Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (2 page)
Read Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Online
Authors: Humans (v1.1)
And the Lord said, I will destroy
man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and
the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have
made them.
GENESIS 6:7
Contents
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 direcdy. 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.)
cc
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.”
1
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
Barrfs
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 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.
Did it seem larger since Barry*d
gone? There was a hole now in the industrial shelving where all his vast
holdings in Darth Vader stereo equipment had once stood, and some welcome space
in the closets and the medicine cabinet, but not a lot. Your footprints don’t
go very deep, pal, Susan thought, angrily pleased at the idea of his
insubstantiality, and she got out of bed, a lithe naked girl of twenty-seven
who had started worrying recently—unnecessarily—about whether or not her
breasts had begun to sag. Her hair, medium long and set for ease of maintenance
as much as for good looks, was the precise shade of Clairol blond to complement
her not-too-pale skin tones and not-too-dark blue-gray eyes. She was lucky in
her nose, and she knew it; it was precisely the nose that girls had in mind
when they made the appointment with the plastic surgeon, but never seemed to
get, and Susan had been born with it. Otherwise, she found her mouth a
problem—a tiny bit too sluttish? or not sluttish enough?—her elbows a
problem—ugly! —and her weight a chronic threat.
Seated on the toilet, she remembered
again her childhood fear that something would come out of the bowl beneath her,
something horrible with claws, and perform unspeakable acts before she could
escape. She hadn’t thought of that terror since she was maybe eight; was it
really some psychological horseshit rising up against her, out of the bowl, as
a result of Barry’s departure, leaving her nethers alone and unprotected?
“Gimme a break,” she told herself, but when had that ever happened? Minds go
their own way, regardless.
Showering, she thought about AIDS.
She had a remote cousin in AIDS research at
NYU
Medical
Center
—Chuck Woodbury, his name was—and to listen
to his party chitchat at family reunions for fifteen minutes was enough to turn
you off humans forever. And that’s the problem. A few years ago, a Barry comes,
a Barry goes, and good riddance. But not today.
No, not today. All of a sudden, you
go to bed with a guy, you’re going to bed with everybody he went to bed with
the last five years, and everybody
they
went to bed with, and there’s this massive cat’s cradle out there, this Mobius
strip of a daisy chain, and unless you’ve fallen in with a horny group of
Baptist picnicgoers the odds are getting better every day that somewhere in
that humid grid there’s the
ding,
and
all the lines turn red. Wanna climb aboard, honey? No, thanks, I’ll wait for
the next virgin. If there’s any more on this route.
Putting on her Reeboks—her grown-up
shoes were in her bottom drawer in the bank—she suddenly realized this was the
fourth consecutive day she’d forgotten to jog before her shower. All those
years of conditioning, going down the tube. Because of Barry? Ridiculous. And
if true, even more ridiculous. I’ll leave myself a note, she thought, so I
won’t forget tomorrow. Scotch-tape it to the hot water faucet in the shower.
At least she was still walking.
Downstairs, she strode west across
19th Street
to
Seventh Avenue
and then headed uptown, the city screaming
and shrieking all around her in its usual fashion. Joggers thudded by, to
remind her of her dereliction. Macho meatheads driving down the avenue gave
that double honk as they went by, that whadayasayhoney honk that didn’t mean a
thing but bravado, because even they weren’t so dumb as to think girls who
looked like her hung out with guys who drove trucks. It was May and cool but
clear, with an undercoating of white in the high blue sky. Susan moved uptown
at a steady pace, hardly thinking about Barry at all.
The coffee shop where she usually
stopped on the way to work was at the corner of
38th Street
. She almost passed it by this morning, to
punish herself for not jogging, but decided that would be stupid. She’d just be
cross and nasty in the bank if she didn’t have her regular coffee and orange
juice and English muffin. So she went in and sat at the counter, and the
waitress said, “Hi, hon.” She was a stout black woman who looked as though she
ought to be motherly but was not.
Hi, hon
was as far as it went. Three years Susan had been having breakfast here, midway
between home and the job at the bank on
West 57th Street
, and she still didn’t know the waitress’s
name. Nor did the waitress show any interest in
her
name.
“My aching
feet
!” said a raggedy old bag lady, huge and shapeless,
gray-skinned and gray-haired, as she settled onto the stool immediately to
Susan’s right, though two-thirds of the stools in the place were empty. Not a
penny
from me, Susan said fiercely in
her mind, and concentrated on the waitress, coming this way with her coffee.
The orange juice would be next, and the English muffin last. The waitress
plunked down the cup, turned away, and the bag lady said, “Marie, I’d just like
a nice glass of tomato juice.”
The waitress turned back to glare,
as though she didn’t like being called by name—so it’s Marie, is it?—but then
she walked off without speaking, and when she brought both juices and slapped
them down, the bag lady pushed dirty-looking coins across the counter, saying,
“And fifteen cents for you.”
“I don’t think I know you, hon,” the
waitress said, with that suspicious glare.
The bag lady had a huge and sunny
smile, beaming and happy. “Oh, I’m nobody,” she said.
The waitress, frown welded into
place, scooped the change off the counter and went away again. If this woman
speaks to me, Susan told herself, I’ll pretend not to hear. But the bag lady
drew a magazine—
Esquire,
of all
things—out of some deep recess within her clothing, opened it, and began
happily to read while downing tiny sips of tomato juice.
It wasn’t till Susan’s English
muffin had arrived and been half consumed that she became aware of the bag lady
studying her profile. Susan gave her a quick glance—that smile seemed sad now,
for some reason—then hurriedly looked away to concentrate on the muffin, but it
was too late. “A pretty girl like you,” the bag lady said softly. “You
shouldn’t be unhappy.”
Surprised, Susan looked full at the
woman, and this time saw nothing in her face but pity and good intentions.
cc
What
do you mean?” she demanded, knowing she didn’t sound as tough as she wanted.
“I’m not unhappy.”
“It’s some fellow, I bet,” the bag
lady said, nodding slowly, heavily. “It’s always some fellow.”
Susan gave her a cold and distancing
smile, refusing to be drawn any further into conversation, and turned back to
her muffin. If she speaks to me again, Fll move to another stool.
A ripping sound startled her, and
she turned to see that the bag lady had torn a page from her magazine and was
now smoothing it onto the counter between them. “If I was your age,” she said,
“and I was unhappy over some fellow, here’s what
Fd
do.”
Susan couldn’t help looking at the
torn-out sheet, and when she saw it was a full-page ad for vodka she couldn’t
help laughing. “I guess that is one answer,” she said.
“No, no, the
contest
the bag lady told her, tapping the ad with a dirty
fingernail and a fat grubby finger. “I’d get away, I would, and that’s just the
way to do it.”
How did I get stuck with this? Susan
asked herself, but there didn’t seem to be any way not to look more closely at
the advertisement, and to see that it was indeed an announcement of some sort
of essay contest, in which the first prize was an all-expense trip to
Moscow
.
Moscow
!
Russia
?
What kind of prize was that? Millions of
people trying to get
out
of
Russia
, this vodka company’s giving away a free
trip
in.
“Oh, I don’t think,” Susan
started, smiling with a more gentle dismissal this time, “I don’t think that’s
the—”
“You just do it,” the bag lady said.
“You’ll see I’m right. You’ve got plenty of time at work, you can do it there,
easy as pie. And off you go, it’s a whole new world, a whole new experience.”
“I don’t win contests, I’ve never
won anything in my—”
“I’ll bet you could win
this
one,” the bag lady said. “Change
your life, it would.” Finishing her tomato juice in one final noisy gulp, she
struggled off the stool and gave Susan her sunniest smile, saying, “It’s just
perfect, a pretty girl like you.” She pushed the sheet from the magazine closer
to Susan. “See if I’m not right.”
“But—why do you want to give this to
m£?”
The bag lady smiled and nodded. She
patted Susan on the shoulder, her touch surprisingly light and comforting.
“Just think of me as your guardian angel,” she said, and went off, swaying from
side to side like a tugboat in a heavy sea.
“Weird,” Susan said to the waitress,
who had come immediately to remove the empty tomato juice glass. She wished she
could call her Marie, but knew she couldn’t.
“Mm,” said the waitress, and touched
the page torn from the magazine. “This hers?”
“No, no,” Susan told her, not sure
why. “It’s mine.”
The waitress shrugged and went away.
Susan, lifting her coffee cup, studied the rules of the contest.
It didn’t look that hard, really.
