On-the-Job Training (Part 1)

It’s the next day, and although my nose is sore I’ve avoided the black eye I got the time I’d broken my nose as a kid. (Rodney, the school bully, decided I looked like a gay twink—well, I did, and I was, but still—and wanted to give me an “adjustment.”)

Luke decided he was going to train me in all the basics I should know before we do any more “field work,” but just my luck, I seem to have found myself an angel who finds teaching really stressful. He’s pacing the tiny combination kitchen/living room of my attic apartment like a caged animal, trying desperately to explain the basics.

“So, wait, there’s no angel guidebook?” I ask.

“No, no handbook.” He looks confused, seeming unhappy with the answer, too.

“Is there a rule that there can’t be a handbook?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

I pull out a large, new notebook from under my coffee table and write Angel Handbook neatly on the front and turn the cover toward him.

He nods. “Sure, that’s fine.”

“So, how did you learn to be an angel?”

“My mentor, Michael, taught me.”

“Like, Michael the archangel?”

“Oh, no, no, Michael from Rhode Island. He’s really big into collecting tulips. Whole garden full of them.”

“So,” I flip to the first page, “how many angels are there?”

“Oh, probably like a hundred. Well, no, more like a dozen… maybe thirty. We don’t always find each other right away, some we’ll probably never find.”

“Thirty?” I write down thirty in the notebook, doing some quick division in my head against eight billion people. “That’s like… one angel for over a quarter billion people?”

“Yeah, there’s only so much energy flowing at any one time to power us, as the population overall grows the number of angels does, too, but not by a lot.”

“Okay…” I write Not enough fucking angels.

“Listen, I can’t teach you everything about angels, because I never learned that much myself. But I can at least tell you what I’ve figured out.”

“Alright, then what are the basics?”

He pauses and thinks for a moment. “You know how sometimes colors are just wrong?”

“Colors?” I look around the room.

“Okay, never mind…” he squints like he’s trying to bring something on my empty wall behind me into focus, “you know when you were a kid and could play make-believe?”

I nod, and he continues.

“There’s a level of childlike belief in what we do, that you can just believe something is different than it is and that makes it so.”

“Like, lying?”

“No, no, like… here.” He pulls the coffee mug from thin air again, showing me it’s empty by holding it upside down.

“Okay, you like coffee.”

“I do, but that’s not the point. This mug isn’t empty, it’s actually completely full.”

“But, it’s not.”

“Oh, but it is.” He sets it down on my coffee table, only surface tension keeping it from overflowing.

“So more magic.”

“Not magic, just adjusting the fabric of reality to meet a need.”

“So you can change the universe to have more coffee?”

“Changing the fabric in small ways that are positive, yes.”

“Uh-huh,” I write in my notebook coffee is positive. “So you couldn’t use it to, say, kill someone?”

“I’ve not tried that, but we shouldn’t use the energy the universe has given us to do negative things.”

I note that it wasn’t a no, which isn’t comforting, and on the next line I write killing is negative energy. Then I pick up my water bottle and drink. “So, when can I learn the woo woo magic?”

“You already have, somewhat. You’ve been drinking out of that same water bottle for, what, three days now? Have you ever refilled it?”

I pause for a second and examine it. “Once, I think… but I’ve drank out of it a lot more than one refill would explain.”

“See! You naturally know how to do this, it’s just… well, your brain getting in the way.”

I take a moment then cross out coffee in the notebook and write drinks instead. This is going to be a long session.