Дональд Уэстлейк: Humans

The science in this novel is as accurate as I can make it.

The theology in this novel is as biblically correct as I can make it.

As for the rest, it is a novel. All the humans in it are of my invention.

The angel... well... I believe I made him up.

One day in 1986, in Taormina, Sicily, Evan Hunter told me I should think about doing a book in some way different from what I’d done before; larger in scope, perhaps, or new in approach, or unexpected in thematic material. If Evan hadn’t put that bee in my bonnet, this book would not exist.

On a later day, in 1990, in New York City, I found that my voyage into this unknown had led to an apparent impasse; I could not for the life of me figure out how to go on. Several desperate phone calls later I met, via fax, a gentleman, scholar, physicist, and science-fiction writer in California named Robert Forward. We communicated over several days in a flurry of faxes, before he finally transmitted, “By George! I do believe he’s got it!” Without him, this book would never have been finished.

On every day, in every way, everywhere, my wife, Abby Adams, makes it possible and keeps me from carelessness and error. Without her, this book would not be coherent.

Evan, Bob, Abby: it’s your fault.

I am, or was, or perhaps still am, an angel. God knows.

I am certainly very different from what I once was. And yet I am, I think, still me. On the other hand, my life is no longer angelic, that’s true enough.

What was I before, when I was all and simply angel? How to describe that existence? It was, I think, like that fleeting part of your human condition when, waking earlier than necessary in the morning, you feel a long flow of weightlessness and selflessness, your bed has become a great soft balloon with you a part of it, and you float through the middle of the air in a vast shadowy domed auditorium., That feeling holds you for a few seconds only, and then all the weight of time and personality returns, you cease to be merely a floating fragment of thinking matter, you become yourself again, and your day begins.

For my kind, the kind I once was, that suspended oneness in the middle of the vasty space is the natural condition. Until, at great intervals, He calls. He has a task.

And so He called me: “Ananayel.”

I must go back to who and what I was at that instant, at the very start. I must track the change that took place in me as I set about performing the task He had given me. In that first instant, I was only what I always had been: a faithful servant.

And so He called me, “Ananayel.” And I roused myself, coiling like smoke as it passes through an open window, recalling myself to myself, flowing together into selfness and awareness and the fact of Ananayel, who answered, “I am here, Lord.”

And so was He, of course. He is omnipresent, among His qualities. But He was not there , if you understand me. I did not face Him directly. To do so, I understand, is to be seared into oblivion and a whole new beginning. The truth of His beauty and power is more than a mortal can stand to gaze full upon, and angels too are mortal, thought not at all as ephemeral as men.

We are all of us parts of God, parts of His dream, His desire, but none of us know any more than our own role in His plan; if indeed He has a plan, and is not merely moved this way and that by cosmic Whim, as sometimes seems the case. And so I, a tendril in God’s imaginings, had to be informed by another entity, as insubstantial as myself, just what my task was to be.

“A messenger.”

Ah. I had never been a messenger, a bringer of annunciations, the word from The Word Itself. It was said to be an exciting and even joyous experience, that one, for all concerned. It was said the look in the eyes of a human who knows himself — or herself, yes, yes, I know — to be in the presence of an angel is a look to be treasured always. (How they love us, as naturally and instinctively as they love their own newborn.) And now I was to be among the blessed few Blessed who would have received that look.

“And an affector.”

Rarer still! An angel who alters the human story, the progression of human events! An angel who crumbles a fortification, diverts a river, lights a torch to safety or defeat! To take part ! (That is the one great thing we angels miss, when we are roused to awareness. We have no history of our own, no desires, no triumphs. No disasters either, of course, which is the trade-off. But even a weeping human, gnashing its teeth, can sometimes seem more real than we.)

“What do you know of America?”

Nothing. Never heard of it.

I was shown the land of the Iroquois, who would let the river carry them down to where the water turned to salt, just before the mighty sea, where their nets could bring in fish that never ventured upstream.

“It’s been a while since you looked.”

I have been elsewhere, and nowhere, floating at times among other stars. Because He has, you know, other ant farms than this, other dollhouses than Earth, other pets than these. So now I look, and much has changed where that river meets the sea. The Indians and their canoes are gone. A mighty city sprawls around the harbor, noxious and colorful, teeming and keening. It must be twenty times the size of Rome!

“One hundred times, if you mean the Rome of the Republic. They have been fruitful. They have multiplied. There are now five billion of the damn things.”

All in that city?

“Not quite. But that is where you are to begin.”

What do they call it?

“New York.”

What was Old York?

“Irrelevant. It is in New York that you will begin to announce, and to affect.”

Pleasure and anticipation fill me and I drift higher, expanding. What am I to do? What is the current state of God’s plan?

“He’s tired of them. They’re too many, too grubby, too willful. They are too prone to error by half.”

And my Task?

“To announce, and to affect, the end of their World.”

Susan Carrigan floated in the great soft cloud of bed, not asleep and not awake, not thinking, only feeling. She hung in the suspended moment, aware and not aware, and then the radio beside her bed exploded into noise: “I can’t get no — no no no!”

“Shit,” she muttered, suddenly assaulted by sensation. Her mouth tasted like green mold. Her ears hurt. Her back hurt. Her bladder hurt. Her right hand, too long beneath the pillow beneath her head, had fallen asleep and now was tingling and smarting its way back into existence.

And Barry’s gone!

She rolled over onto her back, glaring leftward at the other pillow, undented and white. The son of a bitch, the son of a bitch, the prick with ears. Gone.

Not that she wanted him back. Let him marry his fucking CD player, he had all the maturity of a retarded chimpanzee, she was better off without him. It was just that, every morning, it came as a surprise all over again that he was really gone. They’d been together almost eight months, after all, and apart now only six days. Seven days? No, six.

The radio kept on complaining: “Oh, I’m talk in with some girl—”

“And fuck you, too,” she said, rising up, slapping her hand onto the button, cutting it off in mid-squawk. The movement agitated her bladder. She was awake. Hello, Tuesday, I must be Susan. And this 14 by 23-foot space (plus kitchenette and john), with windows viewing ailanthus trees and the dark brick backs of buildings on West 19th Street, must be all mine.