Your Orisons May Be Recorded

 

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All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no.

And sometimes the answer is: “Let me talk to my manager and get back to you.”

“Really,” the caller is saying, “I've been donating to the church for years. Going every Sunday. He wanted that. He wanted us to get married there. It's legal now. Honestly, I expected better service, but I think persuading him to come home is the least you can do at this point.” The client's voice shakes a little with frustration. “Amen,” he adds.

“I understand your frustration,” I say. “I really do understand, and I appreciate your patience, Mr. Rimington-Pounder.”

Across the desk, Grem, my cubicle buddy, collapses in a fit of silent laughter. Gremory is a demon, so he's allowed to laugh at the unfortunate, including the unfortunately-named.

I try to explain to Mr. Rimington-Pounder, as gently as possible, that prayer is not a vending machine, where you pop in a certain amount of devotion and miracles drop into your hands.

“Is there—” the client moistens his lips. “Is there someone higher up the chain I can talk to?”

“Certainly, sir,” I say, in my best friendly call center assistant voice. “Let me just put you on hold for a moment.”

I press the mute button and roll my eyes at Gremory.

“Let me guess,” says Grem, “Rimjob wants to speak to someone higher up?”

I nod. Of course he wants to speak to someone higher up. Everyone wants to speak to someone higher up. But you can't speak to the manager.

The manager is absent.

I take Mr. Rimington-Pounder off hold and adopt a different voice, a man's voice. Something broad and comforting and Midwestern. Authoritative.

“What can I do for you, sir?” I ask. The client is soothed by this voice. I let him talk. I follow protocol and offer a lot of unspecified redemption without actually promising anything at all.

Human beings are generally confused. That's where we come in. Mainly, as the floor supervisor explained in a recent slideshow presentation, humans are confused about wants and needs. They're always on their knees begging for things they want rather than asking for things they need. It's very important to steer them away from the wants and speak to the needs, not that we could solve them, because—as the supervisor explained—that would just be too easy.

Wants and needs. Of all the indignities of flesh, I'm really glad that problem doesn't apply to me.

I know exactly what I want.

That's
my
problem.

*   *   *

Where is this place?

Somewhere overhead. Somewhere between thought and memory. You might catch a glimpse of it from the window of an airplane, with the dawn burning in over the endless blankets of cloud and all the lights dim in the cabin. You might tell yourself you didn't see what you saw.

Do angels walk in the clouds?

Not if we can help it. It's damp and full of weather balloons.

But can you peer through the mists rolling around the lower levels of heaven? Did you see the endless tower blocks of human resources tangle through the curds of cumulonimbus, in the deathless place where they serve Him night and day in His temple with monthly production goals and customer satisfaction surveys?

Angels work. Of course we do. We're all on zero-hour contracts. Time, after all, is a human idea.

We get twenty-five minutes of it for lunch, with deductions for any bathroom or smoke stops we might have taken. Hating your boss is also a human idea.

The day everything changes, I spend my lunch in the break room with Gremory. There are many rooms in my Father's house, but only one with a functioning coffee machine.

Gremory wears his hair long and shaggy, which is against regulations, but he has the highest client satisfaction rate on our floor. He has this ability to be nice to every caller without letting the slow grind of their daily trauma worry him too much. It's a demon thing.

Grem waves to me from behind his copy of
Kerrang!
They tell us it's important to stay authentic, but Grem doesn't need to try very hard at that. He's sitting with his feet up on a swivel chair, reading his magazine and eating a ham sandwich.

“You shouldn't let it get to you,” he says, seeing my face. “I never let it get to me.” This is true. Every demon I know is a profoundly chilled-out individual. Our two spheres incorporated over a thousand years ago, and the merger has been a big morale boost all-round.

“I hate not being able to do anything for them,” I say, grabbing a coffee from the machine. “The heartbroken ones, most of all. You shouldn't laugh at them. It's not their fault.”

“Human hearts,” says Gremory, “are brittle, but also durable. I should know; I've eaten thousands. You should never attempt to engage one while it's still beating. I advise against it.”

“You're jealous because nobody wants to fuck you because you're a demon.”

“That,” says Gremory, pushing half a sandwich into his second mouth, “is a vile stereotype. I get mine. I just don't like drama.”

“I can't bear the lovesick ones, though. They're so pathetic. And they're always killing themselves, or each other. My ones do, anyway.”

“Your problem is that you keep trying to talk them through it,” says Grem. “I just tell mine to take a walk in the sunshine. It's not like they remember the calls.”

That's not quite true. They remember the calls in snatches, like the dregs of dreams you can't touch with your tongue, draining away. A sense of something profound, whether it's redemption or frustration, vanishing on the edge of vision.

Our repeat business is booming.

“I submit to you,” says Grem, “that you are projecting, my friend. I submit to you that you're getting stressed because you've been due another of your dramatastic love affairs for years, and you're bored, and you need to learn to relax.” Grem wipes his hands on his untucked shirt.

“If you will insist on romancing the doomed,” he says, “Go and fuck a panda.”

I throw my empty coffee cup at him.

*   *   *

They tell you not to fall for human beings because they always die. For me that's part of it. That's their beauty and their tragedy—everything is always rotting, puckering and falling apart under your hands, and you claw at them with your kisses to slow the tug of time but you can't. The panic in their eyes when they reach the age when they realize that, yes, it's happening to them too.

The way they swallow their breath at the point of orgasm.

I can't get enough.

Some of us are perfectly happy counting dust motes in sunlight, or recording the little lives of the luminous creatures at the bottom of the ocean trenches who live and die and drift to the sea floor and know nothing but darkness.

Not me.

Loving humans is what got me demoted.

A long time ago, before the current system, when there were far fewer of them, it was our job to walk among men and women and all the other human creatures and teach them things they needed to know. Writing and calculus and basic food hygiene. We were allowed to give real advice, back then, and we taught them a lot. But they taught us things, too.

They taught us what it is to fear death and to nourish hope. They taught us about pleasure. And passion. And love. Love more than anything. I have always been drawn to the ones who burn with it, the ones who take their tiny lives in trembling hands and try to wring out all the juices before it's too late.

I love fucking human men.

I love loving them, too, though if I'm honest, the fucking is quite a significant part of it. Nothing is ever just sex.

I loved a scientist, once, in Babylon, in the land between the two rivers. His beard was slight and his eyes were black and fronded with long, long lashes, and it was the eighth century after they killed the Nazarene, and he found me in a decorative jar in the market, where a witch whose son I had seduced kept me prisoner for a decade.

He took me home and broke the glass and out I blossomed, fully-formed and heavy-breasted, and he rushed for his notebooks.

He was tortured by the impulse to understand everything. A fatal condition in humans. He was full of rage at his own ignorance, and the more he eked out through his art and philosophy and mathematics—which in those days were all part of the same discipline—the more he discovered he did not know, and the more that knowledge consumed him.

I loved him for it, and he resented me. Even in our bed, he resented me. His fingertips would outline my contours as if I were drawn on a manuscript, searching for the secrets of my substance.

It hurt him to love me because I was a door to the wisdom of eons that he couldn't unlock. I knew the names of all the stars, and I wouldn't tell them to him. I couldn't. It would have driven him mad, and he would have ended up wandering the streets with the beggars and the crazed soothsayers.

He told me that there were worse places to end.

He longed to know the names of the stars, the true names that they only tell each other, how they were born, the exact latitude of this or that red giant. I told him that I had walked on a star once and it was nothing special. After that he didn't fuck me for weeks.

He liked me in feathers, though. One morning I found that he had plucked out all the filoplumes on my left side and was dissolving them in acid, trying to determine what I was made of. So I took him walking on a star. He didn't like it as much as he thought he would.

*   *   *

After lunch, I spend the afternoon answering calls from the Gulf of Mexico, where the summer storms are the worst they've been in a generation, just like they were last year. And the year before that.

The lines are going mad.
Please protect my home. Please save my children from the water. Lord, let us get out in time. In your name, Amen.