| Desk
Job
by Abigail Carter
I had failed him. Finally I had failed him. It was of course a fact of
life; no matter what you did. Eventually they died. It wasn’t as
if I hadn’t tried. I really had, but there were limits, even for
a guardian angel.
That was me. His Guardian Angel. I had been assigned to him when he was
ten. My own age was indeterminate, hovering somewhere between twenty and
thirty and a constant. They say you are only as old as you feel; well
in this case it was true. After all, I’d been eighty-seven when
I’d died.
There are two types of Guardian Angel. The first are those that had been
good in their lives. Those that were instinctively helpful and moral.
It came naturally to them. They didn’t necessarily do fancy things;
just lived good lives where they helped their neighbours whenever they
could and used their common sense. You know the sort, the ones that became
perfect grandmas or grandpas, baking cakes and giving good solid advice.
Of course there were the heroes too, I’d seen Marlene in the New
York Times when she was alive, and Hiro’s stories of his time abroad
never grew old. Bit like us really. But there aren’t many of them.
I wasn’t that type.
I was the other type. The ones who had screwed up so badly we needed to
make amends. To be fair, those of us that were here were doing it for
our own sakes, because we wanted to. Those who messed up without remorse,
they went elsewhere. We didn’t talk about it.
So I had spent my days with him. At first it had been odd, watching, analysing,
judging. But soon it became as if he were my own child, and the urge to
guide and nurture was all that mattered. After all, I was allowed.
I had a desk, in the most beautiful spot on earth. Of course the ‘on
earth’ bit was debatable. There was nothing out there but clouds
and blue sky. Always blue sky. You’d think that I’d get tired
of that, but I don’t.
We all had our theories of course, about where we were. I liked Hiro's
theory best, mainly because it saved the most arguments as it neatly encapsulated
everybody elses’ ideas. He speculated that there was one Guardian
Angel's office, where all nationalities were mixed up, like some exotic
soup. This office was situated in heaven. (He was vague about what heaven
actually was, except that it was 'above' and, unseen by the living.) He
then said that when we walked out of the door, we all set off some kind
of trigger that sent us to our respective locations.
One of the absolutes in our little world was that we all went where we
had been. Being a Guardian Angel wasn’t some great opportunity to
travel the world and learn a new language. As far as I could tell we hardly
even left our districts or counties or, fill in the blanks for your country.
We all understood each other linguistically, so we weren’t bound
by that, though Hiro had a theory that this only occurred in the ‘office’
as, as far as we were aware, we were all speaking our own language and
yet were perfectly understood. Hiro had a lot of theories. He was from
Japan, which may or may not have been the reason.
You know another odd thing? We all hang onto our previous lives. On my
desk is a picture of my daughter, even though I can’t be with her,
and food. It changes with my mood. I never buy it, and I never eat it.
It’s just there. Hiro has language books. I’ve already said
we can’t travel, but he is learning the languages anyway. And Marlene,
she still reads the gossip magazines, even though she hasn’t heard
of half the celebrities in them.
As I say, odd.
My job? Well it’s not as glamorous as you might think. There isn’t
much dashing in front of buses to prevent tragic accidents. Though Marlene
did it once, but then, she has a flair for the dramatic. No, it is much
quieter than that. More along the lines of the day when I nudged him in
the right direction when he had to choose between two girlfriends. He
married neither, but the one I’d chosen did introduce him to his
eventual bride. I didn’t know this was going to happen. We have
no sense of precognition; we just help our ‘charges’ to make
sensible choices, usually by discussing it with whoever is in the office
at that moment. We can freeze time if we have to. That is the one cool
thing we can do. Only for discussion’s sake, not just ‘cos
we fancy it. Well, that is what we are told. I’ve done it three
times now for no better reason that I wanted to, and I haven’t been
fired yet.
When he was fifteen I nudged him into choosing a viper over the bunny
at the pet shop. It had taken me weeks to undo that one. And the others,
they’d been disappointed. Nothing was actually said, per se, it
was the not saying, and the looks that had done it. Next time it had seemed
funny to nudge him into a wacky decision, I had resisted.
My charge’s death was a good one, as I understood it. Once I'd got
past the fact that there was nothing more I could do, I’d sat and
watched from the spare chair by the door with some pride. There is something
satisfying in coming to the end of a life well lived, even when it isn’t
your own.
He’d made up with most of the members of his family and they’d
been there, at his bedside. The nurse had been nudged into overdoing his
medication so that he’d been garrulous and relaxed.
Still, you couldn’t help second-guessing yourself. What if I gotten
him to the cancer clinic earlier? What if we’d been able to persuade
his brother Herb to be there? That kind of stuff. Well, you know.
Of course as I sit here now I wonder where all this is going for me too.
I’ve learnt a lot, about living well, and I don’t mean that
in the monetary sense, and about myself. I feel that I have made amends,
and more than that, that I have improved as a person.
Given a chance to live my life again, I would try to do it differently.
Moreover I would know how to do it. I know about self-help groups and
how to find them and about the little back doors that you can slip through
in life.
Of course they didn’t have a lot of those things in my day. My day
being about sixty years ago. I figured most of my key decisions were made
at about the age I seem to be now. I guess that’s why I am it. Hiro
is forty or so, he had an affair and it all ended in divorce. He felt
sorriest for the kids. Marlene is in her late sixties and it all has something
to do with defrauding the bank after her husband’s death. And me?
Well, me, I became a con artist at the age of twenty-three. I was quite
good at it too. Except that it never sat quite right. But I needed money.
Money to get my daughter out of the Bronx and into a better neighbourhood.
I’d managed it too. But I wish there had been another way. If you
let me out now, I could find that ‘other way’.
I’ve seen such progress over the last seventy years, and yet in
other ways I’ve seen none. But I’m not going to comment on
that. It’ll create enough debate in the office simply by my writing
it.
At first I’d wanted to blame my faults on the fact that I didn’t
have a guardian angel, but now I know that that is too easy. How did I
know that I didn’t have a guardian angel? Well, firstly, I'd screwed
up, monumentally, and they’re supposed to prevent that kind of thing.
Secondly, I knew because I’d checked. We don’t all get one.
Not enough to go around, and all that. Those that do get one are picked
at random I believe, though actually that is simply Marlene’s theory.
She’s just miffed that she didn’t get to go back and interfere
with her daughter’s life. There were certain things Marlene had
wanted to know about that husband of hers. Still it was all too late now.
Marlene had been in the office for three lives now. There was a lot of
speculation about this, but only when she wasn’t around of course.
What made a repeat guardian? The failure to learn from your mistakes?
The sudden need for extra guardians? Or the desire to continue the good
work? No one was really sure.
I guess most of all; I know now that there really is no such thing as
fate, though there is a lot of destiny. There is no advance map of a person's
life. But there is a lot of expectation and acceptance. If you were born
black and poor then you’d end up with a gun and die from a stab
wound. It was hard to do anything else.
So here I am, back at my desk, writing up the final report, wondering
what will happen next. Did I do well enough to continue? Is that the way
it works? I enjoyed helping someone not to screw up quite as badly as
I had. I feel that I’d like to do a few more. Not so long that I
get tired and a little jaded like Marlene, but just so long as it is fun,
and good for my soul. I guess that that is what it's all about isn’t
it? Being good for someone's soul, and incidentally, good for my own.
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