Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-six: bobby wins again

FOR ME, there was little or nothing in the way of transition back to Earth, although the five ephors must have discussed the arrangement a bit. The next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of the main quad of the Museum of Industry where the Mule had handed me over to the Counterstrike unit, by the same bench near the fountain. I was dressed in the same street clothes. My gun was even back in my coat pocket. Crazy, right?

Even crazier, I hiked over to the parking lot and found my taxicab right where I’d left it, shiny with recent rain like a healthy young banana slug. Who had cared about me enough to put me back next to my ride? And why was it still sitting here, instead of being stripped and searched for evidence in some heavenly impound garage?

After all I’d been through, I was as nervous when I got into the cab and started it up as one of those anti-Mafia judges in Sicily. It didn’t go ka-boom, though, just coughed into life with what might have been a bit of a fuel-mixture issue. When I backed out, it left a dry spot in the parking space, as if it hadn’t been moved at all.

Same bag from El Gran Taco on the floor. Same Coke cans that the Amazons had left in the back seat. Everything in the cab seemed untouched, although I would have been a fool not to suppose it had been stuffed full of tracking devices.

Still, the condition of the cab was another piece of minor weirdness I didn’t have time to think about just now. Time was short. I was dragging a barely suspended death sentence like a ball and chain, and I had things to do and best friends to betray. I drove until I spotted a pay phone—not that easy these days—and called Oxana on the shielded, rerouted landline at Caz’s apartment.

She picked up right away. “Bobby? That is you? Where you go? I am so worrying!”

“I’m sorry about that. I’m not going to talk about it on the phone, but I’m okay.” Which was a wild exaggeration, but whatcha gonna do? “How about you?”

“I am fine. Was food to eat. But I am worry when you go out and don’t come. All night!”

“All night? Hang on, what day is today?”

“Is,” she had to think about it for a bit, “is Thursday.”

“Thursday? Like, the day after I went out? You saw me yesterday?”

“Yes, Bobby. Yesterday.”

Wow, I thought. The spirits did it all in one night. Except Ebenezer Scrooge’s spirits had saved him, but mine had just pissed me off. “Okay. Well, I’ve got an errand I need to run. I’ll be home by dinner. Don’t go out and don’t open the door for anyone. Remember, you’re getting on a plane day after tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“We’ll talk about it. But you’re going.”

• • •

It was another cold, foul day as I sped over the hills to the coast. No CDs with me, and the cab’s radio didn’t work very well up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, so I had nothing to listen to except the slap, slap of the wipers and the hissing of the tires on the wet road.

It was a lot easier finding Casa Gustibus the second time, and soon I was rolling up the gravel road and around the promontory. I’d left so many messages without reply that I almost expected to find the house simply gone, like something out of a story, but as the road curved back in toward the hill I saw it, facing out toward the cloudy, rain-lashed ocean just like last time.

It might even have been the same sister who came to the door, or a slightly different one in the same hat, but since I’d left my copy of Audubon’s Antique Nuns of North America at home, I’ll never know. She beckoned me in before I’d even finished introducing myself.

“Dr. Gustibus is in the middle of something important,” she said. “He will see you as soon as he can.” She poured me a glass of water and decorated it with a lemon slice, then left me in a sitting room by myself with nothing to look at except old pictures of architecture and engineering projects. I got up and wandered around a bit, but the photos were all of things: there wasn’t a person or an animal to be seen in any of the images. I still had no idea who this guy was, or even what he was. In any other circumstances, trusting him for important information would have been frightening. But I wasn’t in any other circumstances. I was in bad, bad trouble, and I needed any help I could find.

I’d been reduced to playing games with my lemon slice when the nun in the hat shaped like a Quaker Oats box finally came back and said, “Come this way, Mr. Dollar,” her accent light as a thin smear of mustard on a sandwich.

Gustibus was waiting among his tables of books and oddments. He was dressed in the same filmy white vestments, and had his hair pulled back in the same white ponytail. He smiled briefly when he saw me, but didn’t put down the thing he was examining by magnifying glass. It appeared to be some kind of clay tablet. At last he set them both down on a nearby table.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Dollar. I gather you’ve had a busy week.” He said it like I’d missed the bus twice and received an unexpected parcel.

“Yeah, you could say that. Why, what did you hear?”

“About your trial? Nothing specific, except that a verdict wasn’t brought in. I gather you found a way to—what do they say? Plea bargain?”

“It’s more like I found a way to stall them a tiny bit longer.” But I didn’t want to talk about the choices I’d made with this unworldly character, who seemed to have no concerns more pressing than which organic vegetables to eat that day. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“I’ve had some busy times myself,” he said with that almost annoying offhandedness. “What do you need?”

“Information, of course. And I’m willing to trade for it.” I looked around to make sure the Low-Flying Nun had left the room. “I need to know things about horns. And feathers. The trial didn’t end, it’s been postponed, and I don’t think it’s for very long. I’m running out of time.”

“Ah.” He beckoned me to a chair, and I remembered that he said he never sat. “And you need . . . ?”

“I need to know how the objects themselves work—how they travel, I guess, for lack of a better word. How they manifest. Where they could be hidden.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask the last time we spoke.”

“Didn’t think of it. I tried to call you later.” For some reason I was finding his distant, benign vagueness a lot more irritating this time. Maybe because I was literally down to my last life in this particular video game. Maybe because a young mortal woman that I’d cared about was dead, and her lover was going to be mourning for the rest of her life. “Look, do you want to help me or not?”

He gave me a searching look, almost as if he could hear echoes of my thoughts. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you, Mr. Dollar. Let’s get right to it. What are you offering to give me?”

“I didn’t tell you about my trip to Hell, last time. It was a long, long trip. I saw a lot of the place and had a number of . . . well, ‘adventures’ isn’t the right word. ‘Fucking horrifying experiences’ is probably closer. I could tell you about that.”

Gustibus shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not really up my alley, as they say. I specialize in Heaven. Hell holds very little value for me, at least as far as my work goes. Oh, I find its minions useful as sources of information, but it’s what they can tell me about Heaven that interests me, not their own sordid home.”

I kind of wanted to smack him. Shit, I wish I had the freedom to pick and choose what I learned, instead of having all my new projects announce themselves by trying to shoot me or gnaw off my face. “Then what do you want?”

“What happened to you before the trial? When you were imprisoned?”

“What? You mean in the white? I don’t know what else to call it.”

“That might do, if anything happened. It’s a part of the process I don’t know much about.”

“I got jobbed by the Angel of Conciliation, Pathiel-Sa. That humiliating enough to pique your interest?”

He smiled. “That might do very well. Go ahead and tell me, and then I’ll do my best to give you good value in return.”

So I described my time in the white emptiness, the things I’d felt and heard and (sort of) seen, with an emphasis on how it ended up with me spewing out every secret I had. Gustibus spent most of the time listening but not looking, staring out the window at the sullen blue-black ocean and the prison-gray sky.

“. . . And I don’t really remember,” I finished, “but I’m pretty sure I told them all about you, too, because I told them just about everything.”

He didn’t appear too bothered. “Did Pathiel-Sa ever directly ask you, or even order you, to confess?”

“No. I did it because I wanted to. God, I needed to. It felt like it was the best thing I’d ever done.” I paused and took a breath, because the memory made me want to shoot something, and there weren’t any acceptable candidates in the vicinity. “Now, does that do it for you? Is it payback time?”

“What you told me is fascinating.” He turned from the window. “What do you need to know?”

“The horn. Since the last time we talked I broke Anaita’s civilian cover and researched her movements. She poses as a Persian-American philanthropist named Donya Sepanta, and she’s been in San Jude for about thirty years or so. She seems to have first met with Eligor at the Stanford Museum, where she’s a major donor, but that’s just a guess, and it isn’t where she’s hidden the horn. We found that out the hard way. What is there is a hidden doorway to Kainos.”

“Ah. The heretical Third Way, as the authorities in Heaven call it.”

“Right. So for all I know she and Eligor could have made their deal decades ago when they first met, or only recently. And there’s a jillion places where she could have hidden the horn just here in San Judas alone. What happened in the museum tells me I can’t afford another confrontation with her until I find where it is for real. I mean, that damned horn could be literally anywhere, couldn’t it? If she could do what my friend Sam did with me when he hid Anaita’s feather in a kind of time-pocket . . . well, the horn could even be here in this room, and I wouldn’t have a chance of finding it.” And as I said it, I realized how arrogant I’d been from the start, how incredibly self-absorbed. An object perhaps the size of a cigarette lighter, that could literally be made invisible and hidden outside of the flow of time itself, and I’d cheerfully set off to find it, as certain of success as the only grown-up at an Easter egg hunt.

“And that’s the problem,” I said when I was done hating myself for the moment. “The more I search, the less I know. How could a demon’s horn or an angel’s feather get from one world to another, anyway? I mean, humans can’t cross over from Earth to Heaven without dying, right?” Like Oxana, stuck in that timeless nowhere between worlds with only her lover’s body for company. “How does travel between places like Earth and Heaven or Hell even work?”

Gustibus nodded. “How does it work? That is indeed the question, and one I’ve been puzzling over for longer than you can imagine. Are you comfortable?”

I shrugged. “Reasonably.”

“Good. Because this may take a while.” He folded his hands behind his back and looked down, like a schoolboy getting ready to recite his times tables. “Very well. Here is what I know, or have enough evidence to guess at fairly confidently. For the purpose of this discussion, remember we are not bodies, but souls.”

Which was a weird thing to say—“for the purpose of this discussion,” like it wasn’t always true—but I ignored it and tried to focus. My previous experience with Gustibus had been that he liked to take people for Socratic roller-coaster rides.

“Now, angels and demons are nothing but souls. That is, although they can inhabit bodies, they exist primarily as bodiless spirits. However, in that state they can experience very little of actual life and certainly nothing that you would recognize as ordinary earthly pain or pleasure. A rather arid existence, I’d call it.” He nodded. “Humans, while they live, are bound to a physical body. When they die, the soul is free of the body and can then leave what we call the Earth and pass into other places like Heaven and Hell. When they reach those places, the soul will be re-embodied in a form that is more fitted for that existence.”

“I already understand all that.”

A small frown. “Please don’t hurry me, Mr. Dollar. Now, as I mentioned, angels and demons—and certain others—are not bound to bodies and so can enter and leave them at will, and in fact, if they want to appear and function on Earth they must take on earthly bodies. Yes? That is clear?”

I nodded.

“Good. Now, if an angel, let us say, wishes to use part of his or her earthly body as a token of agreement—a feather, for instance—then it is not enough simply to hand it over to someone. A feather on Earth, even an angel’s feather, is only a feather, a part of an earthly body—an earthly thing. It is of no probative value whatsoever.”

I raised my hand. “Probative?”

“It proves nothing. So in order for that token to mean something, it must be invested with at least a tiny bit of the essence of the angel who gives it away. Some of that angel’s soul must enter that article, and I’ve never heard of it happening by accident. The same would be true for a demon and his horn.”

I thought about this. “So the reason it was so obvious that Anaita’s feather was an angel’s feather is because she made it an angel’s feather?”

“Yes, more or less. She had to release something of herself into it when she gave it away. Similarly, Eligor would have had to imbue the horn with part of himself.”

“Okay. But what does that mean for me?”

“It means that the object itself is not the important thing, although the essence of it is. And because it is in truth an essence, like a soul, it is not confined to the earthly realm but can go anywhere the angel or demon in question can go. Do you understand?”

The only thing I understood was that my impossible task had just become even more so. I had single-handedly discovered a previously unmapped realm of impossibility—Bobby wins again! “So, basically, I’m fucked. The horn could literally be anywhere, and there’s no way to tell. I’m just massively, totally, permanently fucked. Is that what you’re saying?”

He might have shown the ghost of a smile. “Knowing the truth is always better, Mr. Dollar. You’re still in the same situation but better informed. And I haven’t finished.”

“Oh, it gets better?”

“That depends on what you make of it. But the first time I met you here, when we discussed Anaita and her motives and history, set me thinking. Something else came to me later that I think could be important.”

I was almost too depressed to reply. “I don’t have anything left to trade.”

“You’d be surprised—but this is, how do you say it, a bonus? I am throwing it in. Yes, Anaita could have hidden the horn anywhere she could go herself. But remember, she has that horn for a reason. It is her protection against Eligor’s informing on her. They are sworn to mutual destruction if either one breaks faith. Now that Eligor has recovered the feather, his horn is even more important to her.”

“So?”

“So she will not hide it anywhere it would be difficult to reach. She might be able to hide it somewhere in the Holy City itself, but that would only make it difficult to recover it in an emergency, especially because Heaven and Earth sometimes move through time at different rates. The chances are, she will have it somewhere available to her at a moment’s notice.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.”

“I am not intentionally tormenting you, Mr. Dollar. I don’t have the answer myself, but I feel that the answer can be found, and what I’ve just told you seems likely to help you do it.”

I stood up. “Well, that’s helpful, then. I guess.” But what I actually felt was helpless. I hadn’t thought I was Mr. Lucky after escaping judgement by the width of an angel hair, just Mr. Delayed Doom, and now I had fallen all the way back to square one, or even square zero.

“One last thing,” said Gustibus. “Remember this, too—Anaita is not an angel who happened to have once been a goddess. She is a goddess who became an angel. She is not like most of the rest of her heavenly peers. She may have existed before humankind, as with the rest of the angels, but she was not as they were. She became what she is because humans worshipped her.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll have to ponder that yourself, I’m afraid, Mr. Dollar. I’ve enjoyed seeing you again, but I have promised to make dinner for the sisters tonight, and the kitchen awaits me.”

Part of me wanted to thank him for his time, another part wanted to pick him up and kick out his window and hold him over the rocks and the foaming waves until he told me why he was always being such a mysterious dick. I don’t handle the Socratic method well, I guess.

I got back in my car instead and drove home through the wet, green hills, listening to the monotonous percussion of the December rain.