THE FIRST COMING
Eloa, the angel of sorrow and compassion, felt the frisson of Empty Boy's longing and despair as she ascended the stairs to the third floor. She was already wet and trembling at the thought of their imminent encounter. Eloa had been born from a single tear shed by the Christ at the grave of Lazarus. But names are evanescent, just as ephemeral as people or even the angels themselves. The names that appear in this epistle reflect this elusive nature of existence, in which even simplest of things change from day to day and moment to moment.
Eloa was also one of the Orishas of the religious tradition called Santeria, sometimes called Obeah or Voodoo. There she is called Ochum, the goddess of love and abundance. She feeds from human desire, and she often uses this power to transform herself. The Orishas, like all angels, are able to take possession of the bodies of their human worshippers.
She called the human horse she rode the "Pin Cushion Girl," for reasons that will soon be apparent. Eloa felt every nuance of the anguish and joy of the people around her, a sensation denied to the unseeing masses that surrounded her in this artificial anthill of concrete, steel and glass. She knew that what she felt was a kind of telepathy or spiritual union. In some cases, she knew events before they occurred, a form of precognition granted to angels and their foes.
But the docs at Johns Hopkins had summarily rejected those ideas. Psi phenomena did not exist, they proclaimed vehemently (and don't get them started on angels or demons). She could feel their intense fear of such phenomena and the threat they posed to their precious Weltanschauung of reductionist neuroscience.
The Johns Hopkins neurologists explained to her that humans possess over 400 different types of olfactory receptors. Whereas most people possess only a small minority of these receptors, they told her, she likely possessed the majority of them. This rendered her extraordinarily sensitive to a wide variety of biochemical ligands, including of course human pheromones. Just passing within a hundred yards of a person enabled her to feel their darkest desires and undisclosed ecstasies, with an almost supernatural accuracy, although Eloa knew they could drop the "almost" in her case.
The Johns Hopkins neuroscientists told her that she was an olfactory empath of extraordinary sensitivity, and they offered her a chance to join the CIA's psych ops team, to assess the psychological states of subjects undergoing enhanced interrogation, using the banal (one might even say medieval) techniques of waterboarding, fingernail manipulation, bisection and extraction, lumbar vertebrae realignment by height elongation through stretching on the rack (far more effective than Shiatsu massage), demi-crisping (burning the right half of a Gitmo guest at the stake while the miscreant's left half was kept alive through being continually hosed down with ice water), and of course last, but far from least, the techniques of sexual humiliation and abasement.
Eloa's ears and nose had perked up at the mention of these last techniques, as she understood that the Gitmo interrogators themselves got to interact directly and intimately with the internees, who were often aroused by their shame and excitement at being stripped naked before the lewdly exposed faces of the infidel women, and their shame at the erections and longings that these female demons engendered in them.
But Eloa was an instrument of pleasure and of carefully cultured defilement, not of the pain, suffering and abandonment that rode the wings of uninvited torture.
So she had declined the CIA's kind offer, and had walked the streets ever since, in search of the unwanted suffering that made the world ring hollow to so many of its involuntary denizens.
Her reveries were interrupted when she reached the door of the Empty Boy's third floor apartment. She considered knocking on it, but knew that his anguish was too great and that there was no time for subtlety or finesse. She pulled her Glock magnum, slammed in a clip, and kicked the door open.
Empty Boy lay crumpled in a heap against the far wall and floor. He watched Eloa with the haunted, shadow eyes of a dying roadkill taking in the descent of a murder of crows. He held a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 revolver to the roof of his mouth. "Mon't co many clozzer, mor I mill ble mu brans ou," he said.
"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full?"
"My mon hab nee..." he said before withdrawing the revolver from his oral cavity.
"I don't have any mother," he said much more clearly.
Eloa raised her Glock so that it was pointed at the center of his forehead. She flipped open her badge. "Freeze, demon. I'm Special Agent Eloa Seraph of the Federal Bureau of Sexual Relations. Eloa took a step closer to him.
"Don't come any closer," he repeated, much more clearly this time, "or I will blow my brains out."
"Drop that pistol, you lowlife pretender," she said, "or I will blow your brains clean out of your skull and scatter them all over your precious Britney Spears wallpaper."
The Smith & Wesson hit the floor in a split second. It was just as Eloa thought. This guy wasn't quite ready to cut his cerebral cortex loose, at least not yet. But he was getting there.
She plopped down next to him, her back resting on the purity of the fortunately still inviolate Britney Spears wallpaper.
"Want a smoke?" she asked him.
"I never tried them, but I guess so. If today is not the day to start, I don't know what is."
Eloa patted down her shirt and skirt pockets in search of a cig. "Sorry, I forgot. I gave up smoking five years ago."
"The story of my life," he said. "Whenever I reach out for pleasure, I'm shit-out-of-luck."
Eloa sniffed the air and wrapped herself in the dark desperation of Empty Boy's loneliness and abandonment. "Do you mind?" she asked, as she ripped the black T-shirt from his torso.
He didn't seem to mind.
She laid her head upon his more than ample shoulder and ran her fingernails down over his left pectoral muscle, down his washboard abs, and beneath his blue jeans, feeling the unshaven bush that awaited all the pleasure that she could deliver to him.
