Borrowed Flesh

She had oodles of charm and I couldn’t help but fall for her, though she is human and I am a destroying angel.

Was it her shiny, roughly cut hair? Her pleasingly measured physical proportions? Her little quips and games of speech? Her youthful bravado? Or simply the way, when I accidentally dropped my books walking past her while posing as a human college student, she picked them up and placed them back in my freshly manifested hands?

I can’t say.

“Hey,” was her first word to me. Then, “Shit, heavy books. What are you studying?”

“Math,” I said. This was an easy cover. Angels are good at math.

After this I said something I don’t remember but which must have been funny, because she laughed and her face made crinkles and corners. I tried to make my face do the same thing.

In my real form there are no crinkles. I don’t look anything like her. In my real form I seem to have six pairs of wings, two of which I usually keep wrapped around my face and two around my feet, so that my unveiled presence does not cause any fire or lay waste to anything out of turn. My face and body are both covered in eyes, as are my wings.

However, I am also a collection of flaming rings with hundreds and hundreds of eyes and a terrible light in the middle. I am also some very specific geometries, again flaming, again many eyes. And some other things.

These are just metaphors, you see? I’m really more of an abstraction. As are you. And as was she. We had that in common, although he didn’t think much about it at the time.

For that mission I had taken the shape of a young human female, rather generic in appearance, so as not to attract attention. It was a relatively important mission, the details of which I am not at liberty to describe, but let it be said simply that I was there for the purposes of collecting certain information and, based on the results of this data, there could be some destruction further down the line.

At first, I thought it might be useful, for information-gathering purposes, to become close to one of the humans, and Miriam seemed as good a candidate as any. By making myself invisible and following her continuously for the next 24 hours, I ascertained that she was popular and well integrated into her community. I also discovered that she indulged often in cannabis, that her shampoo smelled warm and musky, that she liked to sing in the shower and that she looked very young and gentle when she was sleeping, which I found sweet, even if sometimes she drooled a little bit.

I was fascinated to watch her sleep. Every few days I would have to send my human form through a few sleep cycles, like you would send socks through the wash, but myself I did not sleep. That is a realm we angels are not permitted access to. The dreams yes, often we walk in dreams, but not our own, and never the direct meeting. Never the immersion.

After so many eons of existence I would never come so close to the truth as she did every night. I would burn if I tried.

So I watched from a distance. All the information gathered I reported to the higher-order seraph above me, who reported it to the electrical being above it, who sent it to an archangel, who passed it along to whatever is at the center, I suppose.

Sooner or later I would receive instructions on whether or not to destroy anything, and who or what to destroy.

I have destroyed many things in my existence. I’m not proud of my work but I’m not sorry for it either. Like a hurricane isn’t proud of blowing things down or a rock for just sitting there, but it isn’t apologizing for it either. It’s what it does. This is hard for humans to understand.

Soon after our first encounter, I acquired Miri’s telephone contact information by means of asking her for it, and we began conversing actively via text messages. This, luckily, was my forte. Angels love messages, and we’re good at them. That’s why in English you call us “angels,” of course, derived from the Greek word for “messenger.”

“DO NOT FEAR,” I texted, “for it is the new girl from McKinley Hall.” It all rolled smoothly from there.

I take no pride in destroying things but bliss, yes. There is a certain bliss, similar to what racehorses feel when they run.

To feel the fire, the last desperate strain and then finally the release, the flair of light consuming itself, forms relaxing back into nothingness. It is the closest embrace I know.

The animal desire belonging to my human form was something else but not too far afield. The same lurching towards decreation. Just that the body and its neurons speak their own language.

There was a night when cigarette smoke drifted lazily into the cloud-dulled night sky outside the library. She was meant to be writing a class paper but instead was stalling out on the terrace, first with friends, then alone. I was also present.

“I just don’t get it,” she said, flicking her lighter again and again.

“Ktcch,” said the lighter. “Ktcchh, ktchh.” The little flame blinked in and out of existence.

“Like I know Byzantine art is important. Probably. No, I know. But it just doesn’t do it for me. The people look like zombies. Otherwise it’s boring. How do I make this into five pages? Am I missing something?”

Unfortunately I did not understand either. Unfortunately human art to me looks like only colors and shapes, incomprehensible. I apologized that I could not help her understand.

“Pff,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect you to, math girl. Curves and shit, that’s more what you’re into, right?”

“Curves and shit,” I said, trying the words on for size.

“Do you want the rest of this? My lungs feel like pavement.” She held out the last third of her cigarette, the tip a red eye.

I did not want it, so she ground it out. The butt caught her interest, and having rubbed away the hot end, she peeled open what was left of the paper. The leftover shreds of tobacco made a small dry sound as she rolled them over with her thumb.

She leaned over the railing of the terrace, arm extended, the extra tobacco pinched in her fingers the way in some parts of the world human beings offer such leaves into ritual fires.

“Be free, little leaves!” she said, sprinkling them into the chalky dark. “Now’s your chance to be in the world.” Which means to be dead and alive at the same time.

I left her then but not for long. There was something in me that had also gone red.

Her body and mine shared a common tongue. When she curled a finger around the fan of my ear, my borrowed flesh trembled although it was in good health. When she pressed her lips into mine, an old rhythm from deep within the earth pulsated my lips into hers.

We met softly, in the dark, without words. What else could I do? I poured blessings over her.

To know every molecule of her form, every spasm of cells right down to the ceaseless motion of atoms, the taste of every bone and the quiver of every nerve, was not enough. What life was there? Only the senseless intelligence of the body. I needed to know her, to know who it was looking out at me through those eyes.

I kissed her with fire and salt. Sank fingers into her mind through the pores of her skin, into that strange crossroads where color and sound were split from each other. I wanted her to see my face. All of them.

Was she afraid?

I blessed her so that she would live for an entire lifetime. I anointed her comings and her goings. I granted her gifts of speech and electricity. I blessed her with the light of every star that had gone to nothing by my touch and poured it into her through the shallow openings in her skull.

She began to see.

It was disturbing, dangerous even, but no stopping now. I revealed more. Her body flopped around like a fish on the shore but the weight of it was fading. Her mind was taking on my shape. I unveiled myself. Her colors were coming unbound, new geometries born and dying, and then I realized she was about to see it.

To see what we are all circling around.

She was melting. She was so close to it, it was throbbing there.

This was not supposed to happen. The archangels would never forgive me if they found out I had melted a human before its time, but there was no going back now. She was right on the edge, she was writhing right on that narrow edge and now — yes. She had gone over, where I could not follow.

Much later she began to speak again. It was deep in the night. Cool air oozed in from the cracked-open window. Outside, the distant growl of cars and, just once, an owl.

“I am,” she said. “I am, I am, I am…” Eyes closed. I had seen this face before.

When she recrystallized, she told me who she thought she was, in a quiet voice. Memories of mother and father, brother, adolescent friends and girlfriends, bicycles, parking lots in the summer where she and a pack of wild girls would pass around joints and cinnamon chewing gum, watching the sunset until the humid dark sent them yawning back home to finish the night with playing cards and stolen whiskey.

There was nothing at all unusual but every detail was irreducibly unique. Every moment only happened once, exactly once. I could see she wanted to hold each one in her hands.

To break her fall, I took her hands and started tracing the lines. I told her her astrology (anyone can do this), showed her the planets in every crease and bulge, the transits and squares and critical degrees. Her life, all hers.

At first she seemed more calm but then she started to shake from the inside. “I never asked for this,” she said.

A bitter edge of panic rustled into the room. She wanted to leave.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “This is your house. It’s 3 in the morning. Where will you go?”

She didn’t know but she was insistent. I couldn’t let her. It wasn’t safe, I had caused enough trouble already. I couldn’t let her. Instead I pressed my fingertips to her brow and caused her to sleep. Naked and crumpled up with keys spilling out of her hand.

In the morning she would try to forget. Again I couldn’t let her, although I had caused enough trouble already.

There are places on this planet where grass is growing and places where great schools of fish are moving and whales are spinning their webs of sound. There are places where only rocks wearing down under the weight of the atmosphere mark the passage of time.

There are places where shards of broken glass lie like splattered water on the floor, each a tiny pool to fall into, as in Miri’s bathroom after she hurled the mirror to the ground.

There are many places where humans walk like strangers, like fish suddenly realizing they are swimming against the tide.

There are places where the Byzantine eyes of saints watch from the walls, for a time, looking down for a while until the paint fades and the walls crumble.

On my last day on Earth, we sat under a tree in the quad and looked up at its branches, bare of leaves and not yet graced with snow. It was an unending modulation that I could have stared at for a long time, and Miri too, it seemed. The small branches and large branches wove a fine web of shapes and angles, made new every time a breeze came past.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“The life of the tree,” I said. “Acorn, seedling, dead log.” Ripples cast in a pond.

Even with human eyes it was beautiful. I tried to look at in only through my human form, as if I wasn’t there.

“There’s one leaf left,” she said, “way up top.”

“Would you like it?”

She was confused. I held out my hand and the last oak leaf of the season, free and of its own accord, slowly drifted down to land on my outstretched palm. It was perfect, veiny and crisp brown-gold, with just one crack between two lobes.

In some places the humans like to leave fruits on their altars to what they don’t understand. Later the fruits must be eaten and the peels must not be thrown away as usual but are buried in the ground or put into the sea.

I offered the leaf to her. She started to laugh, but it became an inward-turning shudder. Her floppy hair twitched and shook.

Not knowing what else to do, I burned the leaf to ash and sprinkled it over her head. “Everything is good,” I said. “You are Buddha, you are Christ. I will sing for you when you are born.”

She grabbed my hand and squeezed it very hard, so hard I thought maybe she would damage it but this was anyway my last day using this body, so I did not stop her.

“Everything is good.”