God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  As though he had all the time in the world, he turned to his wife, smiled, touched her cheek gently, and asked an affectionate, almost joking, question which was drowned out in the discordant chorus of sounds.

  She nodded. Gently but firmly, he moved her from his left side back a few paces on the platform and turned to face the encroaching band of thugs again, his sword raised in grim defiance. I am Lenrau, he seemed to be saying; maybe I’m a mystic and a dreamer and not much of a Duke, but you threaten my woman and our child at peril of your lives. The attackers who had inched closer to him stopped.

  In the meantime tidal waves of panic swept across the huge throng. The rain had doused most of their lamps and the roaring thunder and crackling thunderbolts sent them rushing in terror towards the forests and the roads back to their homes and towns.

  DELETE PANIC, I told them and the mad race for safety slowed but did not stop. The back rows of priests cast aside their swords and spears and ran too, leaving the score of goons who had been the Cardinal’s personal guard by themselves to stand off Lenrau.

  He had another ally. As soon as she had freed the Duke, Ranora darted down the steps, grabbed a dagger from a paralyzed guard, and with the help of N’Rasia, who had thrown back her hood and whose gold-and-silver hair shone like a halo in the lightning flashes, cut the ropes binding Kaila and Malvau and the others. I am prepared to swear that N’Rasia winked at her husband.

  Straight as an arrow, the ilel raced to G’Ranne and cut her bonds. Ruffling little sister’s hair again, the warrior woman grabbed a sword from a startled priest, and, her own black hair waving in the wind and rain like a pirate’s flag, chased a couple of squads of the enemy away. Some of the other warriors, including of course the Three Stooges, rallied to her side. Her face glowing in the lightning flashes, she began to close in on the altar, her tiny army following close behind.

  N’Rasia and Ranora scurried among the milling mob freeing the other friends of the Duke and pressing spears and swords into their hands. Ranora barked a crisp command, a waterlogged little demon with only a shred of cloth clinging to her tiny body, and formed up her band, closing in on the flank of those who were preparing for another charge at the Duke.

  Lightning continued to crackle and sizzle around the plain. The thunder blasts followed immediately after each flash—the center of the storm was upon them. Rain poured out of the sky like a gigantic waterfall.

  With his left arm, Lenrau brushed the water out of his eyes and, swordpoint in front of him, walked lightly down the stairs. One of the goons thrust with a mighty two-handed swipe of a huge broadsword. Lenrau deftly brushed the blow aside as if a mosquito had buzzed at him. The goon’s blade leaped out of his hand, spun through the air, and fell ten yards away.

  The man backed away from Lenrau’s swordpoint, broke, and ran. Rather against orders, B’Mella, knife still tightly clasped in both hands, slipped down one step and then another, a strategic reserve for her husband. The ilel’s squad moved cautiously in to attack from the flank, and G’Ranne’s warriors, like a mob of angry pirates, swarmed in on the other side.

  For a dramatic moment, while the lightning ripped all around, there was no motion on or by the altar. Everyone was frozen as if in a giant sculpture of warfare in the rain.

  I didn’t want any of the good guys to get hurt, particularly nutty little Ranora who had a Balaclava gleam in her eyes. I could simply eradicate all the priests with a few well-placed lightning bolts. But if you’re going to be good at the God business, you have to learn restraint.

  PRIESTS FLEE, I instructed the keyboard.

  Lightning hit the top of the altar again, dangerously close to B’Mella. It was all the clerics needed. They dropped their swords and took off like the Sioux in the old films (if not quite in reality) when the U.S. Cavalry rode over the hill.

  Lenrau smiled briefly, signaled G’Ranne to throw a protective cordon around the altar, turned and led Ranora and her band up the slippery steps, placed his weapon on the altar where he had almost died, and enveloped his rain-drenched wife in his arms.

  CROWD GO HOME, I told the machine. It was time to wrap this game up.

  The Duke and the Duchess both talked at once, pouring out a torrent of grief, remorse, guilt, affection, and admiration.

  My Crooked Lines were working pretty well, all things considered.

  “Well.” Hands on hips, modesty now provided only by her energy and enthusiasm, Ranora was trying to control her merry laughter reborn from days gone by. “If you’re finished with all that, you might apologize to the Lord Our God too!”

  Still clinging to each other and with streams of rain pouring off their bodies like flash floods, Lenrau and B’Mella tried to tell me that they were sorry, that they would begin again, and that it was my responsibility to see that this time all went well between them. So it is with humans when they are reborn—God gets little of the credit and much of the blame.

  Suddenly, just as they were running out of prayers, Lenrau broke down and started to sob, his tears mixing with the rain, his body quivering in syncopation with the exploding thunder. Real men didn’t seem to cry in their culture either. But poet/kings have to be able to cry. Finn MacCool and Cuchulain and that bunch used to go on week-long crying jags.

  ’Course these people weren’t Irish. Not that I knew of, anyway. (Except G’Ranne, who somehow was in the wrong story.) ’Ella, nevertheless, did a very Irish-woman thing. However much she may have been shocked at the sight of a warrior weeping in public, she took his head gently in her hands, laid it against her breasts, and, while the lightning flashed around them and the thunder roared, sang to him the song he composed for her on their wedding night.

  Nice going, kid. God will not give up on you after all.

  They had learned something, perhaps enough so that the next time they were in the down phase of the cycle of their love, they would cling to each other again instead of fleeing from each other; then a few more times around the course and they would be sufficiently practiced at the art of creating a rebirth of love so that they would be truly and permanently man and wife.

  Not bad for a novice at the game of the Crooked Lines.

  Malvau’s arm was draped around the shoulders of his heroine/wife, who seemed to be ruefully looking in my direction. No rewrites possible anymore.

  Well, you wanted the big time, kid.

  Ranora, thank God (the Other Person, not me), was the ilel of old. Unimpeded by the absence of clothes, she scurried up and down the line of loyalists standing respectfully on the steps of the altar, hugging and kissing them and cavorting in a happy dance as she played a hornpipe on an imaginary pipe. Kaila was the first one she kissed, lightly and respectfully, as befit a relationship between an ilel and her Protector. Then, after she’d gone down the line and bestowed an especially fierce hug on the laughing G’Ranne, as if she had second thoughts, she bounced back to him and embraced him passionately.

  The surprised young man, admirable and proper as always, was overcome with delight, an impossible dream suddenly coming true. He was very reluctant to let her naked little body out of his arms. She didn’t seem very eager to leave either. Ah, the poor man would never have a day’s peace for the rest of his life.

  Then, remembering her obligations, she danced up the steps, clapped her hands for attention, and announced imperiously, “Also you should thank the Lord Our God for sending you such a perfect ilel as Ranora.”

  “We thank you, Lord Our God,” B’Mella said dutifully, raising her eyes again towards me, “for sending us…”

  “A wonderful imp child,” Lenrau had recovered his cool, “to remind us how to laugh.”

  Everyone’s tears dissolved into laughter. Ranora flew across the altar platform, a bird sailing blithely through a rainstorm, and threw herself upon her patrons, hugging them both and laughing with them as if she felt that her laughter and her embrace might bind them together forever.

  Even the thunder seemed to join their laughter.


  Dutiful ruler that she was, B’Mella wrapped her cloak around the ilel. Our vestal virgins must maintain a modicum of modesty.

  Enough crooked lines for one night. I pushed the TERMINATE function key and quickly disconnected the PC from its link to the TV system. Then I removed the Alpha 10 from its slot in the Bernouli box and put it on a shelf where it would be safe.

  The last image before their world faded off my screen was a close-up of the tearstained, joyous face of G’Ranne, radiant in the light of the four converging moons which had elbowed their way through the clouds: Teresa emerging in the light of Mount Carmel after the Dark Night of the Soul.

  If I had saved her life along with the others, she must have thought, I did love her after all.

  Ah, my beloved, you spoke truth. Authors need characters, God needs people; but it takes such tiny gifts, crumbs from my table, to make you happy. Thus all the greater my need for you.

  I sank into my gray chair, so exhausted that I barely had the strength to pour myself an extra large glass of Baileys Irish Cream.

  “It’s a good thing for us,” Nathan would say smugly later, “that the Other Person can’t quit.”

  “She has had more practice. Anyway you don’t believe in Her.”

  “The God I don’t believe in,” Nathan leaned forward with a happy grin, “is a He, and I’m glad that He can’t quit merely because the game gets rough. What will happen to all those people now that you have deserted them?”

  “Nothing more than what happens to my characters when I finish a story. I still worry about them, but I’m not responsible for them. My grace doesn’t have to war with their free will.”

  “You abandoned them,” Nathan insisted, glad for the rare advantage he had in our own ongoing game.

  “They’re being watched over,” said his wife Elisa (a saintly woman, God knows, to put up with what she has to put up with and, though I’ll be in grave trouble for saying it, slightly ahead of Nathan in the fitness game). “Who made the lightning strike your dish in the first place?”

  An interesting point, I admitted.

  “And remember what Nathan means in Hebrew?”

  “All right, what does Nathan mean in Hebrew?”

  “‘Given’— maybe you’d say ‘Grace’!”

  Tell me about it.

  That’s about all. I played the game a couple of dozen more times, with another Alpha 10 of course, and never did get that ending again. Nathan claims that it is a possible ending but that it requires extraordinary concentration and that possibly the animated blips don’t excite the kind of commitment required for such concentration.

  The game has sold very well (the Red Shift has been replaced by a newer, bigger, and allegedly faster boat). Nathan’s marketing people are using Boris’s art now. He’s done a good job on Lenrau and B’Mella, although he hasn’t quite captured them. But Ranora is perfect, a blond pixie wrapped in peppermint candy with snapping eyes and a determined little jaw jutting comically to the sky.

  They have renamed it the God Game.

  The Hagans are back together, and she seems to glow much of the time. It’s still a rocky pilgrimage for them. One or the other dashes off to a divorce lawyer almost every month. Rumors have it that they see Doctor Shanahan and “someone else out at Loyola.” So maybe the dreams worked.

  Michele?

  “Like, I didn’t phone you. I mean I had a dream I called you, but no way did I really phone you.”

  “What did you say in the dream?”

  Frown. “I wanted you to do something. I don’t remember what it was.”

  “Did I do it?”

  “Of course!”

  Sometimes at night, as I say, I hear the pipe outside my window forty-seven stories above the Magnificent Mile. It sounds like the Menuetto in Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade (K. 320), only a little kinkier.

  Maybe, on the other hand, I am only imagining it.

  Despite our seminar, I’m not sure I understand any of what happened. I did receive a week ago a picture of an infant—not a photograph exactly, rather something which seemed to have been burned on the paper. The kid might have B’Mella’s deep brown eyes, but I’m probably kidding myself. Sometimes when you hold the envelope the right way, you might think that it could be red-and-white striped.

  The Alpha 10 which has every move of the game recorded remains quietly on the shelf in my office at Grand Beach, a mute reminder that it’s hell to be God.

  I ran the Alpha 10 data through one of Nathan’s graph-making programs, and it produced a rather curious map, which one of my water-skiing friends adapted for me. (I guess it’s pretty much like the other cosmos, though my cartographer claims that in the original version of the story I had the sun rising and setting in the same place!)

  The Alpha 10 is also a chance to play the real game again. Sure, it’s hell to be God. It’s also fun to be God. You are loved by a lot of wonderful people; which is probably why God, the Other Person that is, doesn’t quit.

  As for Nathan, well, I intend to get even (of course). I am part of a conspiracy to teach him what it is like to have to play God to a group of fractious humans, to have far more responsibility than you have power.

  We’re going to make him departmental chairman.

  Author’s Note

  So they all lived happily ever after.

  My narrator knows better than this. As Blackie Ryan notes elsewhere, the most one can expect is that they have only two or three big fights a week.

  Blackie will settle for one day of happiness a week, some weeks.

  Yet Msgr. Ryan and his various creators have been criticized for being unrealistically hopeful. Life is after all a vale of tears, abounding in suffering, sickness, injustice, and death. Plot, especially the fiction of an ending which imposes meaning, is a fallacy.

  Or, to put it differently, the cosmos in which we live is a good deal more complex and problematic than the narrator’s fictional cosmos down the block. He (and I with his uninspired cooperation) has created a world in which there are solid grounds for hope, plausible reasons for seeing purpose, justifiable arguments for an Other Person who loves.

  But that, as Bastian says in The Never Ending Story, is only a story.

  Hope, purpose, and love are not always reflected in daily life and often not at all in some lives. My friend David Lodge in his Out of the Shelter describes his narrator as praying for his childhood friend Jill who is killed in an air raid and not praying for his wife when he fears in sudden panic she may drown. How can there be purpose and hope and reason for prayer in a world in which children are killed in air raids?

  Yet his narrator swims eagerly to his wife when she surfaces uninjured in the pool.

  Is the story really never ending? Videtur quod non, as the scholastics put it. It often seems not.

  Is the “wild cry of longing” which Nathan Scott sees in the child’s demand “Momma, tell me a story!” self-deceptive or revelatory?

  Is the mystery that happiness is limited or that there is any happiness at all? Is the proper question not whether despair is more tough-minded than hope, but whether it is correct?

  Does a story, finally any story, no matter how pessimistic as Professor Lodge clearly perceives, put hope in life that isn’t there, or does it draw out of life hope that is there but which without the story we cannot see?

  Is the story if not true at least True?

  Ah, but as the Irish would say, that’s another story altogether!

  Then again maybe not. Maybe it’s the only story, your story, my story, every story.

  NOVELS BY ANDREW M. GREELEY

  The Cardinal Sins

  The Passover Trilogy

  Thy Brother’s Wife

  Ascent Into Hell

  Lord of the Dance

  Time Between the Stars

  Virgin and Martyr

  Angels of September

  Father Blackie Ryan Mysteries

  Happy Are the Meek

  About the Author

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sp; Priest, sociologist, author and journalist, Father Andrew M. Greeley built an international assemblage of devout fans over a career spanning five decades. His books include the Bishop Blackie Ryan novels, including The Archbishop in Andalusia, the Nuala Anne McGrail novels, including Irish Tweed, and The Cardinal Virtues. He was the author of over 50 best-selling novels and more than 100 works of non-fiction, and his writing has been translated into 12 languages.Father Greeley was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and a Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. In addition to scholarly studies and popular fiction, for many years he penned a weekly column appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers. He was also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America and Commonweal, and was interviewed regularly on national radio and television. He authored hundreds of articles on sociological topics, ranging from school desegregation to elder sex to politics and the environment.Throughout his priesthood, Father Greeley unflinchingly urged his beloved Church to become more responsive to evolving concerns of Catholics everywhere. His clear writing style, consistent themes and celebrity stature made him a leading spokesperson for generations of Catholics. He chronicled his service to the Church in two autobiographies, Confessions of a Parish Priest and Furthermore!In 1986, Father Greeley established a $1 million Catholic Inner-City School Fund, providing scholarships and financial support to schools in the Chicago Archdiocese with a minority student body of more than 50 percent. In 1984, he contributed a $1 million endowment to establish a chair in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago. He also funded an annual lecture series, “The Church in Society,” at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, from which he received his S.T.L. in 1954.Father Greeley received many honors and awards, including honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arizona and Bard College. A Chicago native, he earned his M.A. in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of Chicago.Father Greeley was a penetrating student of popular culture, deeply engaged with the world around him, and a lifelong Chicago sports fan, cheering for the Bulls, Bears and the Cubs. Born in 1928, he died in May 2013 at the age of 85. You can sign up for email updates here.