THE ANGEL STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF A PORN SHOP on Seventh Street near Pershing Square reading a map. His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten anything in four thousand years. Worse, the plastic sandals he’d found in a Salvation Army discount bin pinched his toes. He had on brown corduroy pants worn smooth in spots so that they looked like a relief map of the Andes, and a green Windbreaker zipped up to his neck to hide his wings. Lucky for him, they’d confiscated his halo, or he’d have needed a hat, too. With the lack of food and the heat, Qaphsiel was sure that if he had to wear one more stitch of human clothing he’d have defected to You-Know-Who’s side a long time back. Probably right after the Black Death swept across Europe and Asia . . . how long ago was it? Things were really looking up for him then. Whole cities laid waste. Flagellants running wild. Riots. Murders. Countries on the brink of anarchy. It looked like the human race was going to snuff it without him having to find the box after all. But then the unthinkable happened. The Plague died out. People got better. Just like after the Flood, the stinking, dirty survivors went on living and breeding and generally making a mess of the planet all over again. Some days, sunny ones like this when people looked so happy and non-extinct, it hardly seemed worth the effort anymore.

The map the angel held wasn’t an ordinary one. First of all, it wasn’t on paper, but a kind of semirigid ectoplasm. Shapes moved across its face, millions of squiggles, dots, spheres, and pyramids in four dimensions. Some shapes floated and others ducked below the flow, like cubist fish—a simple symbolic representation of the Earth, plus humans, supernatural creatures, and other celestial beings.

Qaphsiel was looking for something very specific. Something he hadn’t seen in forty centuries. The lack of the object was why they’d exiled him on Earth in the first place. In the cool of the Earthly nights, when he slept in Griffith Park staring up at the stars, among winos and teenagers screwing in the scrawny drought foliage, he longed for the good old days in Heaven when he drank ambrosia and he and the other angels played games with star dust and DNA. His old friend Raphael—the archangel of healing—had invented the platypus that way, while Netzach had invented pulsars. Back when he was still allowed to play, Qaphsiel mostly stuck to star games, since the one time he got a really complicated DNA pattern to work, it turned out that he’d invented syphilis, and that hadn’t been a hit with anyone.