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The bars of the cage were not physical, not in a way Adam could perceive. They were present, in some way, anyhow. Adam hadn’t eaten (by now, it had been years), but in his sinuses a metallic tang like iron poked at his brain. A heavy lock that he could never entirely forget about.
Michael had hidden him away. The way all this had started, Michael inside Adam, had reversed. Now Adam occupied somewhere incomprehensible. A place with no ceiling, yet gray walls that went up forever. Fronds, layers, twists and turns. The walls did not form any box, but an elliptical, blob-ish shape that gave the impression of something organic. Segments marked the rise of the walls up to the white, vaporous impression of the ceiling. A gray band of smooth material, then a shadow of the darkest black concealing things Adam could not imagine. One and then the other, inscrutably upwards forever.
At the base of this structure was where Adam inhabited. He could wander when he liked. There were no closures, anywhere. Shadows persisted, though, where they sprang from the irregular gray struts that crossed the upward chasm. Some were thick, something Adam could walk on if they weren’t high above his head. Others were spindles, poking out of black layers like the whiskers of a catfish.
Indeed, the inside of an angel could not, to Adam’s reckoning, be so different from the cage itself. Still, Michael’s gesture of protection was something Adam noticed. Even an empty gesture was something more than nothing. In this spirit, he blandly felt a kind of camaraderie with Michael.
“Do you think God will let us out soon?” Adam wondered aloud. He had asked before, and Michael had never answered with more than a few non-committal syllables. Today, he sighed, and seemed to roll. Like a hardened prisoner turning to address a novice.
“I wouldn't advise hoping for it,” Michael said, voice sonorous heard from the inside. “I have not prayed to my Father since we entered the cage.”
“What?” Adam cried, perplexed. This was counter to his understanding of what had happened so far. Michael had been so quiet, and so prayerful on Earth. Adam had assumed this had continued. “Why?”
“Ex turpi causa non oritur action,” Michael said, Adam was no less perplexed. After a pregnant moment, Michael continued. “No cause arises from dishonorable action. Prayer would be pointless in my position.”
“How do you figure that?” Adam asked, challengingly. Michael seemed not to notice this and sighed again. Each sign was like the space itself was trembling, a prick of the existential pangs that perhaps compelled Michael to sigh.
“It's a simple idea, really. One cannot plea for clemency when the damage comes from one's own injurious action. If I believed my imprisonment here to be correctable, to be wrong, I would have to believe that I made no mistakes. And I did.”
“Make mistakes?”
“The worst mistakes. I failed. Not at a whim, or at some minor matter. But at the way the world was meant to be.”
Adam was skeptical. A palm frond, something like the unremarkable plastic ferns decorating many a corporate office, fluttered over his hand. He had become used to this; every part of Michael was something strenuously alive attempting to conceal itself. Adam hummed.
“At your duty?” He asked. The strain of confusion from a moment ago had already subsided. No strong emotion persisted long here, and the passing time colorlessly collapsed into one large span. A mercy, maybe.
Michael scoffed. “At my purpose.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Duty is something humans invent to entertain themselves. Purpose is something granted by God.”
Now Adam frowned, half thoughtful and half offended. “What sort of ‘duty’ are you talking about? I never felt a particular duty, I don’t think. I had freedom.”
“You’re more hopeless than even I knew if that’s the truth,” Michael sneered. Adam was angry, and he strained to hold tightly onto the feeling. Michael continued: “your mother, your friends, your education. All of these are only duties, things that humans use to conceal the short pointlessness of their lives.”
“I didn’t need duty to love my mom, or my friends! I didn’t need a duty to want an education! You don’t know anything about humans!” The palm fronds fluttering quickened, giving the leaves a furious, wound-up manner.
“I know everything about humans,” Michael hissed, like the sibilant sound of a rushing river. “With no rules, with no management, you’re nothing but scoundrels. I know your laws; I know your hearts. There is nothing worth saving in them, and yet here I suffer for the attempt.”
Incensed, Adam took the fluttering frond in his fist and crushed it. The wet green sap inside the leaves dribbled out on his straining fingers. “God clearly doesn’t agree with you,” he ground out.
The frond gave up moving in his grip when he said so, and the great dark chamber of Michael’s insides took on a gloomy tinge, colder and darker.
“You never pray, you think you know better. You think you everything better, better even than God. It’s no wonder we’re both stuck down here.”
A long silence passed. Though Adam’s strange abode had not been hospitable before, he found himself pondering the loss of distant silence. Now Michael was close and personal, his feelings at hand. Inadvertently, Adam released the fronds, and they retreated some distance away.
“You don’t know,” Michael began, in a fainter voice than his lecturing candor form before. “You don’t know what its like in here.”
Indeed, Adam did not know. Later he would understand that the cage was changing Michael. Beliefs so long-held that they had almost been in a symbiosis were becoming impossible. A car was one thing before it crashed, and another thing after.
At any moment, the anger that Adam was holding so firmly would dissipate, lost in the ether that numbed him to however many years were passing by. Feeling the pressure to make a final strike, he spat “if you had prayed, I doubt anyone would’ve heard it.”
The gloominess gave off a sound, a sharp hissing like steam rushing out of a pipe. Adam thought that Michael might be about to throw him out, to the real Hell and to where Lucifer was sure to be waiting. His breath froze up in his throat.
After a few moments (or perhaps much longer), though, nothing happened.
The palm fronds, laying limp and somewhat crushed where they had fled from Adam’s grasp. The leaves took on a yellow tinge. In time, none of the green leaves would remain.