Tad Williams: The Dirty Streets of Heaven

Suddenly the deceased was gone. Grasswax took off a moment later, silent and very unpleasantly angry. Howlingfell pointed a shaking, clawed finger at me. “You’re dead, Dollar!” he growled, but his voice was still a bit weak from my knee crushing his trachea. A moment later he followed Grasswax through the shimmering wound and then, except for the judge, it was just angels standing around in the frozen moment.

“Congrats,” I told Clarence. “You’ve made your first batch of enemies today.”

“What?”

“And not just on the other team,” Sam said. “If you ever do that to me again, kid, they’ll never find all the different pieces.”

“Pieces…?”

“Of you.” He shook his head in disgust. “You get any more bright ideas, try ’em out on me or Bobby first.”

I was watching Xathanatron, who to my discomfort seemed to be staring in my direction. I’d kind of hoped that scuffle with Howlingfell would have been beneath the high angel’s notice.

You Are Wanted In The Celestial City, Angel Doloriel, the pillar of light told me. Sam and the kid didn’t hear it, but for me it came loud enough to make my cheekbones ache. Your Archangel Wishes To Speak With You. Then the big glow was gone.

“C’mon,” Sam said to me. “Time to go back. I’m going to buy Clarence an ice cream. I mean, we did win the case.”

Me, I was feeling thirsty-that’s just how I react to happy endings. But then I react to unhappy ones pretty much the same way.

I already know some of the questions you want to ask. The answers are:

1) Yes, it’s pretty darn interesting being an angel.

2) No, I haven’t met God. Yet.

3) I can’t tell you which religion was right after all, because it’s not exactly clear.

4) As to what Heaven’s like…well, bear with me and I’ll try to explain.

First off, Heaven is…complicated. It’s not just a castle on a cloud or some paradise garden. It’s big, even though there’s only one city-the Celestial City itself. But that city is surrounded by what they call the Fields, which are lands that stretch on and on in all directions, seemingly forever, rolling hills and meadows and even forests full of souls that I’ve always assumed are the departed of Earth living the good life of Eternity. If you ask them, though, they don’t know any more about it than I do about my own pre-angelic life-they’re just happy .

Usually when you’re summoned you go straight to the Celestial City. You don’t walk when you’re there, or even fly. Nothing that simple. Even calling it a city is a bit misleading, although there are times when it seems to be exactly that, when you catch glimpses of the enormity that is around you, towers and heights and shining walkways impossibly far above your head. Wherever you go shining presences surround you like the lights of a million happy cars on a busy but absolutely safe freeway, and each of those presences is an angel. And somewhere at the heart of it, a place you can never quite see but that you always know is there, a constant glow in the edge of your sight and sense and imagination, is the Empyrean, the innermost district of Heaven where they say the Highest dwells.

Invitation only, needless to say.

But all that doesn’t begin to describe Heaven, how it looks, feels, tastes. Do you remember the Electrical Parade they used to do at the Disney parks in the evenings, with all the gleaming lights and dancing characters? Well, it’s a bit like that, but only if you had a strong fever that also somehow made you feel secure and comfortable and like you never wanted to ask another question because it was just too much trouble.

I got over the last part-a few of us do. Now I ask lots of questions, but mostly to myself.

Another problem: the sights you see in Heaven, the look of the citizens, even the conversations you have there tend to be slippery in the mind afterward. I’m sure I’m frustrating you, but there really is no good way to explain quite what it’s like, because by the time you get back it doesn’t even feel the same to you, even though you’re the one it happened to. Like trying to remember exactly how everything worked in a dream. When you’re up at the House, as Sam calls it, you know how to get where you need to go, you know where you are, you see things and they make sense. But just try to draw a map afterward. Doesn’t work.

I don’t think most of the angels in Heaven worry about things like this-certainly not the way I do. In fact, other than a few of my earthbound friends, everybody else in the angelic throng seems to believe that even wondering about how things work is a form of ingratitude. But I can’t help being this way. It’s just the way the Highest made me.

Don’t get me wrong, though-I like Heaven okay, and I like being an angel. Beats the crap out of the alternative. Especially when you consider that the time-frame in question is eternity.

You can think of the next part as taking place in Temuel’s office in the California building of the North American Continent Complex, although calling any structure in Heaven a “building” and any place in that structure an “office” is a gross oversimplification of a very strange, very shiny and floaty reality. Temuel was my special archangel-my supervisor, I guess you’d call him. Not my mentor, though, because I’d been in the department longer than he had. He was aware of that, so he shied away from the whole “boss” thing and tried to work the “older friend” angle instead, especially with me and Sam and the other veterans. We let him. It’s better when everyone knows, or at least thinks they know, where they stand.

We didn’t tell him his nickname, of course. There aren’t too many good ways to spin “The Mule.” But nobody really disliked him. He was just the boss, and an archangel to boot, and that made real affection difficult. The higher angels are just too…distant to get chummy with, even the more approachable ones like Temuel.

“Ah, Angel Doloriel!” he said with deliberate good cheer when I showed up. (You can’t always tell by looking at them, but some angels in Heaven are “he” and some are “she,” some are kind of both, and others are just “it.” Nothing personal on my end.) “God loves you. How are things in Jude?”

If there’s anything that makes people from San Judas wince, it’s hearing people who’ve never been there call it “Jude,” but I was already feeling the mandatory cheerfulness of Heaven bubbling through me and doing my best to go with it. “Hello, chief. Things are fine, I guess. Of course the Giants spent all last year playing like they never heard of runners in scoring position, and they could use a lefty reliever something fierce, but hey, spring training’s just starting so there’s always hope.” Sometimes I talk about baseball just to annoy people who don’t understand it. It’s one of the many wonderful things about that game. “Oh, and speaking of training, Sammariel’s working with this new kid.”

“Ah, yes, young Haraheliel.” He nodded. “How does he look so far?”

“Like a pig in a bikini. But I’m sure he’ll improve.” Or he’d run his mouth again at a bad time and get us all yanked out of Jude and demoted to an eternity of making pointed suggestions to minor sinners in Purgatory. “Where’d he come from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The bright visage of Temuel clouded the tiniest bit. He lifted his shining hand in a gesture of calculated vagueness. “Oh, Records, I think. He was transferred to us as a favor to one of the higher-ups.”

There were so many things about that sentence that scared me that I didn’t dare say a word.

“Anyway, that was really what I wanted to talk to you about,” the Mule went on.