Mister B. Gone Page 18

  There were five others at the table. Gutenberg himself, who sat a foot or two away from the table than the others, and two devils and two angels, all unknown to me, on either side, their positions reversed, so that Angel faced Devil, and Devil, Angel.

  Around the edge of the room, their backs against the wall, were several onlookers, amongst them those who’d been part of the events in the workshop. Quitoon was there, standing on the far side of the table, close to the Archbishop; so, too, was Peter (another angel hidden amongst Gutenberg’s circle), as was the demon who’d made such murderous use of broken glass. And the workman-become-angel who had wounded me. There were four or five others I did not know, perhaps players whose performances I’d missed.

  I had slipped into the hidden room in the middle of a speech by the Archbishop:

  “Ridiculous!” he said, pointing down the table at Hannah.

  “Do you imagine for one moment that I would believe that you truly intended to destroy the press, when you’d gone to such trouble to protect it?”

  There was a round of approving murmurs from various members of the assembled company.

  “We didn’t know whether we were going to allow the device to exist or not,” the Angel Hannah replied.

  “You’ve spent—what?—thirty years, masquerading as his wife.”

  “I was not masquerading. I was, and I am and always will be his wife, having sworn an oath—”

  “As a member of Humankind—”

  “What?”

  “You swore to your marriage as a human female. You are certainly not human and it would be the subject of a very long and probably unresolvable debate as to your true gender.”

  “How dare you!” Gutenberg erupted, rising with such speed from his chair that he overturned it. “I don’t pretend to understand what exactly is happening here, but—”

  “Oh please,” the Archbishop growled, “spare us all the weary spectacle of your feigned ignorance. How can you be married to that ? ” He stabbed a heavily decorated finger at the Angel Hannah. “And then claim that you never once saw it for what it truly is.” His voice thickened with revulsion. “It virtually sweats out excremental incandescence from every pore—”

  Hannah rose now, the tidal robes of light she wore ebbing and fl owing.

  “He knew nothing,” she told the Archbishop. “I married him in the form of a woman and did not violate that form until today, when I saw that the End was imminent. We were man and wife.”

  “That’s not the point,” the Archbishop said. “However realistically you let your dugs sag over the years, you were one of God’s messengers, still watching out for the interest of your Lord on High. Can you deny that?”

  “I was his wife!”

  “Can. You. Deny. That?”

  There was a pause. Then the Angel Hannah said: “No.”

  “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The Archbishop tugged at his collar with his forefinger “Is it me, or is it hot in here? Couldn’t we put in some windows, get some fresh air coming in?”

  I froze hearing this, deathly afraid that if anyone took him at his word they might look to open the door and find me there.

  But the Archbishop was not so feverish that he was willing to sacrifice the momentum he’d gained in his interrogation of Hannah. Before anybody had a chance to act to cool down the room, he answered the problem more radically.

  “Enough of these damn vestments,” he said. He tore at his robes of office, which for all their weight and encrustation ripped readily. Then off came the gold crosses that he’d had hanging around his neck, and the rings, those countless rings.

  He threw them all to the floor, where they were devoured by yet another fire, its flames in countless places beyond the grasp of my paltry sight. The speedy progress of the flames was not unlike rot spreading through all the mock-Holy artifacts, unmaking them with the ease with which an actor might destroy his costume of painted burlap.

  Oh, but that was not all the devouring fire was taking. It also leapt up from the bonfire of his finery to scour the skin off his head and hands, and the hair off his scalp. Underneath—why was I surprised—was the scaly skin that I had myself once met in the mirror, while from the base of his knobby spine a single tail, the massive, virile state of which suggesting he was a much, much older demon than he was an Archbishop. It lashed back and forth, the stripes of its scales the color of blood, bile, and bone.

  There was plainly no element of revelation in this for anyone at the table. There were a few barely suppressed looks of disgust on the faces of some of the attending angels, seeing the demon naked. But the only audible response was from one of his own, who said:

  “Excellency, your robes.”

  “What about them?”

  “There’s nothing of them left.”

  “They wearied me.”

  “But how will you leave?”

  “You’ll go fetch more, idiot! And before you ask, yes, I will put my human face back on, down to the last carbuncle on my nose. Though Demonation, it feels good to be free of that wretched stuff. I’m practically stifled in that skin. How do they put up with it?” The company let the question remain rhetorical. “Well, go then,” he told his troubled underling. “Fetch me my attire!”

  “What shall I say happened to the vestments you were wearing, Excellency?”

  The Archbishop, pushed beyond the limits of his patience by the witlessness of his servant, threw back his head and then instantly threw it forwards again. A wad of spittle flew from his lips and missing its target struck the wall no more than a body’s length from where I crouched, and ate at the stone. But nobody looked my way. At that moment the Archbishop had the attention of every eye in the room.

  “Tell them I gave it all away to those of my flock who are stricken with disease, and if anyone doubts you tell them to go looking in the plague houses down by the river.” A bitter laugh erupted from him, raw and joyless. The mere sound of it was enough to make me confer upon him all the hatred I’d felt towards Pappy Gatmuss.

  The stirring up of old venom didn’t make me forget the dangerous state in which I remained, however. I knew I had to retreat from the door before the Archbishop’s lackey made to leave, or I would be spotted. But I could not bring myself to withdraw from the threshold until the very last moment, for fear of missing some exchange that would help me better understand the true nature of this clash of wills divine and demonic.

  The lackey pushed back his chair. But even as he began to rise, the naked Archbishop gestured for him to sit down again.

  “But I thought you wanted—”

  “Later,” his Unholy Holiness replied. “For now we must be equally matched, if we’re to play.”

  To play. Yes, that’s what he said, I swear. And in a sense you have the whole sorry story in those two Words. Ah, Words! They work to confound us. Take, for instance, Printing Press. Can you imagine two less inspiring words? I doubt it. And yet . . .

  “This is not a game,” the Angel Hannah said grimly. The colors in the pool of robes in which she floated darkened, reflecting her change of mood. Blue went to purple, gold to crimson. “You know how important this is. Why would your masters send you here?”

  “Not just masters,” the Archbishop replied with a sultry tone. “I had mistresses, too. Oh, and they are cruel.” His hands went to his groin. I could not see what he was doing but it clearly offended all of Heaven’s representatives. Nor had the Archbishop finished. “Sometimes I deliberately make a punishable error, just to earn myself the reward of their torments.

  They know by now, of course. They must. But it’s a game. Like love. Like . . .”

  He dropped his voice to a skinned whisper. “War.”

  “If that’s what you want, demon, it’s yours for the asking.”

  “Oh now, listen to yourself,” the Archbishop chided her.

  “Where’s your sense of priorities? And while you’re mulling that over, ask yourself why we of the Demonation
would care about having control of a device that makes insipid copies of books whose only claim to significance in the first place was their rarity? I couldn’t imagine a more pointless reason for the two halves of our divided nation to set upon one another, than this.” He looked at Gutenberg. “What’s it called?”

  “A printing press,” Hannah said. “As if you didn’t know. You don’t fool anybody, demon.”

  “I tell the truth.”

  “Insipid copies!”

  “What else can they ever be?” the Archbishop protested mildly.

  “You sound as if you care,” Hannah observed.

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why are you ready to go to war for this thing you can’t even name?”

  “I say again: We don’t need to be at one another’s throats over what Gutenberg had made. It’s not worth fighting over, and we both know it.”

  “Yet you don’t return to the comforts of your palace.”

  “It is scarcely a palace.”

  “It is scarcely less.”

  “Well, I won’t stoop to trivialities,” the Archbishop said, waving this fruitless exchange away. “I admit, I came here because I was curious at the beginning. I was expecting, I don’t know, some kind of miracle machine. But now I see it, and it isn’t very miraculous at all, is it? No offense to you, Herr Gutenberg.”

  “So you are leaving?” the Angel Hannah said.

  “Yes. We’re leaving. We have no further business here. And you?”

  “We are also leaving.”

  “Ah.”

  “We have business above.”

  “Pressing, is it?”

  “Very.”

  “Well then.”

  “Well then.”

  “We are agreed.”

  “We are, indeed, agreed.”

  That said, stillness fell. The Archbishop peered at his warty knuckles. Hannah stood staring into middle distance, her attention absented. The only sound I could hear was the soft murmur of the fabric that surrounded Hannah.

  The sound drew my gaze towards it, and I was surprised to see that there were strands of black and red passing through the otherwise placid color and motion of the Angel Hannah’s robes. Was I the only one in the chamber noticing this? It was evidence, surely, that for all her calm composure the angel couldn’t help but let the truth show itself, even if it was only for a few seconds.

  Now, from somewhere, perhaps the workshop behind me, I heard another sound. That of a clock ticking.

  And still nobody moved.

  Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  And then, at precisely the same moment—as though they were more alike than not when it came to matters of patience and politics—both the Archbishop and Hannah stood up.

  Both set their hands down, knuckles first, on the table and leaning forwards both begin to talk at one another, their voices in their righteous anger so alike that it was difficult to separate one from the other, the words simply one endless, incomprehensible sentence:

  —for why you the haven’t been the holy oh yes you can holy isn’t you right what’s swords and this business be harvesting not books aren’t we don’t futile yellow don’t blood on this whole yes gone entirely—

  And on and on it went like this, with everybody in the room doing exactly what I was doing, concentrating their attention upon either the Archbishop or upon Hannah in the hope of deciphering what they were saying, and by doing so making it easier to comprehend the other party’s contribution to this crazy exchange. If others were having any luck with the tactic, they showed no sign of enlightenment. Their expressions remained puzzled and frustrated.

  Nor did the Demon Archbishop and the Angel Hannah show any sign of mellowing their vehemence. Indeed their fury was escalating, the power their rage and suspicion generated causing the geometry of the room, which had seemed to me flawless when I’d just taken it in, to warp out of true. The way it did so may sound crazy, but I will tell you what my eyes told me, as best I can, hoping that the words I use don’t crack beneath the paradoxes that I’m obliged to describe.

  They were approaching one another—the Devil and the Angel—their heads swelling prodigiously as they did so, the space between their hairlines and their chins easily three or four feet now and growing larger with every heartbeat. But even as their heads grew to such grotesque a size they also narrowed, until it seemed to my outraged eyes that they were barely two or three inches wide, the tips of their noses no more than a finger’s length apart. The words they continued to spew out emerged from their grotesquely misshapen mouths like spurts of smoke, no two of the same color, which rose up to form a layer of dead speech on the ceiling. Yet at the same time as this bizarre spectacle was going on—I warned you that some of this would be perilously close to the ravings of a madman—my eyes also reported that they were both still sitting in their seats as they had been all along, unchanged.

  I have no explanation for any of this, nor do I understand why, having listened to their vehement exchange for two or three minutes without comprehending a single argument made by either side, my brain now began to decode portions of their dialogue. It wasn’t a casual conversation they were having, needless to say, but neither were they spitting escalating threats at one another. I slowly realized that I was listening to the most secret of negotiations. The Angel and the Demon, their species, who had once been joined in celestial love, now enemies. Or so I had understood. Their hatred of one another, I’d been taught, was so deeply felt that they would never contemplate peace.

  But here they were—adversaries so familiar that they were almost friends—laboring to divide up control of this new power that, despite the Demon’s claim that Gutenberg’s press was of no great consequence, they all knew to the contrary. The press would indeed change the shape of the world, and each side wanted to possess the lion’s share of its creations and their influence. Hannah wanted all holy books to be under Angelic license, but the Archbishop wasn’t any more ready to give that up than was Hannah willing to give up all printed materials that related to the erotic impulse of Humankind.

  Much of what they were arguing over were forms of writing that I had never heard of: novels and newspapers, scientific journals and political tracts; manuals, guides, and encyclopedias. They traded like two of your kind buying horseflesh at an auction, their bargaining getting faster as some portion of this immense agreement approached closure, the words only agreed upon if some other part of this division of spoils was successfully resolved. There was no system of high-flown principle shaping those parts of the World According to the Universal Word that Hannah pursued, nor was there any special ferocity in the way the Archbishop pursued works in arenas I expected Hell to pursue: lawyerly writings, for instance; or works by doctors and assassins, spreading their wickedness. The Angel fought vehemently for control over the confessions of whores, both male and female, and any other writings designed to inflame the reader, while Hell fought with equal force to possess power over the licensing and distribution of all printing fabrications that their authors had written in such a way as to suggest that they were, in fact, the truth. But then, Hell countered, what happened if the author of such a work of invention happened also to be or to have been a whore?

  And so it went on, back and forth, the pair of advisors each Power had brought to the table offering their own subtle qualifications or verbal manipulations to the principals’ exchanges.

  There were references back to earlier arbitrations. To The Matter of the Wheel and to The Threshing Impasse. As for Gutenberg’s great work—the reason why Heaven and Hell were so close to war—was dispassionately referred to as The Subject Under Review.

  Meanwhile, as the argument became even more complex, the bewildering spectacle of the demon’s and the angel’s heads swelling and narrowing had become still more elaborate; dozens of extrusions emerging from their ballooning craniums, as thin as finger-bones, wove between one another, their elegant intertwining reflecting, perhaps, the escalating intricac
ies of their debate.

  Everyone continued to watch them as they carved up Humankind’s future, but with so much of the negotiation beyond me, the whole thing, for all its Great Significance and so on and so forth, was actually beginning to bore me. The lavish complexities of their interwoven heads were an entirely different matter: They beggared the inventions of my dream-life, seeing the woven heads continue to find new ways to reflect each proposal and counterproposal, each successful barter and failed assault. So elaborate had the process of the argument been, and so exquisite the interweaving of demonic and angelic flesh, that their heads now resembled a tapestry, “Portrait of a Debate Between Heaven and Hell in Order to Prevent War.”

  Here was a Secret that made Gutenberg’s Press a footnote.

  I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world.

  What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering. And why? Because it was the profit that came of these newfound forms that fueled the negotiations. The Angel Hannah was utterly indifferent to the way all this “printed matter,” as she dubbed it, might poison or impoverish the spiritual lives of Humankind. Nor were the Demon Archbishop and his advisors concerned that they possess ways the Word might be used to corrupt innocents.

  It was the pursuit of word power gained from word wealth that moved both sides, inspiring maneuvers of such complexity that the due performance of every tiny portion of this knot of agreements and arrangements was dependent upon the performance of every other part. Far from behaving like enemies, the two sides were making what was doubtless just another marriage contract between their opposing factions, occasioned by the creation of Gutenberg’s press. It would make money, this press.

  And it would control minds at the same time. At least that was as much as I understood of their convoluted talk.

  My weary eyes strayed to Quitoon, and they came upon him at the very moment that his wandering gaze found me.