For you see, in the beginning Word made the world upon the waters when God spat Word from His mouth. Later, Word made flesh. Without their tongues, men would be no more than animals. Without Word, men’s tongues would be no more than meat.
Word is the beacon of our minds and the light of our days, withered proxy for an absent God.
SARIELA; OR, SPIRITUAL DYSFUNCTION & COUNTERANGELIC LONGINGS: A CASE STUDY IN ONE ACT
Michael Bishop
MICHAEL BISHOP’s novels include the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy but Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning Unicorn Mountain and the Locus Award-winning Brittle Innings.
His short fiction has appeared in seven collections, but recent uncollected stories include “The Door Gunner” and “Bears Discover Smut,” both recipients of the Southeastern Science Fiction Association Award for short fiction, and “The Pile,” recipient of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for short story.
He has also edited a number of books, including, most recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human.
“I originally wrote the one-act play ‘Sariela’ for the angel-themed anthology Heaven Sent, edited by Peter Crowther,” explains Bishop, “and mostly recall great glee at turning my studies of angelic hierarchies and an interest in ‘counterangelic longings’ into remunerative fictive drama.
“I also take some pride in turning the male angel ‘Sariel’ into the female ‘Sariela’ and in referencing Milton’s Paradise Lost on the provocative question of angelic sex.”
NIGHT. The interior of the Cat’s Eye Bar, Grill, & Pinball Parlor on the outskirts of Ackley, Georgia, U.S.A. To the right (from the audience’s point of view), a pair of high-finned, cut-down 1957 Chevy convertibles (one hot pink, one turquoise) set together bumper to bumper on blocks: the bar.
Nine stools in front of it: upended airplane turbines with revolving leather seats. A mirror behind the bar reflects liquor bottles and glasses; it wears a swag of fishing net and is plastered with beer ads, travel stickers, and soiled pieces of U.S. and Latin American highway maps.
Left of the double-car bar, and up a half step, extends a sawdust-sprinkled drinking area, jukebox room, and dance floor. Rickety tables and cane-back chairs make a ragged archipelago across this expanse. A bank of lit-up Li’l Abner, Snuffy Smith, and Grandpa Clampett pinball machines share rear-wall space with a jukebox, a Roller Derby video game, and an art-deco thermoplastic Drew Barrymore umbrella and fly-reel stand.
A few shadowy HUMAN FIGURES slump at the back tables, nursing their booze and/or piecing together jigsaw puzzles of the Little Grand Canyon, loglike alligators in the Okefeenokee Swamp, or the Waving Girl statue on Savannah’s River Street. A downstage table to the far left sits vacant, with a battered dessert cart behind it and an overgrown bonsai apple tree in a glazed Ming pot to one side in front of it ... as a pretentious mythological symbol.
It is a chilly, damp Friday, the seventh of January, ano Domini 1994 (as ostensibly civilized western Earthlings reckon, subdivide, and pigeonhole time), but in the Cat’s Eye—except for the video game and the Lucite umbrella stand—it could be 1963 (before John F. Kennedy’s assassination), 1972 (shortly after the breakup of the Beatles), 1985 (near the premiere of A Lie of the Mind at the Promenade Theater), or 1991 (the evening the Minneapolis Twins took the World Series from the Atlanta Braves in a domed stadium draped, it appeared to many Braves fans watching on television, with Hefty trash bags).
The BARTENDER, a handsome twenty six-year-old farm-boy type with a long jaw and mismatched ears, sets a rosy cherub (raspberry ginger ale and Albigensian bitters) before his four-year-old son, AUBREY, and squints ceilingward. AUBREY floats a worm-eaten pecan in his rosy cherub and repeatedly kicks the rear door of the turquoise Chevy with his Payless penny loafers. The other five PATRONS at the car bar ignore the boy’s toe drumming.
BARTENDER: Raphael? (Squints, cocks his head, listens.) Hey, Raffy, your table’s ready.
RAPHAEL materializes at the table by the dessert cart and the symbolic bonsai. His head nearly touches the ceiling. He wears tight black leather pants, a beaded Choctaw vest over his otherwise unclad torso, and a white terrycloth headband on which the Magic Marker motto BEGOTTEN TO RAZE HELL is fuzzily emblazoned. He has huge wings, a single pair only.
He sits, props one wing, the left, on the dessert cart, and holds the other aloft so that it casts an oxymoronically luminous shadow over the entire dance floor, even to the near edge of the double-Chevy bar. He glances at his naked wrist, shakes his head disgustedly, and looks about the Cat’s Eye as if for a waitress or a tardy drinking chum.
RAPHAEL: Hashmal, we have an appointment. Appear at your earliest convenience. Please.
HASHMAL manifests at the bar, between AUBREY and a hungover PATRON who doesn’t even notice the chief of the angelic order known as dominions. HASHMAL—like RAPHAEL, a daunting seven feet tall—wears a brocaded jerkin, plum-colored tights with a sewn-in codpiece, and calf-high, slipper-soled, suede boots.
He pays for a draft Michelob Dark and turns to carry it up the half-step and across the floor to RAPHAEL’s table. His pivot causes havoc: HASHMAL’s wings trail him like a pair of feathery drag chutes, sweeping a Coors Silver Bullet, a highball glass of Wild Turkey, the ignition key to a Dodge Dakota pickup, and a woman’s tortoise-shell compact onto the buttand sawdust-strewn floor.
AUBREY looks after HASHMAL wide-eyed, but no one else at the bar reacts, either to mumble, “Watch it, buddy,” or to snatch a wisp of down from one of his pillaging wings.
HASHMAL sits across from RAPHAEL, toasts him, and grimaces when the jukebox starts to shake the joint with the raucous Garth Brooks anthem, “Friends in Low Places.”
RAPHAEL: You’re inappropriately dressed.
HASHMAL: Beelzebub calling Moloch vile.
RAPHAEL: I mean for the era.
HASHMAL: I manifested. Never mind my attire. Just tell what urgency requires my presence here.
RAPHAEL: Sariela, of whom I have charge as captain of all guardian spirits. You, as captain of the order regulating angelic duties, need to hear how Sariela has proved negligent, just as I need your advice and counsel about what to do to help this unhappy spirit.
HASHMAL: Sariela? The name has a slippery sort of familiarity.
RAPHAEL: May I tell you the story?
HASHMAL: You do outrank me. Always have. Always will.
RAPHAEL (refolding his wings, leaning forward): We posted Sariela, a guardian of deliberately feminine aspect, to protect a newlywed couple from this very town, Ackley, Georgia, U.S.A.; Earth; Sol Planetary System; Milky Way Galaxy; Local Cluster Number—
HASHMAL: I know where we are.
RAPHAEL (sotto voce): If not when. (Aloud:) The couple to whom we posted Sariela go by the names Philip and Angel Marie Hembree. We sent her—
HASHMAL: Angel Marie? The woman’s name is Angel Marie? How odd. Such ironic synchronicity.
RAPHAEL: A simple coincidence. It’s only a name. In any event, we posted Sariela to the Hembrees on their wedding day, August 15, anno Domini 1993, the thirty-second anniversary of Philip’s birth. Angel Marie had insisted that they marry on this day as a precaution against Philip ever forgetting their wedding anniversary. This same stratagem had also worked for her previous husband, Bobby Dean Gilbert, who died in 1989 in a collision between a trailer truck carrying a load of Christmas trees—Frasier firs, primarily—and the Gilberts’ rattletrap 1978 Toyota Corolla.
HASHMAL: Both husbands were born on the same day?
RAPHAEL: No. No! Listen! This accident occurred on a fog-blanketed switchback of a North Georgia mountain, and Bobby Dean died instantly, impaled boccally by the trunk of a Frasier fir and thoracically by the Corolla’s steering column.
HASHMAL (shuddering): Praise God our basic incorporeality frees us from any fear of impalement. (Arches one eyebrow.) Or we’d play hell dancing on the heads of pins, wouldn’t we?
RAPHAE
L (impatiently): Angel Marie, on the other hand, survived the accident, but with crippling injuries from which she still quietly struggles to recover. Her survival owes much to the professionalism of the Georgia Highway Patrol and a pair of Emergency Medical Service personnel who drove her to the county hospital.
A few weeks later, as a physical-therapy patient in the Cobalt Springs Rehabilitation Center here in Ackley, she met Philip Hembree, driving instructor for the resident disabled and also the teenage progeny of the Center’s senior medical and administrative personnel. Blessedly, Angel Marie fell in the first category. Philip found her a much less demanding, and exasperating, student than the overweight male quadruple amputee, Carrol Bricknell, who could negotiate Ackley’s back roads only with the aid of an experimental voice-activated computerized guidance unit and a strap-on chin pointer that its manufacturer refers to whimsically as either a “directional diviner” or a “unicorn wand.” So, as you can imagine, Philip was predisposed to welcome Angel Marie into his customized, state-provided instructional vehicle as a student. In fact, he—
HASHMAL: Forgive, but these proliferating details overwhelm me. Of what sin of omission or commission is Sariela guilty? Has she somehow sabotaged the well-being or happiness of the Hembrees?
RAPHAEL: Oh, no. Far from it.
HASHMAL: What, then?
RAPHAEL: The trouble lies in Sariela’s untoward response to a very specific, and somewhat delicate, manifestation of the Hembrees’ admittedly exemplary mutual regard. I dilate on the human beings under her novice protection to give you a clearer insight into her anomalous attitudes and behavior. Must I cut to the vulgar chase? Or may I give you all the facts necessary to reach an informed and sagacious judgment?
HASHMAL: Pardon my impatience. Enlighten me fully.
RAPHAEL: Technically, Sariela served as Angel Marie’s guardian. She replaced the quasi-disgraced Cristiana, who only by her pinion tips contrived to save her ward’s life in that wreck with the Christmas-tree truck. Cristiana, I regret to report, has since lapsed into a vegetative spiritual funk—but that’s another story. Sariela, despite her posting as Angel Marie’s protector, had a sidelong responsibility to Philip, a professed agnostic, and this extra duty made her the de facto guardian of the Hembrees as a couple.
HASHMAL: Yes, yes. I understand.
RAPHAEL: Philip’s agnosticism denies him a separate angel, of course, but his “goodness”—a state without heavenly imprimatur, albeit one that usually elicits unofficial seraphic approval of a conditional sort—did in fact put him in line for collateral protection. We hope to win him through Angel Marie, for, in the Apostle Paul’s take on such matters, “Even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives ...” At which point, of course, we would delightedly grant the redeemed man a guardian exclusively his own.
HASHMAL: I have another appointment two decades into the next millennium. Could we speed this up a bit?
RAPHAEL: Sure. (Aside:) But visit a haberdasher before you go to keep that appointment. (To Hashmal): At the Cobalt Springs Rehabilitation Center, Philip chastely courted Angel Marie through the latter two years of her convalescence, physical therapy, and fight for psychosomatic wholeness. He entered the relationship a long-term bachelor and, in his own self-mocking phrase, a “recidivist virgin,” whatever degree of celibacy that implies. The result was—once Angel Marie had placed her late spouse at a psychological remove, and Philip and she had fallen in love and married—their union had the recurrent, uh, libidinous enthusiasm one would expect in the conjugal relations of much younger adult lovers. You see, from the vantage of a woman once satisfactorily yoked to an athletic hedonist—namely, Bobby Dean—Angel Marie had much to teach Philip, even while recovering from her severely crippling injuries. Philip, in turn, had much to offer Angel Marie from the hand-on perspective—metaphorically extended to the act of erotic intercourse—of a driving instructor for the “physically challenged.”
HASHMAL: You’re blushing.
RAPHAEL: That’s impossible.
HASHMAL: Perhaps you’re right. Go on.
RAPHAEL: The early weeks of the Hembrees’ marriage—the past four months, in fact—exposed Sariela to such a repeated commotion of eroticism, whether obstreperous or tender, quick or protracted, that it at first unhinged and eventually totally transfigured her. Sariela, rather than formulating strategies to protect the couple from accidents, evil-doers or harmful individual or joint decisions, began to obsess on the apparent joy of, well, carnality—especially in the divinely sanctioned context of marriage. For these reasons, I guess, Sariela gave herself over to a most unangelic pornographic voyeurism.
HASHMAL: My God! Didn’t you reprimand her?
RAPHAEL: Despite her preoccupation, she held the Hembrees entire, as individuals and as a couple.
HASHMAL: Of course she did. Barring unwanted pregnancies, communicable diseases, and mattress fires, bed is a haven from danger. But surely you took steps, however feeble, to reclaim Sariela from her obsession?
RAPHAEL: What would you have done?
HASHMAL (after thinking this over): Summoned counselors, persons of good judgment and experience, to expostulate with her, to expatiate upon the pitfalls of—
RAPHAEL: And so I did. (He snaps his fingers, and a bewigged and somewhat bemused MALE FIGURE, in the garb of an eighteenth-century British gentleman, appears on the dance floor. No one else in the Cat’s Eye pays the newcomer any heed.) Look there. (Tendering introductions): Hashmal, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield. Lord Chesterfield, Hashmal the Dominion. Sorry to yank you so unceremoniously out of the afterlife again, but my colleague here has questioned the course I pursued in attempting to treat Sariela’s unseemly variety of spiritual dysfunction.
CHESTERFIELD: Ah, yes, Sariela. A charming sprite. (He approaches the table.) Altogether charming.
RAPHAEL: I summoned you to counsel her, sir, because in your earthly incarnation you once made a rather witty, not to say astute, observation about the manifold disadvantages of human reproductive liaisons.
CHESTERFIELD: Sex?
RAPHAEL (grimacing): As you prefer.
CHESTERFIELD (quoting himself): “The cost is exorbitant, the pleasure is momentary, and the position is ridiculous.”
RAPHAEL: That’s it.
CHESTERFIELD: And, just as you wished, Your Seraphacy, I took that very epigram to Sariela.
HASHMAL (fascinated): And how did she respond?
RAPHAEL snaps his fingers again, and CHESTERFIELD vanishes, demanifesting without so much as a hollow pop. RAPHAEL snaps them again, and Sariela materializes in the center of the grungy dance floor. The jukebox plays “God Didn’t Make Honky-Tonk Angels.”
SARIELA stands nearly six feet tall, her svelte body draped in a flowing, snow-white robe. She has a noble, startlingly beautiful face—that of either a somewhat feminine man or a rather masculine woman—and her wings sprout from her shoulder blades like impotent, if shapely, nubs.
SARIELA: “The best is free of either payment or guilt, one may protract or re-experience the pleasure, and imaginative partakers may vary the position.”
RAPHAEL: God have mercy.
HASHMAL (caught off guard): How clever! (Recovering): But how crass. Never do I pity the Almighty’s fallen creatures more than when I hear tell of them in the reason-annihilating throes of recreational passion. And you, Sariela my dear, have fallen prey to the meretricious allure of the activity that even Lord Chesterton, as a frail mortal, had the wisdom to adjudge specious and demeaning?
SARIELA (unabashed): I confess it. Also that it profoundly irks me that I can’t indulge.
RAPHAEL (to HASHMAL): She’s bright. Her counter to Lord Chesterfield’s bon mot was virtually instantaneous.
HASHMAL (to SARIELA): I congratulate on your quick thinking, if not on your tact.
SARIELA: Each parry of my tripartite reply sprang from the Chesterfieldian clause that it contradicts. He smoked me out.
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HASHMAL: I take it you don’t like the man.
SARIELA: Despite Samuel Johnson’s ill-tempered diatribes against him, Lord Chesterfield was—and remains, even in God’s unimpeachable Heaven—the perfect gentleman. But that doesn’t negate my view that as a living human being he scantly deserved the functional genitals vouchsafed him.
RAPHAEL: Child, come over here. Sit down with Hashmal and me. Have a glass of wine.
SARIELA: I’d prefer ouzo, for all the feeble kick it affords intelligences without digestive tracts.
RAPHAEL: Come on. Don’t quibble over drinks.
He pats the table. SARIELA stalks over to it, scrapes a chair away from it, twirls the chair around, and straddles the chair like a lean chip-on-the-shoulder cowpoke.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 30