Only A Lower Paradise, Page 2

CHAPTER 2

  Martha and Robert and I set out from Venice Beach in Robert’s van with three week’s worth of canned beans and bacon. Our plan was to stop briefly in San Francisco, where we would pick up Che-Maria, and head over the mountains for Denver — which is where our adventure really began.

  I had not been outside of Venice Beach since I had graduated from a small liberal arts college in Oregon five years earlier. Robert and I were a real pair in those days. We would spend our nights refining our poker game, every once in a while coercing some of the other guys in our dorm into a round for serious cash, which usually presented us with beer money for the next two weeks. Our days were spent drifting from poetry seminars to computer workshops.

  I had a girlfriend, too. Pique. A fine arts major. She specialized in graphic design. I still have some of the photographs she took of me and Robert and the rest of our crowd. Mostly experimental stuff, very weird. One collage she made had my head attached to the body of President Quayle.

  Pique came into my life in a strange way. She was taking a course in Modern American Literature and a mutual friend told her I knew something about Hemingway — which was a laugh. All I knew about Hemingway was that he was dead and had once had a thing about bullfights. That’s all I remember my high school English teacher saying about him. We had read a short story out of an anthology, and the teacher had gone on about how bullfights were symbolic of the Hemingway Hero, a noble man struggling against significant odds. It was farcical, really. But that’s what people went for in those days, I guess. Machismo. Real blood and guts stuff. Earthy. In the end it got Hemingway, too. Blew his head off with a shotgun. None of which I told Pique. I just asked her what she wanted to know, and she said, “Oh, you know, just enough to get this essay finished. Why don’t you come back to my apartment?” So I did, and for the next three years, for reasons I have yet to understand — though not for lack of trying — we were lovers, through many growing pains and countless pleasures.

  When Martha first started visiting me, I was real depressed. Pique had come back from a European vacation three months before and moved in with a sculptor she met on a train in Germany. We hadn’t planned on getting married or anything; it’s just that I was beginning to think I might love her. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, but for better or worse it’s the closest explanation I can come up with that even vaguely resembles the truth.

  Martha said I was right; it was a vague explanation; and she told me I had been wrong to take my relationship with Pique for granted. I still miss her, though. Sometimes I miss her one-hell-of-a-lot. I missed Che-Maria, too. When Robert and Martha and I pulled into their driveway in San Francisco, Che-Maria came bombing out of the house with hugs and kisses for everyone, and I suddenly remembered how much.

  “Jon, Jon, Jon,” she squealed. “You must see my new toaster. It holds four pieces of bread at once.”

  She was crazy about appliances, having never had any when she lived on the streets and no television to tell her what she was missing. She was at quite a loss when Robert brought her back to the suburbs after her short stay in the hospital to recover from the mouse bite. In the six months before she met Robert, she had only worn clothes she had stolen from Salvation Army dumpsters. All the belongings she had brought with her across the border in the back of a farmer’s pickup truck were lost when the farmer took an unexpectedly short rest at a truck stop. More than once Che-Maria had cursed herself that she had never learned the quickest way to pee.

  She dressed in fashion now and was well versed on all the latest style trends, but kitchen appliances were another universe altogether. They were an endless source of amusement for her. She couldn’t get over how shiny they were.

  “Che-Maria,” I said. “This is Martha.”

  “Oh, Martha. Yes. Robert told me Jon had a new girlfriend. You are very pretty. She is very pretty, Jon. Now both of you come inside and see my new toaster. I’ll make some toast for you. It’s very good, and quick.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Martha, quickly adding, “I’d love some toast, thanks.”

  Che-Maria led Martha across the manicured lawn, around the over-populated flower beds, and under the Corinthian arch set into her and Robert’s modest suburban bungalow. Modest, of course, in a relative California kind of way.

  I started to follow them, but Robert grabbed my arm and directed me around the side of the house to the backyard.

  “OK, champ,” he said. “Who’s the babe?”

  “Martha?”

  “Yeah, man. Who else?”

  “I met her at the beach.” I lied.

  “Yeah?”

  “She just came up to me and asked if I hadn’t been in her class at UCLA.” This was the story Martha and I had invented.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said yes, of course.”

  “Good, man. Excellent style.” Robert was hip on style. “What next?”

  “She started talking about some Professor Larson, and I agreed with everything she said. Larson was a bumbler and a fool. His lessons were catastrophic free-for-alls, and nobody had a clue going into the exam what the questions would be like. Sounds like some of our profs, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then she told me she had gone to this Larson guy to ask about her term paper, and he had suggested they go for a coffee to talk about it.”

  “Ah.” Robert was so gullible.

  “She had just broken it off with Larson when she picked me up. She probably thought she had found somebody who would understand what she had been through.”

  “She’s gorgeous, man. And a lot more stable than that Pique chick.”

  I hated myself for lying to Robert, particularly for making Martha seem ordinary, but Martha had been insistent no one find out she was an angel. As long as we kept a low profile, we would be alright, she said. While God knew and saw everything, there was no equivalent power in Heaven at the moment. That’s why the Supreme Cosmic Command was so nervous about their agents securing their objectives. The situation was in serious risk of destabilizing, and they had no way of controlling it if it did. The plan of the Supreme Cosmic Command was to place angel agents in key positions of power: to replace all heads of state, all advertising executives, and the leading point-getters of all the professional sports leagues. Television executives, newspaper editors, and late-night talk show hosts were secondary objectives, followed by church officials and academic deans.

  “But Martha,” I had asked her then, “Why can’t things just go on as they always have?”

  “Things are not improving,” she said.

  “According to whose schedule? I think that’s a load of bafflegab, myself.”

  “Well,” she said. “That’s what you humans are good at — independent thought. But what do you know about the cosmic continuum? What do you know about running the universe?”

  “Still,” I said. “I don’t see how this so-called crisis warrants all this intervention.”

  This was the sort of argument I had with Martha every once and a while, and it never turned out well. She would never give in because she had never been wrong in the history of the universe, although something inside her told her she might be this time.

  “Nice pool, Rob,” I said, once we had reached the backyard. “Can we go for a swim after lunch?”

  “Hey, yeah. We’ll have to try and get that girlfriend of yours into a bikini.”

  Che-Maria poked her head out the back door.

  “Your toast is ready, Jon,” she said, smiling.

  Che-Maria was always smiling. She found goodness in everything. Nothing irked her except the most overt forms of violence, cruelty, and oppression, which made her extremely susceptible to the political and commercial propaganda that played on people’s emotions and their intuition against things wrong.

  “Come, Jon. Quick,” she insisted. “Before it gets cold.” She disappeared inside.

  Then, as we were sitting around Robert’s and C
he-Maria’s kitchen — shiny appliances littering the counters, one wall plastered with Mickey Mouse wallpaper, the refrigerator humming loudly, Martha smoking, and the radio turned to some Spanish language station playing soothing siesta music, our toast finished — Robert leaned forward, placed both elbows on the table, and announced he had some important news to tell us before we planned to leave that afternoon.

  “Quiet everyone, please,” he said. “We have a problem.”

  We sat hushed in anticipation.

  Robert had worked for the Post Office ever since college, struggling his way up to district manager in charge of distribution in five years. He had started at the bottom, sweeping the mail room floor, and graduated to mail-sorter-guy, mail-delivery-guy, and finally, mail-guy-who-drives-the-truck — a variation of mail-delivery-guy but more prestigious because you get your assistant to battle the Dobermans. Robert was the fastest promoted employee in the history of his branch. In fact, he was due for another promotion. He had told me he had applied for the Director’s job in the Special Deliveries Division, Government Services. It was only a matter of days.

  “Yesterday, just after you called, Jon, my boss, the Director General, called me into his office and told me he was going to give me a tour of the Special Deliveries Division, which is usually off limits to anyone but the people who work there. I had never seen it, even though I had been working in that same building every day for the past five years. I walked over to his office. We took the elevator to the basement, showed our passes to the security guards, went through two electronically-coded steel doors, and ended up in a warehouse-sized room full of robots and computers. Every couple of seconds a computer would beep and print out a message; a robot would grab the message, stuff it in an envelope, and rush across the room to drop it in a mail bag. The Director General told me the Director of Special Deliveries didn’t have to do much except call the computer-repair guy. The only thing the Director could not do was read any of the messages. Then he turned his back and I picked up a message off the floor.”

  “Now, Jon,” he said. “You know me. I’m not one to question authority, so why I broke a rule just as soon as it had passed through my ears I’ll never know. But once I had done it, I couldn’t undo it. Still, even after I had picked up the message, I didn’t intend to read it.”

  “What did it say?” Martha interjected.

  “It said: Oval Office secure. CIA, FBI next. Pass it on.”

  God, I thought. It’s started already.

  Robert continued: “Usually I don’t care about stuff like this, so long as I get paid, you know, but for some reason I felt I had to do something about this. I felt like I should take some action, but it’s been such a long time since I’ve acted from conscience. So, anyway, I stole it.”

  “You what!” Che-Maria screamed.

  She was such a moral person, especially for someone who’s had such a rough time of life. Robert, on the other hand, who’d had a life as easy as they come, was a great relativist, usually balancing the scales in his own self-interest.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. Why don’t I take it?’ So I did. Now I’m in big trouble. I’ll never get another promotion. I don’t even know what it means!”

  I looked over at Martha who had turned towards me. She shook her head.

  “Don’t worry, Rob,” I said, trying to reassure him. “I’m sure they’ll never miss it. Computer malfunction.” Right. “The robot broke down. I mean, what was it doing on the floor in the first place?”

  Robert picked up the keys to the van and pointed towards the door. “I just wanted you to know that,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that if they’re after me, we may be in for more than a camping trip.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Martha said, sharply, but her eyes seemed duller and she slouched a little in her chair. “Everything will be fine.”

  “Sure it will,” I confirmed.

  Che-Maria squirmed.

  Said Martha: “I can’t wait to pitch our tent, stroll down to the lake, and dive into its cool, slow, shimmering blueness.” Angels can be so poetic.

  Said Robert: “I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”