Biblical (6 page)

“You say this guy claims he’s the angel Gabriel?” Corbin asked the sergeant.

“Something like that. Or maybe his name really is Gabriel, but you know what these types are like, they run off at the mouth and none of it makes sense. He kept on going on about knowing the truth, having a message, all the usual crap. Funny thing is he’s calmer than most.”

Corbin nodded and moved closer to the priest and the man on the parapet.

“Hi. My name’s Peter … I’d like to talk to you. Can I come closer?”

“Not too close.” The standing man spoke quietly and calmly but the young priest turned in Corbin’s direction and held up a halting hand, his expression impatient. Corbin ignored him and crossed the roof.

“That’ll do fine,” said the naked man, over his shoulder.

“Hello …” Corbin repeated. “I’m Peter. What do I call you?”

“His name is Gabriel,” said the priest.

“Is that your name?” Corbin asked the naked man, then turned to the priest, keeping his voice low and even. “Move away, Father. You could do more harm than good.”

“I am here to tend to a soul in distress. I have a place here.”

“At least move back.” Corbin shot a steel thread of warning
through his tone. The priest didn’t move. Corbin turned his attention back to the naked man.

“Is that really your name? Are you Gabriel?”

The naked man made no hint of having heard Corbin, continuing to stare out over the city.

“You can call me Gabriel,” he said eventually and absently, as if talking to Corbin was a distraction. “Call me whatever you want. Anything can be given a name, but that doesn’t mean that thing is what you call it. You can give something a name, but it doesn’t mean that it is. Tell me, Peter, are you a psychiatrist?”

“I’m here to help you, Gabriel,” said Corbin. “That’s the most important thing, but yes, I’m a psychiatrist.”

“I see. You’re here to observe me …” Gabriel said, still distracted by something only he could see, far out over and above the city. “To observe me and evaluate my state. Those two things are contradictory, if you don’t mind me saying … the Observer Effect in quantum physics proves the act of observation itself changes the state of the observed. Did you know that?”

“I’m not here just to observe, Gabriel, I’m here to help.”

“To stop me jumping.”

“To help you,” repeated Corbin. “Help you find a way out of this.”

“Like I said: to stop me jumping. We live in a superpositional universe of infinite possibilities, so you’ll get the outcome you want: I won’t jump. And I will jump. I’ll jump and survive. I’ll jump and be killed. It’s not a choice. All of these things will happen. And none of them will.”

“Why are you on the roof, Gabriel? Why are you here?”

“I’m not here. I don’t exist.”

“That’s a strange thing to say. Of course you’re here.”

“Strange? Not really. I know I’m not here.”

“Have you taken drugs tonight, Gabriel?”

“The K-hole?” Gabriel laughed quietly. “No, Peter, I haven’t taken Ketamine or anything else. I’m not suffering from drug-induced depersonalization. I’m just really not here.”

“I see you, Gabriel. That means you’re here.”

“Does it?” Gabriel said, then gasped suddenly, swaying forward slightly. Everyone looked to see what had startled him. There was nothing. For a moment the young naked man stood frozen, then the tension eased from his pose.

“Does it?” he repeated, still as if Corbin was distracting him from watching some event unfold on some vast TV screen visible only to him. “I’m here because you see me here, is that it? Does that mean if you look away, I won’t be?”

“You were here before I came up onto the roof, Gabriel. You were here fifteen minutes ago when the police called me. You were here fifteen minutes before that when the security guard called the police. I couldn’t see you then, but you were here, weren’t you?”

And before that, thought Macbeth, remembering the taxi driver’s account of the distracted passenger he’d taken to Christian Science Plaza.

The young man frowned. “I remember
being
here fifteen minutes ago. I remember
being
before you looked at me. But I am remembering that now. That memory of existence has been generated in this moment. Maybe it’s the present memory that’s real, not the past existence. Because I
remember
being here fifteen minutes ago doesn’t mean I really was here fifteen minutes ago.”

“Do you know something, Gabriel?” said Corbin. “I don’t like heights. I mean, I
really
don’t like heights. Never have. Why don’t you step back from the edge? Just a little bit …” Corbin glanced meaningfully over to the cops standing beside Macbeth. “No one is going to come close. It’s just so that we can talk. You know, without me being all scared about the height.”

“Height is a dimension, a measure. It isn’t the measure you’re
scared of, you’re afraid of the force the measure exerts on your mass. Gravity. And gravity is nothing to be afraid of.”

“I don’t know about that, Gabriel,” said Corbin, “I’ve seen gravity make a real mess of people falling from a height lower than this.”

“Of the four fundamental forces of the universe, gravity is the weakest. By far the weakest. The other three forces push it around. Bend it and twist it and fuck it up. If you want to be afraid of a force, Doc, be afraid of electromagnetism, or the strong nuclear force. Be afraid of the forces you can’t see or feel but hold you together and can tear you apart. Not gravity.” Gabriel sighed. “If you don’t like heights, you can step farther back. I like it here. Is Father Mullachy still here?”

“I am still here, my son.” The priest stood up, casting a nervous eye over the building’s edge.

“What’s your name, Father? I mean your first name.”

“Paul,” said the priest. “My name is Paul.”

The naked man laughed. “Peter, Paul and Gabriel … two saints and an angel. Do you believe in angels, Father?”

“I believe God is manifest in many ways, Gabriel. Many ways to many people.”

“I didn’t ask if you believed in God. I didn’t ask a vague question for you to give me a vague answer. I asked you specifically if you believed in angels … you know, anthropomorphic beings with giant wings growing out of their backs.”

“That’s not what an angel is, my son,” said the priest. “An angel is a messenger of God, or even the message itself. More a being of spirit than—”

“Do you believe in angels, Gabriel?” Corbin cut the priest off.

Gabriel laughed bitterly. “Believe? I believe in nothing. But the funny thing is that the nothing I believe in is a nothing where absolutely everything is possible. All things, all ideas, all possibilities. Even angels. If you’re a psychiatrist, Peter, then
you’ll know that angels are real. Not to everybody, but to some. I bet you’ve had patients who believe totally, completely, that they’ve seen angels. The fact that the angels exist only in their minds and no one else’s doesn’t mean they’re not real. Angels, demons, ghosts …” He paused, his tone becoming troubled. “And monsters. I bet you’ve seen them all, treated them, cured them. Am I right? Have you cured people of their belief in angels?”

“I’ve helped patients with delusional disorders, if that’s what you mean.”

There was a pause. Gabriel’s gaze remained fixed on the farin-the-distance something invisible to everyone else. “You’ve been very busy recently, haven’t you, Peter?” he said eventually. “You’ve had to chase away a lot more angels and ghosts of late. Many, many more than usual … Am I right?”

There was another pause, this time Corbin standing quiet. Something in that silence troubled Macbeth.

“Why do you say that?” said Corbin.

“I’m right, aren’t I? There are more people than usual seeking a cure for their visions. What do you tell them? Do you tell them they’re mad? Or has it begun with you too? Maybe just the odd thing out of the corner of your eye? Those are the worst. Those are the ones that drive you crazy … they’re never still there when you turn. Has that been happening to you, Peter? Are you already a seer of visions yourself? Do you now tell your patients that they were right all along? Do you tell them the angels are coming?”

Again Macbeth noticed that Corbin paused before answering. In the silence he could hear the city sounds of traffic in the dark; distant shouting and laughter. Noises off.

“Do you see angels?” asked Corbin. “Is that what you’re seeing now, in the sky?”

Gabriel laughed. “Stop reflecting. Deflecting. I want to know if you ever wondered about the reality your patients describe …
Have you ever lain in bed at night, in the dark, and questioned whether their reality is the valid one and yours the false? I mean, you must encounter as many people with their own version of reality as those who share the standard version.”

“We all know what true reality is, Gabriel.”

The naked man laughed. “You mean consensual reality? Reality is reality if enough people believe in it? What if everybody … and I mean everybody … started to have visions? Everybody except you? Would that mean that you were delusional? Let’s put it this way: Father Mullachy here has devoted his life to serve a supernatural entity. But that’s acceptable because there’s a history to his fantasy and there’s still some consensus behind it. But if he devoted himself in exactly the same way to exactly the same set of beliefs, but said it was a giant mouse who lives hidden in the clouds that commanded his presence here, because the giant mouse is worried about my spiritual wellbeing, that wouldn’t be acceptable. You would say he was delusional. Big question, isn’t it?”

“The only question I’m interested in at the moment is why you are here, Gabriel.”

There was another elastic silence before Gabriel spoke. “Have you ever seen a Golden Dart Frog? They’re beautiful: bright, beautiful colors, not just gold. And so tiny – less than half an inch long. Do you know what I can’t understand about the Golden Dart Frog? Why such a tiny, beautiful creature is the most deadly poisonous animal on the planet. One frog – one half-inch-long frog – could kill five African elephants stone dead inside of a minute. Or twenty to thirty humans. If you put your bare hand on a branch where one has been sitting an hour before, its skin secretions could still kill you. I just don’t get it … Hey, Father, you got an answer to that? Why God made something so beautiful then made it so toxic?”

“There is room in God’s creation for all kinds of thing, Gabriel,” said the priest. “There are wonders we may never understand. His reasons may forever be beyond our grasp.”

Gabriel laughed and as he did so, his naked body swayed again. Macbeth saw Corbin tense.

“That’s good … I like that … ‘wonders we may never understand’. The Pope’s get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Gabriel. “But we really try to understand, don’t we? I mean, of the eight or nine million species on this planet, we are the only one trying to make sense of it all. You see, the Golden Dart Frog makes no sense to me because it carries a thousand times more poison than it would ever need to kill any of its natural predators. And you know something? We’re exactly the same. We don’t make sense, either. I mean, why are we so smart? We don’t need all of this intelligence.”

“I don’t get you,” said Corbin.

“Just like the Golden Dart Frog’s been overloaded with poison, we’re overloaded with all this brainpower. Brainpower we don’t really need to hang on to our place at the top of the pile. Look at all of this …” He swept an arm to indicate Boston glittering in the night. “All of this created by an ape. Art, science, music … none of it makes any sense. It’s absurd. Everything is absurd. What do you think, Peter? You gauge and measure and probe the human mind … What’s your take on it?”

“Human intelligence?” As he answered, Corbin took a clumsily casual step closer. He was now halfway between Macbeth and the naked man. “Like you said, we’re top of the evolutionary tree; it’s our intelligence that’s put us there.”

“Now that’s just not true, Peter, and you know it,” said Gabriel. “What about dinosaurs? One hundred and thirty million years at the top of the tree. Infinitely more successful than us. They didn’t need technology or civilization or culture. Our intelligence is actually an evolutionary threat, not an advantage – it has brought us close to extinction at our own hands within what? Two hundred thousand years of modern humans? Fifty thousand years of behavioral modernity? I mean,
that’s not even a blink of the evolutionary eye. But in that tiny space of time we have pretty much succeeded in fucking up the planet we depend on and have developed the weapons we need to wipe ourselves out several times over. Yep, Pete … dinosaurs have us beat, all right.” Again he waved an arm to indicate the city spread out below. “They had all this beat.”

“I can answer your question, Gabriel.” The priest moved closer, uncertainly, again casting a nervous eye over the parapet’s edge. “Our wisdom, our inquiry, is God-given. He gave it to us so that we may
seek
to understand Him. And come to know our sins – the nature of sin. So that we can strive to know God.”

“What if I told you,” Gabriel said to the priest, “that I know God? That I know God in a way that you could never, ever understand? That I completely, totally understand the true nature of God?”

“No you don’t, my son,” said the priest.

“But I do,” said Gabriel, for the first time with feeling in his voice. Almost pain. “You’re the one who’s deluded. I’ve seen the answer, the truth, Father. And it’s a big, big truth. A truth so big and so beyond the imaginings of your tiny superstition that you’re incapable of understanding it.” He paused, and seemed to survey the lights of the city again. “So big I can’t bear it …”

An upcurrent from the Plaza below lifted and ruffled the fringe of fair hair. Gabriel leaned forward slightly and looked down. Macbeth held his breath and sensed the two cops next to him do the same. Pete Corbin moved forward then checked himself.

Then, unexpectedly, Gabriel stepped back: off the parapet and away from the edge. Father Mullachy looked across to Corbin with an expression of undisguised triumph.

“Better get a blanket,” the sergeant told the younger cop and started to cross the roof. In the meantime, the young priest
had taken a step towards Gabriel and placed his hand reassuringly on his naked shoulder.