The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Any angel can do it-even you. Hasn’t Sam showed you how yet?”

“He said he would, but he hasn’t got around to it.”

Probably trying to minimize the trouble you can cause, I thought but didn’t say. “I’m sure he will.”

“I hope he’s okay. He looked terrible! Tubes up his nose and down his throat…”

I felt more than a bit guilty that I hadn’t visited Sam in the hospital, even though I’d been told not to show up. “As far as getting trapped Outside-no, it can’t happen, not without causing an interafter incident. The rules are very strict. They must have spent a huge part of the Convention just arguing about how all that had to be regulated.”

“Inter…after?”

I smiled. The phrase had been one of Leo’s. “Friend of mine made that up-he was a friend of Sam’s, too. Inter-afterlife. Between them and us.”

“And when you say ‘Convention,’ you mean the Tartarean Convention, right? Where we got together with the Opposition back in the beginning and made up the rules?”

“Yeah. Once it was clear that the Highest was banishing Satan’s crew but not destroying them, then everybody had to agree how the game was going to play out.” I remembered something. “You can’t force anybody to go Outside, either, or take them there against their will. That actually saved my life recently.”

“I know. With Eligor, in his office.”

I squinted at him. “How did you know that?”

“Because you told me, remember? Come on, Bobby, you’re getting paranoid. When we were getting coffee that time with Sam?”

“Oh. Yeah.” But it knocked me back a little, and so we continued for a while in silence.

I’ve been glossing over the journey through the Fields, but I really shouldn’t because it’s quite an experience. I mean, believe me, mortals would line up for miles and pay Disneyland prices just to stroll for a few hundred yards. The most amazing thing is the colors, the way they glow and snap and sparkle. People who have experienced peyote or magic mushrooms or LSD might have some inkling of how, when you’re tripping, the colors of everything seem to intensify, almost to throb with inner light. The difference with Heaven is that there’s never the harshness that happens with psychedelic drugs, let alone the potential for a bad trip. In fact, a hike through the hills and meadows that surround the Celestial City is pretty much by definition the opposite of a bad trip.

Now, of course I don’t know anything about peyote or any of those others myself. After all, I’m an angel, and even an angel who was stuck in a desert training camp with a bunch of other bored angels wearing human bodies for the first time would never experiment with drinking and illegal drugs and other such bad human habits. It just wouldn’t happen. You see that, don’t you?

Anyway, since I had decided to be a little more reticent with Clarence, I had time to appreciate again the peculiar beauty of the Fields, as well as the parts that were just plain peculiar. For one thing, although there were people all around-the Blessed, perhaps, certainly the souls of the happy departed-it was very hard to reach any of them. The Fields were dreamlike, as was the Celestial City itself, but the nature of this particular dream was that it was easy to reach things, like a shady grove or invitingly grassy hillock, but people were always farther away than they seemed: You could get to them, but if they appeared to be a few hundred feet away to begin with it might take what felt in Earthly terms like a quarter of an hour to do it. I don’t know whether that was just the unique physics of Heaven or because the Highest didn’t want people’s afterlives interrupted too easily. Not that you ever got much out of people when you talked to them in the Fields, anyway. They often seemed half- asleep, cheerful and willing to answer you, but lost in memories of the lives they had lived or the afterlife they were currently living, and only capable of paying partial attention. Sometimes, in the early days, when I was still asking my questions out loud, I would leave the Fields of Heaven feeling like a creepy grownup who’d been hanging around a children’s playground.

But the rest of the Fields offer themselves up much more easily than the inhabitants do. The sun shines all the time, but-again, like a dream-if you walk into the darker places, the shadowed corners and forested glens, you quickly find that it’s much like night in some trustworthy, beautiful, and benign nature spot. You discover places that seem to be right out of your own fondest memories, although of course, if you’re someone like me or Clarence, you have no memories to match them with, just that feeling. Everywhere you go it’s like that: unfamiliar but unthreatening, or familiar but still mysterious, as if deja vu was in the very air you breathed. And like the City, being in the Fields of Heaven feels right. It feels good. Every time I pass through I tell myself, I need to see more of this. I need to learn more. Maybe I could be happy here. Maybe.

But all things come to an end, even the endless Fields. Eventually you reach a high place where you can discern the shimmering walls of the City in the distance. For most people this would be the highlight of any trip, but for me it always comes with the smallest internal shiver of disquiet. I’ve never really felt like I belonged in Heaven. Every time I come here, even when summoned by high authorities, even on those rare occasions when I’ve been praised, I still feel as though I’m in danger of being found out.

Found out about what? I don’t know. I wish I did.

“So why did you want me to come with you?” Clarence asked as we made our way through the great gate and into the murmuring flow of angelic inhabitants that always crowd the streets. (By the way, although the streets are not really all paved in gold, there are certainly parts that seem to be, but it’s a gold that’s pleasant to the touch, yielding as firm earth, with few of the real qualities of gold except beauty.) “Is it something about Sam?”

“Why would you think that?”

He shrugged. He was already acting a little distracted, caught up in the infectious good cheer of Heaven. I could feel it myself but I was struggling hard to hold onto my sense of purpose, as I always did when I went back. I’ve found that if I go about it in the same way that a drunk undertakes a complicated task-concentrate, concentrate, concentrate-I can just about manage. Then I pass under a tree full of blossoms, each one shining from within like a fairy subdivision, and I have to start over.

“Why? I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because Sam’s in the hospital ‘cause he got hurt helping you against that ghallu thing. And because Sam’s kind of my boss.”

“Not a bad guess. But no, not really. I wanted you because you used to work in the Records Hall, right?”

For the first time since we entered the City his cheerful calm retreated a bit. He wrinkled his forehead as though I had just spoken the name of a particularly unpleasant ex-girlfriend of his-not that I believed he’d had many of those, unpleasant or otherwise. “Really?” he said. “But, I haven’t worked there for a while….”

“Not too far back, really. A few weeks, Earth time, plus your stretch in training before they sent you down- which obviously wasn’t long, at least, based on how little you know.”

He blushed. I’d never seen anyone blush in Heaven. It was charming in a pathetic sort of way. “Am I really that bad?”

“You know how nature makes babies helpless so we don’t want to eat them? Well, even Eligor’s horned monster would probably just pick you up and ruffle your hair and play a game of got-your-nose.” He looked so shamefaced I almost felt bad, but I was determined to test him. “But there’s plenty you can do to help out, and this is one of them. Let’s head over to Records and I’ll tell you.”

We drifted across Merciful Square and down the Eternal Way with its endless white columns. Angels passed us constantly, but some of the highest simply appeared and disappeared, not bothering with approximations of Earthly life. I suspected these might be the ones who had never been mortals. Every now and then I could make out the shape of golden wings inside a high angel’s glow, and it reminded me that one of the Celestial City’s very important citizens might well be a traitor. I distracted myself by pointing out some of the more esoteric sites to Clarence.

“And that’s the Panepistimion,” I said. “It’s where they learn to work with the Dominions of the Second Sphere. I don’t really understand what that means, but it has something to do with the machinery of the universe.”

“See, that’s the problem with Sam,” Junior said abruptly. “He never tells me anything. Not like you do.”

I bristled a little. “Sam’s got his own way of doing things. Don’t underestimate him.”

“I don’t, but sometimes I wish he wouldn’t…I don’t know, hold me at arm’s length so much. Half the