life forever. You’ll never go a day of your life without knowing you have them, that they need you, that you mustn’t disappoint them. And they will never experience a moment without knowing they have your love and acknowledgment. Don’t you grasp the changes already taking place? Living under the same roof, that would be one aspect of this.”
“That’s a bloodless way of looking at it,” I said, before I could check myself. “You don’t know what it means for humans to live under the same roof.”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
He waited. I did see it, see how very enormous it was, what had happened with Liona and Little Toby, yet the concept of infinite possibilities spinning out from the moments we’d shared did not stop me from longing for so much more, I had to confess it.
“You know how to love,” he said. “That is key. You can love not just those people you meet in the embracing illumination of Angel Time. You can love people in your own time. The woman and the boy didn’t frighten you. Your heart beats with a new and practical love that two days ago was unimaginable to you.”
I was too overwhelmed to reply. I pictured them again, Liona and Little Toby, as they’d looked when I first set eyes on them. “No. I didn’t know I could love like that,” I whispered.
“I know you didn’t,” he said.
“And I’ll never disappoint them,” I said. “But be merciful, Malchiah. Tell me I might one day live under the same roof with them. Tell me it’s at least conceivable, whether I deserve it or not. Tell me I might somehow someday deserve it. Bear with me.”
He was quiet for a moment. The tears were gone from his eyes. He looked placid and wondering. His eyes moved over me as though he were studying me. Then he looked at me directly.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps there is world enough and time for that. Eventually. But you mustn’t think on it now. Because now, it most likely cannot be.” He paused as if he meant to say something else, and then thought the better of it.
“Can you make a mistake?” I asked. “I don’t mean that I want you to, I only want to know. Can you be mistaken about something?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Only the Maker knows all things.”
“But you can’t sin.”
“No,” he said simply. “Long ago, I chose for the Maker.”
“Good God, can’t you tell me—?”
“Not now, perhaps not ever,” he said. “I’m not here to give you the history of the Maker and His angels, beautiful young man. I’m here to know you, and guide you, and ask of you that you give me your devoted service. Now leave your cosmic questions to Heaven, and let’s get on with the work you must do.”
“Oh, give me world enough and time to make up for the things I did, and world enough and time—.”
“Yes, remember those words,” he said, “where I’m sending you, because it will be a complex series of tasks. You don’t go now to England, or that age, but rather to another in which things for the Jewish children of God are both better and worse.”
“Then it’s Jewish prayers we’ll answer.”
“Yes,” he said, “and this time it is a young man named Vitale, and he is praying both desperately and faithfully for help, and you will go to him and find a complex of mysteries which only you can understand. But come. It’s time we were on our errand.”
WITHIN AN INSTANT WE HAD LEFT THE VERANDA behind.
I don’t know what others saw if they saw anything.
I knew only we had left the solid world of the Mission Inn, and the solid world of Liona and Toby, and we were once again high in the clouds. If I had a form I couldn’t see it or feel it. All I saw was the moist white swirling around me and here and there the tiniest flicker of a star.
I ached for the celestial music, but it did not come so much as the songs of the wind came, swift and refreshing and wiping me clean, it seemed, of all my thoughts of the recent past.
Suddenly below me I saw spread out an immense and seemingly endless city, a city of domes and rooftop gardens, and rising towers, and crosses beneath the ever shifting layers of clouds.
Malchiah was with me, but I couldn’t see him any more than I could see myself. But I could