After a brief phone call with his mother, Samuel received permission to head to and stay at the hospital until visitor hours ended. He walked that way, thankful that the day's events turned down what was probably the best road possible. He did fret over whether the police would realize that Althea had deceived them, but he told himself that they wouldn't catch on and would remain in chase of a fictional character.
When Samuel entered Althea's hospital room, he found her dressed in a hospital gown and staring out the window. The mountains were swallowing the dying sun, which painted the sky a bright orange.
“Hey,” he muttered.
She rolled her head to see who her visitor was, then rolled it back to the sunset. “Come to chastise me? Or are you selling me your services again?”
“No, not at all.” He sat his backpack next to the seat beside the bed and occupied it. Its soft cushion was the only redeeming factor about the hospital, Samuel thought. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“I'm still alive, thanks to you,” she said, unappreciative.
“That's good,” he said. “So, why did you help me on the bridge?”
“You mean with the explanation of what happened? Returning the favor.”
“I don't see why you would have,” Samuel said. “You sound ungrateful for my catching you.”
“Don't get the wrong idea. It would have bothered me had I not done it. I'm not a complete bitch, you know.”
“I never said you were.”
“I think bad things about people who hit me, too.”
Touché, Samuel thought, ashamed. He said, “Thanks for that. Had you not said anything, everyone would have thought I was the one who attacked you like that.” He hunched forward and stared at his twiddling thumbs. Why am I so thankful? I'm the one who drove you to suicide. He intertwined his hands and pressed his knuckles in an alternating pattern. “I'm sorry.”
“Stop. I'm tired of your apologies.”
“I'm s—I mean, I feel so bad about what I did, hitting you like that.” He checked to see if she seemed interested. She wasn't. Regardless, he continued: “There was a reason I hit you, but I don't mean to make it sound like an excuse. I just—” He paused to wait for the words to arrange in his head. “I just want to let you know that you're not the only one suffering. Well, suffering isn't the right choice of word to apply to me.” He paused. “Everybody has their challenges in life, I believe, and has done things they regret or are ashamed of, myself included.”
“Is this the part where you tell me of your tragic past?” Althea asked as though such dialogue was a trope she had grown weary of long ago.
“I'll try to keep it brief,” Samuel said. “As a kid, I had some anger problems. I got into fights all the time. If someone pissed me off, I pressed their nose in with my fist. I've been expelled more times than I'd like to admit, and I was expelled from one middle school. In fact, finding a new school that would accept me is what brought my family to this town. Anyway, I got into a real nasty fight one day. I stormed off the school grounds, with a couple of bruises. I was still irate over the argument me and the other kid got into, and was kicking any piece of trash I happened upon, usually empty soda cans. Then...” He swallowed. “A kitten walked out of an alley. It was the cutest little thing, probably only a month old. It looked up at me and mewled.” He pulled in air through quivering lips. “But I was so angry at the time that I...I...I...” He covered his eyes with his hand to hide the tide of tears. “I never meant to actually hurt anyone or anything,” he sobbed while shaking his head. “I thought I was just letting off steam.” Embarrassed that he was crying before another person, he quickly swiped away his tears and collected himself. Althea was looking at him pitifully, and he couldn't maintain her eye contact. He began twiddling his thumbs again, and with some forced humor, he said, “That was a pretty convincing lie, by the way, what you said on the bridge. You almost had me fooled, too.”
“It wasn't a lie.”
He looked up from his frozen fingers. “Your father really attacked you?”
“Yes.”
“Why'd you protect him? You could have given the police his address and name, and the guy would be sleeping tonight with a new pair of silver bracelets.”
“The police can't do anything to him.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked, challenging her for a reasonable answer. “He got friends in high places or a lawyer he's slipping 100s to?”
“Why should I bother telling you? You wouldn't believe me.”
“Try me.”
“You wouldn't.”
“And I said, 'Try me.' ”
“Fine.” She sat up, looked him dead in the eye, brows furrowed, not a hint of humor on her face. “The police can't touch my father, because my father is God.”
The only thought that came to Samuel's mind was, What? Some of his classmates joked about being related to God or Jesus, but that was the first time he had heard someone earnestly claim such a fact. He had laughed at the former, but he drew a blank of how to respond to the latter. Samuel was no religious person, but he believed in God. He believed that God birthed the universe, probably still watched over it, and maybe even governed it from time to time; but he didn't believe the people who would murder “in the name of Jesus” or debut on television with the most magnificent tale about their trip to heaven as told in a book or three for sale. So when his mind did assemble a comment, it was a skeptical one.
“It's your choice to believe me or not,” Althea said, and rolled onto her side. Large white cotton patches taped onto her skin covered her shoulder blades.
She's a nut, Samuel thought, though he didn't want to believe that she was. While her having gone off the deep end was the most likely explanation, he examined her words to see if perhaps there was some other meaning behind them: that perhaps she had grown up believing her father really was God, and that belief had remained glued to her. Like a teenager who refused to accept that Santa Claus was an urban legend. Farfetched, yes, but possible, he concluded.
A short spell of thinking supplied him with no acceptable answers, so he played along with her claim: “Suppose that I do believe you: you're God's child. So what exactly does that make you?”
The bedspread shuffled with Althea's movements as she scrunched her body into the fetal position. She mumbled something that took Samuel a few seconds before he understood: “An angel.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You mean like the angels from the Bible?”
“Yes and no.”
“Can you explain?”
Althea shifted to her back again and stared at various points in the room as she clarified. “We—or they, rather, have two feathered wings and watch over humans but for different reasons than what religious manuscripts say. We—they aren't benevolent beings at all. In fact, they're all emotionless and better resemble androids rolled off a factory conveyer belt.”
“Then why do you have emotions?”
Althea shrugged one shoulder while staring out the window. “I don't know. In all honesty, I think I was part of an experiment. God was curious to see what might happen if he created an angel with emotions, and so I was born some centuries ago.”
“Wait, you said centuries?” Samuel closely examined the minute details on Althea's face and in her hair; no wrinkles and no gray fibers to report. “Do angels age slower than humans?” After asking that question, he realized that he had been netted by Althea's tale, as though he believed every word of it, and was slightly embarrassed.
“No, angels are immortal. Once born an age, always that age. Most appear to be a twenty-year-old woman, give or take two or three years. And unless they give God a reason to dispose of them—like he did me—they remain forever young. Me, I'm not sure if I'll stay stuck like this or not. Without my wings, I figure there are two possibilities: a.) I'll eventually die; or b.) I age as a normal human, but I'm not optimistic about the latter being true.”
“What do angels do that they need immortality?”
“They have but one primary duty: to stand watch.”
“That's it? Just stand around watching a person?”
“They're called angels in your language, but God would rather they be referred to as sentinels; cameras, if he was in a foul mood. And that's what they are: cameras that projected their film reels for God to watch. Whatever they see, he sees, too. Many of them are assigned to humans, but many more to mice, fish, plants, even microorganisms; mountain ranges, rivers, solar systems, comets, stars, and the black voids in space. God watched all of it at once, never stopping.”
“Wait.” Samuel held up fingers, as if he had enough to account for the billions of humans, trillions of insects, and countless microorganisms on Earth alone.
“Whatever number you're thinking of, it's too small.”
In school, Samuel had learned about large numbers—numbers that blew his mind. As intriguing as they were to think about, the scale of them and the formulas behind them ached his brain. To think that there existed angels in ranges such as that ached his brain now. He buried the thought for the time being and thought of living an existence of floating in space, staring at some rock or sleeping rodent. Looking around as if searching for ghosts, he asked, “So, are there angels floating around in this room?”
“Without a doubt.”
“You can't see them?”
“Angels are invisible to one another. Else, all they'd see is each other.”
Samuel looked at the bedside, where he guessed an angel might be standing, watching Althea. Placing himself in her shoes, watching a girl sulk beside a dumpster, nearly fall off a bridge, and laying in a hospital bed, he found such an existence to be horrible. Had Althea earlier not mentioned that the angels were better described as robots, he would had sympathized with them or at least pitied them. It was a great way to prevent rebellion, he thought. Recalling her “fib” to the two college-aged gentlemen and the police, Samuel said, “You said something earlier about not doing what your father—God—wanted you to do. Is that true, or did you make that part up to fit the situation?”
“I've told no lies about what happened,” Althea stated. “I've told the truth, but not the whole truth.”
“Then...will you tell me the whole truth?” Silence hung between the two of them, and he regretted asking his question, since she said earlier she didn't want to disclose that portion of her story. “I forgot. I'm sorry.” He looked at his twiddling thumbs in shame.
“Have either or your parents asked you to do things you didn't want to do?”
Unprepared for any questions aimed at him, Samuel thought for a minute about such events. They were quite common, it occurred to him. But they were minor things: helping with chores or accompanying his mother to the grocery store as her “bag boy,” as he thought of the role. “It happens all the time. Like a few days ago, my mom had me run down to the store to buy her a few things, but I didn't want to, because I was in the middle of watching a movie.”
“And what did you do?”
“I did her the favor. I wasn't happy about it, of course, but I did it. After all that my mom and dad have done for me, I can't refuse them one little request.”
“I must admit, I'm jealous.”
“Of what?”
“Of your parents,” Althea said. “Just based off your example, I can tell that they don't ask much from you. And certainly not anything you'd rebel against. But thinking about it”—she leaned her head back as she reminisced—“I've watched over a lot of children with wonderful parents who grew up to become wonderful parents themselves.”
“Is that why you rebelled?”
“Not at all,” Althea said, shaking her head. “You see, while angels passively observe for God, sometimes his curiosity reaches a peak, so he experiments via the dreams of men and women. He'll find an appropriate subject, give their angel a script for a dream, then the angel will obey and manipulate their host's dream down to the T. The dreams vary, but they're nothing better than what the mind usually creates. I've played with the dreams of enough people, but it didn't bother me until I received one request.
“I had been watching a little boy; he was missing a few teeth, but he was the sweetest thing. God commanded that I manipulate his dream so that—” Althea's clenching hands scrunched her blanket. “I'll let you decide what that dream was supposed to be. But let me just say this: what God had in mind for that little boy would have scarred him for life. I just know it.”
“And that's when you refused?”
“I marched into his throne room, which is this huge void where he sits and watches his countless monitors floating in the space. I tried negotiating with him at first, but he refused. Then I begged him to alter the dream or take back his previous order, but he refused again. That's when I grew angry and yelled. I said some pretty nasty things, I did, and I paid the price.”
“I suppose I can understand your pain, but there's something I don't get: Why did you put up with him for so long? Didn't you ever grow tired of just floating around, watching some kid falling asleep in class or some guy lazing about on his couch?”
“It's all I knew. I was born with a single purpose in my life. I had no other choice, so I accepted my fate and went about my duty, as much as I hated it. Now, I don't know what to do with myself. I lost the only reason I had to live.”
Now that Samuel knew the reason behind Althea's misery, he understood. He hadn't yet embarked down the path of his career choice, but if it was suddenly barricaded by a Do Not Enter sign or ripped from its foundation, he wouldn't know what to do, either. His hobbies passed the time well enough, but when the time came for him to put on his big-boy pants and support himself, flipping burgers or asking someone if they'd like fries with that shake wasn't his ideal purpose in life, nor could it be. Even so, he had an advantage as a human, and said, “That's why you find a new purpose in life.”
Althea looked at him curiously yet intrigued.
“I'm sure you've noticed, since you've apparently spent so much time observing humans, but we have so many paths before us to take in life. So many things we can do with ourselves. Granted, it may not be a number as large as how many angels there are, but it's a hell of a lot bigger than the number of choices you were given as an angel.”
Althea looked down at her blanket, with concern on her face. “You say that like it's so easy.”
“It can be, but there are people in history who didn't accomplish anything until they were well into the last decades of their lives.”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I'm going to be become a teacher. I'm not sure what subject yet. Maybe English,” he said, with a finger on his chin and his eyes on the ceiling.
“I expected something more charitable,” Althea said.
Samuel leaned back in his chair. “I was thinking that, too, and I enjoy helping people, but the one thing I enjoy more is teaching others, even if it's simple little facts.”
“I must admit that I'm jealous once more. You've got you ambitious set up and your goals ahead of you, and here I've nothing.”
“That's because you haven't had a chance to live. You've lived with a collar chained to your neck, but now you're free to live however you please.”
“But...I don't know where to start,” Althea said.
“I can help you, if you'd like.”
“On with that again?” Althea asked, with an exhausted tone.
“I'm not going to shove it down your throat anymore. I just want to put it out there: if you need help, ask.”
Over the intercom, a woman announced, “Visitor hours will be ending in 15 minutes. Again, visitor hours will be ending in 15 minutes. All visitors must vacant the rooms by then. Thank you.”
“Hold on a moment,” Samuel said to Althea, then left the room. He returned a moment later with a pen and paper he borrowed from a nurse at the desk down the hall. He scribed his address and phone number on it and handed it to Althea. “If you make up your mind, stop by. Oh!” He dug into his backpack and produced two candy bars, which he gave to Althea. “You can have these. They cheer me up when I'm blue, so maybe they'll do the same for you.”
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