Visitant

      It is definitely an angel. Probably. That much everyone seems to agree on. Melody says it first, Cheryl’s daughter, it's an angel, so quiet that only the crowd's hush lets the words move past the gate of her own lips. Her mother repeats the words, first with the soft laughing incredulity given to all children's ideas, but then again, and her eyes never leave the figure. 

      It stands in the middle of an empty lot near the place where the town washes back into desert. In the near future, citizens’ digs through old records will reveal nothing hallowed about the site: no burned-down church, no former site of battle or slaughter, not even so much as an event space for communion celebrations or quinceañeras. It is just a lot. Land flattened once to make way for a building that never materialized, now overtaken by the golden scraps of weeds. It is littered with crumpled wrappers, beer caps eaten by rust, the shattered remnants of decade-old needles. Past it is a rocky hill, and a span of desert nothing.

      The angel is enormous. The heads of the tallest of the people in town barely reach its featureless navel. Its own head is nonexistent. There is only a smooth taper of perfect aurous skin from shoulder to shoulder. Hayward Olsen, ever eager to display the breadth of his college education, declares it similar in shape to the mythical blemmyae or akephaloi, the headless men spoken of by Herodotus. But no face resides in the angel’s chest, no indicator at all of any senses. It wears a loincloth of a rough material like burlap. Its musculature is sharp and perfect.

      It doesn’t do anything. Just stands with its arms hanging stone-like at its sides, the backs of its hands facing the onlookers who examine its front for some defining feature. Greg Parkins thinks the pose and its broad shoulders give it an apelike aspect, but he doesn’t say so, aware in a dim, confused way of what angry response the comment might invoke. Sheila Blanc thinks it looks like a department store mannequin, and is unafraid to say so, repeatedly and loudly, as friends and acquaintances arrive. 

      Within hours, most of the town is there, watching the towering visitor. Some hoist their children on their shoulders so they can better see; others keep their little ones back with a protective hand, unwilling to accept the seeming miracle on sight alone. The air is a solid wash of people pontificating, debating, talking over each other. Few face the angel directly, but instead turn to glance at it sidelong from time to time. 

      After a while, someone thinks to go and get Pastor Alberto, and he is brought to the head of the crowd. He is a small man with thinning hair, no air of priestly haughtiness about him. He looks like a high school science teacher. 

      He examines the angel for a long time, barely blinking, doing an admirable job of keeping the vagaries of his thoughts on the matter from reaching his face. After a while, he seems to settle on a decision, and closes his eyes, whispering a prayer no one else can make out the words of. Townsfolk crowd him with questions, and he receives them graciously, but says that he has no answers, that he'll need time to pray and to read. He remains with the crowd, putting a reassuring hand on shoulders, urging calm. His soft example quiets the crowd, and if there was a danger of frenzy before, it is averted.

      When night falls, a new aspect of the angel reveals itself. A dim golden light shines out of its fingers and toes. The luminescence spills from beneath its nails, soft and steady, with no more intensity than a nightlight. Some of the parents begin to shift uncomfortably, to speak of needing to get their children home to bed. Some of them think of divine retribution, others of radiation poisoning; the fear that stirs them to leave is much the same in either case. 

      Eventually, by the early hours after midnight, the town sleeps, people trailing off alone and in small groups, seeking the reassurance of their homes' familiar spaces. Only a few outliers remain. Artists, the drunk, the elderly; those for whom sleep wasn't among the evening's options to begin with. The angel abides the weight of their stares in silence.

 

      On the second day, the angel remains resolute in its post. Noon swells hot around it, the warming days of late spring; the lot gives its usual faint stink of spilled beer and rot in old wrappers. 

      People call out from work; much of the main street remains empty. The first of the encampments begin to pop up; lawn chairs and umbrellas and fold-away canopies.

      It is early afternoon when Hayward declares that he is going to see if there is warmth coming off the creature’s fingers. He hasn’t stopped using that word, creature, even though no one else has adopted the term. 

      He strides confidently across the lot. Dry stalks of grass and the remnants of glass bottles crunch under his shoes. The sounds are amplified by the rocky hill, uninterrupted by the breath of the onlookers. 

      He cups his palms one over the other, as if to hold the angel’s entire extremity between them, pull it close to his eyes. 

      He takes the angel’s hand. 

      There is a sound, something like a chime, something like the spark of a downed power line whipping against the ground. There is a roar of golden light. 

      The angel’s hand settles back down from the bare inches it was lifted. It stands, in a circle of blackened ground 10 feet across. It is unchanged, its perfect skin unmarred by any sign of scorching. 

      Hayward is gone. All that remains are the ashen remnants of his shoes, a pall of smoke twisting up from them, and then that’s gone, too.

      The crowd takes in what has happened. There are a few screams, but not as many as might be expected. There is an air of the inevitable in the crowd; a few murmur to each other about justice, about profaning the sacred. 

      They talk a little, in the next day, about Hayward’s belief in his own college learning, his lack of faith. But it’s decided, unspeakingly, that talking ill of the dead doesn’t befit a town hosting an angel, and they quickly stop. 

 

      Cameras burn out when pointed in its direction. 

      Pastor Alberto says that’s not surprising. He quotes 2 Corinthians 5:7, For we live by faith, not by sight. He suggests, reasonably, that the townsfolk keep this miracle to themselves until God's plan is revealed in greater fullness. 

      The people agree with his suggestion. No one calls out-of-town family. The papers print nothing about the visitor. It is as if the angel is theirs, and no one else’s. The fear is palpable, if largely unspoken, that bringing the eyes of the world on their miracle might make it vanish. Grizzled men in the town’s two bars growl at each other about what they’ll do to any government types who try to come and take their angel. They drink, and make plans to brush up at each others’ shooting ranges. But their bravado proves unnecessary; the dirt lot is so far from the main track of town that none of the occasional passing cars ever make it out that far. 

      The angel and its lot become the new center of town, despite sitting at its far edge. Pastor Alberto gives a soft, even-spoken sermon in front of it, to a sea of people sitting in lawn chairs, folding chairs, dining room chairs. James and Ahn Nguyen ask to have their baby baptized in front of it; Pastor Alberto, after some deliberation, agrees, and folk line up for the chance to hold little Tracy Nguyen. 

      After the baptism, a small mob of townsfolk materialize with no planning, everyone seeming to have the same idea, and all carrying buckets and rakes and garbage bags. In the span of the third afternoon, the lawn is cleared of its cans and needles and fast food wrappers, the more daring among the crew even braving the space around and between the angel's feet. No one is stricken with holy fire. If the angel esteems the gesture, or even notices it, it gives no sign.

      Within a day of the lot's cleansing a garden of faith has blossomed, shrines of flowers and candles, plaster garden statues laden with rosaries.

      Artists spend hours at the edge of the lot, sketching, crumpling up the pages of their pads in a fury of inadequacy, sketching again. Captured by human hands, the angel is only a giant. No one can mimic the sensation of its proximity to their satisfaction. But their discontent doesn't stop them. In nearly all of the town's creative types, the same conviction burns: that to do the angel justice, in sketch or painting or poem, will bring them that many steps closer to immortality. 

      Eventually, Greg Parkins is the first to break the unspoken taboo that has kept the gathering from being a summer party. Three men help him pull a gas grill down from the back of his pickup, and soon the old smells of the lot are overcome entirely by the sizzle of chicken and hot dogs. People eat, guiltily at first, then with greater vigor. Folding tables are draped with checkered cloths, people begin to bring covered dishes of potato salad, plates of elote, cake and brownies. By some unspoken rule, the festivities stop short of any alcohol, but the laughter in the air is as hot and drunken as if there were an open bottle at every table. 

          And through it all, the angel stands sentinel over its lot, and through the celebratory atmosphere, the attempts at joviality, all the town's minds are trapped on the same imaginings of what it could be waiting for. 

 

      Lori Ramirez sneaks out on the fourth night, in a fever for knowledge. Sundown has done little to drive the heat from the hills, and nothing to pull the heat from her chest, her bones. The angel awaits her, in the center of the lot, its fingernails shining their soft golden radiance. 

      It is past three in the morning when she arrives, and the angel has been abandoned by even its most vigilant witnesses. 

      She casts around her, and comes up with a four-foot length of rebar, the best option she can find. She steadies it with both hands, reaches with it gently, gently, fighting the shake in her hands, fully remembering the way the last plasmatized remnants of Hayward billowed up out of his shoes, and she brushes it just against the rough fabric of the angel’s loincloth. 

      There is no bolt of Heavenly golden wrath. She is not swatted aside like an insect or burnt like a leaf fallen into a bonfire. 

      The span beneath the cloth is as smooth and unfeatured as a distant-swept dune of sand. If the angel notices her attention, or her disappointment, it reacts to them no more than to any other stimulus. 

      Her mind is cooled, but not quelled. Later in the night, she realizes the angel's absent manhood is not the place her mind drifts to, but rather those heavy, golden-lit fingers, and whether they might not be touched in a way that does not invite destruction. 

 

      Pastor Alberto wrestles in the early morning dark, a tiny battle against his own heavy limbs. A battle of questions, his own and those of the people who look to him for guidance. He shifts under the blankets, in the liminal place between waking and sleep, and twitches at the golden images that pass beneath his eyelids.

      He believes it is an angel. That part, he has settled in his own heart, that it is God's messenger standing there at that most seemingly unimportant of posts.

      It's not belief that he has trouble with. It's just the way he feels about the angel. How much the image of that blank headless form unnerves him. 

      It is an offense, to find the thing so unnatural. He knows it. It's not fear. There is wisdom in fearing one of God's messengers. It's the aversion that concerns him. To say that the angel repulses him is excessive, yet not far from the truth.

      There is an encroaching thought, one with the bitter taste of blasphemy on its surface. He pushes it away, does not permit it to fully form, but the outlines are there. An image of docility, of slavery, of a forcible removing of the means of rebellious thought altogether. An idea of the angel as a hobbled thing, standing in the field not like a soldier, but like a eunuch harem guard.

      His eyes fly open, and he narrows them at his own folly. He kicks the covers off and drags himself off the edge of the bed, planting his elbows firm in a child's nighttime gesture of prayer. His wife rolls over, murmurs a half-question; he quietly reassures her as he lowers his head.

      He's a fool for having such thoughts. He's already chided his congregation for just this: by faith, not by sight. If anything, the angel is holier for its featurelessness, joyfully closer to God's presence without the distractions of mortal senses. 

      Pastor Alberto prays, apologizes earnestly for follies born of exhaustion. When he feels he has knelt in adequate penance, he returns to bed, confident God has not taken true offense to his doubts. 

      But when he sleeps, the images of the golden body return, and if they are not nightmares, they are something close.

 

      On the fifth night, a small squadron of children take up stations on the rocky hillside behind the angel. They have come on foot; though the trip would have been much easier by bike, they do not want to risk being noticed. Their faces are grim, grimmer than might be expected given the prankishness of their task. Each looks to the others as if praying for one of them to talk the group down. None of them do. They feel their urge to mayhem bent to some greater purpose, as if only they can test the town's faith in the sentinel at the center of the lot below. 

      They lift their weaponry, tucked into backpacks or thrown over their shoulders. Paintball guns, BB rifles. A small .22 in the hands of the leader.

      They take aim, and the tiny crack of the leader's squirrel rifle starts the fusillade. 

      Many of the shots miss. But the angel is broad, and motionless, and they begin to find their marks. 

      There are little flashes of gold, barely brighter than flicked lighters. The angel does not react. 

      They fire until their weapons are empty, fire with a fury born of a child's lack of understanding, fire for every distant, anxious face worn by the adults back in town. The flickers of golden light are barely enough to color the angel's chest in the moonlight. It does not react. 

      They slide down the hill. Later in life, they will reflect on some proof of human nature in this moment, that the fear of being seen as cowardly by their peers is greater than the fear of angelic retribution. 

      They approach, as close as they dare. 

      The skin of the angel is unmarred. No pockmarks from bullets or pellets, no splashes of color from paintballs. Even the loincloth, aimed at repeatedly in youthful viciousness, is clean of any damage.

      There is a noise. Maybe it is the angel, voicing a momentary note of warning, like a parent might do to a child. Maybe it is the wind bending a nearby piece of fallen chain link fence. 

      The children do not wait to see if the noise repeats. As one, they give a stifled shriek like the sound of startled rabbits, and they flee down the empty street back to their houses. 

 

      On the sixth day of its vigil, the angel unfurls its wings. There are two pairs of them, gauzy things, thin and shedding the same golden light as its digits. They wave slowly through the air, as if stirred by some wind other than the one at the town’s edge. Everyone agrees they are wings, even if truth be told they’re more like tendrils, or billowing scarves. 

      The town gathers to see. They set their lawn chairs and their folding chairs and their dining room chairs in rows like pews. The children who took their shots the day before hover furtively next to their parents, each wondering if it was their own act that prompted this development. 

      Pastor Alberto speaks softly on the cherubim who turn their wings to cover the Mercy Seat, and the Seraphim who fly on two wings and cover their feet and hands with two more. He quotes Psalm 91:4, He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. His tone is modest. He confesses to those gathered that he does not know the meaning of the sign the angel has given them. He encourages those gathered to pray, to ask God for clarity.

      After the ceremony, the townsfolk depart. For all its mystery, it is only a still figure, and they've done so much watching and waiting already. 

      Father Alberto sits alone in the orange light as the afternoon turns to evening, his eyes on the waver of the ephemeral pennants at the angel's back. He flips to a page in his bible, considers, flips to another page. After a while, finding no satisfactory answer, he returns home.

 

      On the morning of the seventh day, a squadron of children on bikes ride through the town, shouting their grim message: it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone. 

      The townsfolk weep, and they sigh, and they lament, loudly enough to ensure others hear. And everyone can hear the relief in everyone else’s voice, under the lamentation, and no one judges anyone else for it. 

      In the empty lot, there is a 10-foot ring of blasted ground. And the weeds sprout up in that space as readily as anywhere else in the lot, but the ground remains black, no matter how many people go there with their jars and vials and Ziploc bags to bring a little of it back with them. 

      And the spring burns into summer, the days sweltering through each other, night no escape from the bone-deep heat. Black storm clouds begin to gather along the edges of the desert, thick with the avowal of thunder. And Pastor Alberto begs the townsfolk for a moment of reprieve from questions, a chance to pray on what has passed.

      And the whole town, everyone in it, sees signs in the growing dark wall, in every breath of hot wind and rustling shrub and every scavenger animal that lingers too long in a human place. Everything seems to murmur apocalypse, and the town waits for something more to happen.