I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL after I saw him the first time in my loft. The next morning, when I went into the lab, I found Sheila Towers sitting behind her desk with Judd Pitt, the lab assistant, hovering over her.
Sheila was a brilliant medical scientist. I’d worked with her on several occasions throughout her career. She was a few years younger than me, but she had sped through an accelerated MD program at the starting at seventeen. It was only natural for me to ask her to join my team when I got the Human Genome research grant.
Judd was working on his MD. Of all the candidates for the job that we screened, he had the best GPA and curriculum mix.
Of course, you already knew all that. I’m sure it’s all in my file.
Sheila looked up when I walked into the office and frowned at me.
“You look tired. Is everything okay?”
“Do you believe in angels?” I asked.
Both Judd and Sheila were taken aback.
Judd, who was the stereotypical gay guy – he talked like a valley girl and walked like a princess – covered his mouth and looked at Sheila.
“O – M – G!” Judd said.
Sheila squinted at me. She was a pretty girl. She could’ve won any number of beauty pageants, or had any man she wanted, but she chose medicine.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never actually had an encounter with one, but my faith says that I do.”
“I thought you weren’t into all of that mumbo-jumbo,” Judd said.
I just looked at him.
He looked like some kind of surfer with his long brown hair, gym-cut body, and ruddy tan. And he always wore tee shirts and knee length jean shorts under his lab coat. That day, he wore a Corona shirt.
“I’m not,” I responded.
“Then what’s up?”
“I had a dream.”
Judd waved at me. “Here’s the paraphrased textbook answer. You go to sleep, and your brain has nothing else to do, so it starts playing with itself.”
I shook my head. “No one really knows what dreams are.”
“She’s right,” Sheila said. “Some cultures believe that your soul actually leaves your body to commune with others when we’re sleeping.”
“Fabulous! Two brilliant women buying into a whole bunch of fanatical mythology.”
I glared at him. “Don’t you have something to biopsy?”
Judd rolled his eyes, and then sashayed out of the office and into the lab. Once we were alone, I leaned in close to Sheila.
“What I didn’t say was that I’m not sure it was a dream. What do angels look like?”
She frowned. “No one really knows. The reason that they’re always depicted with wings is that the Bible mentioned something about the wings of angels.”
“What are they?”
Sheila scratched her head. “Different ones have different purposes. If you’re curious, look it up on the internet.”
“You’re Catholic, right?”
She nodded and looked away. “Yes but I haven’t been to Mass or Confession in a long time.”
“Have you ever heard of an angel talking directly to a person?”
She shook her head. “Only in the Bible. What exactly happened, anyway?”
I recounted the story to her down to the last detail. Sheila sat on the edge of her seat the entire time. When I had finished she shook her head with awe.
“I don’t know if what he said about trials was a good thing or not.”
I mulled it over for a moment, and then all of it suddenly struck me as hilarious. I laughed and shook my head.
“I’m being silly. It was probably just a dream like Judd said. I’ve pretty much sworn off everything having to do with religion.”
Sheila shook her head. “If it happens again, maybe you’d better go see my priest. I’m in a little over my depth.”
“I’m not going to do that. It was just a dream. A very vivid dream.”
“And you don’t know if you were asleep or not?”
I shrugged. “I had to be. I don’t know.”
“Don’t assume it was just a dream.”
“Sheila, this is psychology – that’s all. I’m sure if I went to a shrink he’d say that the angel represents something that I’m going through right now.”
Sheila gave me a cynical look. She was such a pretty woman with raven black hair and steel blue eyes – very Russian-looking.
“You’re trying to think through this logically. This is a spiritual thing.”
I stood and patted Sheila on the shoulder and thanked her, and then I started toward the lab.
“Cecilia?” she said.
I turned around and looked at her.
“If you see the angel again, ask him his name. That will tell you everything you want to know.”
* * * * *
THE ANGEL did come again.
I was sitting at my computer Googling the names of angels when
I felt a warm sensation at my back.
“Hello Cecilia,” he said.
I spun around, and once again his radiance took me aback.
“Cecilia Faith Carson,” he said again. “That is a perfect name, and inadvertently correct.”
So many thoughts crowded my head at once that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask first.
“Why me?” is all I could manage.
The angel drifted toward me. The closer he drew, the more overwhelming the scent of jasmine, and the heat he threw off was overpowering.
“That is why I’ve chosen to come. I need offer no explanation as the will of divinity is subtle and incomprehensible to man, but your exhaustive toilings and struggle to improve mankind has moved me.”
His voice, if it was a voice, was mesmerizing and melodic like a machine crafted by God himself.
“What is your name?” I asked.
He smiled, and when he did so, his entire form grew brighter. I had to squint in order to see him.
“My real name is unpronounceable with a mortal tongue. I have been called many names through the ages by man – some of them you may recognize and others you would certainly not. For the sake of our encounter, you may call me Belial.”
“That’s beautiful,” I said.
His body dimmed. He seemed saddened by my reaction.
“I’ve come to show you something, if you like.”
I looked around my empty apartment. “Sure.”
The room irised out around me, and I found myself sitting in a desk in a collegiate auditorium.
I smiled. “This was my first college classroom.”
The room smelled of aged timbers and books.
The door at the bottom of the classroom to the left of the scratched-up oak podium and just before the projector screen opened and a man dressed in a navy blazer, a blue button-up shirt and jeans stepped inside.
His features were perfectly proportioned. Every sandy hair on his head was exactly in place.
“Who are you?”
The man stopped before the podium. “It is me. I’ve chosen a form that may be a bit easier on your eyes.”
“Why my first college classroom?”
He shook his head. “This is not a place but a model. We are inside your psyche. I thought that perhaps the best way for me to illustrate my point was to shift through some of the events prior to and during your life.”
I squinted. I wasn’t quite sure where he was going.
He lifted a remote from the top of the podium and pressed a button. The projector over her head hummed to life throwing an image on the white screen behind him.
A ‘50s era Plymouth pulled into a parking lot on the screen. The white paint on the car was faded and flaking off. The engine sounded as though it was about to throw a rod. The driver’s side front wheel was missing a hubcap leaving nothing but the dirty black wheel.
The car pulled to a stop, the engine shut off, and the driver’s side door swung open with a stubborn squeak.
I nearly cried when I saw who the man was stepping out of the car. He was of average height – no more than five feet nine inches with ruddy skin that betrayed his half-black heritage.
“Daddy?” I said.
But all was not well with my father. He had a worried expression on his face as he slowly crossed the parking lot. The angle changed and I saw where he was headed. It was a small space inside a Big Star shopping center, and the sign above the shop read US NAVY.
Just as Daddy reached the door and extended his hand to enter the recruiting office, Belial hit another button on his remote. I looked down at the podium to find him no longer standing behind it.
I looked at Daddy again standing frozen with his hand on the silver handle of the glass door. Belial – in the human form stepped in front of him.
“What do you suppose may have happened had your father never walked into this recruiting office?”
I shook my head. “Daddy always said he wanted to be an artist. When I was little, he used to draw me some of the prettiest pictures. I still have a portrait he did of me when I was six. I guess I would have been the daughter of an artist.”
Belial nodded and stepped straight out of the screen and behind the podium.
“You would have never been born. He would have never met your mother.”
I frowned.
He nodded to himself and clicked his remote again. “Let us look at some less personal examples, shall we?”
The scene of Daddy entering the recruiting office disappeared and was replaced by a dirty back alley in an enormous city.
A man in filthy rotten clothes was sitting on the concrete with his back propped up against a red-brick wall. A rusty, green dumpster sat beside him and beyond that, a beaten-up Kenmore Refrigerator box. He had a long gray beard and his teeth looked to be rotting out of his face.
There was no expression on his mien. He just seemed to be looking up blankly at the rain.
Belial stepped in front of him. “You know this man, do you not?’
I studied him. His face was so dirty that I couldn’t tell his ethnicity for sure. His eyes – green – looked vacant as if there was nothing going on in his head.
“No.”
Belial smiled. “Ah, but you do. In a distant Aiden, this man’s name was Aiden. You met him in college. At the time, he was the professor of your anatomy class.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes, but it was true.
Belial cleared his throat. “His current residence now is in that Kenmore box you see to the right of the dumpster in a back alley of New York City.”
He looked down at the man and shook his head.
“It’s such a waist.”
He looked back at me through the screen. “Aiden here is one of the most gifted men alive at present. “
“What happened to him?”
“A few seasons ago, a student, angry at having been caught cheating on a midterm shoved him. Aiden, already overworked and over-stressed, hit him. He lost his wife, his house, his car, and the only job he could find was menial.”
My eyes welled up. I pictured the kindly man that had explained anatomy in a way I’d never imagined it before.
“How do you suppose his life would be different had he reacted in another way?”
“He’d still be a professor.”
Belial shook his head and paced around the alley.
“He would have won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his medical research – research that would have completely changed medical science. Research much like your own.”
Belial held up his remote again, still inside the screen, and clicked it. In a flash, I found myself looking at the back of a woman’s head.
She was a fat, black woman with a complexion much like mine. She stood with her back to me with her hands immersed in a sink washing dishes.
Belial stepped in front of her.
“You know this woman as well. This scenario is one that never happened but would have if one of two things had never happened.”
I studied her.
I did not recognize the kitchen she stood in. All of the appliances looked to be at least thirty years old. The curtains were all mismatched and in various stages of rot. The linoleum on the floor, a simple white and gray block pattern seemed to be peeling up at the edges as if the floor had been re-done by an amateur.
The woman turned around and I saw her face.
My breath caught halfway up my throat.
It was me.
Belial smiled and stepped out of the screen.
A man walked up to the alternate me and kissed me on the lips. I smiled back at him with tired eyes.
Belial pressed the pause button on his remote.
“So judging by what you know, what differences in your life might have landed you here? A housewife, mother of three, no education.”
I shook my head.
He sighed and nodded. “Even the unfortunate events that occur in our lives shape our fate. This is what you would have become if your father had not died at sea.”
“No, I would’ve gone to college.”
He shook his head. “Your father, though he seemed progressive, was actually quite old-fashioned. You would’ve graduated from High school and married your boyfriend.”
A hot tear rolled down my face.
I looked away and bit my lip.
I didn’t know what to say.
Belial clicked his remote once more, and I found myself back in my apartment. The angel stood before me in Angel form. His aura dimmed. He looked as though he were pondering something rather difficult.
“Fate is a false ideology. The only thing man is born with is predisposition — all else amounts to choices. There are infinite choices mortals can make throughout the course of life. Sometimes the choices that seem correct are foolish. Sometimes something so small as buying a Snickers bar at the local convenience store ends your struggle.
“Very rarely does man ever make the best choice. When he does, no one rejoices more than I. For that man has went against all odds and found self-actualization. He has become the best that he could possibly be. And unlike divinity, man lacks perspective.”
I squinted at him.
“This is all fascinating, but I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”
His aura dimmed again. It was so dark now that I could barely see him.
“I realize that it’s not an adequate explanation. You are not divinity therefore you could never understand, but at least now, you have a bit of perspective.”
“Perspective on what?”
“On why I must bring you down.”
(Soon to Come: Chapter 2 — The Demon Belial)
What People are Saying…