I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.
He took me home and broke the glass and out I blossomed, fully-formed and heavy-breasted, and he rushed for his notebooks.
He was tortured by the impulse to understand everything. A fatal condition in humans. He was full of rage at his own ignorance, and the more he eked out through his art and philosophy and mathematics—which in those days were all part of the same discipline—the more he discovered he did not know, and the more that knowledge consumed him.
I loved him for it, and he resented me. Even in our bed, he resented me. His fingertips would outline my contours as if I were drawn on a manuscript, searching for the secrets of my substance.
It hurt him to love me because I was a door to the wisdom of eons that he couldn’t unlock. I knew the names of all the stars, and I wouldn’t tell them to him. I couldn’t. It would have driven him mad, and he would have ended up wandering the streets with the beggars and the crazed soothsayers.
He told me that there were worse places to end.
He longed to know the names of the stars, the true names that they only tell each other, how they were born, the exact latitude of this or that red giant. I told him that I had walked on a star once and it was nothing special. After that he didn’t fuck me for weeks.
He liked me in feathers, though. One morning I found that he had plucked out all the filoplumes on my left side and was dissolving them in acid, trying to determine what I was made of. So I took him walking on a star. He didn’t like it as much as he thought he would.
After lunch, I spend the afternoon answering calls from the Gulf of Mexico, where the summer storms are the worst they’ve been in a generation, just like they were last year. And the year before that.
The lines are going mad. Please protect my home. Please save my children from the water. Lord, let us get out in time. In your name, Amen.
I hate telling them no.
Those of us whose work is out in the world call the phone lines an easy job. I say, you try finding fifty different ways to tell people that all their prayers won’t save their home, their business, their kids. Try persuading those people to stay signed up to the long-term plan.
I don’t like it when they shout at me, but I understand. That’s practically what we’re here for, to be shouted at. We’re here to sit and take all that fury and frustration and tamp it down into something manageable. Angry people boil over with life, raging and raging. They fascinate me.
What I really dread are the quiet ones. The ones who say very little. Sometimes they cry very, very softly, hoping you won’t hear them, which just makes it worse.
They all get through to us eventually. That’s why it’s important to know where they’re calling from. A Catholic with an urgent question about the propriety of cleaning consecrated wine off a good white carpet will get rankled if you quote the Koran by accident, and there you are and you’ve just lost a repeat client.
So I talk to the flood victims in my gentlest voice for an average of ten minutes and twenty-three seconds each.
Then I have a nice chat with a nun in Bolivia who really just wants Jesus to tell her where she’s left her glasses this time.
I tell her they’re by the sink. Miniature miracles are allowed for those who’ve signed the lifetime plan. Nobody believes them anyway.
Then there’s a Satanist kid in a hospital in Dallas, having his stomach pumped and calling on Lucifer and all his many minions to slaughter his enemies and bring him a dose of medical-grade morphine to get him through the night.
I hand that one over to Gremory. He lives for this sort of thing.
“Hello,” I hear him say, “my name is Legion. How can I help you?”
Eventually he persuades the kid that he doesn’t need to call on Satan to destroy his squat-mates with fire and fetch him drugs, he needs to call his mother.
Then we go for dinner. Grem has three hot dogs and reads me extracts from High Times.
Grem is happy because on Thursday afternoons they play heavy metal over the main speakers, rather than the usual airport music. Apparently heavy metal is calming and improves our productivity. I have another coffee.
“Are you there, God?”
The next caller is six or seven years old at the most. Before answering, I wait for the standard message to play over the still, small song, remote and clear:
Your prayer will be answered by the next available operative. Please note that we cannot take requests for miracles over the phone. Your orisons may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.
“You’re speaking to a member of the heavenly host. How can I help you tonight?”
“Is that Jesus?” A little girl’s voice. I check the location: Cape Town. It’s morning there.
“No,” I say, “but I’m— I’m friends with Jesus.” This is an acceptable lie to tell to children. Nobody has seen the Nazarene in two thousand years.
“I’m friends with Jesus, too!” says the little girl. “Can I talk to him?”
“Not just now,” I say, “but I can take a message for Jesus and he’ll definitely listen to it.”
“Oh. Okay. I just wanted to ask about my cat. His name is Lemon. My name is Carla. I’d like Jesus to please look after Granny and Lemon and make sure they don’t die.”
Why are children always the hardest? Adults know not to ask for that sort of thing directly.
“Also, I’d like Jesus to kill Mr. George.”
“You can’t really ask us to kill anyone, Carla,” I say. “That’s not very nice. Who is Mr. George?”
“He’s Mummy’s boyfriend,” says Carla. “He hurts me sometimes. I was going to pray for him to go away, but then Mummy might go away too. So, really, it would be better if he just died.”
You can’t fault her logic.
We’re not allowed to smite wrongdoers with great vengeance, or even moderate vengeance. We’re not allowed to make calls to social services. Human beings are supposed to sort things out by themselves, even six-year-old girls. We’re just supposed to listen. That’s all.
I hate my job sometimes.
“I’m afraid I can’t kill Mr. George,” I tell her. “That’s not allowed.” Carla starts to cry very quietly, as if she’s worried someone might hear her.
“I understand that you’re frustrated right now,” I say, reading lines off the on-screen handbook. “I’m just looking through your options for you. Hold the line, please.”
I press the mute button, and I lay my head on the desk for a while. Then I pick up the phone again.
“Well, Carla,” I say, “I’ve had a look, and unfortunately we’re not able to murder Mr. George for you today. What I can do for you, though, is make the bad feelings go away for a bit. I can make them go deep down inside you where they won’t bother you until you’re grown up. How does that sound?”
The snuffly sound of a small nose being wiped. “Okay.”
I tap in some numbers. Eventually, Carla stops sniffling. I cut the call after twenty-three minutes. Across from me, Gremory is nodding to a client and rocking out to The Number Of The Beast.
The floor manager calls me in toward the end of the shift. Apparently I’ve been slacking on my call quota. I spend too long talking to each client.
“Some of them have a lot of problems,” I say, inspecting the carpet.
“They all have a lot of problems,” says Uriel, who used to be a big shot back in the days when everyone with more than six wings got to call themselves a Duke of Heaven. Now that there are so many more humans and we’ve had to move with the times and go to full automation, he wears a suit.