The elevator departs from the enormous angelic hall—okay, it’s really part elevator, part rocket ship—and shuttles across the galaxies. Brooke gasps as the beautiful blue orb of Earth appears through the window. “Oh!”
“Beautiful, isn’t it? One of the finest creations in the universe. And they insist on decimating it, even though they have alternatives.”
The shape of North America appears in the window, and in just a matter of seconds, California appears to be rushing up to meet them.
“But they’ll get it,” Henry assures her. “That’s their job—to get it—and they have eternity.”
“They do?”
“If not here, somewhere. But it would be a shame to waste this incredible creation. Do what you can about that, okay?”
“Absolutely.” Brooke gasps again as the Southern California coast is now right beneath them.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yeah!”
“What?”
“Yeah!”
“What?”
“YES!”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You sure you’re sure?”
“I’m SURE I’m sure!”
THUD! The elevator lands on E. The elevator door opens and Brooke is too surprised even to gasp. They have landed in a small patch of grass by the 405 Freeway, somewhat near the Los Angeles airport. The trees, leaves, and grass shimmer and radiate with their own internal light. From Brooke and Henry’s vantage point, the veil has been lifted, and bending over every single blade of grass is an angel whispering, “Grow! Grow! Grow! Thank you for being here. You are so loved. You are such a blessing. You are a miracle.”
As Brooke looks up and down the freeway, she sees more and more areas of grass, and she marvels at the amazingly stunning sight of more and more angels becoming visible to her.
The freeway is completely clogged. The cars are lit up by the light of the human occupants inside of them. But the exhaust from each car and the smog that hangs over the city seems to move, even dance, in a demonic way.
“What—what are they doing to themselves? Can’t they see what they’re doing?”
“It’s just wild how much denial humans can put themselves in. All of some can see, and part of the others can see, but they suppress it. It’ll be part of your job to help all of all of them see.” To Brooke’s confused expression, Henry adds, “You’ll see what I mean, all in good time.”
He gently takes her by the arm, and they float over the cars. “We landed a little too far east,” he tells her. “We have to cross over the freeway to that neighborhood over there.” The houses he points to are barely visible through the thick smog.
Brooke becomes aware of something that sounds like a beehive. And the beehive is growing louder and louder. As they glide over the freeway, she peers through the car windows. Inside each vehicle, accompanying but completely unbeknownst to the humans, are three angels—two are sitting beside their human and the third is in the backseat consulting a laptop computer.
A seriously suntanned man with a seriously bad hairdo shakes his fist out the window of his BMW to the driver that just cut him off.
“Goddamn son of a bitch! Where in the world did you learn to drive—on a farm?”
“Actually,” Henry chuckles to Brooke, “the answer to that is yes.”
They float over the car next to the boorish Beamer driver to find a woman who appears to be very composed—almost as if she’s about to step onto a ballroom dance floor. But inside her head, her thoughts are going a mile a minute.
“Oh, why didn’t I tell him what I really wanted to say? Why did I say what I said? What was I thinking? Should I call him and tell him what I really wanted to say? Oh, how could I have done that? What should I do?”
“Ouch!” Brooke winces, although she can’t feel pain. But she feels compassion—that’s her job. “That must hurt!”
“Oh, yes,” Henry sighs, “it does. Quite a bit. Takes most of ’em a long time to learn that—if they ever do, that is.”
The beehive, Brooke realizes, is really the cacophony of millions upon millions of thoughts drifting up to her.
Brooke and Henry float over the next car, where the driver is singing to his dashboard. “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt!”
They float over the next car, where the driver is doing the exact same thing. “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt.”
Puzzled, Brooke turns to Henry. “That sounded a little different.”
“He was singing in Japanese. But you can understand everything, everywhere.”
“Why aren’t their angels talking to them, any of them?” Brooke asks.
“How in the world could they hear their angels if their minds are so overly overactive?”
They float over another car and no thoughts float up to them.
“She must’ve meditated this morning,” Henry answers Brooke’s quizzical look. “And every morning for the past thirty years.”
Brooke notices the woman has four angels sitting in meditation around her. “So why aren’t her angels talking? They could get through to her.”
“No need,” Henry replies. “She’s on her right path. They speak to her from time to time just for a touch of guidance and reassurance.”
One of the angels opens one eye to look at the graphs on her laptop and then returns to her meditation. One of the other angels breaks from his meditation to address the woman: “Thank you for all that you do. You’re such a blessing.” As the woman smiles, the angel returns to his meditating.
“See?” Henry says to Brooke. “Actually, every single person on Earth has an angel who says that, over and over, when he or she can get through all the noise of the TV, radio, and the human’s own thoughts. But, even then, so few hear it.”
They float over another car with two people inside and six angels accompanying them. The radio is blaring loudly. The angels have their hands over their ears.
Brooke notices one lone angel over one lone blade of grass growing through a crack in the concrete by the freeway.
“Grow! Grow! Grow!” whispers the angel. “You’re a miracle. Thank you for being here. You’re such a blessing to us all.”
They float over the freeway wall, and Brooke sees an entirely different world as they glide down an attractive, tree-lined street of lovely, little homes with tidy, freshly mowed yards and well-tended gardens. Henry leads her to one particular house with requisite tidy yard along with innumerable angels talking to each blade of grass, each flower, even each leaf on a shrub.
“When it gets too much,” he tells her, “just fade them. You’re not even seeing all the dimensions. Even I don’t, when I can avoid it. It’d make you crazy if you did. But if you do want to see other dimensions, just choose. The choice is always there.”
The angels in the yard fade away as Brooke makes that choice.
The two voyagers float into the house. A pile of shoes greets them and piles of who-knows-what line the foyer. They float down the hallway and into a large family room off the kitchen. Now if you had just walked into the room, you would see a man playing with his young son and a woman potatoing on the couch to an early-morning quasi-news show. And if you could see like an angel, you would see the three humans and nine other beings in the room—a committee of three angels for each human. And that’s not counting the angels for the plants around the room, who are working even more intensely because their charges haven’t been watered in weeks.
Jack. Ohhhhh, Jack. He’s the man playing with the little boy. Yikes—you just want to grab him by those tightly hunched shoulders and shake him loose! The only thing tighter than his clenched fists is his jawline. Jack could be very handsome if he weren’t so sad. And even if you weren’t particularly sensitive, and even if it was a rare moment when Jack had a smile on his face, you’d still know he’s sad. You could feel it, even across the room. If you were to take one look at him, you’d probably want to close your eyes so you could reenvision him as a strong, beautiful, powerful man—what he could be, perhaps what his original blueprint depicted about thirty-five years ago.
“But it’s kind of like someone came along and deflated the balloon of his being,” Brooke says.
“If someone else actually has that power,” Henry replies. “Which no one does.”
Three angels surround Jack: Christopher, Sapphire, and Blake. Your quintessential computer geek, Christopher wears glasses over his sharp, black eyes (yes, as you probably already surmised, angels wear glasses, too, when they want to proudly present that intellectual look). His ebony skin contrasts against his red and blond Mohawk—even angelic geeks like to sport that alternative look from time to time. Christopher constantly studies his laptop to watch graphs, analyze trends, make mental notes from the running tick of information gathered from all corners of the universe, and calculate statistics. On occasion, he looks up from his computer, but it has to be quite the occasion—which you know will happen because you certainly wouldn’t be reading a book about a non-occasion. But basically picture an angelic actuarial services analyzer albeit from the very hip part of town, and Christopher’s your guy...well, your angel.
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