Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-four: deep inside it

SHE WAS sitting beneath a tree in a patch of filtered sun, the gold of her hair so pale it looked almost . . . almost . . .

I felt like I might cry. “You’re so beautiful. Oh, God, you’re so lovely, Caz.”

“Trite,” she said.

I laughed and dropped onto the ground beside her, leaves and fallen evergreen needles crunching beneath me. I kissed her cheek, then down to her neck and the curve where neck met shoulder in an expanse of smooth skin.

“Don’t bite!”

“Sorry.” There was indeed a small drop of blood where I had been too fierce, too careless, a glitter of red. “I got carried away.”

“You’re so right.” She pushed me back.

I didn’t understand why she was upset with me—it was just a little blood. “Come on, don’t take it that way. Come back.”

“Forget it. You’re tight.” And suddenly she was walking up the slope, leaning forward a little to keep her balance. The sun falling on the hill above her seemed too strong, too powerful. It wasn’t the sun at all, it was something else, something blinding.

“Caz? I haven’t had a single drink all day. Come back. Don’t be silly.”

“I don’t want to fight,” she called.

I got to my feet and scrambled up the slope after her, but already I was having trouble seeing where she’d gone. A mist rolled slowly downhill toward me, a great, ground-hugging cloud.

“Caz?”

“Something’s wrong with my sight!” Her voice rolled down the hillside, this time with a note of terror in it, but I couldn’t tell the direction.

I was stumbling over stones that blended into the gathering fog. I fell and got up. “Caz? Caz, where are you?”

Her voice was fainter now. “I think it’s turning to night.”

But it wasn’t getting darker at all. Rather, the mist was rising up all around, stretching itself like an animal just awakened from hibernation. I was lost in a sea of cottony nothingness. “Caz?”

“Bobby, I’m getting really fright—!” Something cut her off in mid-cry. I shouted her name again, but no reply came. I charged uphill, but something went wrong, and I was staggering downhill instead, far too fast. I swung my arms to keep my balance, but I was out of control. It was no longer just mist that surrounded me, it was something colder. Snow. Flurrying, whirling, making everything the same, turning everything . . .

Where was she? Had the Frost King come to take her back? Or had that only been a story?

And all around me, silence. All around me, nothing but . . .

White and more white.

“Where did you go?”

Nothing but white.

“Caz!”

Just white.

“Caz, come back!”

White.

• • •

It was like rising slowly through milk, or from the center of a pearl toward its outer edge. For a long time I didn’t even realize I was awake, because the difference between the white dream and a real dream was so small. It was only when I realized I was thinking the same kinds of thoughts over and over that I finally knew I was actually conscious.

Still, it wasn’t exactly the kind of consciousness you could stake a claim to, or build a house on. Nothing that satisfying. More like being an iceberg in a sea of other icebergs, the slow bumping of thought on thought, the unending and unchanging surroundings. I wanted to be alive again, to do things, to be something, but instead I could only float.

I’m in some kind of prison, I finally realized. At first I couldn’t understand why such a cruel thing had been done to me, but then it came back—Temuel’s betrayal, the needle into the vein, the darkness that had rushed at me like a silent storm. I tried to use my body to push against whatever held me, but I didn’t have a body, or if I did, I was so disconnected from its workings that I might as well have been on a different continent, trying to operate it by trans-Atlantic telegraph messages.

White. I was in white so deep that nothing else existed, so complete that it was hard to think coherently. It reminded me more than a little of the between-place I’d gone after being tortured by Eligor, that gray, utter emptiness. It also made me wonder when Heaven’s torturers were going to show up.

• • •

Days. Weeks. Years. Centuries. I floated like a fish at the bottom of a frozen winter pond and nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. Thoughts became more rare. I think I actually forgot how to think.

Then, after what seemed a thousand years or more of milky nothing, something disturbed the mindless calm. Stirring in my white dream, I waited, or at least I tried to remember what it felt like to wait for something. Gradually the disturbance became a presence, then a cadence, and then it became words.

“Angel Advocate Doloriel. God loves you.” It was a low, sweet voice, a female voice, one I had never heard. Just hearing it pushed back the worst of my fear, but it also woke me to how far from life I’d drifted. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been. “Can you hear me, Doloriel?”

I had to think carefully about how to turn all the emptiness inside me into words. “I think so,” I finally said.

The presence settled closer, warm and comforting, like the mother I must have had once but couldn’t remember. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t alone. I didn’t ever want to be that alone again.

“I am Pathiel-Sa, Angel of Conciliation. Do you know why you are here?”

It came back to me then, at least some of it—Temuel, Counterstrike angels, a needle. “No. Where am I?”

“In Heaven. Do you remember nothing?”

My thoughts were as slow and clumsy as blind grubs. “I remember Earth.”

“Yes, but you are not on Earth anymore. You have been brought here. To me. Are you afraid?” The voice was sweetly patient.

I told the truth without exactly meaning to. “Yes.”

“Try to let go of that fear. The Highest wants only what is best for you. That is a fact the entire universe cannot refute. Why are you frightened?”

“Because . . . because I’m so small. Powerless. And there are bad things happening.”

“Powerless, you say. Are there things you cannot do? Things that are important to you?”

“Left alone. Be left alone forever. In the white.” I could barely frame my thoughts. I felt like a head-wound victim waking up after only partially successful surgery. “But they won’t let me—” I fished for words, but deep in the cold white, even with Pathiel-Sa hovering comfortably close, they were hard to catch. “Try to be good,” was all I could come up with.

“And are you good, Doloriel?”

I wanted her to stay. I wanted to tell the truth. My returning thoughts were like shivers, convulsing me without really warming me. I felt crippled by my long bath in emptiness. “Try. But it’s hard. Maybe I . . . maybe I really am bad.”

“What do you think, Doloriel? Are you bad? Have you done bad things?”

Why was I afraid? Pathiel-Sa wanted to help. I could feel that. I didn’t think I’d ever felt anything so clearly. “I don’t know.”

“Is that true?”

Something deep inside shrilled at me to keep silent, but that voice was easy to ignore. All I really wanted was for this floating cloud of sympathy to stay with me. “Guess. I guess I have. I’m a good person, really. I try to be.”

“But you say you’ve done bad things, Doloriel.”

“I didn’t want to.” But I had wanted to, at least some of them. I’d wanted to do some of those things very much. “Can you do bad things and still be good?”

“Yes, good people can do things which are not good. But they feel sorry about it. They know they did wrong. Are you sorry, Doloriel? Did you do wrong?”

Again a smothered part of me tried to pull back, but the rest of me reveled in the feeling of safety, of being known and accepted, and I was tired to my nonexistent bones of half-truths and outright lies. After the clean cold of the long white, I felt as though I had been living in a swamp of falsehood.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I tried. I tried to do the right things.”

“Oh, Doloriel, it makes me glad to hear that,” said Pathiel-Sa. Her voice might have been her wings enfolding me, protecting me. “And it pleases the Highest, too. It pains Him when His children are in pain or error. But most of all, it pains Him when the good do not repent of their mistakes. He wants to love you, Doloriel, but He wants to love you for who you truly are.”

The thought of God’s love swept through me like a tropical current, so warm that for a moment it pushed away the deep chill of the white. Something like happiness spread over me. I had forgotten how good that felt.

“But you cannot hide anything from the Highest,” Pathiel-Sa added, and the warm current dissipated. The cold washed back in, dulling me, diminishing me. “That is the one thing that He cannot abide. Do you understand that, Doloriel?”

“I . . . I do.”

“And it is wearying to harbor secrets. It is wearying to lie. It is wearying to wear one face for some and then change it for others. Do you see that?”

I did. Just then, it seemed the clearest I’d ever seen anything. How could I ever hope to do God’s work when I could not even live in Truth? “Does the Highest despise me?”

“Never, Doloriel. The Highest misses you. The Highest wishes you to return to His love and the happiness it gives. Like a father who watches his little child do wrong and is unhappy only because the infant does not know better, He wants to show you the way to live in His Love. Do you want that?”

“Of course. More than anything.” I climbed into that certainty, huddled in it, anything to bring back the warmth. “But how can I be forgiven? After all I’ve done wrong?”

The Angel of Conciliation did not speak again for long moments, or so it seemed. In my slow way I was terrified, thinking I had driven her away in disgust.

“Are you truly good, Doloriel?” she asked at last. “Truly?”

“Yes. I think so. Oh, God, I want to be!”

“But things have happened—things you did not plan but which forced you into difficult choices. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes.” And I could plainly see it now, see the course of my angelic life laid out like the map of a journey, but the ways I had traveled were complicated, dangerous, many of them completely unnecessary, as was now clear. “Yes, I made choices. Some of them were bad choices.”

“How did that come to be? You meant well, did you not?”

“I did, but sometimes things are complicated. Sometimes things that seem simple get complicated.”

“The Highest is not complicated. He is simple. He is love.”

A deep sense of failure gripped me. Pathiel-Sa was right, of course. Every step of the line there had been a proper path—I could see it now so easily—and yet so many times I had chosen the wrong direction. How could the Highest forgive so many mistakes? I thought that I had chosen love with Caz, but how could it have been love when it was against the Highest’s own word? Even if she had loved me too, she was a tool of the Adversary. I had put all Heaven in danger because I thought I knew more than the Highest and his most trusted angels.

“You are thoughtful, Doloriel.”

“I don’t understand why I did some of the things that I did.”

Pathiel-Sa seemed to come closer then, or at least the whiteness warmed once more, her presence wrapping me like a blanket around a shivering body. “Of course not, Doloriel. Because you did not mean to do what was wrong, and it was not clear to you at the time. Or did you put your own judgement above God’s?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” I had the strangest feeling of wanting to cry, but instead of tears from my eyes, something larger but even less solid wanted to burst out of my soul, wanted to free itself even if the escape killed me. “I wish everything had been different!”

“It can be. Heaven is forever, which means there is always enough time. But you must see your errors before you can do better. You must admit your mistakes before you can forgive yourself. The Highest has already forgiven you, but you still hold yourself in a prison of regret.”

That was exactly right. A prison of regret. This cold, white nothing was a prison of my own mistakes. And there were so many of them!

“You must think about it,” said Pathiel-Sa. The quiet sincerity of her tone as reassuring as sunny skies after a storm. “You must consider your mistakes. You must see them before you can escape them. Where did you step from the path of the Highest, Doloriel? Where did you stray from His love?”

So I told her. I brought out everything I could remember, from my first moments of doubt back at Camp Zion to the very last secret I had hidden from Heaven before Temuel gave me up. I told her about Caz, and about Sam and the Third Way, and about the lopsided war I had fought with Eligor the Horseman. I even described my journey to Hell itself. The only thing I didn’t tell her was that Anaita was behind so many of those things, even though I hadn’t always known it at the time. In fact, I didn’t mention Anaita or even think of her.

Only later did I realize how strange that was, since Anaita had been front and center in my troubles for a long time, and one way or another had been responsible for many of my worst crimes against Heaven. But as I poured out the contents of my soul to Pathiel-Sa, Anaita might never have existed.

As the Angel of Conciliation listened I described every single ugly thought I had entertained against Heaven, every petty act of defiance against my superiors. At times I wept with the horror of what I’d done. At other times I felt a fire of joy kindling deep inside me as I shed myself of these old, sick fears, of my countless petty crimes and insubordinations, the lies I had been forced to live, the fellow angels I had betrayed with my falseness. Pathiel-Sa barely spoke, but I could feel her quiet approval. When she asked me a question, I could feel that it came from love, which made me answer all the more fully. She loved me—the Highest loved me—and more than that, she understood me. She saw the good underneath the mistakes, the benevolent impulses that had turned bad, not through evil intent, but through clumsiness or bad luck. Pathiel-Sa loved me. I never wanted her to leave.

It seemed to take days, but at last I finished. The Angel of Conciliation thanked me and assured me for what might have been the thousandth time that God did indeed love me. Then she was gone and I was alone in the white—floating, calm, relieved. I had cleansed myself. I was empty, ready to be filled once more with God’s light and truth.

I am good, I told myself. Despite everything. She knows I am. And the Highest knows I am.

It was only later, after many more centuries surrounded by endless blankness, that I realized I had met Heaven’s torturer after all, and that I’d surrendered to her every last detail of my own certain damnation.