Original Sin

"Hey you. Flannel Guy. You wanna watch how you talk to that kid? So what if he's gay? What's it to you?"

I was staring at a nice hard collection of knuckles when the voice rang out. The truck driver who was about to feed me those knuckles startled, and glanced toward the voice -- a little guy, nondescript except for his eyes, which were electric blue and seemed to throw off sparks.

"Flannel Guy," as my would-be rescuer called him, grunted and shifted his focus back to me. He'd just been yelling at me, calling me "faggot" and "cocksucker" and a bunch of other, less complimentary things. He'd been pumping his fist, drawing back as though to slam me and then thinking up new derogatory names, such that he never quite got around to throwing that punch. He had a handful of my shirt in his other hand, and he didn't seem inclined to let go.

"Hey, asshole!" the guy with the blue eyes yelled again.

"Just never you mind," Flannel Guy yelled back at him. "This is between me and him. Ain't nobody here talking to you, so fuck off."

"Ha, that's good," Blue Eyes returned. "You're not talking to me? Well, asshole, I am talking to you."

"Yeah?" bellowed Flannel Guy, finally letting me go and whipping around to face Blue Eyes. "Who the hell are you?"

"Who am I?" mocked Blue Eyes. "You can't tell? I am an Angel of God."

"Fuck you," Flannel Guy hollered. He seemed to have lost interest in me; he spared me one last glance, then tromped off, muttering, "Fucking fags, crazy dickwads, I ain't got time for this."

I watched Flannel Guy's retreat. He clambered into his truck, started her up, and rumbled off.

This was all taking place at a truck stop in deepest Idaho. It was a cold February afternoon in 1967. I'd been hitching for three days without any kind of problem. The last guy had brought me here and since he was heading to Pocatello and I was bound in the other direction, we parted ways. My attempt to cadge a ride from Flannel Guy had quickly gone sour -- probably because he'd sneered that, sure, he'd give me a ride. A good hard ride, right up my ass.

I had tried to walk away at that point, but he'd grabbed me and started yelling. Enter Blue Eyes at that point... Speaking of whom, my rescuer was now crossing the parking lot, heading toward me with a kindly smile.

"Well, okay, the part about God is an exaggeration," he said as he drew close. "Angels have no more idea about God than you organics do. God is as mysterious, as remote, and as questionable for us as he is for you. Some of us don't even believe that God exists."

"Uh..." I didn't know what to say. He sized me up.

"Doesn't look like that bozo roughed you up too bad."

I smoothed my shirt and jacket. "I'm fine."

He continued to smile at me, his bright blue eyes peering into me in a way that felt strange. Good strange, like he really saw me. Like he really had taken an interest.

"You don't look like an angel," I said, just to have something to say.

"You're right, I don't look like no angel," Blue Eyes said. He took me by the elbow and turned me toward the diner. With a tug, he got me walking. "You were expecting wings and a halo, I suppose, but then again you people think that we spend our time guarding over your miserable little lives and ferrying messages from The Almighty."

He'd looked out for me pretty well. But he didn't slow down and let me offer that observation.

"There's an awful lot about us that you have gotten wrong over the ages," he continued, as we kept walking toward the diner. "It should tell you something that we don't care enough to make any big attempt to set the record straight."

I had no idea how to respond to that, so I said nothing.

"You're hungry, I bet," Blue Eyes said.

I knew exactly what to say to that. "Mister, you have no idea."

A few minutes later we were seated and Blue Eyes, talkative sort that he was, had ordered for me and himself both. I had a plate of biscuits and gravy coming my way. I wondered if I should warn him that I didn't have a dime, but I figured that he probably knew that already.

"What's a youngster like you doing hitching rides with guys like him?" Blue Eyes asked -- meaning Flannel Guy.

I shrugged.

"How old are you, kid?"

"Seventeen."

He snorted. He stared. He waited.

"Fifteen," I admitted.

He stared at me a little longer, waiting to hear what my deal was.

I was more interested in his deal. "So you're an angel, huh? Are all angels like you? I thought you had wings and harps, shit like that."

"No need of such language, young man," Blue Eyes said. The waitress returned with more coffee. She refilled his cup, and passed mine over -- I hadn't touched it.

"So what are angels like?" he mused, sipping. "First things first. You look at me and I don't seem too angelic, do I? Well, and that's a fair point. I live like a man; I am a man. But this ain't my natural way of living."

I shifted, wondering if he was going to be dangerous. If I hadn't had food coming -- food I desperately needed -- I would probably have taken to my heels. Then again, where would I go? It wasn't like there was anyplace where I could run. The truck stop had to be seventy or eighty miles from any town.

"I'll try not to bore you," Blue Eyes said dryly. "But I do want to explain something to you. In their native state, angels aren't bound by the restrictions of physical existence. We aren't organic life. We don't dependent on metabolism, and we don't worry about decay. We aren't jammed up by things like locality or even numerality. Space and time don't stand in our way; they are just part of how the universe is laid out before us. In my natural form I could be anyplace, or many places, or no place at all, if I so chose. I could be myself, or someone else, or nobody. I could be Legion." He took another draw from his cup, and then set it down. It was thick truck stop china, stained white with a faded blue stripe running around the rim.

I stared at his cup, afraid to meet his eyes. It made me feel good for a minute or two that he'd bother with me, that someone in the world would care. But now I was starting to get that pinned-down feeling, and a lump was starting to grow in my throat. I didn't know if I wanted to cry or rage at him.

"Looks like you could use a laugh," Blue Eyes said to me. "You know my favorite joke? 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' "

I didn't answer. I didn't hardly dare to look at him.

He supplied the punch line without prompting. " 'How big a party do you want to throw?' " He grinned at his own humor. I didn't get it. He leaned a little closer. I was glad there was a table between us. "Size, number, time," he said. "None of it anchors us. Not until we come to live here like human beings live."

He was full of shit and probably totally nuts. Probably a Vietnam vet or something. Someone who had seen too much. Like my Uncle Chuck. "Why the fuck would you come here?" I asked. "If I was an angel I'd stay the hell away."

I thought he was going to scold me for my language again, but he didn't. Instead, he said, "Why would we live here? Among men? Well, now, that's a good question. And the answer is twofold."

Twofold, huh? This guy talked pretty fancy. And he talked a lot. But listening to him took my mind off my hunger. God damn I couldn't wait for those biscuits to arrive.

I realized I'd tuned out for a few seconds. He was still talking.

"A long time ago there was a war in heaven," he was saying. "Well, not Heaven, don't get me wrong; rather, heaven, the top of creation. Imagine the universe is an ocean. Heaven is the very surface. Here, Earth, physical existence... all this is down in the deep. The top of the universe... how do I explain it so you'll understand? Kid, I don't think I can. I'll just out and say it: The top of the universe is a transdimensional membrane that encompasses everything in this existence and brushes against existences beyond."

I was clueless as to what that meant. He seemed to see that. He smiled. But he didn't take mercy on me.

"When say 'heaven,' I mean heaven in the cosmological sense of the word, not the theological," he went on. "It's the very top energy level, the very highest plane that is still bounded by this reality. That's heaven. That's home."

I picked up my cup of coffee. I hated coffee, but I needed to do something with my hands. The cup trembled. No, those were my hands: My hands trembled with hunger, and with nerves. I realized he had stopped talking, and that made me more nervous than his crazy story.

"So you had a war," I said. "How do angels fight? With guns? With swords?"

"Our war was not a shooting war or a battle with swords and spears," Blue Eyes explained. "It was more like what you would call a culture war. Or rather, I guess, you will call it a culture war, maybe twelve or eighteen years from now. We didn't really call it a war, but that was what it felt like. The heavenly host was riven over the very question of -- "

" 'Riven?' Mister, you know some words I never heard of."

"You can imagine it's hard for me to keep in character," Blue Eyes laughed. "Okay, fine. The host of heaven was split on the question of existence itself: Is this universe musical in nature, or mathematical? Is this cosmos a work of art, making it poetry and inspiration, or is it the result of logic and numerical rigor? The answer was important to us because we figured we could only know God by looking at his creation. Because, like I say, God is as remote from us as he is from you."

"But how can you be an angel and not know God?" I asked him. I wasn't sure I believed in any of that, but he seemed dead sure of himself. I found myself entertaining the idea.

"We desire his closeness," Blue Eyes said. "Just like human beings desire his closeness. We want to understand him so we can understand what he wants. To understand him, we look at the universe, which he created. Sort of like human scientists do, at least some of them. But a God of mathematics is very different than a God of music. At least, we thought so. Should we be singing the music of the spheres, or calculating the value of pi forevermore? What defines a moral existence? We don't know."

Our waitress was back, plates balanced on her forearms -- a couple for us, a few for a nearby table. No sooner was the food steaming before me than I was plowing into it.

I ate one of the three biscuits that sat there swimming in pork gravy. Holy Jesus Christ, it was good. I stopped for breath, and Blue Eyes was grinning at me.

"I don't get it," I told him. "I don't understand anything you're telling me."

"You don't get it? Son, there's a lot you're not going to understand about beings so superior to you that, compared to them, Albert Einstein was an ant. Just an ant. Einstein, an ant."

"I get it already," I muttered around mouthful.

"You think ants understand you? I don't think they can even tell you're there."

"They can tell," I argued back. "I got bitten up pretty good a few times by some pissed off ants."

He shook his head. I go the feeling I really didn't understand him. But did I care?

"Just understand this: A lot of angels from both sides of the debate left heaven in disgust, and a lot of angels left who didn't even care," he said. "It was like... like all this Vietnam stuff, the protests, the cops beating kids up for protesting, a clash of world views."

"Were you in Vietnam?" I asked.

He huffed a laugh. "I seen enough of that. I ain't gonna study war no more. No, kid, I'm a lover, not a fighter."

After seeing him handle Flannel Guy, I wasn't so sure.

He got back to his story. "The angels who left heaven came here... to the lower energy level, that is, not to Planet Earth necessarily. Those who did come to Earth lived like you live, like I live now. Those who went to other planets with life took on the flesh and form of the locals. But when this happened, we came to understand two things that shocked us. First off, life in the world of the senses is so very limited... but so very rich. Physical sensation... it's absolutely intoxicating. Human beings perceive a tiny, tiny fragment of reality, but the intensity of it... the immediacy of it... sensation is just sensational!" He smiled at his own joke. "And the emotional response to physical stimulus, we didn't expect that. It's so overwhelming to us. Kid, it's addictive."

Angels were addicts? I chewed on another forkful of gravy-drenched biscuit and tried to sort this out.

"But that's not the worst of it," Blue Eyes went on. "What really set us back on our heels was the realization that organic life can truly be intelligent. You're ruled by your emotions, and you're pretty stupid all in all, but you do truly have a spark of intelligence, and we had always assumed that was not possible. To see that organic intelligence existed provoked some of us, insulted many of us, seemed like a preposterous and blasphemous thing. We were so shocked that our first thought was to eradicate you. All of you. All organic intelligence everywhere."

He paused as if he wanted me to take special note of this. I shrugged again.

"Thought to us is the same thing as deed, and the thought of destroying you was enough in itself to cause the instant annihilation of a great many of you," he said softly. "Lucky for you the very idea of number is foreign to us, or we'd have gotten you all in one.

"And by destroy you I don't mean interrupt your existence at some random point in linear time," he continued. "I mean destroy you entirely: Scrub you from the universe, past and future and always. And not just in this quantum reality, but in every iteration of the hyper-time in which the universe exists. You don't get that either, but never mind," he added.

He was right. That last part was pure gibberish to me.

"The point is, we almost sterilized the universe of organic intelligence from start to finish, and from top to bottom. As a consequence, the universe damn near came unraveled."

I just kept chewing. I got the gist. I just couldn't put all the pieces together. Was all of this actually one story? How did all these things relate?

He made an attempt to explain. "There are six fundamental properties to this existence. Time and space; matter and energy; consciousness and event. Take any of those foundational pillars away and the universe collapses into static. We thought you weren't necessary for any of it, but we were wrong. By removing you, we robbed the universe of a specific form of organic mentality, something that the underpinnings of physics demand. We also deformed the universe by altering its stream of events.

"And that, too, was our goal; we didn't hate you, and that wasn't why we wanted to destroy you. What shocked us was the violence and waste and suffering that mark your lives. Organic intelligence always follows the same arc, rising to a level of technical ability and then extinguishing itself. It's like seeing a mental ward full of lunatics who have gotten hold of knives and spend hours, spend days carving bits off themselves, screaming and bleeding, until they finally succumb. Would you want to have to watch that? If you knew that suffering was real and there was truly a mind writhing in agony with each dying individual, could you stand it?"

That lump was coming back. I didn't like hearing descriptions of violence. I wasn't sure he might not try something like that out on me.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said at that moment. "We didn't want to hurt anybody. What we really wanted was to stem the tide of suffering by making it never happen at all. But in this, God's universe, your suffering is part and parcel of the very fabric of existence. All of which has brought us back to our first argument among ourselves: What kind of God have we been searching for?

"But we only have the luxury of debate if we continue to exist, along with the rest of creation," Blue Eyes said, and I found myself understanding this much anyway. Many was the time I had heard my mother -- when she wasn't drunk or coked up -- screaming terrible oaths and curses, accusing God, shrieking her hatred for a life she hated, a man who beat her, my little sister who died after he struck her tiny body. Mom blamed God for all that, and I always thought maybe she should have examined her own choices a little more closely.

But Blue Eyes was still telling his tale. "In order to restore the cosmos, we had to replace the individuals we had destroyed -- fill in the holes we had poked in the structure of all of history. So we took on your bodies and your lives, and we carried out the task of enacting history, the history of each organic form of life, everywhere it lives... and suffers... and perishes. On Earth alone there are 600,000 angels walking amongst you at any given time."

Well, that was interesting, I supposed. I started in on the third biscuit.

"We're addicts to the senses, and we dwell in the filth of organic bodies, and we stick ourselves into time like bugs in amber," Blue Eyes said. He sounded, I thought, like a poet. His story was strange, but it was sort of beautiful, too, and his voice mad you want to keep listening. "We weep and we laugh. We suffer the indignity of rolling in the mud at the bottom of a gravity well. We are corrupted by this task, but... at the same time... we do it purify ourselves of our crime."

"Crime?" I asked, now really caught up in his story.

"You see, this is our penance," he told me. "Too late we came to realize the error of our judgment against you, and the cost of our arrogance. This is something else you got wrong: You believe that God punishes you with a life of sorrow and hard labor for an 'original sin' your first father and first mother committed. But the truth is you are the victims, not the perpetrators. We angels committed original sin in trying to destroy you."

I stared at him the way he had stared at me earlier, trying to coax him to explain through force of expectation. He sighed, and beckoned the passing waitress for more coffee. She stopped at pour table and refilled his cup.

"There's a lot I need to tell you," he said to me. "You know why? Can you guess?"

"Holy shit," I said, because I suddenly knew. He wasn't telling me his story... he was telling me our story.

My story.

"The human brain can't accommodate us very well," he said. "We leave a lot of ourselves behind during our human lives. We dwell in that same ignorance, but there are ways to reclaim some sense of who we are and what we do. You asked me to find you when you were ready... Fifteen is a little young. But I think you're ready now. What you think?"

I thought I needed to hear more, so I traveled with him. I lived as his son for eight years, until he sent me off into the world to continue the work of repairing history. He helped me remember certain things... things about that other mode of being, that other life, that life outside of time and, in a way, outside of existence. And he helped me recall, and then live with, the fact that in the great Chorus of Voices I had been one of those who had lobbied for the eradication of human beings, and all organic intelligence.

Original Sin was my sin.

And God? That question still haunts me, for all the answers I have found. Is God capable of sin? Because if so, God Almighty committed the first and greatest of all original sins by creating this world, and you, and us. Creating this world to be what it is, and then walking away from it to let its machinations of cruelty and waste and pain chug and churn for the billions of years of its pre-programmed course of existence.

So, Mr. Evangelist, I'm not telling you to leave that gay kid alone because I'm some bleeding heart liberal, although I admit that my heart does bleed. I bleed and weep for your, for our suffering. You should, too. Hurting kids like him won't make you feel better.

We're all very sorry, you see. We're all pathetic and doomed and abandoned. So leave that gay kid alone. His sin, and yours... and even ours, the horrifying sin of the angels... is nothing when you compare them to the sins of the Father.