Love gives Amy thousands more impressions to collect. She swings around a green cast iron streetlamp, and savors the coolness of the lamp, the heavy ease of her swing, the glances of passersby in cars or with strollers, the uncaring continuation of the world. God would be pleased with her haul.
She collects as gifts and mementos: the skip in her step, the faint mixed scent of pies from a nearby diner, the daylight moon watching over her. Even the raised crack of a sidewalk disrupted by tree roots, even the flashing red of a broken stoplight, even the bends of a chain-link fence that rings a patch of iceplant and jasmine—Everything is stars and guitars!
But Amy works to better hide her joy as she strides into the hospital complex. She tries her best to walk and act like a normal human. She gives the clerks and nurses peaceful smiles while heading down halls, nestling into the elevator, riding to the psychiatry floor.
FIDELITY
The diverter valve was crusted with decades of chalky white lime. Amy pulled it gingerly, and the water stopped flowing into the tub with metallic gagging sounds. The pipes rattled and then the showerhead spat hard water through its holes. The stream beat her head, her small breasts, her belly. She yanked the shower curtain more tightly closed, too late to prevent a trickle from soaking the bathmat. It wasn’t her fault that the shower curtain was so short, but her parents would scold her.
Suddenly, Amy was angry at everything: the indelible grey tinge of the tub, the trickle running down the pipes from the showerhead, the dark mold and swells of the ceiling, the thuds of bouncy bass and footsteps from the family living above them, every beige carpet, every barred window, every wood veneer, every darting roach, every damn thing about the housing complex.
Why? Why did they have to be poor? God had put her in the wrong body.
Armed with a pink shower puff, Amy scrubbed her brownness in violent frustration. She scratched in white lines and only stopped when it began to hurt.
Her body was part of her assignment, after all. She had to treat it with care.
Amy stepped out of the stream, soaped up her puff, and resumed cleaning herself slowly, carefully, tenderly. Maybe at least she could collect a new crevice of herself, a new crook or mole or angle.
Amy returned the water and let it bear down on her face, eyes closed, head raised. The first shower taken in a housing project, she labeled the experience, and packaged the impression up neatly in her mind. She could feel the suds slide down her torso, down her thighs, down her shins, chased by new water. What other firsts could she take from this?
Her body was developing, her lank becoming curve so gradually that the growth was hard to catch. Amy had missed collecting her first pimple and was now accustomed to acne. She had, however, captured the first dirty look from grown men and delivered it to God.
What next?
Her hands wandered to her genitals, and memories rose up of having her hand slapped away from her panties as a toddler. There were short, kinky hairs she’d never before noticed. Oh, Amy realized, this could be a new thing to collect.
COMPETENCE
Amy stood atop a foothill that felt as high as a mountain. She was eleven, made of limber mahogany and tall for her age. She wore black and white and red plaid, but also white wings, black spaceman antenna, a red bowtie.
Around her neck was a golden locket that she grasped with her right hand. She closed her eyes, exhaled, opened them, beheld the world. The desert trail leading to the cliff had dusted her buckle shoes with the hike. The day’s heat rose off the sand and into her body. The sun sank slowly into cupping mountains as blue became twilight. Amy collected these impressions: the thrill of the height, the giddiness bubbling within her. Her flight, this flight, only for her.
You’re sure it’ll work? she asked the animal at her feet. We won’t get in trouble?
Just this once, yes. The animal was a plush toy chimera made of everything cotton-fluff cute and toyland-pastel. Didacus, with his koala ears and cleft-mouth nose, spoke again. But you have to believe if you want to do this.
The sand colors of the city lay spread below, a local bus rumbling along its route on the sun-faded streets of Desert Hot Springs. Amy fixed her gaze on the foothills below her, at the shoe-worn trail that would serve as her landing strip.
I believe.
It’s like you said, you’re a magical girl. Remember? No one can know.
No one can know!
A superhero, just for today.
Just for today! She straightened her bowtie and made a heroic pose. She was Secret Triple-A Amy, Secret Agent Angel Alien. She cried out, Agent, Angel, Alien! Servant of God, defender of Earth!
Amy ran backwards, onto the trail, then forward with arms outspread.
Amy jumped off the cliff, and she—
LOVE
Agent, Angel, Alien? Solomon echoes.
Yeah. You know how heroes have themes, like bats or spiders or panthers?
The couch Amy lies on is perpendicular to her therapist’s office chair. She watches Solomon out of the corner of her eye. He folds his fingers together, taps them tip to tip. It’s mesmerizing.
He waits for eye contact that Amy can’t hold. She glances quickly but then looks back to the paintings on the opposite wall. Grey eyes, she thinks. She’d never before met a black man with grey eyes.
It was my theme, I guess. Secret Triple-A Amy! Amy does a heroic gesture with her arms. A fallen hero from outer space with secret celestial powers even her parents didn’t know.
Solomon covers his mouth but laughter escapes. His voice flows through her ears and fills her blood with heat. His cheeks dimple beneath the scruff, and it’s unfair. It isn’t fair for middle-aged men to have dimples and ringlets and lashes that long. It’s his fault, and now she must capture him too.
I’m sorry for laughing, he says. That was unprofessional of me.
I’m not offended. It’s fine. Amy taps her fingers together.
And this was when you broke your leg?
Both of them, but I bounced back quickly. I’m a magical girl, after all. She laughs.
Solomon strokes his beard in thought. It’s the platonic ideal of a beard, a full but trim salt-and-pepper. Her fingers tense in sync with his strokes, her mirror neurons alive to every movement. What is a ‘magical girl’?
Oh, it’s… It’s a silly anime genre, kind of like a schoolgirl superhero. Sometimes they’re called majokko, little witch girls. They wear costumes and have powers that are secret from the world.
Sounds cute.
Yeah. One of the tropes is that the cute witch girl is sent to live with a human family on Earth to learn something. The host family is hypnotized to believe that she has always been their daughter.
But she’s actually special and will one day return home as a princess.
Exactly. Amy forces a laugh. Did you eavesdrop on my childhood?
I only know what you tell me.
True.
HOPE
Amy was newly a medusa when she first met God. She’d been spending most of her days in the upper atmospheres, learning the seasonal winds as part of a basic navigation class, capturing novel cells to incorporate into herself (she had grown stronger at photosynthesis recently and was developing her grasping strength), or part-timing in the construction of a polyp roost that would be the highest in the region.
God arrived in a column of light strong enough to seem solid. It was like a spear, straight from a sun into their planet. The light broke the sky, cut through clouds, and hit a gathering plane. The socializing strangers scattered in frightened silence.
Amy should have run or hidden but she lingered, mesmerized by the brilliance. A few brave souls remained to watch, their insides bouncing with curiosity. Their emotions jumped from body to body to Amy to the next body. They were witnessing something world-shaking and had to see it through.
And then God spoke—and in their language! Who knew that a column of light could emit pheromones—the air shook and he flared with voice, with scent, with touch, and thundered in all their languages at once.
You, His thunder and flame licked towards Amy, who tensed with fear. She began to sink, letting her flagella rest too long in shock. She felt the others watching her.
She drifted forward, her movement a question.
Yes, child, you. God said, and she was the only one He could mean.
FIDELITY
Amy collected: the rattle of the chain-link fence around the corner house when the neglected pitbull threw his weight against it; the flutter of the ominous P.O.W. flag over the mid-century modern house where an angry white neighbor sat watching from his porch; the subtle shift in tone when her white friends addressed each other versus when they addressed her; the unsmiling eyes of the social studies teacher correcting Amy’s answer with a more acceptable one before the entire class; the dark red smudge of dried blood staining the crotch of her favorite jeans and forcing her to keep her legs closed until the end of the school day; the stink of egg scraped from soaking pans after a breakfast she crafted for her siblings; the non-Black boys who quoted hip-hop lyrics to degrade her while their eyes leered and smiles sat crooked; the coughs; the sighs, the groans, the yawns; the quick ass-grope of a passing male classmate on a dare; the long hip-grope of a touchy uncle that her father should have seen; the trembling tug of her lips during the third classmate funeral in the school year; the cool feel of the desk against her forehead when she lowered her head to feign sleep; the distant pop-pop-pop she prayed was only fireworks; the white contrails crossing the air following a wall-rumbling takeoff; the split pinpricks of the Milky Way as seen from the rooftop in a stupid empty desert town like this one; the pocket-stashed cartons of grocery store candy her family traded among themselves during a second-run movie showing; the flake and peel of shoulder skin mistakenly believed too dark to sunburn; the chuggh-chuggh-chuggh of mom’s sewing machine as it wed together discounted space-patterned cloth for a maxi dress; the separation—however imagined—of her self from her body during conversations with friends whose greater wealth triggered shameful silence; the salty tracks down her cheeks that she did not wipe because she didn’t feel sad, no, that would be ungrateful; the backlit brightness of the computer screen shining an anime otherworld onto her eyes and preloading Amy’s dreams with motion and color on nights where she knew she had to wake up early for school tomorrow.
LOVE
Hey Solomon…
Amy keeps her gaze on the wall but catches sight of his wince.
She flinches too, then starts over. Dr. Robinson, what kind of God do you think rules over us?
Now, I’d like to stay on track today and address your suggestion to taper off your sertraline. This does sound like an important tangent, however. What kind of God do you believe in? Let’s begin there.
A hot and cold one, stupid as that sounds. Very Old Testament. Very capricious. When I feel like He cares, I love the world and I love myself. When I feel He doesn’t, that’s when the depression hits. Geez, it sounds like I’m describing an abusive dad. Amy can’t help laughing.
Solomon leans back in his chair and stretches his neck, tilting this way, then that way. Amy aches to tangle her hands in those curls. Her body pumps another dose of endorphins at the thought.
It sounds as if your mental well-being is deeply linked to your spirituality. In previous conversations, you confessed to feeling guilty for lacking the level of faith your parents possess. Is that right?
Maybe. It’s probably not a coincidence I wound up in that family.
You’ve also mentioned feeling as if you let down your parents for losing your religion.
It’s more that I’ve let God down, but that means letting them down too.
Amy can tell from the shift in his breathing that he’s waiting for an explanation. Instead, she closes her eyes and tries to feel the presence of God. She can feel her freshly manicured toes encased in ankle socks encased in loafers, the sheer leggings clinging to her skin but utterly failing to draw Solomon’s eyes, the folds of her miniskirt that cover the heat and hunger between her legs, the cable-knit turtleneck sweater in an alluring red, her nipples pressing against the sweater with no bra to restrain them, the unearthly metal of the locket nestled between her breasts, the weight of her mascara on her lashes, the foundation concealing her pores, the newness of everything she’d just shaved. He’s scarcely looked at her, despite it all.
Amy can feel the chaise longue beneath her body. Beneath that, carpet, floor, concrete and wiring and piping, soil, crust, mantle, magma, core, and whatever she couldn’t sense. And on the other side: core, mantle, crust, mankind’s thin layer of activity, a couple of layers of atmosphere, and beyond that, darkness and space.
No, she couldn’t feel God from here.
Amy prays in silence: Are you allowing this? Will you help me for once? All I want right now is this one stupid human thing.
Eyes still closed, she nods and speaks aloud: I believe in an impartial God, but I want to believe in a loving one, like they do. Amy opens her eyes to face her therapist straight on. Do you know what a demiurge is?
A malevolent or neutral deity in Gnosticism who is responsible for creating the material world but is not necessarily invested in the stewardship and tending of it. Correct?
You said it better than I ever could.
PURPOSE
The first day with her host family was a tangle of brown limbs in hugs and kisses and wrestles and noogies and held hands. Didacus chose a family with symmetry: a fourth-grade older sister, a second-grade older brother, a toddling younger brother, an infant younger sister, and Amy placed right in the middle.
Look at that! You’ll be able to experience every form of sibling relationship.
Didacus rode in her arms as her trusted security plushy. When the family slept or worked, he doctored Amy into their photos, gave them baby books and health records, tied up loose ends to complement their false memories of maternity and paternity leave.
And they loved her.
They gave her a translation of her name: “Amy,” beloved. They taught her the names of other things: West Adams, Disneyland, North America, NASA, The Industrial Revolution, The Mexican–American War, The Magic School Bus, Sailor Moon, Michael Jordan, Whitney Houston, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Cleophas Oliver Academy, Westside Park, Ralphs, Vons, the hospital, the library, the Social Security office, the mosque, the Prophet Muhammad. They called her precious and entered her into elementary school early—although they were careful to preserve rank by placing her a grade below her older brother.
When her host father flopped down exhausted on his bed, Amy and her baby siblings would jump on his back and call it a foot massage. Amy would wriggle into her host mother’s lap and watch as her crochet needles looped and clinked and tugged at the yarn, birthing a sweater or beanie. She took turns riding in the seat in the shopping cart, she saved her older sister’s dioramas from the trash, she was scolded for scooping quarters out of public water fountains, and she was given free samples of organic apricot and peanut brittle at the farmer’s market. She thought hunger an amusing tickle at first, widened her eyes at the veterans with signs who waited near highway entrances, and regarded all humans with curious acceptance.
Amy reported everything to God each hagioday. He would praise her: My detail brush, how observant! My assistant scribe, so insightful! My lord and lady of minutiae, irreplaceably precious.
God was so easily pleased back then. Amy could tell him stories she invented based on the pareidolic stains on the kitchen wallpaper and He would deem her a genius Earth had never seen before. They were rich then—not in human terms, but Amy and Didacus dropped off bulky Santa-sacks of impressions, robbers’ sacks rich and teeming with Earth’s beauty.
COMPETENCE
Amy wore her magical girl uniform following a report to God: black and white and red plaid; white wings, black antenna, red bowtie. She was one of those invincible orphan children from books and movies, alone aside from Didacus as he led them down a desire path, coached her over a brick wall, down a backroad, across a sandlot. The world around them was bleached and faded with windblown grit in every eroded corner.
I haven’t seen anything new in forever.
It’s not just what you see, Amy, it’s how you see it.
I guess… Amy hopped another low brick wall. Is it possible to run out of new experiences?
They were in a neighborhood of unfinished frames for prefabricated houses, a graveyard for unborn skeletons. Many of the unfinished houses still wore housewrap, their walls calling Tyvek, Tyvek, Tyvek for attention. The only noise was distant traffic.
What if I get tired of everything? she continued. Didacus still hadn’t answered.
Then you jump on a plane and restart your life. That’s what I did. It was an older boy who spoke. He sat in an unfinished glassless window, a dirty blonde in jeans and a band shirt. Agents “Amy” and “Didacus,” right?
Who are you?
Jeremy Newman, Didacus said, Earth Assignee 39R, and Domnina, Companion SPS 418T. You are not authorized to make interunitary contact. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Jeremy jumped from the window and approached them. Domnina ambled four-legged at his heels. Domnina opened her mouth and emitted words without using tongue or teeth to shape them. We have seen so much of this world: its tallest peaks, its forgotten catacombs, its silver gilding and its bulletproof armor, its sweet fillings and soft entrails… So much that humans consider the finest, we have seen.
Jeremy reached over to pat Amy on the head. I have collected so much that God cannot possibly need a thing from you. It was a slow pet, his hand resting where her curly hair was stretched and parted. I want to help you. His palm met the skin at the roots of her hair, his skin cold to the touch. I want to quicken your understanding so that you may escape sooner. He felt the coils that made up her two afro puffs, his thumb and forefinger rolling a spring of hair. But you can take as long as you need. Hadn’t he seen coily hair before? Or was touching her an impression for him? All I ask is that you remember my offer: if you’d like to break free of limitations, find me. Jeremy pulled his hand away and smiled, perfect teeth visible.
Don’t let your mind become as small as theirs. You’re too good for that, Domnina emitted. She and Jeremy leapt upwards and faded to nothing on their way up.
Amy was dumbstruck, then excited. Humans can do that? Can I fly too?
Didacus scowled. They’re breaking the rules of the assignment.
To get more impressions, right? It sounded like he was running out.
You can’t run out. God told me Jeremy was placed in such a wealthy assignment that his views were warped and he could no longer see the value of any impression. That’s why you were placed here, to cover for agents like him with your attentiveness and perspective.
Amy looked long and hard at Didacus’ dark eyes, her mind buzzing with thoughts she hadn’t the words to express.
He’s the bad guy, Didacus simplified further. You’re the hero.
At the time, she believed him.
LOVE
What does it mean to fail God? Solomon continues.
Suicidal thoughts are a waste of the life God has gifted you with, right? Before he can respond, Amy adds, Not that I’m not suicidal. Even now, she wants to show him her good side. I’m just struggling with the problem of evil. I think God allows us to suffer because it’s interesting. Like a child with a bowl of sea monkeys, sometimes you just want to spin them to see how they deal with a hurricane. Amy churns the air, imagining His light. She stops when she thinks He may be watching. Though I’m one to talk. I haven’t suffered that much. I really shouldn’t be sad, huh?
Depression does not respond to reason. There’s nobody who should or should not be depressed. Do you think it would alleviate your depression to explore your spirituality? Solomon turns his hands upwards. Amy’s eyes linger on his ring finger, rejoicing that there is nothing there while knowing that the lack of a ring meant little. He could have a girlfriend, a baby mama, an open marriage, a fiancé; who knew? I might also suggest reading classics on theodicy: Aquinas, Augustine, Hick… I’m not the most familiar with Islamic arguments, but I can have resources gathered by our next appointment.
Amy gazes at the brown paneled ceiling, warmly lit by its three hanging lamps. She bathes in the depth of his voice, paying half-attention to his attempt at his job. He says many things: …religious observance might worsen your distress … literally God-fearing … unhealthy paradigm … there may be no definitive answer to be found … a list of recommended literature … my earlier recommendation … mindfulness meditation.
Maybe he realizes she’s not listening, but Solomon quiets. He rummages in his desk.
I think I just need to be indulged, she says.
Indulged? He speaks without looking at her.
I’m finally starting to value the basic things humans use to distract themselves: food, sex, consumption…
She wants to say it already. She finally understands the emotion that inspires every goddamn human pop song. She wants to thank him, she wants to jump him, she wants to start with the top button of his dress shirt and slowly work her way down to his pants zipper. She has never wanted an experience so badly. It’s the fault of this adult body of hers, isn’t it? Too old for innocence and limerence, her first crush is supercharged with lust.
I… Amy watches his face. Why did his anticipation look so sad? Was he disappointed in her? Did he know what was coming? I think I’m doing things out of order.
Can you expand on that? He turns to her, engaged again, calmer now.
I feel like there are steps or levels in the game of being human, like I was going the right way at first but then got lost or fell behind. I think I’m close to getting back into the game, but I have so much to catch up on. I don’t know how to flirt, for example. I’ve never been in a relationship before. I wish there were classes on things like that, people who could teach you.
I disagree that there is a set order, but I understand your desire for guidance. Solomon nods slowly and strokes his beard, ignoring all her subtext. I have an idea.
WILL
Headquarters was not something that Amy could remember with a human mind. It didn’t help that she had to shed her human skin to report back. It didn’t help that it looked different with every visit. Conflicting memories of HQ settled in her mind as manageably mundane images: a mall extending outwards in all four dimensions, a beehive of activity in a tessellated nest, a pure white backdrop like a light tent. Many of her memories were so baffling that they failed to stick and decayed into mental lacunas.
Amy remembered this particular trip as an anime: bright, drawn, cute, flat, the heroic story of someone else. HQ was a mothership of biomimetic machinery and angular halls, all populated with aliens designed by a hundred guest artists. Didacus was with her, and the little blue guy was setting the telecurr on a heavy blue and green planet. Their destination was visible through the scope of the telecurr, which had a door to the scope’s target within its massive base.
Didacus explained as he worked at the telecurr’s computer console. Theoretically, you could return to HQ on any sunbeam that reaches Earth, but your assigned body will be too heavy and fragile for light travel. Fortunately, the planet has a reflective satellite we can reach via its reflected beams. You’d just ride those moonbeams right back to their original star, and voila! But you’ll need this.
Didacus placed a locket in Amy’s hands. She knew by feel that it was crystallized wisdom.
Are you ready?
Amy held the locket to her chest and nodded. Didacus pressed a console command and the telecurr’s door swung open. The door closed behind them after entering, sealing them in a chamber that filled with light. The light dissipated their bodies, pulled them in and shone them across the galaxy to their target.
Amy and Didacus landed embodied in the sand of a deserted beach, the air dark above them. Amy stood on only two legs, now a skinny brown child. She couldn’t stay in the air when she leapt, couldn’t drift or float at all. She grabbed a handful of sand and tried to take it into herself, but her body was shut tight, skin cutting her off from the world. The only opening she could find was the body’s mouth, which rejected the sand in pain. Amy spat, then dipped her head in the waves to let the liquid wash away the irritants. The water stung her new eyes. Everything here was so rough and heavy.
Didacus kneeled with Amy in the foam and cleaned her baffled face with a paw. Her body shook from crying, laughing, or hiccupping. It would take a while to understand its needs.
It looks like we got our first impressions.
PURPOSE
Amy’s favorite impression was the second grade’s new microscopes. There were four of them, bright green with knobs chunky enough for their hands. The teachers inserted the tiny glass slides, clicking the microscopes’ bases locked. Amy’s twelve-student group bunched up around Ms. Hill to take turns. The louder black and brown kids clashed with the most covetous white kids, and little observant Amy was the last to take a peek.
It’s me! She cried out, confusing her classmates. There was a translucent green orb, carrying little green balls inside it, floating in a microscopic world. The teacher called it volvox, and Amy hung the word in her mind like her parents hung photos of their children in their home. Ms. Hill narrated the history of diatoms and algae, objects that looked like home. Amy seemed to leave her body and float around the room as her old medusa self. She was slow to return to her seat for the next exercise. The teacher spoke on and the others teased her, but she was silent with glee. How did something microscopic look so much like her gas giant home?
As she returned to her seat, the world began to shake. Amy thought at first that she was becoming weightless again, but the other children felt it too and hid under desks. Earthquake! they shouted as even the teacher took cover. Amy did not duck, focused as she was on the collection of others’ fear and surprise, of the swing of the science room cabinets, of the clatter of the desks the children believed would save them. Amy! The teacher hissed, and she finally crouched on hands and knees to wait out the shake. She was smiling as she did so, still so new that she found pleasure in collecting even painful experiences, so new that she believed she would not be allowed to die.
Posters rustled as thumbtacks fell, the microscopes thudded against the ground, the storage case shook open and dropped glass, classmates wailed, and Amy was happy to be alive.
FIDELITY
Amy’s legs were wrapped in white and elevated in front of her by a hospital bed. The food was bland, but she dutifully collected even that—the taste of your mom’s cooking after several days of mediocre hospital food was a stronger and more particular impression than your mom’s home cooking.
Her family returned to hug and coo over her, to bring her flowers and balloons from classmates and teachers, and deliver her favorite stuffed animal. Her mom tucked Didacus into her arms, and Amy forced a smile. She waited until evening, when her family was gone and the hospital staff was busy elsewhere, before she spoke to Didacus.
You’re a liar.
No, it was a miscommunication. I told God that you wanted to cheat a little, and He seemed open to it… But that morning, He said that the impression of your injury would be more valuable than the impression of your flight, which would not count as a true human experience—
You promised!
I never used the word promise. I only ever said it should work. It should have, it didn’t. Anything outside the normal rules of this world’s physics requires special clearance that, ultimately, we didn’t get. I do have permission to speed your recovery, and I doubt we would have gotten the experience of hospitalization otherwise.
You’re a liar. Hot tears welled up in Amy’s eyes. She let them flow. So many of these experiences were new, including her first swear: you’re a goddamn liar, and evil too.
I’m not. Part of my duty is that I care about you. You could even say I love you.
If you did, you’d try harder to take care of me. Can’t you fix my hair, my nose, my acne, anything? Why did you let me get anemia? Or let my little siblings get jaundice, every one? Or let my grandma die of cancer? Are you going to do that to me? Do you want someone to capture that experience because Jeremy won’t? Why do you let my mom and dad work so hard for so little? Can’t you punish the little white girls on the bus who called me the n-word? Or the ones at school who got me in detention? You know I wouldn’t be like Jeremy if you gave me powers for real, all bored and selfish. I would be the kind of magical girl who makes houses for Skid Row or puts evil billionaires in jail. I could do so much more, see much more, feel much more if you’d even let me ride a plane and travel. So why do you keep me weak and let the world stay unfair?
Didacus shook his head at everything she said, like a teacher disappointed in her response. Because it’s beautiful. Can’t you see? It’s all beautiful.
Amy grabbed him by the top of the head, roughly as if he were filled with cotton. She tossed him, ribs pained with the effort, into the large trash can near the hospital sink.
Didacus said nothing as he climbed back out. He would vanish for most of the night, only returning slightly before her family did, because they expected him to be there.
But when her family returned, she would toss him again, claiming that she was too old for stuffed animals. He would have to go dummy while they were watching, and she would stare past her family right at his face as he sat immobile in the trash, searing it into her memory as a present for God.
LOVE
You love video games, if I remember correctly. Right?
I do! Amy’s heart jumped every time Solomon remembered anything about her. Never mind that he was paid to do so.
A colleague of mine is developing a social skills development app I think you’d like. It builds upon Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development, which theorizes that children develop into healthy and functioning adults through a series of stages, each characterized by crises over what the individual can accomplish. The failure or success in each stage affects the health and socialization in the following stages.
Oh, game levels? Like the original Mario Brothers?
Solomon stifles a laugh, and Amy’s heart sings to have prompted another smile. Something like that. He regains his composure. Erikson likens each stage to the floor of a house, a foundation for the next. A failure doesn’t prevent you from moving forward so much as it becomes unsteady ground on which to build. But you’ve always got to keep building.
Even if you’re building on a failure?
Failure is when lessons are learned.
Is there a stage where you need to learn how to love?
Yes, but it’s more focused on developing the capacity for intimacy. Not necessarily romantic love, but friendship, trust… Solomon’s hand steeples collapse into wringing. Amy stares. His fingers are two-toned with the dark creases where they’re accustomed to bending, and every one is unringed and naked.
What age is that? What stage am I in? She leans towards him, knowing very well that he can see down her shirt from that angle.
Psychoanalysis is not my area of expertise. Solomon shrugs. I believe the fifth or sixth stages lasts from the age of eighteen to the age of forty, from the beginning of adulthood until middle age. The crisis is whether one can develop intimacy or suffer isolation. He pulls his jacket closed as if modeling the behavior he expects.
It’s me! So how do I win?
I can refer you to a psychoanalytic therapist if you prefer. He can’t face her. He checks his watch, then returns to his papers. Or I can write the name of the app for when it’s released.
How are you doing in your stages, Solomon? Are you winning? Sweat gives a shine to his brow, and his mouth tightens.
I don’t think that’s relevant to the conversation at hand. He forces a smile, undimpled.
But it is! You’re the first person I’ve told about so many things and your humanity helps me feel more human. I need to know more about you. Dr. Robinson, tell me more about love.
WILL
Amy’s first view of HQ was a bottomless, topless bustle styled by the likes of Kandinsky or Miro. She was entering a painting of music, having become a jot of orange cutting a pink arc past all kinds of color and form and field. Everything tangible was sentient, every figure in motion a different lifeform, with shapes suggesting unknown histories and homes. The lines were paths and the colors, rooms. Each figure cut an arc towards a central field of black.
Amy can’t remember how many were chosen, let alone their scents and sounds as they lined up in the black field for orientation. Fragments came to mind: a stoney brow, four segmented eyes, a thin exoskeleton, bone, flesh, collagen, or liquid.
God revealed Himself, now a radial burst of light instead of the column she’d seen before. He stared them down, a star addressing each figure personally at once.
You have been chosen to serve as my limbs. You shall take in impressions of creation and report to me the thisness of all things.
God led them to the essay room, a color field of darker black where they would drop off their impressions. God pulled into Himself and was gone.
The crowd buzzed. There were other orange jots, strangers of her people, Earthbound strangers with foreign bodies. They bonded with sighs and jitters.
Amy had been too shy to ask for origins and destinations. Looking back, she wonders if they were all angels. Did they get Asian or white or Latino bodies, lean or weighty or disabled ones, homes in the slums or the suburbs? Perhaps HQ was nothing more than a great dice cup, and Earth was just where her little jot self happened to land, snake-eyed.
FIDELITY
Amy’s last view of HQ was a dry tundra dotted with freestanding doors to nowhere. Every angel or agent was a chimera with a stoney grey cast. There was neither up nor down, only Nearer or Further to Meaningful Objects. Amy could not remember her form in that view, only that it was ugly. It was becoming harder to feel, collect, and report back. The de-Chirico starkness of HQ seemed to reflect her failures as the Secret Agent Angel Alien.
The servant of God, defender of Earth, heaved herself into the black field of the essay room and flopped onto its floor. She used to stand straight with arms outstretched to offer all of herself for examination. Today, she lay prone as a slug, belly delivering her impressions directly to the floor. This worked just as well.
A sob shook her body, cheek against the floor, tears another medium for information. The walls lapped up those tears, inhaled those sobs, took whatever they encoded. Her saltwater filled the room to the top, filled and pressurized until it squeezed her body and burst her.
Inside, she was her original self, a delicate mote.
I only have sadness and sadness and sadness to give, she warned God.
She had cried in the essay room many times before, but this was the first time it answered: you have offered this exact flavor of sadness before, my pet. Please return with something new.
CARE
Sometimes, Amy chanted the names Jeremy, Domnina to herself.
She would say it every year, every decade, as her skin’s creases grew deep and permanent, as her muscles lost their tautness, as her hair crisped and whitened, as fibroids swelled from peanuts to walnuts to grapefruits inside her bowels, as her ovaries puttered to a permanent stop.
Jeremy, Domnina she’d whisper as she jogged her pants leg in a fifth-floor waiting room.
Jeremy, Domnina; she’d whisper with eyes closed while laying corpse-posed on the YMCA floor.
Jeremy, Domnina. She’d catch glimpses of their smiles on TV, as a flash of platinum blonde in a downtown crowd, as a fog-blurred child and pet in the backseat of the sedan in front of her.
She chanted it for good luck: Jeremy, Domnina. Maybe they could be summoned like the fallen angels they were. Maybe they would appear to carry her away: Jeremy forever young with his pink-and-pink hand outstretched; her hand dark, wrinkled, with moles like her Earth mother’s. She would accept his offer of endless life and meaningless pleasure. She would become her most beautiful self as he pulled her out of her wasted, wilting form and into a body of rapture and light.
LOVE
If you want me back—Amy grasps her locket with one hand and prays into it—then please! Please, please, God, please make him love me back. I’ll capture everything all over again, from the sandbox to the full moon, anything you want, but it’ll all be different this time. Please, God! You know you owe me one.
Solomon has been quiet for a spell, so she stands. Solomon?
Please sit back down.
She sits, but grabs the bottom of her shirt, arms crossed to pull it over and off.
Amy Thomas. Solomon’s voice is firm. He reaches below his desk. A panic button?
Wait, wait, wait! Amy waves for him to stop, turtleneck caught around her neck. Please don’t call security. I’m keeping my distance, see? I’m not going to hurt anyone. She finishes removing her sweater, topless aside from the locket. I guess it would hurt your career to play along, but you can call me crazy if that helps. This’ll be a new experience no matter what happens: love, heartbreak, involuntary commitment… She bends to remove her shoes, socks, and stockings. Although I’m sure that I won’t get better, can’t get better until I tell you this, and you indulge me a little more. She drops her miniskirt, then her panties, and faces Solomon nude.
Amy has never been prouder of the body she’s been assigned.
I love you.
MATURITY
What happened to an agent or an angel when they died?
Maybe she would let herself fall, softly down into the desert where her parents made their home, and her soul would rise out like heat back to the sun. She would ride back to HQ on a sunbeam, never to return.
No, God would want the impression of her death. She has to die in the essay room where the walls can swallow her up. Her host family won’t mourn because the familiar will erase her every trace. No funeral to record. Only God and little Diddy would ever know.
Or they could return her to her original featherweight body. If she lived long enough to collect all there was on this planet, maybe God would send her home with a plaque or medal to carry within herself. She could return home to build mountains and teach polyps.
Maybe dying was fine after all.
HOPE
Words in Amy’s birth language couldn’t capture her life on Earth. This human brain was losing the language to describe her original being as a one-girl colony. She missed her chemosensors, missed sighing her thoughts. The human tongue was too clumsy for her people’s poetry. Amy recited and reconstructed definitions to keep her language alive:
The word for “self/I” was the same as “accumulation/bundle,” or “gather/prize” plus “time.”
The word for “you” was “another/this/that” plus “accumulation/bundle.”
The word for “adult” was “heavier/older” plus “bundle.”
The word for “child” was “lighter/newer” plus “bundle.”
The word for “baby” was “lightest/pure/potential” and sometimes even “nothing yet.”
The word for “lover” was “regular/steady” plus “energy/emotion” plus “source/base.”
The word for “sex” was “deep/entangled/extensive” plus “conversation/exchange”.
The word for “society” was “sex” plus “deep/entangled/extensive” plus “beyond/many”.
The word for “death” was “disperse/exhale” and it was always a willing decision.
There was no word for “murder.”
There was no word for “hate” or “evil.”
There was no word for deliberate harm, and the words for “regret” and “accident” and “harm” were the same.
The most violent thing about English, the language of her assignment, was the power differential in its subject-verb-object structure. That things were done to and done at was painful to her. Her people sighed in synchronicity, everything with unless otherwise noted. In her language, to love was to be loved, whether physically or emotionally.
That a one could fuck or rape the object of one’s desires was evidence that English was not a language of love. Or so thought Amy one day, while sitting in a bathtub surrounded by pony toys and shampooing her child-body’s coily hair.
LOVE
Solomon blinks fast and often, hands tapping fast, his eyes glued to her—but isn’t that desire in his gaze? He tries to clear his throat, preparing to de-escalate her somehow.
It hurts Amy to see pain on the only human she’s ever desired. She gives him a good minute to reply, but he provides nothing.
So she continues. Amy reaches to remove her skin, her bones, her body, all the illusion of material being. The three hanging lamps blaze bright as her locket cracks and breaks.
God is watching now, she can tell. She prays up in gratitude: thank you.