Transfiguration

Eighteen

The days of the week lost their meaning during finals. Friday night saw the library packed to the gills, the unwashed masses swaying in prayer circles of binders, textbooks, and loose notecards, willing their brains past the point of saturation. The hour of closing—midnight—was almost upon us. I staggered out of my carrel and joined with the exodus, intending to study Macro for another hour in my dorm room (granted Caleb and Lilli did not bully me to bed sooner).

My eye caught on a small, fluttering thing trapped between the floor and bathroom door. I slowed and the bodies parted around me until I was the last one left, save for the librarians; one of them was sure to spot me lagging, usher me out.

But my eye, I felt, had not been wandering this time. This feather was mine to see.

I pushed open the door.

He stood with his nose an inch from the mirror, the boy in the red down jacket, though the jacket was gone, not even slung about his waist. He gripped either side of a sink, the bare skin of his arms and face nacreous, almost translucent, under the stark white lights. A pair of wings muscled out two holes cut crudely into the back of his t-shirt, scant patches of knobby skin visible through the coating of down; sleek flight feathers were growing in along the edges, some as long as my forearm, banded and speckled like a gull's.

He turned to look at me, almost smiling.

"I'm glad you didn't jump off the Temple the other night," I blurted.

"Sorry if I startled you," he replied. "I wasn't going to jump, though. I don't want to do that anymore."

His wings shuffled and twitched in the silence.

"I don't mean to question any of it," I said slowly. "But I have questions. Is that okay?"

"Sure," the angel said. He crossed his arms and leaned casually against a stall divider.

"Why did you choose this?"

The corners of his mouth turned down in thought.

"The choice I had," he said, "and the choice you think I had are probably not the same."

"You chose to be an earth-angel," I clarified. "You chose to take the Tincture. To go through all this."

"You give me too much credit," the angel replied, smiling for real now; he had a dimple in his left cheek. "I was born of woman, yes, but born an angel. It's a contradiction, I know. But some of the Almighty's best work is contradictory—like the Trinity, right? You see, I'd be an angel whether I followed through with the Tincture or not. I could try to find some inner peace through Transfiguration, or succumb to fear and falsehood for the rest of my life. That was the choice."

I could see my own skepticism staring sidelong at me in the mirror. I tugged a few paper towels from the dispenser and shredded them absently.

"God told you to do this?" I asked.

He nodded.

"God talks to me same as he talks to you," he said. "Human or angel, we all possess souls that speak to the divine. God made me as he made you, and through him I am passed hints of who I am. You get those too, don't you—longings, in your heart?"

I gave a perfunctory nod—of course I got them. Everyone did. But still it struck me as counterintuitive that God would intend this clumsy, convoluted path for anyone.

"It's not elegant," I announced.

The angel raised its eyebrows.

"So God manifests only in the elegant?"

"I mean, it's never fulfilled," I revised. "You'll never be an angel like an Angel of God is an angel. You'll always be an earth-angel. You'll always have been born of woman."

The angel dipped his head side to side in resignation.

"It used to bring me agony to even think those words," he admitted. "I raged at God for making me like this: an angel that could never be an angel, only some approximation of one. But I feel differently now—or at least I'm working on it. In all of us there exist ideals and we fall short of most of them, don't we? Why is the conformation of one's soul to one's body the one specification by which we judge an entire being? Human or angel or something in between—why does this dictate the worth of all my other attributes? What of the people who dye their hair blonde or black? What of the hearts with pig valves and legs made of titanium? What of those who are born with flagging lungs and skipping brains and kidneys that need replacement? What of the PhD candidate whose thesis is denied, the artist whose paintings lack proportion, the pianist who plays well but not well enough for the stage? What of the doctor who misses a diagnosis, the cashier who double-scans an item? What of the polymerase that fumbles a strand of DNA or the womb that miscarries a fetus? None of them are perfect analogies, but they touch on my predicament, I think. Sometimes I just want to go up to people and say, 'Tell me what is so singularly ungodly about the mistake of my creation, if you insist it is a mistake?'"

He paused to draw breath. The bathroom was ringing with his words; my head felt like a tolling bell. Part of me wanted to run, escape the jumble of thoughts and noise, but I did not.

"I see how unclean it looks on the surface, a man who would break himself to look like an angel," he continued. "There is discomfort in watching someone suffer openly with something all too often left buried. But God has asked us to wrestle with more difficult foes before."

I let the shreds of paper towel drift from my fingers into the trashcan.

"What did God say to you, if you don't mind me asking?"

I worried this question went too far, but the angel just shrugged.

"Oh, many things. Too many if I'm honest. At first I didn't know what it was God was insisting I do, why I was so restless, why I always felt something calling in me. It was all cryptic—Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. Stuff like that, stuff that made me feel like I'd done something wrong. Like I was being punished for being what I was. For a long time it made me hate myself, and hate God."

"People—nobody I know—say you're crazy, earth-angels. They say it's not really God speaking to you," I mumbled.

His laugh was like a wave crashing into a steel drum.

"It's God for me, same as it's God for you," he reiterated. "You know, the Tincture is just distillations of blood and holy water. It's made entirely of things found in the bodies and souls of humans. Angels and men—boil it down, and it's a divine soul, regardless of the vessel. That was the last hurdle for me to overcome, actually. Like, why does the vessel matter so much to me if I'm more than my vessel? But that coin flips just as easily to the other side—why should it matter to anyone else?"

He scuffed his sneaker along the grout. He checked his watch.

"Do you think God is ever lost in translation?" he asked me.

I hesitated, taken aback.

"I think the feelings have more of God in them than the words, sometimes. The words can be...twisted."

Both of us stared at our hands nervously. It made me feel bare, saying such a thing aloud.

He turned away from me. Before he disappeared into a stall, I saw a heavy collar of bandages wrapped about the base of each wing; I suspected there would always be scarring on his shoulder blades. No Tincture could grant flawlessness.

I heard his fly unzip and a gentle splashing echoed off the tile. I left the bathroom, my business done.