The only reason the film even premiered at all to that many people was because Jordan had the bright idea to apply for a grant from the Doc Agnes Foundation for Young Filmmakers and we got eight hundred and fifty dollars, which was barely enough to buy a new computer. Later, everyone found out that Doc Agnes was a satanist but we didn’t know that at the time. At the time, Jordan and I were just pretty happy to get a new computer. Keeping an angel on the last one’s hard drive hadn’t been good for it.
Jordan bought a suit for the premiere, and I borrowed an old dress from my mom, this uncomfortable heavy-skirted thing that Jordan goggled at before settling down. There were two other films being shown after ours but I don’t really remember the specifics. By that time, we had figured out that if we picked up flutes of champagne and drank them fast enough, no one stopped us. They didn’t end up showing those other two movies anyway.
It was at Doc Agnes’ house, of course. He had this whole private movie theater set-up that took up the entire third floor, and everyone filed in, loud and tipsy, cheerfully rustling their silks and wools and whatnot. Jordan and I sat in the last row, sweating and nauseous, like we already had hangovers. Ours was the first movie. It was fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. By the time the film was done, the projector was smoking so much they had to douse it with a fire extinguisher, and an image of the angel in the shape of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 32 had been burned into the screen. All twenty people seated in the front two rows passed out. There were reports later of hallucinations, visual impairment, cognitive dysfunction, and loss of appetite.
Afterwards, Lockheed Martin put out a statement saying that they had nothing to do with it and didn’t even know that dead satellites had the operational capacity to house angels. NOAA’s director announced in his resignation that they’d lost contact with DMSP-32 three years ago, right after the mysterious death of its lead operator. A whistleblower from NASA leaked transcripts from the Apollo 17 mission in which astronaut Ronald Evans spoke with an angel while in orbit around the moon. At one point, Ron asked the angel if God was real, but whenever the angel spoke, it was just written as “[inaudible]” in the transcript, which was all in all hugely anticlimactic and of course Ron had died five years ago so it wasn’t like anyone could ask him what the angel said.
Jordan and I never asked DMSP-32 a single thing about God. We were both sixteen, and we weren’t expecting to find an angel-infested weather satellite hovering in Jordan’s weedy, dried-up backyard. God was just about the last thing on our minds. Jordan’s parents had just divorced, which meant that Jordan’s dad gave him a shiny new video camcorder for Christmas. We’d been taking turns filming each other climbing up onto the roof of the shed and jumping off to to see who catch the branch of the neighbor’s apple tree and hang from it. I fell and broke my wrist, an excruciating, screaming kind of pain that was displaced almost immediately by fear, because that’s when the angel showed up.
After the premiere, the government confiscated the camcorder, both computers, every single floppy disk and memory card Jordan and I had ever so much as breathed on, the movie screen with the angel burned into it, and the projector. They sealed all of it into lead-lined drums and kept it in the same place Los Alamos kept their nuclear waste.
They didn’t really know what to do with Jordan and me. We’d been in contact with DMSP-32 for about ten days. It was twenty feet long, almost the entire length of Jordan’s backyard. It healed my wrist and then stuck around, hovering in place. Most of the film consisted of Jordan and I peeling shreds of metal off the skin of the angel and finding light inside. On the tenth day, it was gone.
Los Alamos offered us both jobs right out of high school. Jordan took it, and I didn’t see him after that. I went to college for mathematics, which seemed like the most angelic major at the time. The day after I graduated I got a letter and parcel from Doc Agnes’ lawyers. Doc had just died, and he’d left me something in his will. This came as a surprise since I had assumed that he was dead already and the foundation was a sort of posthumous honoring of his legacy. It turned out that Doc had been alive the whole time. In fact, sat three seats to our left during the premiere.
The parcel contained a piece of cloth upholstery cut from one of the chairs from Doc’s movie theater. It had a scorch mark in the shape of DMSP-32. I’d know it anywhere.
That night I got a call from Jordan. He sounded older, and also just the same. We hadn’t spoken in four years, but we’d both been chasing angels in the meantime.
“Doc sent you one too?” I asked.
He had. Jordan asked, “Do you ever miss the angel?”
“I miss it all the time,” I said. “Why didn’t it ever speak to us like that other one spoke to Ron?”
“Maybe it thought we weren’t listening,” Jordan said. “I mean, we were kids. Or maybe Ron was just a liar.”
I rotated my wrist. Ever since the angel healed it, it bent ten or fifteen degrees further than it used to.
“I think Doc wanted us to call the angel back,” I said.
“I think so too,” Jordan said. Neither of us asked each other whether it was a bad idea. “Meet me you know where.”
“You know where” was Jordan’s old backyard of course. His mother was bemused to see me, and her bemusement only grew when we filled her backyard with old computers. Jordan revealed that he’d pulled in a favor at Los Alamos, and he’d gotten his hands on my old computer, corrupted past meaning by the angel it had kept.
“I don’t think it’s corrupted,” I admitted. “I think the angel left a piece of itself behind and it’s being kept inside a paradox and can’t get out. We can set it free and let it call the rest of it down. Like a beacon.”
“Will you ask it about God?” Jordan said.
“No,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t feel like the truth either. “Maybe I’ll ask it about Y2K,” I joked. “What about you?”
Jordan looked up at the sky. The sun had gone down, and every now and then a satellite streaked across the sky. In 1998, the world launched one hundred fifty-seven new objects into space, bringing the total to about five thousand. How many of those were dead or dying? How many had angels living in them?
“I’d like to see if it has any questions for me,” Jordan said.
It took us a week. We survived on Red Bulls, beer, and Jordan’s mom’s casseroles. I worked on the computer, and Jordan drove back and forth from Los Alamos with whatever equipment he could pilfer. I wondered how long it would be before the DoD would be knocking on our door. Jordan didn’t seem concerned.
It wasn’t impossible to resolve a paradox, just terribly annoying, and from what I knew of mathematicians, the source of a great deal of discourse. Paradoxes were nearly impenetrable in their state of perfectly balanced absurdity. Garbage in; garbage out. Divinity in; divinity out. Meaning found on either side of infinity.
“Is this what prayer is?” I asked Jordan.
He looked skeptically at the flickering computer screen. We both hadn’t slept in a long time, and I could see the greenish gray light reflecting badly off his sallow eye bags. I probably didn’t look any better.
“Are you going to start praying to it?” Jordan asked me. He turned off the computer immediately.
I slept for a few hours, tossing and turning. Then a little after three in the morning, I went back to the computer and turned it on. To resolve a paradox, you had to partition the illogical from the logical. So that’s what I did.
I woke Jordan up when I realized that it had worked. We both came out into the backyard, our breath steaming in the cold desert air.
Above our heads, satellites were drifting down into the atmosphere, catching fire as they went. A few of them would make it through unscathed enough to make to the ground. The rest would tear apart, too fragile to withstand the sudden friction of the atmosphere.
The angels were falling.