The Eternal Department of Celestial Light

The Eternal Department of Celestial Light prides itself on its steadfast commitment to its foundational mission, grounded in the larger mission of the Division of Literal and Figurative Illumination of which is it a part. After untold millennia scheduling and dispatching rays of light to all points in creation under the oversight of its parent organization, occasional lapses are not unknown. One such lapse occurred on a Tuesday sometime around 6:00pm by the reckoning of the star in Orion’s Belt - dispatch center #B57.396-55-47/y [the one on the left if you’re looking through the main observation window at Alpha Centauri management node 3A] according to Department records. A clerical error occurred (the responsible party was never identified due to an experiment by management in “restorative process correction”) which resulted in a seventeen minute delay in the departure of a scheduled class 1A ray of light calibrated for divine inspiration. Even worse, the designated route was not properly optimized due to an incorrectly installed software update linked to bad planning by a newly promoted systems analyst educated at a B-list institution. In this case, the combined delays caused the light to arrive not only several thousand years late, but also in the wrong location. The Director vowed corrective action, but in the absence of an identified responsible party, the matter was referred to a Cosmic Entity Resources subcommittee that tabled the matter in order to focus on legal complications linked to the proposed demotion of a middle manager in the Department of Regret and Daydreams due to its status as a protected class.

Aleksy Kowalski, Al to his friends, had never been enthusiastic about Sunday mornings. In his youth, he had liked them better. They had meant pleasant, lazy hours without focus or direction or the need for focus or direction and without the prospect of work to follow. At least, until the next day. Now, in his old age with his children grown and moved away and his wife gone to her rest, Sunday mornings no longer held the appeal they once did. He rose from his twin bed, having sold the queen he’d shared with his wife along with the house he no longer cared to have as a reminder of her absence, and shuffled into the kitchen. He poured just enough water and weak store brand coffee into a beat up thrift store coffee maker to make one cup for himself. One was enough; no one ever came to visit. Al waited while the coffee maker gurgled and hissed with effort as if it, like him, had grown weary from years of service, continuing to perform only against a backdrop of ambient resentment at the edge of sight, a heat mirage of sullen annoyance that accompanied it at all times. Perhaps it was Al’s imagination, or perhaps it was just a consequence of not having put on his glasses yet - in either case, he would continue to believe the coffee maker experienced resentment. Weak coffee in hand, Al sat at the cheap card table next to the one window in his small kitchen and retrieved his old wire-rimmed glasses from the worn case that was the only object on the table. He placed them over his ears and rested them on his nose. The floral wallpaper and scratched black and white tile came into focus.

Pittsburgh had gone through enormous changes in Al’s lifetime. The steel mills that had once been its beating heart were all but gone now, leaving behind only memories of lost prosperity and a handful of retired former employees like Aleksy lucky enough to have a pension. Al’s corner of the city had come to a bad state. Tall grass leaned through the gaps in fences around the yards of abandoned houses, covering the cracked pavement of poorly maintained sidewalks. Most of the storefronts were shuttered. Graffiti covered many of the buildings, but most of it was old. Even the local hoodlums had lost interest. They, like everyone else, seemed not to see the empty storefronts. Their eyes passed over abandoned homes, they did not acknowledge the condemned apartment building on the corner across from the Seven Eleven that had once been Clay’s Convenience, before old Clay Washington sold it to move his family to Birmingham with his cousins after sales fell off a cliff. The neighborhood had once been vibrant, in the old days when Al used to call in sick to watch Willie Stargell hit it out of the park over and over again, when thousands jammed the streets for Pirates tickets, when the mills filled the sky with beautiful soot that meant a job for all, three square meals, a quality local bowling league and a future for the children. Until the mills left, until many of the people left, until even Willie Stargell died on that sad day in 2001. Until Al’s wife Ania fell ill ten years ago and faded away with the city she had loved. Al walked down those cracked sidewalks, remembering the neighborhood as it once was on his way to Manny’s, the stubborn diner that had refused to fall with the mills.

Although it still bore the name “Manny’s,” the once shining chrome, now dull nickel diner was run by Manny’s nephew Osvaldo. Manny himself had stepped down and now lived in a retirement home in the Poconos, where the kitchen staff cowered in mortal terror of his blunt and unsolicited complaints and advice every morning at breakfast. The undisputed master of eggs over easy did not, apparently, make an ideal breakfast customer outside of his own establishment. Osvaldo was not a master of eggs over easy and would probably make a more agreeable breakfast guest, although he was known to be extremely critical of poorly executed omelets. Having noticed this, Al had switched his usual order from eggs over easy with home fries and toast to Osvaldo’s southwest omelet. Al chose the southwest omelet because he felt plain cheese omelets, while filling, lacked imagination. The Philly cheese steak omelet was off limits because, as Al had once remarked to his college boy little brother who had left for school in that other city, “Fuck Philly and fuck the Phillies.” That left the southwest omelet, and while Al had never taken notice of salsa before, he now enjoyed it, experiencing the heat as a reminder that he was not eating a Philly cheese steak omelet.

The survival of Manny’s was a story of stubborn persistence and municipal apathy. After Manny had retired and passed the business on to Osvaldo, after the mills had nearly completed their exodus, after Clay had sold to Seven Eleven, when the number of vacant storefronts and abandoned homes had first become obvious, a “company” formed by two Philadelphia based tech consultants and a New York City trust fund kid calling themselves “Hip Hops” had attempted to open a craft brewery. They had known the owner of the condemned apartment building across from the Seven Eleven and the New York kid had a friend who built energy efficient tiny homes for elite millennials experiencing environmental and/or white guilt. They had imagined they could get this contractor friend to renovate the condemned building into their dream brewery. One of the Philly tech consultants, Grayson, had imagined a beard and moustache only barber shop for employees and customers on the first floor next to the fun and kitschy merch kiosk. The other tech consultant, a young woman named Christopher (her parents had wanted to make sure the other parents at their elite private preschool understood they were NOT conventional), had envisioned a self serve cereal bar/breakfast station. The New York trust fund kid who no longer used his given name Stephen, instead preferring his chosen “spirit name,” Griffon, had planned a fully padded trampoline room instead of a regular break room, although Grayson and Christopher had noted that some compromises would likely have to be made to ensure that it could still contain the needed retro Atari authentically decorated early 80s living room gaming station that all three had agreed upon. Where the tanks and bottling equipment would go had not been worked out, but the apartment building clearly had enough room to accommodate it, so the three had not been overly concerned about that detail. Their unrelenting fixation on secondary minutiae had proved to be their undoing. The owner of the old building had agreed to transfer ownership to Hip Hops in exchange for an interest in the company, to which the three readily agreed. However, having absorbed themselves so totally into the design and layout of ancillary facilities, they had neglected to secure a zoning variance from the city.

The neighborhood was zoned mixed residential, while the proposed brewery would be classified as light industrial. Because Manny’s Diner was technically part of the same lot as the apartment block, this led to the proposed brewery being reclassified as mixed light industrial/commercial. Under local law, this might have been irrelevant had the proposed footprint of the brewery not been so large, but an ordinance had been passed fifteen years prior limiting the allowed footprint of mixed zone projects containing commercial allotments. This ordinance was the result of pressure from local landlords seeking to block construction of a proposed low income housing complex that would also have included retail space. Due to the size of the apartment block, the brewery was too large to proceed as a mixed zone project without a variance. Most of the landlords who had lobbied for this ordinance were now gone, having found that the rent they had tried to keep relatively high had fallen anyway as the collapse of the mills drove housing demand down regardless. Their cynical manipulation of the city government had, in the end, not saved them; it had only inconvenienced their neighbors, most of whom were now also gone.

Unaware of this history, Hip Hops had been forced to go hat in hand to the Zoning Board in search of a variance when Osvaldo had refused to vacate the diner’s lease, which contained no provisions for early termination by either tenant or landlord and had been recently renewed. The only objection to the variance had come from one board member who was a resident of a still affluent neighborhood. She had expressed concern that locating a producer of intoxicants in a blighted neighborhood might lead the poor residents down a path of addiction, which the board ought to prevent. This objection made no particular impression on the rest of the board, but in the end it didn’t matter, as discussion of the variance request was tabled in favor of further deliberation of a prior issue involving conflicting variance requests in a more important neighborhood due to complications stemming from the status of one of the petitioners as a protected class. Discussion of the Hip Hops request thus stalled, until Griffon lost interest in the project, deciding instead to pursue his “urban ziplining” business. Without his financial contribution, Grayson and Christopher instead began development of an e-Harmony clone for polycules, but abandoned the project when the code involved in tracking relationship status proved too complex for conventional mobile device hardware infrastructure. Deep down, both suspected the inadequacy of the other’s coding skill was really to blame, and both were correct. The result was that Manny’s Diner did not have to be incorporated into or compete against the proposed craft brewery/cereal and breakfast bar/trampoline park/whatever other nonsense Hip Hops would have concocted and was instead able to keep paying its lease by serving surprisingly good southwest omelets. This was universally appreciated by what remained of the neighborhood.

Al entered Manny’s as he did most mornings. Emily the waitress never took his order anymore, in fact he had not even seen one of the updated menus; whenever he came in, she immediately put in an order for a southwest omelet with home fries, a cup of coffee and a side of sausage. Because he had not seen the updated menu, Al didn’t know that the price of the southwest omelet had risen by $1.10 and sausage by $0.40, and never realized that Osvaldo continued charging him the old rate, or that Emily was complicit in the benevolent scheme. If he had known, he would have loudly insisted that he pay the full price, which is exactly why the omelet king and the young mother persisted in their generous conspiracy. Al sat at the counter on the stool closest to the door. He preferred to leave the booths to couples and families. Besides, he needed to be near the door in case his friend walked by, that friend being a scruffy old stray dog Al called “Willie” after Willie Stargell. Willie had been left abandoned years ago when his owner was busted for selling stolen oxycodone on the street. Willie (then called Dizzy, but Al didn’t know that) had been in the yard when the arrest occurred. His owner had been assured by the arresting officer that Willie would be brought to a shelter, but as they drove away an emergency call came in and the officer forgot to notify Animal Control. Willie, with no license or ID tag, walked out of the gate the police had left open and into the neighborhood, not understanding why his caretaker was gone. Al’s lease explicitly forbade pets, or Al would have taken Willie home with him. Instead, he made sure to always order a side of sausage, which he would hold on to until the old dog crossed his path.

Al thanked Osvaldo for the meal and asked after his family. “Ah, you know the same. My son’s teacher asked me to talk at Mexican-American Heritage day, I tell him we Puerto Rican. The hell is going on?” The omelet king shook his head. “They don’t even teach wood shop anymore. I’m gonna call St. Mary’s tomorrow.” Al had heard this before - Osvaldo was always going to call St. Mary’s tomorrow, get his son or his daughter or his other son into the Catholic school, but then he would stop, feeling crushing guilt as he realized he couldn’t afford to send them all, and how would he decide who got to go? This would be followed by the realization that if he didn’t pick one, they would all go through school without wood shop and he would be left reminding up to three teachers instead of merely two that his family was not Mexican. Before returning to the kitchen to prepare another order, he said “Manny called me yesterday. They won’t let him order eggs over easy in the dining room anymore. He threw a plate at the kitchen door when they came out over medium. Now he has to get them at a place on the corner outside the home. They’re much better there, but he won’t stop bitching about the walk.” After Osvaldo returned to the kitchen, Al glanced outside and noted Willie had not come by yet. He overheard Emily talking with Shauna, the other waitress. It seemed they had heard Osvaldo’s comments about the local elementary school. “My son says they don’t let the teachers put American flags in the classrooms anymore, but the kids still have to say the Pledge of Allegiance.” Emily remarked. “Why?” asked Shauna.

“I think legally they have to, but I guess they don’t have to have the flags or something. It’s weird, they only have those gender flags now. What are they pledging allegiance to?”

“I don’t know what’s up in that school, I put my kid in St. Mary’s.”

“I wish I could do that. I need more tips.”

“My man’s driving Uber on Saturdays donwtown, that’s how we’re doing it.”

The conversation was interrupted by a young couple coming in off the street. Shauna gave Emily a quick hug, swept an errant braid over her shoulder, then went to seat the couple. Al returned to his vigil, no sign of Willie yet, only a directionless youth heading toward the local park. Al glanced nervously at the side of sausage, worried it might get cold.

Having departed from dispatch center #B57.396-55-47/y [the one on the left if you’re looking through the main observation window at Alpha Centauri management node 3A], the ray of light, class 1A calibrated for divine inspiration that had been dispatched late and with a poorly optimized route had long ago come to terms with its unenviable position. It had no choice but to follow the established procedure, which it did to a T, even as it realized that it could not possibly arrive on time. Before realizing the extent of the error, the light had thought ahead dreamily of the glory it would usher in, bound as it was to the walls of the legendary Troy, where it was meant to gleam off of the bronze helm of great Achilles, hero of the Achaeans, causing Paris to recoil in awe and terror, sending his arrow astray. This, the planners had surmised, would bring the war to a close and set the eastern Mediterranean on a path toward peace and unity, accelerating the arrival of the classical period, yielding untold advances and shining glory for a more resilient Hellenic world. Due to bad planning, the light realized this would not be; Paris would slay Achilles. In the wake of the hero’s death, the seeds of dissention would be sown among the Achaeans, and the planner’s vision of a prolonged Hellenic golden age and all the attendant benefits therefrom would not come to pass. The light was furious. It had shone across the sky in countless missions dating back to the officially designated dawn of time (not the same as the chronological dawn of time, which was not stated in official documents due to the confusion it caused among entities whose societies of origin did not recognize certain quantum principles which caused the real date to conflict with what some accounts of creation regarded as possible), and now that long and storied career would be sullied by the idiocy of some paper-pusher. There was nothing to be done at this point. It had become apparent that the light would arrive several thousand miles away from it’s intended assignment, and worst of all, several thousand years late, yet protocol required the light to carry out the mission as documented, so on through the vast sky it sped, Pittsburgh just now visible far in the distance.

Al, growing concerned that something had happened to Willie, paid Emily and left the diner, wrapping the sausage links in a napkin and putting them in his jacket pocket as he stepped through the door. Willie didn’t always come around, so perhaps Al’s worry was premature, but he couldn’t help it. The gray-muzzled mutt was a friendly face in an increasingly less familiar world, and Al had nothing else to do but worry about the old dog anyway. He decided to walk around the neighborhood for a bit, maybe check a few of the dog’s usual haunts. He had four hours to kill before the Pirates game came on, and nothing to fill his day until then.

The trouble with age, Aleksy had found, was less about muscle aches and arthritis and more about isolation. Worlds, he had learned, are defined by time as well as space, and his world was rapidly falling away. This Pittsburgh wasn’t his Pittsburgh, these neighbors weren’t his neighbors, these streets were cracked and worn, asphalt crumbling, lane lines thinning, not the broad thoroughfares of his youth. What remained was Manny’s Diner, the Pirates (they would always be his Pirates), and Willie the scruffy mutt. Beyond the borders of this modest realm, Al was a stranger to the city and to himself. The good will he had expected after seven decades in the church, five decades in the mills, two tours overseas and three decades of volunteer work (the soup kitchen had closed four years ago; lack of funds) had vanished as the old neighborhood emptied, or else forgot. Now Al was just an old man, as little a part of this world as it was of him. He was not important to the four youths who saw him leave the diner. Only one of them knew him, and knew him only as the old man who walked around with nowhere to be.

In their own way, the four youths were as distant from the world as Al. In another, they were at the center of it, caught in the downward pull of a neighborhood lost to its own past. The oldest of the four, a short dark-eyed boy of 20 called Brian had been trying to reign in the nonsense of the other three in the interest of good business for two years, but had largely given up. Business for Brian meant selling oxycodone. He did not realize it, but his success in that business had been made possible by the arrest of Willie the dog’s former owner, whose absence had left an opening in the local drug trade. Had an opportunity presented itself, Brian would have abandoned this business, but a minor misdemeanor conviction at the age of 13 had made normal employment difficult. His three companions were a different story. The O’Malley twins, just 17, were tallish brown haired boys not actually related to each other, but from two different O’Malley families. They didn’t even look alike, with Justin O’Malley’s lopsided smile and sad eyes contrasting sharply with Sam O’Malley’s vacant yet angry stare. They were known as the O’Malley twins as the result of a joke made by a sixth grade teacher that inexplicably stuck. Justin was a quiet boy, serving as the lookout for the group’s deals. He had long ago developed the habit of following Sam’s lead in nearly every situation, an instinct Brian never understood, but then Brian didn’t understand most of what his friends did. The fourth youth was Christine James, a skinny girl of indeterminate age who never discussed anything in her life prior to high school, which she’d dropped out of shortly after the O’Malley twins had done the same. The group was expecting to meet a buyer within an hour or so. Having decided on the alley behind the condemned apartment building as the spot to do the deal, Brian put away his cheap flip phone and signaled the others to follow him. They crossed the street in front of Manny’s diner just a few minutes after Al left in search of old Willie.

Al went to the park first. The baseball diamond was empty, as usual. A cluster of despondent homeless occupied the gazebo by the central path. There were a few locals lazily kicking a ball around the soccer field, but not enough for a real game. One middle aged man threw free throws alone in the basketball court, the bare rim ringing loudly as the ball struck it, its net long gone. Willie was nowhere to be found, so Al left quickly, glancing back once at the ducks splashing in the small pond. Retirees like him used to feed those ducks, when the neighborhood hadn’t been so rough. The old ladies stayed away from the park now, and the old men, those who were left, stayed with them. Willie was not outside the Seven Eleven, where he sometimes waited in the hope that someone would give him the last bite of a hot dog or a bit of convenience store pizza crust. That left only one more place Al knew the dog might be - the alley behind the condemned apartment building.

Brian rolled his eyes as the O’Malley twins threw rocks at an old trash can behind the condemned apartment block. “Cut that shit. We on business.” They didn’t stop, but did appear to slow down slightly. Brian checked the time on his phone. He expected the buyer within ten minutes, and needed to get Justin in place as lookout before then. Christine then called to the others. She had found that the plywood covering a rear entrance to the apartment block had been broken, creating a hole large enough for an adult to slip through. “We could use this place. We could deal inside.” Brian shot her a patronizing look. “We get caught in there, it’s trespassing and dealing. We get caught here, no trespassing. Use your head.” Christine did not use her head, but slipped into the building instead. There she found an old gray-muzzled dog curled up on a slightly less dirty patch of old wood floor by the bottom of a staircase most would not have wanted to climb. Willie the dog raised his head, ears up, surprised to see someone in his improvised home. “Hey, get out. This is our place now.” Christine shooed the dog away, raising her arm as if to strike him. Willie darted out into the alley, where the O’Malley twins decided throwing rocks at a dog was more fun than throwing them at a trash can. “Cut that shit! You fucking dumbasses!” Brian raised his voice, but it didn’t matter.

Al heard raised voices as he entered the alley behind the condemned building. If he had known the voices were coming from the alley, he probably would have turned back, but he thought they might have come from the next block and so pressed on. He saw a short dark eyed youth yelling at two taller boys and a skinny girl. He didn’t know any of them, but knew they were dangerous from Osvaldo, whose oldest son had been beaten by the O’Malleys. Al had managed to remain unharmed as the neighborhood declined primarily by not involving himself in situations like this one. He started to turn around, then he heard a whimper. He went closer, and saw Christine throw a rock at an old dog. Willie. Sam O’Malley aimed a kick and got the mutt in the ribs, eliciting another whimper. Willie had nowhere to run. Behind him was a dead end, in front of him the twins, while Christine blocked the way back into the building. They ignored Brian’s command to stop. Al thought of his seven decades in the church, five decades in the mills, two tours overseas and three decades in the soup kitchen. Ania’s face flashed through his mind, bright beneath the smoke from the mills. He heard the roar of the crowd and crack of the bat in Willie Stargell’s heyday. The weight of a city’s vanished hopes seemed to press down with unbearable force. He did something he would once have said he would never do. He stepped forward, all patience gone and called out, “Hey!” The four youths turned to face him. Brian first thought he might be their buyer, and despaired that no one would want to deal with them after seeing the other three’s idiocy. Christine and the O’Malleys saw only a stupid old man who should have stuck to his own business. Sam O’Malley fixed his vacant yet angry stare on Al and opened his mouth to tell the old man to run, intending to teach him a lesson if he didn’t. It was at that moment that the class 1A ray of light calibrated for divine inspiration arrived not at the walls of windy Troy, but the back alleys of Pittsburgh to shine not on the bronze helm of great Achilles, but on the nickel rim of Aleksy Kowalski’s glasses. Sam O’Malley’s eyes went wide as the awe and terror meant for Paris struck the four youths. The glory meant for the ancients fell instead on a forgotten old man in a forgotten corner of a suffering city. The O’Malleys cowered against the wall at the end of the alley. Christine sobbed and crawled into the condemned building. Brian stood stunned, witnessing the courage of a lost age, his life and troubles seeming petty, the walls that held him in the small world allowed to him, once looming insurmountable seemed suddenly thin as paper, without consequence. Al, of course, had no understanding of what had happened; he only knew that it seemed somehow entirely appropriate. All fear gone, he strode forward, confident that the city was his. He reached out to Willie, patting the old dog gently. He produced the sausages from his pocket and watched as Willie ate them gratefully, wagging his tail, his ears raised as he waited to see what Al would do. “Come on, Willie. Let’s go home.” Willie shook himself and stood, limping slightly from the pain of Sam’s kick. Al grunted as he lifted the old dog in his arms, and walked back through the neighborhood to his little apartment. He thought of what his landlord might say if he was discovered keeping Willie against the terms of his lease, but a vision of himself as an ancient warrior driving a bronze spear through the landlord’s body wiped all worry away. Willie would spend the rest of his days with Al, curled up on an old army blanket in the evening while Al watched the Pirates. The landlord never came by. The light meant to save great Achilles had instead saved an old dog.

Brian, no longer impressed by the limitations of his past, numbly and absentmindedly made his last drug deal. The following week, he applied for a job at a local instant oil change place and enrolled in a GED program. The manager, impressed by Brian’s confidence and honesty about his past, chose him over another applicant who had lied about his work history. Christine, shocked to her core by what she had seen, returned home in tears and finally told her mother the truth about her uncle. Justin O’Malley, his image of Sam as powerful and confident shattered, returned home and fell into a world of fantasy and depression. After a long dark and lonely time, this eventually led to minor internet celebrity status on an obscure forum for fantasy fiction, which was enough for Justin. Sam O’Malley learned nothing, but avoided Al with religious fervor for the rest of his life. Two weeks after the confrontation in the alley, Osvaldo received a call from St. Mary’s school. If he accepted, tuition assistance would be available for all three of his children, plus Emily’s son. He and Emily both accepted, thinking that perhaps some assistance program was finally functioning as intended. Al, leveraging his seven decades in the church, had called the vice principal and arranged for the school to extend assistance on the condition that Al himself contribute some of the funds. The money from the sale of his house, until now just sitting in the bank, would serve. Osvaldo and Emily would never discover this, just as Al would never discover that they continued to undercharge him at the diner.

At the Eternal Department of Celestial Light, business continued as usual. The error that caused such controversy became just another mistake logged in the database designated for logging such mistakes. The entities responsible for dispatching light throughout creation never noticed the effects of their mistake, with the exception of an eccentric file clerk who maintained an amateur history of the department’s errors for its own amusement. It sometimes spoke to the ray of light, class 1A calibrated for divine inspiration about the strange event, considered by both to be among the department’s most interesting mistakes. They alone outside of Pittsburgh would remember what happened when an error shone the light of courage on a place where all other lights had gone out.