“Does it really change things so much?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“How do we measure evil? By what evil does, isn’t that so?” he waited. Then: “Nothing’s changed. You’ve cast off the ways of Lucky the Fox, that’s what matters. You’re a Child of the Angels. A philosophy of evil does not alter those things.”
I nodded. But I didn’t find this perfectly comforting, true as it was. A wave of dizziness came over me. And the thirst was burning.
I went to the refrigerator in the little dining area, found a bottle of icy cold soda and drank it down in several gulps. The sheer sensuous pleasure of this quieted me and made me feel a little ashamed. Abstract thoughts yield so easily to bodily comfort, I thought.
“Don’t you sometimes hate us?” I asked him.
“Never, and again you know that I don’t.”
“Are you trying to persuade me to ask genuine questions, instead of rhetorical questions?”
He laughed. It was a small agreeable laugh.
The caffeine in the soda was going to my head.
I went to the other windows one by one and drew the drapes, turning on the lamps that I passed—on the desk, and by the bed. The room felt a little safer now, for no good reason. Then I turned on the heat.
“You won’t leave me, will you?” I asked.
“I never leave you,” he said. His arms were folded. He was leaning against the wall by the window, looking at me across the room. Though his hair was red, his eyebrows were more golden, yet dark enough to give his expression a definite character. He was wearing shoes like mine, but not a wristwatch.
“I mean you won’t go invisible!” I said with a little gesture of both hands. “You’ll stay here till I’ve had a shower and changed clothes.”
“You have things to do,” he said. “If I’m distracting you, I should go.”
“I can’t call Liona at this hour,” I said. “She’s asleep.”
“But what did you do last time when you came back?”
“Research, writing,” I said. “I wrote down everything that had happened. I looked up more of the history of what I’d glimpsed. But you know The Boss is never going to let me show my writing about all this to anyone. That little dream of writing it down, being an author, putting it in books, it’s gone.”
I thought again of how I’d boasted to my former boss, The Right Man, that I would write about this great “something” that had happened to me, and about how I’d turned my life around. I’d told him to keep his eye on the bookstores, that someday he might find my name on the cover of a book. How foolish and impetuous that now seemed. I also recalled that I’d told him my real name, and I wished I had not done that. Why did I have to tell him that his trusted assassin, Lucky the Fox, was really Toby O’Dare?
Images of Liona and Toby flashed through my mind.
Those awful words of Ankanoc came back to me. Wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?
Well, I’d been filled with consolation and light when I’d spoken those words to The Right Man, and now I was confused. I didn’t mind so much never telling anyone what I did for Malchiah. A Child of the Angels should keep confidential what he does if that is what is expected of him, just as secrecy had always been expected when I was assassin for The Right Man. How could I give the angels less than I’d given The Right Man? But there was more to it, this restlessness and confusion I felt. I felt fear. I was in the presence of a visible angel and I felt fear. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it hurt, as if someone were subjecting me to an electrical current just strong enough to burn.
I took out another bottle of soda, savoring the coldness of it, even though I was still cold, and then drank again.
I sat down in the chair by the desk. “All right, you don’t hate us, of course not,” I said. “But you surely must become impatient with us, with our constant striving for a simple solution.”
He smiled as if he liked the way I’d worded that, and then he answered,
“What would be the point of my becoming impatient?” he asked gently. “In fact, what is the point of your addressing my thoughts and emotions at all?” Again he shrugged.
“I don’t understand when and how you intervene and when and how you don’t.”
“Ah, now that is a valid question. And I can give you a rule,” he responded calmly. His voice was as gentle in all ways as Malchiah’s voice, but he sounded younger, almost boyish. It was like a boy speaking with the restraint of an older man. “Your own free will is what matters,” he explained, “and we will never interfere with that. So what we say or do, or how we appear, will always be governed by that imperative, that you have the free will to act.”
I nodded. I finished off the second soda. My body felt like a sponge. “All right,” I said, “but Malchiah showed me my whole life.”
“He showed you your past,” he said. “What’s bothering you now is the future. You’re talking to me but you are thinking of a multitude of things, all having to do with the future. You’re wondering when and how you might see Liona again, and what will happen when you do. You’re thinking of things you have to do in this world to erase the evidence of your hateful past as Lucky the Fox. You don’t want your past deeds ever to harm Liona and Toby. And you’re wondering why this last assignment from Malchiah was so different from your first assignment, and what the next assignment might involve.”
All that was perfectly true. My mind was feverish with these questions.
“Where do I start?” I asked.
But I knew.
I went into the bathroom, and took the longest shower in my own personal history. And it did seem my own personal history consumed my thoughts. Liona and Toby. What did their presence in my life require me to do next? I didn’t think about phone calls or checks to them, or visits. I mean, what did it require of me with regard to my ugly past? What did Lucky the Fox have to do about that past?
I shaved and dressed in a clean blue shirt and pressed jeans. I had a little mischievous desire to see if my guardian angel would change his garb because I’d changed mine.
Well, he didn’t. He was sitting in the high-backed chair by the fireplace when I came out, and staring at the empty hearth.
“You’re right,” I said to him as if we’d never stopped talking. “I want to know all the answers as to the future, and as to my future. I have to remember that you are not here to make this easier for me.”