Angel

Bradley already knew by heart the tales of the lonely angels who hovered at busy street corners and watched careless children; of angels whose tears for all the unconfessed sins of the world created the mountain streams that emptied into the oceans; and of angels who lived in upholstered chairs and waited for lapsed believers to settle unsuspectingly into a suddenly renewed faith. Yet as he sat in the front row of the nearly empty catechism class, resisting as always the impulse to stare at the wispy hint of pompadour that dangled from Father Gregory’s forehead, Bradley still listened carefully as the priest said, “Celestial beings have no bodies of their own and need none, for they are clothed in thought. But they love to assume the human form, and this they can do instantly.”

The Father looked up at the ceiling, away from Bradley and the other remaining student, that young girl named Lisa who always sat in the last row. Only two left, he thought. “Some angels,” he half-mumbled, “let their fingers, hands, and limbs fill out slowly, with voluptuous grace, quietly erupting from nothing into a diaphanous shape.”

Though Bradley knew most of these words, he wished Father Gregory would spell the hard ones so he could look them up. But he was afraid to interrupt the Father, who, regarding his hands as if he were alone, said, “Others spend hours inventing a perfect face for their angelic temperaments.” Then the Father held one hand before his lips as though suppressing a cough and continued, very softly, “There is some dispute as to whether angels invent clothes for themselves.” Bradley suppressed a giggle and glanced back at Lisa. He was shocked to see her indifferent face.

At the end of all those empty rows of folding chairs, Lisa watched the Father’s bulbous lips move, which she imagined slapped together. She was glad she wasn’t close enough to hear, so she could decide what to make up about today’s class—the last time she had told the truth about Father Gregory’s stories her dad had smacked her for lying. But right now she couldn’t concentrate; instead she wondered why the Father still called out the long class roll even though only two kids were left.

“It is of course well known that angels can read a person’s thoughts,” Father Gregory said, “but some angels will do this only briefly, for they are too easily lost within that thicket of desires and fears, strange opinions and unspoken urges—so unangel-like!” He looked down at the two students and wondered how long it would take before they too stopped coming to class, so his afternoons would finally be free. ^“All angels—the seraphim and cherubim—are addicted to us,” he now whispered, “and they hover not so much to protect, but to experience us.” Bradley, straining to hear this, felt uneasily that he had just heard a secret. He didn’t care if he couldn’t always understand; he loved being spoken to as if he were an adult.

*

Bradley stood beside Lisa under the church eaves and pretended, because it was raining, that his parents would be picking him up too. He wanted to ask Lisa why she kept coming to class if she didn’t appreciate the Father, but she stood away from him and offered no opening for his curiosity.

Jonah and the whale, that’s what we talked about, Lisa thought, watching the station wagon pull up to the curb and stop. The dim figure of her mother leaned over in the car and the window slowly slid down. “Hurry up, dear, you’ll get wet,” she called. Lisa’s fingers scraped at her skirt. Finally, she walked to the car slowly, still not sure how long Jonah had been in that whale’s stomach.

“I want to hear all about your class, sweetie,” Bradley heard, and he envied such attentiveness. Then the glass rose up and the car pulled away. He remained at the church entrance and waited. His parents were probably home from work by now, and maybe one of them might actually be on the way. But the wet street was empty.

He held his school satchel over his head and walked quickly, imagining that the rain fell through his angel hovering alongside him. If only he had a bicycle. Remembering the Father’s words, he tried to express himself clearly and calmly, so his angel would listen longer than usual to his unangel-like thoughts, and slowly enumerated all the special features he wanted: ten-speeds, orange-and-black trim, a bell and adjustable seat. But he wanted this bicycle only if his parents gave it to him—this would be a sign that his angel had heard.

Opening the front door, Bradley could smell dinner cooking and he walked to the kitchen. There were his parents, leaning over the stove, his father stirring a wooden spoon in the pot, his mother shaking salt into the rising steam. They stood so closely together that Bradley couldn’t imagine a space for himself.

“Mom, Dad.”

Jill and Bud turned to see their son standing in the doorway, holding his catechism. “Hello dear,” his mother said, bending down and offering her cheek for his kiss. She rested her hand on his damp shirtsleeve. “Oh, is it raining?”

“Just a little.”

Unsettled that her son had walked in the rain, Jill decided to offer Bradley his daily treat early. “Have you been a good boy today?” she asked.

Bradley nodded.

“Then here’s your potato chip,” she said, reaching for the counter, and she placed the chip in his waiting mouth. Her son stood still with his mouth closed, for he wasn’t allowed to chew. This was their own home-grown communion: if Bradley was becoming religious, Jill couldn’t see why she shouldn’t exchange a greasy wafer for some quiet.

Bud said, “Well, Brad ol’ boy, dinner is on the way, so why don’t you take in some TV?” Bradley turned and walked down the hall to the den. Bud watched him disappear. His son’s recent piety was yet another example of the inexplicability of childhood. He was pleased he could restrain himself from criticizing this latest addition to Bradley’s recent manias: handwriting analysis, when his son searched the desk drawers for even the shortest note, and then that oatmeal box telephone system, with strings leading from room to room. It was so hard to be a good father in the face of such perplexing enthusiasms.

In the den, Bradley settled himself into a chair. The television was already on and waiting for him, busy with laughter and applause. Even with his eyes closed he could barely make out the indistinct murmur of his parents’ voices. He wondered if their angels spoke to each other, revealing secrets about his parents that he would never know. Then he felt a salty twinge, and he concentrated on the potato chip dissolving on his tongue. Angels don’t like to eat, he remembered Father Gregory once saying, because the thought of mixing food with their angelic form upsets them. But they like for us to eat, and they try to imagine taste, they try not to think of digestion. In an effort to endear himself, Bradley decided to describe his experience for his angel. First it’s very salty, he thought, your tongue wants to curl up, and it’s hard not to chew. When the chip starts to go mushy, you can press it—very softly—against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, and then little pieces break away. They melt very, very slowly.

Jill called her son to dinner; when he didn’t answer she entered the room quietly. She regarded her son’s small body, framed by the upholstered arms of the chair. His eyes were closed, and his obedient silence in front of the blaring TV was so total that he seemed about to disappear. She couldn’t stop watching him, and she remembered his alarming cries as an infant, his tiny arms raised, pleading to be held.

The hardest part, Bradley thought, is to let the last piece melt instead of swallowing it. He was able to restrain himself, and soon the last bit of chip disappeared. It was terrifically difficult, he felt, to pay such close attention, and he wondered how angels could do this every instant. Suddenly his mother was before him, repeating again and again how she was going to take him to the old amusement park before it closed down. Bradley stared up at her, amazed: this wasn’t a bicycle, but it was good enough.

*

Alone in the Ferris wheel, Bradley felt weightless circling so high up. He still didn’t quite believe he was here, and the rust and the loud groans of the ancient rides couldn’t spoil his pleasure. He picked at the chipped paint in his cabin, watched the little flecks flutter down, and he tried to make out his parents in the crowds below.

Jill and Bud waited below while their son spun above them. Though they had intended to come alone, Jill had managed to convince Bud to bring Bradley along. Better bumper cars and greasy food, she said, than genuflection, genuflection, genuflection. They had first met here while standing in some long line, and it was so romantic now, holding hands in this amusement park for one last time before it closed forever at the end of the season. Jill could remember Bud smiling at her in the extraordinary heat and then holding his jacket over her for a little shade.

All afternoon Bradley rode on the Loop-A-Loop, Tumble Buckets, and The Space Twister. On the boardwalk he aimed ineffectually at stacked wooden bottles, he was drawn to the pervasive promise of pizza and hot dogs wafting from the open stalls. He especially loved the sticky sweetness of cotton candy, the way it clung to the edges of his mouth and stuck to his fingers when he touched his cheek. He closed his eyes, about to describe this to his angel as a way of thanks, but then his mother bent down to wash the glistening smudges from his face.

As Bradley watched her scrape the last bit away, he heard the happy screams from the nearby roller coaster ride. He looked up at the cars making such swift, tight turns above them. Jill watched too, remembering how she’d clutched Bud’s jacket on that ride so long ago.

Bud bought the tickets and fingered them with pleasure. But when they approached the seats he and Jill hesitated—the rundown roller coaster didn’t fit their memories. Finally they sat together in one of the last cars, and Bradley could see that there was no room for him, although his mother patted the bit of cushion beside her. “That’s okay,” he said and he settled in the car behind them. The leather seat was cracked with age, and he picked at the tiny, pliable pieces while the conductor collected tickets.

The roller coaster slowly ascended the sharp rise of track with a ratchety, metallic groan. Regretting that he had ever entertained the slightest desire to be on this ride, Bradley imagined his angel was beside him. Rather than recount how the people on the ground began to shrink, however, he simply wished he had squeezed in with his parents. Bradley rattled his safety bar and hoped one of them would look back just once.

The first cars rushed down the steep slope with a curling roar and the howls of passengers. Even his parents screamed and Bradley joined in as the roller coaster hurtled to the bottom of the slope, and at each curve of track it twisted improbably one way, then another. Bradley was sure the cars would lurch from the tracks and he tightened his grip on the clattering bar. But another steep rise suddenly appeared and the roller coaster swiftly rose and fell and spurted toward another sharp turn. It tilted precipitously again, and Bradley heard a loud snap.

His parents were in the air in awkward disarray, hands clutching at their broken safety bar. They swiftly fell from sight and the roller coaster rushed down the next slope. Unable to believe what he had seen, Bradley struggled to stand in his seat, hoping his parents were somehow still in the car before him. His body trembled with the shuddering roller coaster, the wind rushed against his face and filled his open mouth, and his howls continued well past the final screeching halt at the end of the ride.

*

Bradley’s aunt and uncle had no children after too many years of trying and they were secretly, guiltily happy to take in their favorite nephew. They fed him little treats, hoping cookies layered with tempting jams would defeat his sadness. They always made room for him on the couch, allowing any channel change he requested, and they avoided any topic concerning his mother and father.

Under the dimmed overhead lights of the dining room, Bradley watched Aunt Lena pass the cucumber salad to Uncle George while they talked of common memories that he didn’t share, of neighbors he didn’t know. When his uncle sipped ice water and squinted from the cold, Bradley recalled his father’s features, and sometimes even his aunt’s crisp footsteps to the refrigerator reminded him of his mother. Bradley stared past the chicken cutlets and wondered if his parents ever thought of him in heaven. Were their angels still with them? Bradley hated the thought that those angels, with all their memories of his parents, might be hovering next to strangers. Or did angels forget? Bradley almost envied the idea.

Though Bradley’s aunt and uncle weren’t religious, they remembered his parents’ complaints and so they took him to church. But now he disliked having to stand and kneel all the time, and why hadn’t his angel somehow warned him and his parents away from the roller coaster? While the thin priest—so unlike Father Gregory—droned the Mass, Bradley tried to recall what he could of the Father’s confiding words: how angels envelop us with rapt attention; how they only want to experience us, not protect us. Bradley pictured his parents smashed on the ground, their angels hovering over them without sadness, simply satisfying their curiosity about death, while his own angel calmly examined his terrible grief.

Bradley squirmed in the pew and imagined he was falling through the air while his parents were safe in the roller coaster. Then, his body twisted on the pavement, dead but somehow still aware, he watched the roller coaster speed to the end. His mother and father left the ride undisturbed and walked over his body as if he weren’t lying broken beneath them. They seemed like giants, and this image of his mother and father, resurrected and enormous, their indifference implacable, followed him out the church and back to his new home.

That evening he sat on the couch with his aunt and uncle in front of the television. “Tonight it’s your Aunt Lena’s night to choose the programs,” his uncle announced with a wink. “What do you say, hon?”

She patted her nephew’s knee. “I think I’m in the mood for Bradley’s favorite show.”

Bradley smiled up at her, sure that his angel would enjoy a description of the one-liners, even the commercial breaks, though when he turned to the television Bradley found himself once again imagining that he lay sprawled on the fairgrounds after tumbling through the sky. But this time, at his parents’ approach he forced himself to rise up despite the great pain in his shattered bones. They stopped, then fled. Bradley watched their figures growing smaller and smaller, yet he felt oddly happy, for they had seen him. He repeated his fall, and when his parents arrived again he reached up and held their wrists. Their faces strangely impassive, they struggled until they broke away and fled again.

With each battle his parents became less substantial, and Bradley remembered that his angel must be hovering nearby, watching. Why won’t it help me? he thought. Then shimmering fingers burst out of nothing and his angel reached out: slowly it loosened his grip on his straining parents until they were able to tear away. Stunned, Bradley crumpled back to the ground. His angel was a jealous angel and wanted no rivals.

Bradley rose from the couch, surprised to see his aunt and uncle laughing at the blaring television. “Sweetie?” his aunt began.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, almost running away. He locked himself inside. It was the smallest room in the house, so small that his angel couldn’t escape. “Keep away, keep away from me!” Bradley shouted, and he swung his arms wildly, hoping he struck through his angel’s shape, bursting apart its invisible presence. Yet he suspected that, unlike him, it could easily heal itself, so he spun his arms about him even more and he screamed until his throat ached, his anger beyond words. His aunt and uncle pounded on the door, but he didn’t let them in until he was dizzy and exhausted.

Aunt Lena held him, unable to hush his wailing, and Uncle George, alarmed at such unhappiness, reached out and awkwardly stroked his nephew’s hair. “Hey, Brad ol’ boy, hey Brad,” he murmured.

Bradley listened to his uncle’s voice, so similar to his father’s, and he eased into his aunt’s anxious grip. They wanted to comfort him, even if his angel didn’t. What Father Gregory had said was true: his angel wanted only to observe him and his thoughts. Suddenly he wanted to protect his aunt and uncle from this same fearsome angel that had kept him from his parents. Remembering the intense calm he had felt when detailing the potato chip, Bradley hoped that more such careful communications might appease his angel. Slowly pushing his aunt away, he began to silently describe the crinkled look of hurt on her face.

*

Bradley’s aunt and uncle grew accustomed to the sight of him fingering the ridges of a lampshade, the interior of a mailbox, and since he rarely spoke they were puzzled by his almost constant paging through the dictionary. Aunt Lena ached for the sound of his voice, and whenever she touched Bradley his hesitant, endearing hug turned into a sudden breaking away, and she was left alone in a hall, the kitchen.

One afternoon as Bradley tried to sneak outside, his aunt called from the living room, “Where are you off to, Bradley?” He pretended not to hear, but when he pushed open the creaking screen door she said, “Would you like a little snack first?”

“No thanks,” he managed, though he was hungry.

Standing outside, he knew from the directions of the subtle, shifting winds that a storm was approaching. All those grasping branches above him shook and his hair swept across his forehead like the softest of touches. He bent down and thrust his hand into one of the last small piles of late snow. Its crystals were larger and harder than he expected. Then he squeezed some in his fist and felt the cold throb against his warmer skin. After the bit of snow dissolved, Bradley slowly swept his tongue over the lines of his palm, silently describing each ticklish ripple. The rain began to fall. Bradley stood there as it soaked his hair and drained down his face, its taste vaguely metallic against his parted lips, and he recorded scrupulously how his increasingly wet clothes matted against him, how an oddly pleasurable chill spread over his body.

Aunt Lena dropped the cauliflower she was washing in the sink when she glanced out the window and saw Bradley standing drenched in the middle of the backyard, his face turned up into the rain. She ran outside, wailing his name.

That night Lena and her husband sat beside Bradley’s bed, alarmed at their feverish nephew’s smile while he touched his forehead carefully with his fingers, as if for the first time. When Bradley recovered three days later, Uncle George bought him a bicycle. They sat together in the driveway and attached baseball cards to the spokes for an intricate, ratchety sound, and Uncle George patiently ignored those unnerving moments when his nephew sat still, his eyes distant, his hands working at nothing.

But Bradley was rarely at home. Instead he ranged through the neighborhood, discovering the patterned silences between birdcalls, the new green shoots and their clusters of buds within buds. Dizzy and oppressed by the seemingly endless supply of the world, he doubted he could ever chronicle it all for his angel, and one evening, while listening to his uncle’s faraway voice calling him, Bradley stood transfixed beneath an evergreen tree lit by a street lamp. In the odd light its needles were an unearthly green. Detailing the ascending, branched pattern of the thin needles, which resembled an odd spiral staircase, he realized that the convoluted spaces between the branches were passages for the wind. But he could only see these spaces by looking at the branches, which in turn held no pattern without the surrounding emptiness, and Bradley was reminded of his own invisible, complementary presence.

*

After years of plumbing the hidden corners of dictionaries, words had become for Bradley exquisite bearers of comfort, yet by high school the frequent sight of boys and girls necking furtively in the school hallways filled him with a strange longing for which there were no words. He found brief solace in gym class, deftly kicking a soccer ball that seemed to float endlessly in the air before suddenly eluding the goalie, or exulting in a basketball’s intricate, rhythmic music as he sped down the court.

Despite his sometimes unnerving solitude a few girls thought he was cute; Debby Wickers, who seemed to always appear by his hall locker, adjusting the pile of books under her arm, thought he was handsome. But after so often standing nearby with nothing to say or do, Debby was almost ready to give up on Bradley ever acknowledging her.

One day Bradley pressed his hands against the side of his locker door and mutely described the touch of metal and how its edges are almost sharp enough to cut—anything to avoid facing the girl who always stood so close to him, to suppress his curiosity about her constancy. But when he heard the sound of her patient sigh, there was something final in it that made Bradley turn and look at her steady dark eyes, her thick brown hair. “What’s your name?” he asked, so quietly, and Debby felt he was staring at her face as if he were trying to memorize it.

The next evening he was at Debby’s house, helping her with algebra. They sat on the carpet in her room, books open and paper scattered, while her parents called up regularly to ask how their homework was coming along. Bradley stammered out the solutions to the problems, and Debby was pleased—his nervousness was so flattering. When she had enough of answers she already knew, she stretched out on the floor, yawned, and then glanced up at Bradley. The night before she had made a long distance call to her sister in college. “Let him take off just one thing,” her sister had said. “He’ll be chained to you after that, he’ll want to know what’s under the rest of your clothes.” Debby put her hand on his knee and smiled before she turned away.

Bradley wanted to touch the back of her neck where her dark hair seemed to burst out of nowhere, but he was at the center of an invisible stage, his curious angel the audience. Debby looked over her shoulder and reached for Bradley. Though he knew he shouldn’t touch her, he tried to convince himself that her beckoning hand had just waved his angel away. He tentatively stroked her wrist and she snuggled against him. Instead of pushing her away, he gently touched Debby’s neck and she arched her back. After a long moment he finally cupped his hand and slowly placed it over a breast, the cloth of her blouse softly tickling his palm.

Bradley let Debby lead his hands to one button after another until the thought of his angel, capable of anything, returned. Debby saw his face blank over. Shocked that he was resisting what she offered, she coaxed him into unfastening her belt, and before long she forgot everything her sister had advised.

When Debby was finally, stunningly exposed beside him, Bradley felt the habitual urge to describe what he saw. Never any privacy, never alone? he thought. He closed his eyes, refusing to explicate Debby, but already he could sense the presence of an angry, invisible hand. “No!” Bradley shouted, “No!” Debby sat up, frightened by Bradley’s cries, by the sound of steps up the stairs. The door to her room opened. Debby held her skirt against her, but she could tell from her father’s brief, horrified glance that he could see right through it. And then he was after Bradley, who was still shouting, his eyes still closed.

*

In college Bradley majored in Accounting and immersed himself in long spreadsheets, half hoping that his angel would eventually grow bored by the regularity of numbers. But that intimate presence had become a habit he couldn’t cast out; Bradley sometimes wondered if Father Gregory had felt this way. He tried to remember the Father’s long-ago words but could only see his lips moving: a silent, distant performance.

He always sat by himself in the dormitory dining hall, tired from programming long columns of audits and inventories, and though he was proud of his secret eloquence, Bradley listened with envy to the chaotic accumulation of speech and laughter that rose and fell in the large hall. He understood grimly that he had forgotten how to talk to other people, and he tried to imagine how his voice might sound as part of those alien give-and-take rhythms. But he spoke directly to no one, for he was afraid not to believe in his angel’s possessive will, and when he felt words brimming up he panicked: he released them as sudden laughter, great huffing gulps of sound that held no happiness.

Soon Bradley couldn’t stop these cheerless bursts, and he began to haunt the local comedy club whenever he felt the need to speak. Sitting alone at the bar, he held back a welter of words and hoped his awkward laughter blended in with the hearty convulsions of the strangers around him. He stared at the rows of bottles lined up beneath the mirror, those almost transparent bodies filled with clear or strangely colored liquids: how he envied the way they could be so easily emptied.

One night he arrived for the Open Mike Spotlight, the least entertaining show of the week, and he had to endure long stretches before he could join in with any appreciative guffaws and snorts. Yet he couldn’t stop watching the painfully amateur failures who grasped at even the most modest reward from the audience. That night’s barmaid, frightened by his desolate laughter, considered refusing him another beer—whatever tormented the poor guy, no drink would drown it.

Finally, after a middle-aged man’s ten-minute repertoire of personal noises, the MC announced “Last call.” Bradley finished his beer, edged off his stool, and was alarmed to discover he was walking toward the stage. He wanted to stop, but he felt the same as when that roller coaster had started its slow climb and there was no turning back. He stepped into the spotlight, absolutely uncertain of himself. As he adjusted the mike he listened to the loud, amplified crunks, the murmur of distant and unfamiliar voices. They were waiting, listening, and Bradley remembered his parents’ funeral, when he had been the mute center of everyone’s attention. His throat constricted—if he didn’t speak right now he might never speak again. A few people in the audience began to applaud ironically.

“Better be careful,” Bradley heard himself say, “God doesn’t like irony.” Where is this coming from? he thought, but more words rose up and he released them. “Irony introduces ambiguity, which undermines the power of God’s Word, and His punishment is the Angel of Irony.”

There were a few hoots, and the MC began to edge toward the stage. They think I’m a fanatic, a crank, Bradley realized with alarm. “No, wait,” he said, “I’m only trying to be helpful. You see, the Angel of Irony is drawn to irony but, ironically enough, can’t understand it. Maybe one day that angel will float nearby when you say something like, ‘It sure would be great to live in this little dump for the rest of my life.’ Then it’ll grant you your wish and you’ll be stuck in that dump no matter what you try to do.”

Bradley paused, struck by the fluidity of his strange thoughts and the booming sound of his amplified voice. He looked out at the audience, their faces pale disks in the dark. Were they waiting for a punch line? He had none, so he plunged on.

“And what about your personal angel? There’s one sitting right beside you now and yet somehow taking up no space at all. Since an angel has no substantial presence it can compress itself to the size of a synapse, can follow the extraordinarily swift and winding ways of a thought. But it must have some weight: imagine that this extra bit of almost nothing attaches to a memory or the beginning of a thought and subtly alters its forward motion, veering it, however slightly, to another neuron. Could our daily indecisions,” he continued, exhilarated, “be the contrast between what we truly want and where our concentrated knot of angel has taken us? Maybe we’re compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they’re attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.”

The audience was terribly quiet, but Bradley felt more words forming and he could hold nothing back. “It’s late. Maybe you’d like to leave, right now, and get away from all my idiotic words, but your angel swerves you away from such a thought. Your angel is vain. Trained by a life of eavesdropping, it can’t resist listening to such delicious talk. And maybe it’s anticipating the pleasure, when everyone applauds, of its transparent body fluttering in the small explosions of the surrounding air.”

Finally emptied, Bradley felt almost weightless, actually released from that burrowing presence, and this purging was pleasurable, a loss that was simultaneously gain. But then the oppressive need to describe returned, and he couldn’t help listening carefully to the applause, that indecisive clapping of hands that was both restrained and enthusiastic, conveying at the same time curiosity, appreciation, and resistance.

*

Although no one could really call his monologues comedy, Bradley became a regular at the club, and soon he was known informally as the Angel Man. Ignoring the clink of glasses, the whoosh of the tap at the bar, he held on to the microphone stand as if it tethered him to the stage, and the intensity of his concentration quieted the occasional heckler. He was immediately filled with words that metamorphosed into phrases and sentences, hungry for that exhausted moment after a performance when, briefly emptied of his angel, he had to clutch the plush curtain backstage and ease into its swaying.

But often his eloquence didn’t seem his own, and Bradley suspected that his angel was confessing its inexplicable qualities. “Consider this,” Bradley found himself saying one evening, “since an angel has no voice, it assumes the vocal inflections of its human companion, and what we sometimes believe to be private thoughts are actually communications from our angels.” Yet as he listened to himself—or was it to his angel?—Bradley wondered if he might be able to pour out all those words inside until they couldn’t be replenished, if one night he might finally be deserted.

He returned to the club as often as possible, pushing his impromptu inventions and never repeating himself. “Imagine how different angels are from us,” he said one evening, “because what we can’t do without, angels don’t need: food, clothes, houses, doorways, or cars….” For one dizzy moment Bradley had nothing to say, and he was filled with a wild thought: Could this really be the last emptying?

Bradley closed his eyes, and in the dark he briefly created he saw a young girl’s face appear, a dot of memory he immediately knew belonged to Lisa, that girl who sat in the back during catechism class. She regarded Bradley with total disinterest, and then her features altered and multiplied into his mother’s and father’s, both imperturbably facing him. He reached out to prevent their escape, but there were no wrists to grasp.

Hearing nervous coughs, Bradley opened his eyes and simply stood there, searching foolishly through the audience for his parents’ faces. Then he noticed a young couple sitting at a front table: the man smiled a steady, peculiar smile, but it was the woman’s impassive gaze, which seemed not to see Bradley at all, that drew him. He needed to speak to her, only to her, and at once he felt a great stillness inside him.

“Imagine a being who shares your secrets,” he began, leaning forward on the stage, “the ones you manage to conceal from everyone. Compared to your angel, your intimacy with your spouse is similar to your occasional dealings with a salesclerk. Are you here tonight with a husband, a wife? Look at that stranger beside you, so unable to challenge the secret knowledge of your angel.”

Diane didn’t dare glance over at her relentlessly devout husband who had come here just because he loved to be appalled. All evening she’d had to pretend she was bored, but now the Angel Man seemed to speak directly to her, and Diane was afraid he saw past her false face and knew how stunned she was by his words.

“Remember, to angels we are both storm and ballast,” Bradley said, anxious for even the barest flicker of interest on the woman’s face. “We’re a promising harbor for an angelic grip, but we are also the most turbulent of passages, the tightest of squeezes for an angel once it truly wants to slip inside us.”

Diane watched the Angel Man, his face so peaceful in the spotlight. She thought of her husband’s angel: twisted in his heart, its wings crushed and worthless, its sad contortions resembling his fist on the table. She could sense him stirring angrily in his seat, aware of the attention she was receiving. She dreaded going home, where she was helpless before the unyielding injustice of his opinions, where even her dreams couldn’t escape the sound of his angry voice. She kept her face a blank.

“We’re sometimes too voluminously primitive,” Bradley continued, “a catalogue of imperfections, for angels to truly enjoy us. I sometimes wonder why angels hover beside us if we’re such an inexpressibly crude version of themselves, for they have more facets than we can imagine, each one lit by a light we can’t see. Perhaps our angels are prodigiously unfaithful, and they temporarily leave us, from boredom or exhaustion, to enter the mind of a new and excitingly unfamiliar human. Perhaps my own angel has done this. Perhaps it will someday leave me forever for someone new.”

He stopped and stared at the woman’s stiff face. She isn’t even listening, he thought, at best she’s holding back a yawn. He looked out over the rest of the faces in the audience, but they all seemed to recede from him.

Diane imagined his angel speeding toward her, whispering the sorts of secrets she had listened to all evening. The lone spotlight dimmed and she could just make out, “Whoever receives my angel, you’re welcome to every dogged attention it’s capable of, and may it give you better fortune than it ever gave me.” She looked up in gratitude, but the Angel Man had turned his back on her and the rest of the audience. As he walked offstage, Diane felt dangerously, deliciously weightless, and her lips tingled with forbidden words. And what could her husband do, she thought, if her words were not her own, how could he possibly reply if she howled out at him in an angelic rage? Already she saw him open-mouthed and speechless before her.

Bradley stopped backstage, giddily empty, and he clung to the heavy folds of the curtain. He kept repeating to himself those last words, hoping to stave off his angel’s possible return. Through the curtain he could hear the rasp of chairs pushing back, murmuring voices, footsteps. He envied that crowd out there, leaving to return to their own lives. Then he thought, I’m the only life my angel has. And this seemed to be its own strange comfort, one that might forever help him to endure his companionable loneliness. But this insinuating idea also alarmed Bradley, and he checked an urge to describe the dark curtain, even though it shimmered along its length from his slightest touch.