down at Halyna’s body, the glint died. “No. Not her, just you.” Tears filtered her eyes. “What is this? What place?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think either of us are supposed to be here—especially not you. But it’s okay. I’m going to take you back.”

Her eyes got big. “Back where? Not there! Not where Halya . . .”

“No. God, no, not to the museum. We’re going back to the apartment.” At least I hoped that was what Sam had managed to arrange, but I wasn’t going to share my concerns with her unless I had to. She’d already suffered too much for my mistakes.

I stood, struggling with the strange surfaces, the oddly thick air. My feet sank into the cellular material of the tunnel, but the resistance was uneven. I couldn’t even make any sense of what I was standing in, whether it was one big thing or a billion tiny things, but the white glow made everything feel relatively safe, if not exactly cheerful.

“No, Bobby. I don’t want it.” Oxana, clearly driven past what any sane person should have to endure, slumped back down beside her friend’s body. “I want to stay. With my Halya.”

“We can’t. This place isn’t meant for people—not living people, anyway.” Remembering what Sam had said, that only angels and souls could pass through, I wondered if we were inside some kind of lining for the universe we knew, a placental barrier to keep things out that should stay out and keep in that which was appropriate. Certainly the living, vibrating vastness of it felt more like some kind of organism than any artificial construction.

It took a while to convince Oxana. I was beginning to worry that Anaita herself might pass through this place on her way to Kainos, and when I told her that, Oxana finally got up onto her hands and knees and then onto her feet, shaky as a newborn foal. “Where we take her?” she asked.

It took me a moment to understand she was talking about her friend and lover, Halyna. “Nowhere,” I said. “I think we should leave her here.”

“No! Never!”

“Halyna’s gone, Oxana, believe me. This isn’t her, this isn’t the woman you love—it’s just a body. The reason I came back but she didn’t is because she died. Now her soul has gone somewhere else. If anyone knows that, I do.”

A sudden, new worry struck me like cold water—what would happen when Halyna’s soul was taken to Judgement? Like everyone else, she must have had a guardian angel. Now that she’d died, the authorities would know everything, including every crime of mine that Halyna had witnessed. And wouldn’t they find out about Anaita, too? She was the cause of Halyna’s death, after all. How could even Anaita interfere with such a basic function of the heavenly system?

As had been the case far too often lately, I could only shake my head. Too many questions that even an angel couldn’t answer. “Come with me, Oxana,” I said. “After all we’ve been through, all my fuck-ups, I’m afraid you still have to trust me. This part of Halyna will stay here, maybe forever. I think somehow this is the body of the universe itself, or at least, as much as we can understand it. The most important part of her has moved on, Oxana, but her body will be safe here. It won’t be any different than burying her in the earth, just . . . cleaner.”

“No!” Oxana would not look at me. “No. We don’t go.” I was close to carrying her out by force when she added, “Give me small time. To say goodbye.”

She bent over Halyna’s body and arranged the limbs, placing the young woman’s pale, freckled hands on her chest, drawing her legs straight. She brushed a coil of glorious red hair back from the bruised face, stroking Halyna’s skin, and murmuring to her in Ukrainian. At last she sat up.

“I wish she had weapon. We bury Scythian with weapon.”

“God will know she was a warrior,” I said. “I have no doubt about that.”

“She was. She shot the Persian bitch! She hurt her.”

“She did, and it saved my life, I think. All of our lives.” I kneeled down and touched the corpse’s bruised, pale cheek. “Thank you, Halyna. God loves you. May your journey be a good one and may you find the reward you deserve.”

• • •

Oxana and I walked along the glimmering, soap-bubble corridor until the light closed behind us like a shining curtain, and we could no longer see Halyna’s body. Oxana seemed nearly catatonic, but even for me it was like pacing through a dream. I wish I could explain that place better, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. I don’t know if I will ever see it again, feel the musical air and the all-blanketing light (which tells you nothing about the weird physicality of the place) but I know I’ll remember it until I finally stop thinking.

We had been walking awhile when I noticed everything around us was getting darker, as if twilight had begun to creep through the not-world. We seemed to be moving through a duller sort of light now, drab and colorless compared to what had surrounded us before. We continued on in silence through this dimming world, but it slowly became clear that the dimness was not uniform: patches of lesser light were followed by even darker stretches, then back to the dull twilight. Gradually these dim passages became alternating bands of dark and darker.

Some time later, we moved from a corridor striped with black and near-black into a few moments of total lightlessness. I felt Oxana’s hand reach out and grasp mine, but I couldn’t reassure her because I didn’t know myself what was going on. Then a few seconds later, with little sense of transition, we were no longer inside something but outside, walking down a suburban street lined with trees and streetlights.

I had my phone in my pocket again. That and the street signs told me that we were back in San Judas in the early morning hours of the day after we’d broken into the museum, still a couple of hours before dawn at least. After everything else that had happened, clever, heroic, exhausted Sam had somehow managed to land us in the eastern part of the city, only a half a mile from home.

When we finally staggered into the apartment, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do for her, I made Oxana a cup of tea. A few minutes later she fell asleep sitting up on the couch, drink untouched. I took the teacup and dish off her lap, tilted her sideways and covered her with a blanket. Then I went back out.

It was a long walk to Stanford, but I needed to get the taxi back. Part way there I caught a bus full of the living dead you always see on buses before the sun comes up. I must have looked right at home. I’d washed myself and doctored my cuts and abrasions as well as I could, but I hadn’t taken time to change clothes. My pants looked like I’d just been fired from Pit Bull Obedience School for incompetence, and I had a couple of weird, large, purple-black splotches on my shirt that would have stumped just about any forensic chemist you could find. Also, I felt dead inside. Empty like you can’t even imagine.

I got off the bus on the Camino Real and climbed over the campus wall. I moved slowly and extremely furtively through the extensive wooded areas until I was close enough to the Elizabeth Atell Stanford Museum to get a good look.

No lights, no cop cars, in fact no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Which was good. Not that I was planning to go back in there, no fucking way. But if the crime had been discovered the cops would have locked down all the main gates by now and be checking anyone trying to leave.

The cab was still sitting in the auditorium parking lot, by sheer luck next to another couple of cars taking advantage of the lot on a weekend, which made mine less obvious. I drove back across the campus, neck-hairs standing up the whole way in anticipation of police lights in my rearview, but nothing happened, which probably meant the mess at the museum hadn’t been discovered yet. The guard at the gate barely looked up, just thumbed the button to open the barrier, then I was through and back out onto the Camino Real. I stopped at a bakery to buy some stuff for breakfast, then ate half the pastries on the drive back to Caz’s place, as if the bodily hunger of an exhausting, adrenalized night of horror and pain had lagged a little behind me but had just caught up.

Oxana was still asleep on the couch. I’d bought a bag of almond pastries that I knew she liked, and I left them for her on the coffee table, then took a fast shower and tumbled into bed.

Somewhere in the next few hours, the door to the bedroom opened. I came half-awake, the adrenaline flooding back, but it was only Oxana.

“I can come in?”

“Sure,” I said. I held up the blanket and let her crawl in beside me. I was more than slightly aware that she was wearing only a tank top and underpants, but I was too tired to care. She pushed up against me, and the trembling that ran through her from top to bottom was enough to tell me what was going on. I put my arm around her and let her get as close as she needed.

“I follow her,” she said. “Halyna.” I thought for a moment she meant she was going to die, too, but before I could say anything she spoke again. “I follow her because I love her. I know her when we are girls in school. To me, she is the bravest there is, like a kite.”

“Kite?” I said softly.

“No, not kite. Ka-night.”

“Knight. The ones in armor, who ride horses, yeah?”

“Yes, knight. To me, she is the bravest, the most beauty. When windy, her hair is like flag. I want to . . . to marry her.” For long moments she couldn’t talk. I held her while the sobbing washed through. When she calmed again, she said, “Halyna tell me I am too young for her. That she is the bad news and that she likes boys, too. I don’t care! And when she goes to join the Scythians, I promise that I will do, too.” Oxana put her head on my chest, as if she liked the sounds of her words better reverberating up from inside me. “And I do. Two years, then I leave from school and go. And I love it. All the fighting practice, I get strong, and Halyna still is the most beautiful—so strong compared to me! And so smart. She knows all about the world and the politics.”

I had never heard Oxana speak so long and had never heard her use English for more than a few sentences at a time. I tried to ignore the physical nearness of a warm, healthy young woman and just become a pair of ears and a brain, because that’s what she needed, but it wasn’t easy. I may be an angel, but I was lonely too, and my body is just mortal as hell.

“And then after while, my Halya, she loves me also. Still she has other love, other girls, but she loves me best, she tells me. That is best ever for me. She call me . . . she call me . . .” Oxana’s voice hitched again. She had to ride this one out like a bad storm, gripping my chest with her arm and pushing her head against me, an animal trying to burrow down into the safety of earth. When it passed, she said in a tight, calm voice, “She call me Hodulocnik. That is bird with long legs that walks in water. She says that is me. Hodulocnik!” The storm took her once more, and this time it went on so long that I fell asleep, still holding her closely.

Later, probably in the first hours after sunrise, I woke again. Oxana was still in the bed with me, but she was wrapped around me in a much different kind of way, her groin pressed against my leg, her breasts against my arm, and she was pushing me, nudging me, making soft, muffled noises. Her nipples tented her thin shirt as she pressed them against my skin. She dragged them across my upper arm and groaned, but so quietly it was like something happening in another room.

Oxana was asleep, I’m sure she was, dreaming of her lost Halyna. I tried to move away from her, but she made a whimpering noise and held on. I had been dreaming of Caz and was already half hard, but the rhythmic pressure of Oxana’s mons pushing against me, the little sounds of need and pleasure, had given me a painfully full erection. I didn’t know what to do, except I knew that I had to get out of that bed. Oxana didn’t want me, she wanted something she couldn’t have, and I didn’t want her, or at least my heart didn’t, and I certainly didn’t want to take advantage of her, whatever my crude and ignorant physical plumbing might have thought was a good idea.

I turned a bit more to the side to keep her out of contact with my throbbing self, and as I was preparing to clamber out of the warm bed and into a cold chair, for the good of everybody in the room and at least one person who wasn’t, Oxana gave a strangled little gasp, then her thighs tightened on my leg so hard I thought she might break my femur. I mean, that woman had some muscles. She lay there breathing deeply for long moments, then said something I couldn’t hear, in a voice completely muddled by sleep, before falling back into even deeper unconsciousness.

I just lay there for a long time, trying to get back to sleep and not having much luck. I was missing Caz in every way a man can miss his beloved, plus a few new ways I hadn’t even thought about before. Eventually all my blood flowed back to where it was supposed to be, dispersing to various useful tasks, and I could slide into darkness again, this time to dream of endless white corridors with no way out.