EveryAngel. Yeah, I made it up. I’m tired of Angels being blond white people. An ongoing story. Thanks for the comments!
Paul paced around the room for what seemed like hours trying to make sense of what happened to him. The visions. The hallucinations. The colors. After he had regained his strength and composure, he did what any curious scientist would do. He jumped back into the bed to see what would happen. To see if he could recreate the experience. If he could experience the same visions twice, he was confident he could repeat the experiment with others and obtain the same results. That was, in fact, the scientific method.
With the nanites already embedded in the synapses of his brain, the effect on him this time was much more immediate. He quickly flew past the illuminated colors and various faces of Christ and found himself in a soundless room, empty except for white flowing curtains that seemed to be draped everywhere. There were no windows, no sound, and the light seemed to be coming from nowhere but everywhere at once, evenly disbursed as in a white, hazy fog. There was no source of the light. It was simply there.
Sitting erect now, and drenched in sweat with a face full of confusion, Paul perceived a figure emerging from the curtains, a human form, walking towards him. The figure was moving slowly but insistently, gliding almost. Judging by the time elapsed as the figure slowly grew closer, Paul new that his judgement of distance was completely impaired. This figure should have reached him rather quickly based upon how far away Paul thought he was from the curtains, but it just kept coming and coming, looming larger and larger, but never seemed to reach him.
He saw that the man first appeared to have blond, almost golden curly hair. It was relatively long, touching his eyebrows then flowing past his shoulders and flowing like an ocean wave down his back. But as Paul squinted trying to see the face of the figure, he was certain the hair color changed before his eyes, from blond, to brown, to black and back again. The figure’s eyebrow’s changed colors to match…But the hair was always long and flowing, seemingly defying gratify as it floated behind him.
The figure seemed to be dressed in the same flowing drapery he had emerged from, as if the figure were one with the wall and they were the same. It was as if the wall had simply become alive, and the figure was dressed in hues of shimmering light, and it approached him steadily. Paul felt no fear, no menace: only the warm glow of compassion and Love.
It was a man. And the hair was blond. And it was brown and it was black. Every time Paul focused his eyes trying to pigeonhole some sort of identity or characterization of this figure before it, it simply changed, denying Paul what he sought the most: a pigeonhole in which to place him.
The man finally smiled a greeting as he extended his hand and grabbed Paul’s arm, lifting him to his feet effortlessly to stand before him.
Paul’s mouth dropped open immediately. The man had wings.
The wings were of the purest hues; but like the hair, constantly changed color. First, from the purest white, then to the deepest black, then all the browns and reds and yellows and all pigments in between. Paul could see the wings ran the length of the man’s body, the tips brushing the floor. As the figure stood upright to tower over Paul, the wings folded comfortably to close snugly to his back.
Putting his face up to Paul, smiling, the man asked a simple question, “Hello Paul. Do you know who I am?”
The man was taller than Paul had first imagined, and built like a heavy-weight boxer, a football player, a first class MMA fighter, a weightlifter. Heavily muscled, yet the touch of his hand was a gentle as a hummingbird, and not threatening or menacing in any way. His nose was long and straight, but Paul was having difficulty describing the man’s features, because the nose, like the hair, changed every time Paul focused his eyes upon them. First the nose was tall and straight, then it was broad, with flaring nostrils and rather squat looking, then it was perfectly snubbed and upturned as if a plastic surgeon had created the perfect nose and placed it upon the man’s face. Nothing about this man stayed the same the longer Paul stared at his features and tried to capture the man’s image in his mind. The lips were full, then they were thin. The skin on his face was smooth and devoid of whiskers, then it was bearded and flowing as long as the man’s hair flowing down his back.
Paul gave up trying to identity this creature, this man before him, because he would simply not stay put long enough to fit into Paul’s mental stereotypes.
Paul’s mouth hung open. He finally managed to stutter, “You’re my hallucination. Either an angel or a demon. A vision conjured by my ID, my subconscious; you’re the embodiment of a Jungian vision, a Freudian projection of mankind’s ancient hope for an after-life. You’re not real, and you’re not here.”
With those words, the man’s wings fluttered as if they had twitched in response to what he just heard.
“Well, if I’m not real,” the man responded, his hair turning a crimson red glowing from its own luminescence, “then explain this feeling to me please. What do you feel now? Is it real now? Am I real now?”
The man gently grabbed Paul’s right hand as if to shake it in a cordial greeting, but slowly, his palm slid down to encompass Paul’s right thumb, and, as he twisted firmly and steadily, his bicep and triceps bulging and rippling as he did so, Paul howled in pain as his entire wrist began to torque, buckle and rip, slowly separating from his forearm.
“Okay, Okay…Ahhhhh! It’s real, you’re real…it hurts, please stop!
“Yes, I’m real,” the man responded. “And so are you. You would call me an archangel. But I’m really an EveryAngel. It doesn’t matter what you call me, because these words, angels, archangels, demons, ghosts, devils…these are only words that your kind can understand. I would use new words for you, but even I cannot undo the millennium of human history and communication levels embedded in your brain, even in someone as smart as you have become. This face that you see before you? This is just a face that you can relate to, that you can identify with. It means nothing to me.”
“I’m sorry, I…I…believe you,” Paul said, rubbing his wrist, so glad the angel had let go of his grip and the pain had stopped.
“I find it sad, really, that your kind relates more to pain than to pleasure and Love,” the angel said, his mouth frowning. “Because I know you felt the Love from me as I entered the room and allowed you to see me, but your mind would not accept my appearance as real until you felt pain. I find that sad, and find it to be your kinds’ biggest fault.”
There was a pause. “I would agree with that statement,” Paul said slowly, “but tell me, since I am here and you are who you are…am I dead?”
–to be continued, maybe.
