“Whoa. You’re just going to lie under the bed up here for a couple of weeks? Spooky.” But that seemed to have addressed his major concern. “I’ll make sure nobody bothers you, Bobby man.”
“Just make sure that nobody includes you,” I said. “Remember, this is a heavy-duty government medical experiment. If you mess with my body, or tell anyone I’m here, you’re risking my life and yours . . . as well as the safety of the Free World.”
Sorry, but I just couldn’t help fucking with him. You’d probably have done it too.
G-Man’s eyes lit up. “Aye-aye, dude!” he said, saluting so hard he knocked off his sideways baseball cap.
The Museum of Industry is a big old place in the Belmont neighborhood west of the Camino Real in North Jude. It used to be the Phagan Mansion back in the days when Belmont was on the rural outskirts of San Judas and people like the Phagans made so much money that they could barely spend it fast enough to keep from drowning in it. A later generation realized the mansion was worth more as a taxable donation, I guess, and gave it to the city.
The museum was made up of what had been the main house, a sprawling three-story structure probably easy to get lost in even when it was a house, and two wings that had been built later. The three parts of the museum were divided into different historical aspects of San Judas and California. One wing focused on the original native inhabitants and the earliest European explorers and settlements; the main house, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when San Judas took off and grew large; then the modern Silicon Valley era in the other wing. It was a popular game among local wags to come up with names for the three sections and their eras—“Ships, Shops, and Chips” was a popular one and, of course, the less politically correct “Injuns, Engines, and Multi-User Dungeons.” (The last is a computer game thing, I think, but if you want to know for sure, you’ll have to ask someone who’s never had sex.)
The fountain in front had actually been salvaged from a derelict, early twentieth-century office building that had stood on another part of the property. When they tore the office building down, some local artist had rescued the maze of copper piping from the fire sprinkler system, then rebuilt part of it in the open space in front of the museum. It was as if the walls of the office building were still there but invisible; the pipes formed empty geometric shapes and drizzled water from sprinkler heads on every level. (It always reminded me of one of those Visible Man models where you can see the circulatory system through the clear plastic skin.)
I was looking up at the fountain when someone approached me from behind. I was a little nervous, what with my run-ins with Smyler lately, and I must have spun around quite quickly. The skinny young African-American kid raised his hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Just wanted to know if you could tell me the time.”
I looked at my watch. “Ten o’clock on the dot.” But when I looked back at him he was smiling in a sort of odd way. “Something wrong?”
“It’s me, Bobby. Temuel.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t get out of Heaven much, do you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re having too much fun with disguises.”
He looked a little hurt. “I’m being careful. You want me to be careful, don’t you? You don’t want everyone to know what we’re doing, do you?”
Why is almost everybody I know so touchy? “No, no, of course not.”
“Good.” He looked around. We seemed to be the only people in the vicinity. The Mule reached up and made a Zipper appear in the air. (If I haven’t explained recently, these are what we use to step Outside, which means outside of Time itself. That’s where we do our job, at least the part where we defend the souls of recently dead customers from the spin-doctoring of Hell.) He stepped into it, then beckoned for me to follow.
Unlike most of what I encounter Outside (because I’m usually at deathbeds or accident scenes) the view inside this Zipper wasn’t really any different than the view outside. Temuel and I were still alone, the museum was still closed, and it was still night. The only thing different was that the water from the fountain was frozen, thousands of individual drops arrested in midair. It would have been interesting to look at them up close, but my archangel had other ideas.
He reached up and plucked something out of nowhere. When he held it out to me, it was only a spark of light on his palm.
“This is Lameh,” he said. “She’s a guardian.” That was another kind of angel, the kind that spends a lifetime with a human and records everything he or she does and says and thinks, then advocates like me use the information they’ve collected to defend the soul at judgement.
“Hello, Lameh,” I said.
“She doesn’t really talk any more,” Temuel said. “Not out loud, anyway. She’s very old.”
Which was an odd thing to say. I’d never heard anyone mention a guardian angel’s age.
“But she’s going to help you. She knows a lot, and she’s going to share it with you.”
“Knows a lot about what?”
“About Hell, of course.” Temuel did something, and suddenly the spark was smoldering on the end of his index finger. “You need to know much more than you do, or you’re going to be spotted as soon as you get there.” His face grew stern. “This isn’t a game, Bobby.”
“I know, I know!” But I couldn’t help wondering why this Lameh had so much information about Hell—not the normal college major for a guardian angel. Before I could think of a discreet way to ask, the archangel leaned forward and put his finger to my ear and something jumped into my head. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was just as odd as it sounds. Then Temuel took me by the arm and steered me back out of the Zipper again before closing the fiery, midair hole behind us.
“Now go home, Bobby,” my boss said. “Go to sleep and Lameh will do the rest. She’ll tell you what you need to know, then take you where you need to be.”
I knew the feeling of a guardian passing me information, so I wasn’t too upset about having something foreign in my thoughts, but I still had questions for Temuel. He, on the other hand, seemed to be finished with the conversation and was climbing the stairs that led out of the plaza. I called to him but he didn’t reply. Halfway up he broke into a trot, then a run, as if he were exactly the twelve-year-old kid he looked to be.
“Call me when you get back!” the archangel shouted as he melted into the shadows of the surrounding buildings.
When I got to the Walker house, I didn’t bother to check in with G-Man, but just climbed in through one of the unlocked windows and made my way upstairs. The sheet was still there from earlier in the day, and I took it with me as I slid under the bed, then rolled myself in it so it was under me and over me, covering my face and everything else. It was hard to ignore the fact that it was pretty much exactly like the shrouds people get buried in.
Lameh was in my head, just where Temuel had put her, murmuring words I could barely understand, things that sounded more like incantations than useful facts, and which entered me not like knowledge but like a chemical transfer. I did my best to relax and just let it trickle through me. It wasn’t like I could actually understand her anyway. She wasn’t telling me the names of things or the chief annual exports of various regions of the underworld. Everything she said was just a feeling I had, as though some benign but strange little animal had made a home deep in my skull and was going about its strange animal business there. But every now and then I could perceive things that hadn’t been there before, as if I had fallen asleep in a misty rain and now was feeling the water beginning to pool and run down my skin. I did my best to get comfortable.
At last I slipped into drowsy darkness, and for a little while that hard-to-hear voice accompanied me as I settled down, down. For a time I dreamed I was standing outside a door, knowing that the saddest thing in the world was on one side of it, but I didn’t know for certain which side the sadness was on, my side or the one I couldn’t see.