The Dirty Streets of Heaven

twenty-nine

Sam looked rough, but anyone who wasn’t an angel would have looked a lot worse. He had purple-grey bruises on his face and an impressive zigzag-shaped scar on his forehead. He also walked like he had rickets. “Try the little pancakes with dipping sauce,” he said, wincing as he slid onto the bench across from me. “They’re real good.”

“You look like shit. I thought we were going someplace nobody knows us.”

“These people have two restaurants, one down near Shoreline that I go to all the time. I’ve never been to this one.”

I nodded, then ordered the pancakes and what appeared to be a spicy beef casserole. They didn’t have any Burmese beer so I had a Singha instead, which is at least from the same part of the world. Sam had some kind of fish soup thing and a ginger ale. “And get the bread,” he said. “It’s like Indian bread with lots of layers, a cardiac’s worth of butter in each piece.”

“You look better than I thought you would,” I told him. “But then it’s hard to separate the new damage from all the preexisting ugly.”

He laughed, then told me about his time in the hospital. Apparently the people there had heard about the gas pipe explosion at The Compasses (the official story our fixers had chosen) and he got lots of sympathy from the staff. Sam being Sam, just listening to him describe the various nurses and orderlies and their conversations kept me entertained until the food arrived.

He downed his ginger ale and called for another. The woman behind the counter looked at him as if he’d asked for the space shuttle to be summoned, but eventually brought him another bottle. “Okay,” he said. “Your turn, B. Now you tell me why you look like you misplaced your dick and the replacement’s going to take six weeks to get shipped here from Korea.”

“That obvious, huh?” I couldn’t help smiling. “I’m glad you didn’t get snuffed, Sammy. I don’t know anyone else who says silly shit like that.”

I wasn’t going to tell him about Caz, not because he would have been horrified (I don’t think he would have been) but because I didn’t want to put him in a position where he would have to lie to our bosses to protect me. I don’t even know if it’s possible to lie to Heaven, except the way I’d already been doing it, by omission. Instead I told him what he was going to hear about soon anyway, which was Edward L. Walker’s last statement to the living world.

When I got to the part where Habari took Walker through to Outside, Sam paused with a look of incredulity on his face and a long noodle dangling from his fork. “No shit? He took the guy through a Zipper while he was still alive? How?”

“Just wait. It gets weirder.” I gave him the rest, including Habari’s claim that he was part of some kind of “third way.” Sam waved a piece of platha bread in irritation. “I don’t give a damn about the philosophy, but the rest is bullshit. You can’t take a living mortal Outside. At least folks like you and me can’t. Maybe Hell’s winning the technology race, but I’ll bet it was some kind of trick.”

I doubted this because the whole thing Walker had described was too much like what we angels and our counterparts experienced when we use the Zippers, but I had to agree with Sam about it not usually working on mortals; the guy with the GOD BLESS sign was probably still wondering what I’d been trying to get him to look at.

“But what if it’s not, Sam? What if this kind of shit is really going on in our own building?”

“Look, B, we all know God didn’t make the world perfect. If He’d made his angels perfect there wouldn’t even be a Hell, right? He must have given them all freedom of choice just like He gave all the folks down here on Earth, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a rebellion in Heaven, and the losers wouldn’t have all wound up down in the boiler room. So even if this is some kind of conspiracy-and we’re a long way from knowing that for sure-it’s still business as usual. Right?”

“I guess so.” But it did make me feel a bit better. That’s what I love about Sam. He’s like one of those airline pilots who can get on the microphone as you’re spiraling straight down at four hundred miles an hour and say, “By the way, you may have noticed we’re experiencing a few difficulties, but we’ve got everything under control.” He might be lying to you, but it beats the crap out of, “Oh, fuck no, we’re all going to die!”

“Anyway,” I said, “now there’s this big conference at the Ralston about missing souls, big swinging dicks from both sides, and I’m supposed to go. I’ll probably have to answer a bunch of questions about the Walker thing now, too.”

“You’ll be fine, it’ll be neutral ground.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t know how I wound up in the center of this thing. Why me? What did I do?”

Sam had an odd look on his face. For half a second I thought he was going to say something truly startling, but instead he leaned forward and snagged my last two pancakes off my plate, then gulped them down.

“Hah! Fortune favors the faster eater,” he said. “Look, don’t sweat the summit, B. I’ll be along to keep you out of trouble.”

I had half-hoped he might volunteer, but I really didn’t want him to get hurt again helping me. “Naw. You’ve got your own work to do, you poor creaky old bastard, and you’re just out of the hospital.”

He grinned. “Technically I’m not out of the hospital, I’m just taking a really long crap. I left a note on my pillow saying I’d be right back. Besides, you didn’t hear the rest of what I was going to say. I have to go to the conference anyway, so I’ve already got the time off work. Young Clarence is going to take all my clients. I don’t know what they’re going to do about yours, though-they’ll have to train a chimp or something.”

“You?” This surprised me. “Why are you going?”

“Because the call where Walker failed to show was originally mine, remember? It only got rolled over to you when I couldn’t take it. So I have an order to appear. Didn’t the Mule tell you?”

I was definitely beginning to wonder about the Mule but I didn’t say so. If I let myself get any more conspiracy-crazy I was going to wind up as one of those guys who call in late-night talk shows to explain how America faked the moon landing. But it did remind me of something. “By the way, how’s the kid coming along? I know you’re letting him work on his own now, but what do you think of him? Ever find out how he got jumped out of Records directly into a field office?”

Sam shrugged. “Nope. I asked around, but nobody at Records would cop to knowing anything. And he sure doesn’t seem to. Maybe someone in a high position recognized him, if you know what I mean.” There’s a consistent strain of paranoid thinking among us earthbound angels that even though we don’t remember our previous lives, our bosses almost certainly do.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“Maybe is the new definitely,” Sam said. “Get used to it, Bobby my boy. You have to learn to embrace uncertainty.”

“That’s the kind of shit you used to say when you drank,” I told him. I may have said it a little more sourly than I meant to: he had reminded me not just of the Mule but of my night with Caz, too. Besides, if an angel falling in love with a demon didn’t count as embracing uncertainty, what would?

“Yeah, you’re right.” He downed his ginger ale and reached for his wallet. “And believe me, when that horn-headed whatchamacallit of yours was kicking my ass, I was definitely rethinking my choice to go straight. I mean, who wants to die sober?”

“Even worse,” I said, pushing a ten and a five across the table for my share, “who wants to die sober more than once?”

I dropped Sam off at his apartment in Southport and drove slowly back up the Bayshore, not by choice but because the rush hour had begun, and the traffic was moving at walking speed. Normally I’d take surface streets but Orban’s Benz had decent air conditioning, and I was in no hurry. I had nowhere to go, after all-I hadn’t picked a motel for the night yet, and I’d just finished eating. When I finally got tired of staring at other people’s brake lights I got off the freeway and followed Bay Avenue east from the Palo Alto district, headed out toward the Ralston Hotel. The office complexes and condos along the bay front had all been full just a few years back, during the last internet boom, but harder times had driven a lot of the new tenants back into cheaper parts of town or out of the area entirely. I could see a lot of “For Lease” signs and a lot of untended grounds. It was kind of depressing, but I wasn’t on a sightseeing tour, so I followed the curving road past offices and warehouses, through East Bayshore all the way out to Sand Point, a jutting finger of land which had long, long ago been the site of an important lighthouse. The antique lighthouse tower still stood just beyond the hotel at the end of the point like a younger brother waiting for an older sibling before going in to swim, and I knew they kept the light shining picturesquely out over the water at night, but I doubted it was any use now except as a post card item.

The Ralston was one of those big old places built in the earliest years of the twentieth century, and although it had been kept up very nicely and had even undergone an extensive renovation in the late 1990s, it still looked strangely out of place, looming up all by itself in front of the sullen green bay. It seemed like it should be the centerpiece of a city block, like the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco or the Waldorf in New York, but there was no city block around it, just a few smaller office complexes perched a respectful distance away on either side. Despite the big flag snapping in the stiff bay breeze atop the green copper roof and all the cars in the parking lot down below, the hotel seemed strangely solitary, like the statue of Ozymandias Shelley describes standing forgotten in the middle of the desert.

The words of the poem came back to me, but from what part of my memory I couldn’t tell; I couldn’t remember actually reading it during my angel years. Seepage from my past life, maybe. Our bosses claim it doesn’t happen, but most of us don’t believe them.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away…

No matter how I tried to concentrate on the banks of flowers in vast planters outside or the bright striped awning that fluttered over the front entrance like a king’s coronation train, I couldn’t make myself like the look of the place. After another couple of minutes I turned my car around and headed back, westward into the setting sun.

As I got back on the freeway I tried Caz again, but she still wasn’t picking up, and I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t already said in the previous three messages. The traffic was still bad, so I peeled off a few exits before I’d planned and headed up the Woodside Highway. On a sudden whim I picked a place just at the edge of Spanishtown called the Mission Rancho Motor Lodge and checked in, taking a room at the far end of the top floor overlooking the local park. I wasn’t exactly certain why the place called to me but it did, and I’ve learned to trust my instincts.

I didn’t figure it out until I got back from a late dinner of tacos al pastor at a little place in the neighborhood and dragged a chair out onto the balcony to watch the lights come on. Not too far away, at the edge of the park and almost hidden by the apartment buildings and commercial buildings that had sprung up on all sides of it, stood the hacienda silhouette of Mission San Judas Tadeo, the place where the whole crazy, haunted city had got its start. The mission building was dark except for a light over the front door, and the streetlights in the park barely bounced back off the adobe facade; even so, the low building looked welcoming, like a campfire would to someone wandering lost in the woods. As I sat staring at the mission, thinking about the poor Indian bastards who had been shanghaied into building it for the Spanish priests, something clicked into place-not about the big questions I was grappling with but about why I was there at that moment, and why I’d had that reaction to the Ralston Hotel. All that gilt and carved stone, the sheer size of the place, had reminded me of the Vatican, something I’d seen only on television but which, to be honest, had always made me a bit queasy. Because as far as I’m concerned, when you pile up that much treasure in one place you’re not glorifying Heaven any more, you’re showing off how much power you wield right here on Earth. The padres who convinced or browbeat those Ohlone Indians to build the mission (the select few of them who’d already survived the plagues of European diseases) might not have been much different than their buddies back in Rome, but in their own way they had been trying to make a place where they and their charges could talk to God and feel His presence-a house that was just big enough for Him and a few followers, not a giant “screw you” to the rest of the world like St. Peter’s. Maybe the Vatican had once been that way too, but it sure wasn’t anymore. I could still see what the mission had been, however-a spot that for a hundred years and more had served as the heart of a community, offering real comfort instead of threat and spectacle.

I don’t know, maybe all that was just more of my sour mood. I had a lot of reasons besides the gaudiness of its appearance to dread going to the Ralston, and I was probably over-sentimentalizing San Judas’s homey little mission, but as I sat there on my motel balcony watching the nighttime traffic eddy past, listening to the sound of other people’s televisions and conversations and music echoing out over the park, motel sounds and neighborhood sounds mingling together, I felt as if I had found something important in the middle of everything-a reason to keep on doing the strange and frustrating things I do.