Where Angels Dwell

When the clock struck ten, my borrowed heart leaped. My legs—his legs—felt the itching urge to run to the door like a human version of Pavlov's dog—minus the salivation. A messenger from Amazon would arrive within minutes: Amazon was nothing if not consistent. Truth is, between the daily deliveries, I simply existed, an alien consciousness inhabiting the husk of an agoraphobic man who followed a daily routine with the precision of a time-keeping machine in an effort to keep the anguish of losing his wife and twin daughters at bay.

Effortlessly, I propelled Richard's body up and off the sofa into a standing position, feeling, as usual, disoriented—I would never get used to this slow mode of motion; matter was simply too cumbersome for quantum-dimensional translocation. At any rate, his body was simply responding to Richard's obsession with the arrival of the daily Amazon package, while my enslaved mind was simply responding to the promised sight of a new delivery person: collecting data on humans was, after all, my mission.

After four years, it had never been the same courier, so the only thrill of my doomed mission was variety. On the high resolution display of Richard's state-of-the-art doorbell cam, I would see each detail of the messengers' humanity, the conjunction of features that made them unique. Added to that was the nuance of movement and expression, a library of human behaviors that never seemed to get old. After all, my mission—before it all had gone completely wrong—had been to study Earth's primitive civilization from the best vantage point: a human brain. My final report would only come after this body's death released me back into quantum space.

Because of Richard's agoraphobia, Amazon delivery people represented my only access to other humans, a limited data source since I never interacted with them. I could hear my superiors' warning, "Interaction is germane to the mission," but I worked with what little I had. With each delivery, my database of humanity grew, while my host's basement teemed with empty Amazon boxes bearing his name, Richard Feinstein, which I had stolen along with his human consciousness.

As I went toward the door, the eagerness—both chemical and intellectual—had reached its peak. I was running at this point, stopping myself with both of Richard's hands pressed against the wall, exactly on top of two greasy smudges that were evidence of the daily routine of four years. Between Richard's hands, the doorbell screen glowed like a window to another dimension. Patiently, quietly, we waited.

Horror struck fourteen minutes later.

Instead of the expected human shape of an Amazon carrier, a small spot appeared in the upper region of the screen, black against the luminous sky. Richard's body began to hyperventilate, and I with it: this couldn't be. As the spot grew larger, we could make out two shapes, one an insectile creature under a blur of wings and the other the package it carried, which was definitely not from Amazon.

Where was the delivery person? I watched in horror as the thing descended and disappeared at the bottom of the screen. Outside I heard a thump and the buzz of fast wings, followed by the reappearance of the creature on the screen, looking straight at us with a single red glowing eye. I now noticed its plastic body, black and shiny. The "wings" were actually small rotors, spinning furiously. Drone, the word came to me from some synapse in Richard's brain.

I took a deep breath with Richard's smoke-damaged lungs, grasping the door handle and turning it in one quick motion. Pulling the door toward me, I lunged for the lonely package with one hand, the other holding tightly to the door, eyes trained on the mysterious box, purposely avoiding eye contact with the thing hovering above us.

The air thinned in Richard's lungs as agoraphobia kicked in, quickly and surely, as if he were climbing the highest of Earth's peaks. Shaking hands grabbed onto the package and brought it to our chest, stars dancing in the periphery of our vision as unconsciousness took hold.

As we fell backwards, onto the cold tiled floor, we managed to shove the door shut before blackness filled our vision, followed by silence, followed by dreams.

Or rather, the dream.

Richard had a single recurring dream nightly, after placing his daily Amazon order for the next morning. As a long-term passenger in his head, I had gradually come to experience the dream as more than some tale of human tragedy; it had become my own nightmare as well.

Richard drives a pink Jeep over a rough terrain of red and copper rock, crimson dust rising everywhere like atomized blood. Julia, next to him, nervously holds on to a side bar, while the daredevil twins, excitedly and carefully describe every feature of the panorama that slides by.

Something is horribly wrong, though. Richard's motor functions have deteriorated in the last fifteen minutes, likely from the unusual strain of weed he smoked before hitting the road. Richard thinks the weed must have been laced with something, but he is too far gone to do anything about it.

"Richard, we're not on the road! Where is this going?" Julia's words echo like bells, beautiful but unintelligible.

Ahead, the red dirt rolls out forever into distant jagged hills, except for a darkened zone that runs serpentine and perpendicular to our trajectory; whatever it is, we are driving right into it. Then it hits Richard—and me by proxy: we are driving directly into the canyon. Richard hits the brakes but they won't respond.

There are only 1,134 feet separating us from the edge of the chasm. At 56 miles per hour, Richard has fourteen seconds to undo his seatbelt, help Julia out of hers and then together free the girls before they all jump out of the car. He undoes his buckle with some difficulty, but Julia's just won't give.

"Girls!" She shouts over the roar of the wind. "Undo your seatbelts! Jump out!" But like hers, their seatbelts are hopelessly jammed.

With only a couple seconds left, Richard makes a split decision. He looks into Julia's blue eyes and mouths "sorry" before hurling himself out of the car, rolling all the way to the edge of the canyon. Horrified, he witnesses the Jeep's final flight, Julia's and the girls' manes blossoming in free fall like three golden flowers, their chariot descending from heaven into the very mouth of hell.

"It is so vast!" Richard cries as he beholds the endlessness in front of him, the car now the tiniest meteor falling into the mouth of the canyon. He loses all sense of perception—and of himself.

"It is so vast!" He repeats, except this time I can feel the words in my throat.

My eyes open wide.

I am on the floor of Richard's home, clutching the mystery box against my chest as if it were a child. I let go of it in disgust and quickly get on my feet, taking a quick instinctive look at the doorbell screen, where I only see the empty evening, the drone gone. Then something hits me, a void within that makes my skin crawl.

I can no longer feel Richard. The flesh around me is as claustrophobic as it ever was, but for the first time, it is all mine. The feeling is a combination of exhilaration and panic, a sense of freedom from Richard's compulsions and guilt mixed with my apprehension at remaining human, all on my own, until the carbon molecules undergo the transformation of death.

I would take over Richard's life, violating all rules of the mission. "You are just an observer," they had told us cadets over and over, but hadn't I already crossed that line only two years ago when I had decided to quantum-seal Richard's consciousness as a last resort to quiet the humdrum of his sickened mind? With my mission already compromised and limited by a mind plagued by madness, I had had no choice but to contain the worst of it.

“It is so vast!" He had shouted before I had sealed his mind into a psychic box that reduced his consciousness to quantic dimensions. He had been actually glad to feel the enclosure and had even called me an angel. After all, what else could a voice in his head be, especially when it promised delivery from the horror and grandeur of the canyon that took his family? Humans in despair are anything if not gullible.

Confined to nearly negligible space in our shared brain, Richard's self had become a sort of tiny black hole, but one that still effected a gravitational pull on the edges of my own consciousness, exerting control over basic, instinctual functions mainly rooted in obsession, guilt, and the recurring dream. It was not complete freedom, but it beat the full-blown chaos of his entire psyche.

Now that pull was no longer there; a part of me wondered what happened to the information trapped in a black hole when it simply evaporated? Reluctant, I picked up the mysterious box and took it with me past the living room and directly into the basement.

With 365 days in a year, a daily delivery of a single Amazon package amounts to 1,460 empty boxes within a period of four years. They filled almost the entirety of the basement, empty shells like Richard himself, so it took some work, as usual, to make a path among them to the center of the room, where Richard's macabre tableau waited.

It was a life size mockup of the chassis of his Jeep, the four seats, complete with three dummies the size of a thin woman and two young identical twins. If anybody wondered what Richard had done with the life insurance money, anything they imagined would have fallen short of what stood in front of me. He had recreated the seating area of the vehicle, seatbelts and all, everything but the wheels and the enclosure of the car. In the back wall, large boxes contained hundreds of spare seatbelts and other parts typically consumed during his trials.

On top of a workbench sat a short tripod holding a video camera trained directly on the car and a display showing a chronometer in numbers large enough to be seen from the driver's seat. Next to the tripod was yesterday's Amazon delivery: an "auto emergency escape hammer with window breaker and seat belt cutter" in "striking red," only $14.95. Somewhere in the room, there were 1,459 similar tools, some of them different brands, from Richard's previous trials.

I looked at these items objectively for the first time without the baggage of Richard's guilt and obsession. I had been there when his project had begun to take shape, about two months after the triple funeral that I had thankfully missed. My alien mind watched him build the chassis of the vehicle, matching that of the Jeep in his daily dream about the accident. When his daily trials began, I felt him choke on the weed he smoked and then relived with him, day after day, the recreation of the tragic accident.

My superiors had taught us about humanity during training, before they had launched my consciousness across the vastness of space to become a spectator to the human race. The human simulators were accurate as far as the senses, the look of things, the workings of the brain, even the process of death, but nothing had prepared me to face the mind of a human possessed by madness.

Relieved by his absence, I returned my attention to the scene. I grabbed yesterday's version of the car safety hammer from the workbench and, with the mystery box under my arm, I walked to the vehicle. For a moment I wondered why Richard had not discarded this safety hammer as he did with the others, but curiosity about the box distracted me from the thought.

Once in the driver's seat, it struck me that it triggered none of the anxiety Richard always felt as he began his daily ritual, using a remote control to restart the chronometer on the display and the video recording to then replay his attempt to rescue his family and himself within the fourteen seconds it had taken the Jeep to reach the edge of the cliff. In four years he had managed to get as close as 15.35 seconds.

I realized that without Richard in my head, it was easier to understand the man's motivation: every trial was an attempt to convince himself that even with the right tool—and he used a new one every day—he could have never saved his family. That's how he permitted himself to live another day. Trapped in his head, I had experienced every single painful second.

If it weren't for the arrival of the daily package and the data I collected from watching the couriers, I would have gone mad, even though madness was a concept alien to my race—a good explanation as to why it was missing from our human simulators. I had had no choice; even locked in its quantum enclosure, the weight of Richard's consciousness still reached out to control the instinctual actions that replayed this tragedy day after day, one of a few behaviors I could not override.

Instead, I had learned to hide my insubstantial self from the vast desert that was Richard's mind, miles of red rock and the bones of ancient creatures that were the vestiges of what he used to be. As an entity unafraid to be launched across the darkness of space, it surprised me that I felt something like fear wondering if any of those bones belonged to his wife and daughters. Worse yet, I came close to panicking anytime I dared to look into the dark chasms that ran like a network of psychic canyons across his mindscape.

Never again, I thought with relief. I returned my attention to the unmarked mystery box on my lap, only slightly larger and heavier than the boxes containing the auto safety hammers Richard used in his daily attempt to appease his survivor's guilt. Using the cutting end of this latest, "striking red" tool, I opened the box. A small bundle the size of my hand lay inside, wrapped in cloth.

After throwing the box onto one of the many piles and hurling the safety hammer into the exact corner where the rest of its brethren rested, I unfolded the cloth, revealing a dark metallic L-shaped object. The elongated barrel on the one end was cold and smooth, sending a chill down my spine. The other end had a couple mechanisms, one of which fit my fingers perfectly.

Like the drone, this object was new to me. I tried to dig into the living brain of Richard Feinstein for a reference, but it was harder now that Richard's consciousness had evaporated. I looked up at the workbench where the video camera stared at me with its objective eye, then at the large display next to it, hoping for inspiration.

The time on the display read 13.56 seconds.

I froze. Then I knew. Yesterday I had gone into my sacred space inside Richard's head, intent on avoiding his little experiment; I had become adept at blocking out all stimuli during some of Richard's waking hours, and even though the nightly dream was unavoidable, not experiencing his daily trials had been a small relief.

Now, staring at the 13.56, red and accusatory, I knew Richard had made the escape under the fourteen-second mark while I was away in my mental safety box, thus unraveling his theory that he wouldn't have been able to save his family no matter what. That's why he hadn't discarded yesterday's auto safety hammer. Instead, he had, somehow, ordered the disturbing object now in my hand.

I tried to stand up, but suddenly, a voice came to life in my head.

Gun. The word came to me like a whisper in the stagnant air of the basement and with it the clear knowledge of the object's purpose.

Shoot.

Richard's voice haunted me now as much as my alien presence had haunted him the day I had revealed myself to him two years ago, only to lock his consciousness away. My arm began to move of its own accord and soon the round end of the barrel was pressed hard against my temple.

Shoot.

How had he managed to escape the tiny black hole? Impossible. Information would be lost forever, but then—

Shoot.

I could feel it now, a tiny seed of psychic information that had remained hidden after the mental containment dissipated; it slowly extended its tendrils across my mind and with it came a clear understanding. Richard, as he was, would not have killed himself; he valued life more than anything. Once confined, however, he had become something else; he had become me: a cold alien entity who would be only too happy to pull the trigger and be released back to its own race.

"No!" I shouted, realizing that I was no longer myself either; I had been transmuted by the flesh, attached to it in a way that violated all of the principles I had ever lived by as a surveyor of humanity.

"No!" My will fought against his, failing to lower the gun.

Instead, gathering eons of training, I pushed all of my lifeforce outward into the confines of Richard's mind: I went supernova. Near infinite energy obliterated the deserts and canyons of Richard's mind, the guilt and anguish, the obsession and the fear.

I saw them then, Julia, Esther, and Claudia, not bones but fully fleshed forms, standing in the space between thought and quantum length. They smiled at me before the eternal light consumed us, and I knew that Richard would be alright. I had delivered him from his ghosts and taken them with me back across the vastness of space to a place where only angels dwell.