Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-eight: showtime

YOU MAY be wondering about the message I left for Sam on the Crazy Town mirror. “Showtime” was breakfast—a joke on “fast break,” as in basketball, and specifically the Lakers teams with Magic Johnson that had earned the “Showtime” nickname. “At your last stiff one” meant “at the site of your last drink,” and in Sam’s case it had been a bit spectacular, since it had killed him.

I could spend a lot of time telling stories about Sam and drinking. Most of the stories are pretty funny, even some of the horrifying ones, but Sam wouldn’t approve. Not because it would embarrass him, but because he hates drinking stories. “It’s a kind of bragging,” I remember him saying once. “‘Oh, I’m such a badass because I turned myself into an animal and lived through it.’ It’s bullshit.” I think he also never wanted to listen to other people’s drinking stories because they just didn’t match up to his, and he didn’t want to repeat his own because he’d decided that whole part of his afterlife had been stupid and was best ignored.

I didn’t know back then, but part of what was going on was his growing disgust with what he was expected to do as part of Heaven’s Counterstrike force. All I could see was a guy who meant the world to me systematically turning into someone I couldn’t even recognize. Don’t get me wrong—Sam wasn’t one of those angry drunks who becomes a monster, at least not the ordinary sort. He didn’t pick fights, which was good because he’s a big, strong dude. He didn’t rage at people, although there were definitely rages. But knowing him then was like watching somebody drown in slow motion. Every time I looked at him, the Sam I knew so well—the guy with the sense of humor like a prison shank, honed and sharpened until you could hardly even see it—seemed more unfamiliar. He looked like Sam Riley on the outside, but the real Sam, my friend, was slipping further and further away. Sometimes I thought I could still see the real one staring out from behind those bloodshot eyes like a prisoner.

These were the days before we became heavenly advocates—I joined up because of Sam.

We didn’t hang out at the Compasses in those days. We spent our time at another angel bar, a place called Barnstorm over in the Mayfield District. It wasn’t much like the Compasses at all: the owner was one of us, but most of the clientele were ordinary mortals. It was a big, loud place, and Sam and I drank there for a couple of years, continuing even after I left the Harps. We might have kept doing it for years more if it hadn’t been for Carlene. She was a waitress, and although quite astoundingly pretty, tall and red-haired, she was a human woman. The problem with her wasn’t that she was a waitress, either, but that she was a waitress at some other joint who only came to Barnstorm to drink. That was the problem: Carlene liked to drink, just like Sam did.

Sam and Carlene hooked up, and for a long time things seemed to be going in the right direction. He didn’t tell her at first what he was, and after he fell hard for her he was scared to do it. He might have been right. She was a strange girl, country-raised somewhere out in the Central Valley, a trailer-park Baptist with a crazy mom who’d fed her kids Oreos for breakfast and potato chips with ketchup for dinner. Carlene had a history of falling for big cowboy-type guys—she said Sam was the first one who didn’t hit her. She also had a terrible self-image, because pretty as she was, what I found out later (and Sam found out sooner, of course) was that she was so pale as to be nearly albino. Her hair was so light that she dyed it red, and she even painted on eyebrows; otherwise, as she put it, “I’m just a ghost.” She was always referring to herself as a freak, and it didn’t make anyone smile indulgently when she said it, because you could tell she was serious. And all the drinking didn’t help. No, that’s bullshit. The drinking made everything much, much worse.

I still don’t know exactly what happened on the night they broke up, but judging by how much booze Sam was putting down afterward, it must have been ugly, because in those days he had already become little more than a method for alcohol to move itself out of bottles and onto the sides of various roadways.

Then Carlene went home and killed herself.

And Sam got the case.

Any sane angel would have asked to be let off—would have demanded it. At that point, however, my friend Sam was lots of things, but sane wasn’t one of them. Again, I don’t know what happened, because Sam would never talk about it, but it can’t have been good. When it was over, he came back to Barnstorm and started drinking again. It was something like what they say about Dylan Thomas’s last binge, I guess—Sam just called for Rudy the bartender to set up a stack of rye whiskeys on the bar, then he poured them down his throat, one after another. He’d been drinking since sundown, and it was one in the morning.

When he finished, he was going to order another set, but I knew it was only a matter of time until somebody played “Queen of Hearts” on the jukebox (because that had been their song), so I somehow convinced him to come outside with me, I think under the pretense that I needed to buy some smokes and the Barnstorm’s machine was empty. Sam insisted on bringing his last shot out with him. He set it down long enough to bend over and yank a parking meter out of the ground—it took him some work, but it was still pretty fucking impressive—and then he threw it end over end down California Street, scratching up a couple of parked cars. He retrieved his drink, swallowed it, set the glass down, then stretched his arms high into the air like a monster.

“Goodnight, Tokyo!” he bellowed. At the far end of the street a couple walking toward us turned around and headed in another direction. “I will fuck your buildings and shit in your harbor!” It could have been funny, in a different world. He took a couple of staggering steps and just dropped onto the pavement in front of Springtime Dry Cleaners like a puppet with its strings cut.

He was dead before the ambulance got there, or at least his earthly body was. The official verdict was heart attack, but the fact is, Sam Riley took the strongest body Heaven could provide and pretty much systematically drank it to death.

• • •

Barnstorm was gone, but the location was still a bar, something called Mike’s Corner Pocket. Springtime Dry Cleaners, however, was still there, as if all those years hadn’t passed. I was peering in the window when I felt Sam behind me. I pretty much always know. I tell him he’s got a heavy shadow.

“You thinking of going into a new profession, B?”

“Yeah. I figure this angel thing can’t last, but people always need clean clothes.” I turned and got the morning sun in my eyes. That’s another thing I hate about that time of the day. The sun is completely fucked up and jumping out at you unexpectedly all the time. “Too bright—why does anyone go out of doors? I think there’s a coffee shop down the street.”

There was, and we slid ourselves into a corner booth. “Sorry to bring you back here,” I said. “But neither of us can afford to go near downtown, and I couldn’t think of anything else without spelling it out for anyone who might be following me.”

He shrugged, but I wasn’t sure that was really what was going on for him. “No big deal.”

“Everything all right on your end? Did you-know-who show up in you-know-where?”

“No. But she will. And you? Has the shit started raining down from our little museum visit?”

He apparently didn’t even know I’d been picked up, let alone put on trial. “Don’t you get any news there at all?”

“In Kainos? Shit, B, the Third Way is like another planet, remember? Everything we used to get came from Ke . . . you-know-who. Speaking of, why haven’t you been squashed like a grape by the folks Upstairs?”

It wasn’t an idle question, I could tell. Sam isn’t stupid—far from it, although he’ll ride that Andy Griffith, aw-shucks routine as far as it’ll take him. “Oh, trust me, it’s been interesting. I’ll give you the details later. But I want to find out if that invitation you gave me is still open.”

“To our place? The you-know-where place? You finally ready to come and join us?”

“I’m beginning to think I don’t have much choice. I’m in trouble, man.”

“We all are.”

I shook my head. “Thanks for showing up at the museum. That meant a lot.”

“Didn’t do it for you. Did it so you wouldn’t get Clarence killed.”

As was sometimes the case when he was in a bad mood, I couldn’t tell for certain whether Sam was kidding. “Yeah, I notice you two have been close. Anything else you want to tell me?”

“Huh?”

“Now that Clarence has come out. Anything you want to share?”

“What do you mean? Did you just figure that out?”

“And you knew?”

“Since before the kid did himself.” Sam waved impatiently and a grizzled-looking guy in a spotty white shirt came over and took our order, which heavily featured caffeine and grease. “Man, someday they’re going to learn how to deep-fry coffee,” said Sam, “and I’ll never have to look at a menu again.”

“Look, moving past Clarence and his lifestyle choices for a moment, how did you finally figure out about you-know-who?” We’d avoided saying her name so many times now it was beginning to feel like a magical necessity.

He gave me a very dry look. “You mean, how did I finally figure out that you were right?”

“Okay, I’ll take it that way too.”

“Fuck yourself, Dollar. It didn’t just come out of the blue. Some weird shit had been going on. First she told us—well, didn’t know she was a she, then—that we weren’t going to be getting any more souls for a while. That the project was on hold, or in hiatus, or some other bullshitty bureaucrat’s term. Then the Magians started kind of disappearing.”

“The Magians? You mean the others like you?”

“Yeah, the other angels she’d recruited. That she’d tricked.” For a moment I had a glimpse of the anger he’d been hiding, and while I didn’t think it was the only thing that bothered him, it was certainly part of it. “First Nistriel, then Tehab and some others. At first we thought they were on some kind of extended missions, but then one of the others ran into Nistriel on Earth and said she’d been wiped.”

“Wiped?”

“Yeah. Like what you said happened to Walter Sanders. She had no memory of the Third Way or anything. So we began to wonder which way the wind was blowing. Then you gave me your big speech, and it made so much sense that I didn’t want to hear it. But I couldn’t unhear it afterward. I started thinking things over, putting a few questions to some of the other Magians, and it didn’t take very long until I could make sense of a lot of shit that hadn’t been making sense before that. It’s a long boring list.”

“The whole thing sucks. And it still doesn’t make any sense. What did she want if she didn’t believe in the Third Way?”

For a moment he looked angry again, then the expression settled into something sadder and more resigned. “Maybe she did, at least to begin with. Fuck, who knows, B—I can’t spend any more time on the whys and why-nots.” He shook his head as the food arrived. “So what next?”

“You mean what are we going to do to protect ourselves?” I paused with a whole sausage impaled on my fork like a harpooned pilot whale. “I wish I knew. I mean, I have a couple of ideas I wanted to bounce off you.”

“Oh, yeah, you are definitely the idea man.” The remark sounded a bit strained. “Go ahead.”

So I told him what was in my head, or at least part of it, as well as some of the ideas I was considering. He listened, asking questions from time to time, and made a few suggestions that made me look at some of the problems from different angles. It was pretty much what I hoped for, and it’s one of the things about Sam that I’ve always valued: he didn’t take things for granted. If you said, “I’ve got a plan that will make us rich,” he’d probably ask you, “Do we really want to be rich?” And he’d be right to ask—that was something you needed to know before you started.

After about half an hour and three or four cups of coffee each, we had a few preliminary ideas scraped together into something that, while not yet deserving the name “plan” or even “desperate stopgap measure,” at least gave me a starting point and a foundation for more thinking. I paid the bill while Sam used the restroom, then we walked outside. The wind had stiffened a bit and the skies were cloudy. Christmas decorations swung on the wires overhead like hardy winter blossoms.

“How do I get to Kainos?” I asked.

“Depends,” he said. “How much notice can you give me?”

“Who knows? Maybe none. I may have Heaven and Hell both on my backside when the moment comes. I sure don’t want to have to leave a note and arrange a rendezvous like this time.”

“Well, I could just stand there for days and days, waiting for you to be ready.”

That had been more than just grumpy. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing. Bad week.” He scowled. “Look, I’ll get back to you on how you can cross over. I have a few things to do while I’m on this side. I’ll call you before I go.”

“Every phone I have is tapped, Sam.”

“Then I’ll be sure to keep it top-secret and hush-hush. I’ll think of something, don’t worry.” He turned and started in the opposite direction from Mike’s Corner Pocket, which was a relief. From his weird mood, I’d been afraid he might have been falling off the wagon, or thinking about it. “Oh, and thanks for breakfast,” he called back over his shoulder.

• • •

The landline rang a little before two in the morning. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, so it took me a minute to get myself oriented. Oxana was watching some movie on television, her suitcase packed and sitting on the carpet beside her, as it had been for hours. She was still pissed at me and had hardly said a word all evening. She was obviously not going to answer the phone.

I crawled toward the desk and picked it up. At first all I could hear was a lot of dull roaring, like I was holding a big seashell to my ear. Then I heard someone’s voice, although it wasn’t talking to me.

“Sam?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“What’s up? Where are you?”

Something was definitely weird, but it took me a moment to figure out it wasn’t the connection. “Just been thinkin’,” he said.

“I can hardly hear you. Did you say ‘thinking’?”

“And I wanted to say something.” There was a long pause. “Tell you something.”

My heart was icing up. I knew this Sam. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, but I definitely recognized him. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Fine, fine. With some friends. Say hello, friends.” Somebody laughed in the background, and somebody else shouted something I couldn’t hear. Country-western music was playing far back there somewhere.

Oh, shit, not now, was my primary thought. It was pretty clear that Sam had fallen off the wagon, and fallen hard.

“Do you want me to come pick you up?” I asked. “You need a ride?”

“Fuck no! A ride? I got wings, man. Magical angel wings, remember? No, I just called to tell you something, man. Because, you know, I was thinking today that I needed to tell you. About some shit, some important shit. And I wanted to, I really wanted to. But then I kept thinking, why should I tell that motherfucker anything when he sold me out?”

Ice. Ice in my chest so cold it burned. “Sam, I didn’t—”

“Get fucked, Bobby. Do you think I don’t know anything? You don’t think I have any friends expect . . . no, except you? No friends except you? So I wouldn’t know you totally sold me out?”

“I didn’t intend to actually do it, Sam. You have to believe that. I had to offer them something so they’d let me go. Shit, they were just about to pass judgement on me!”

“Yeah, oh, yeah. I get it. Completely. You weren’t really going to do it. That’s why you didn’t even tell me.” For a moment his voice threatened to break. “Didn’t even tell me . . .”

“Sam, I would have, but we got talking about all that other stuff—”

“And you know, I said I’d get back to you about how to get to my place? When they come for your lying ass? And so I’m getting back at you.” He laughed like something badly broken. “No, getting back to you, sorry. Sorry. So when you need to come along to my place, when you really need to . . . you just take a flying fuck at the moon, okay? Okay? That’ll do it, baby, that’ll . . . do it.”

Then there was nothing on the other end of the phone at all. No people talking and laughing, no country-western music, and no Sam.