As the pain oscillated in the front part of her head, Gwendolyn’s headache seemed far more important to her than the report she had just heard on the radio about the death of 593 Burmese peasants, or the story about that seven-year-old boy in Arizona who was unable to make a proper paper airplane and found himself the subject of ridicule. Gwendolyn firmly believed her trouble would go away if only she could find that bottle of little white pills in the bathroom cabinet, the cabinet behind the mirror she didn’t especially want to look at right now. There it is. She grabbed the bottle.

As Gwendolyn’s headache slowly ebbed, she wrapped a birthday box for her friend Samantha. Gwendolyn had bought the wrapping paper first, and then the box, and then some confetti. She had planned to find a gift to hide among the festively colored strips of shredded paper, but as she went from store to store and shelf to shelf, none of the items satisfied her. "Oh, just pick out something," she had told herself, but found she could not follow her own advice. "There must be something Samantha needs, something she wants, something she wouldn’t hate..." In frustration, Gwendolyn filled the box with the confetti, folded the wrapping paper around the box, then tied a bow.

Gwendolyn leaned out her apartment window to watch the traffic on the street below. She saw an angel go through a red light. "They don’t even pay attention to common traffic laws. Just who do they think are? Someone could get hurt." The angels in Gwendolyn’s neighborhood rode bicycles, darting between the lanes of cars, narrowly avoiding accidents and miraculously skirting around the never-to-be-crushed toes of pedestrians. "What is it they want? What is it they do? They never seem to stop riding their bikes. I thought they were supposed to protect us or something."

Gwendolyn returned to the table where she had wrapped the box and saw how empty and light it felt when she lifted it. She knew she couldn’t actually offer it to Samantha, unless she could think of a story to explain the enigmatic box of confetti. "An angel gave it to me, and said it was for you..." No, Gwendolyn knew that explanation would never work. Samantha was an atheist, despite the overwhelming evidence of the angels.

"Just who does she think those bicyclists are, anyway?" Gwendolyn thought. "I’ve noticed the way she dares them by stepping into their oncoming paths, as if challenging them to prove their existence. They always swerve, just in time."

Gwendolyn sighed with resignation and thought of throwing out the foolishly wrapped box, but instead she placed it on a bookshelf. She flipped through the pages of a clothing catalog she had received in the mail. "Perhaps something in here... God, all the stores seem the same, the same dresses, the same pants, the same purses..." She yawned and dropped the catalog on the floor. The trouble that had caused her headache obviously was lingering, although the pain was no longer in her temples. She went to the telephone and called Mrs. Evelyn Alger of Tuba City, Arizona.

"Hello, Mrs. Alger?... This is Gwendolyn Goshen... No, I don’t think you know me. I was just calling to see if your son had figured out how to make a paper airplane yet... What?... Well, I didn’t mean to upset you, it’s just that... Yes, I know the other kids make fun of him. I feel so sorry for him, to tell you the truth. It’s just that we’re all very anxious for him to learn how to make a proper paper airplane. It’s causing great anxiety, many lingering effects. I feel somehow that your son’s ability to make paper airplanes is very important to me. If only he could cross this hurdle, it would have a ripple effect, and these horrible migraine headaches of mine might cease. Hello? Mrs. Alger? Are you there?" Gwendolyn put the receiver back in its place. "I don’t know why she got so upset. I was just trying to help."

Gwendolyn stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at the bedspread, at the bookshelf, at the box of confetti, and then she realized she was staring again. Mr. Trimble was always telling her to stop staring off into space. "For Christ’s sake," he would say, "at least attempt to look productive." And she would type a memo or walk to the water cooler and then go back to her staring.

Gwendolyn remembered there was a new store at the mall in the suburb north of her neighborhood, where the people who waited behind the counter picked out the presents for you. She felt a slight lull in her headache, so she thought it was safe to look in the bathroom mirror long enough to comb her blondish-brown hair, which became entangled in thick knots if she failed to comb it every hour, as if it were consciously struggling to form a new hairstyle without her consent. She tried to imagine what that hairstyle would look like, but she never let it reach that point. She combed out the knots and paused a moment to examine her skin. The tiny pores on her sharp, triangular nose were not as noticeable as they had seemed on some previous visits to the mirror, or perhaps it was just the angle of light coming through the window.

On the way from her apartment to her car, Gwendolyn forgot to look both ways and felt the breeze of a bicycle passing inches behind her back. She turned in time to see the angel speeding away, the crumpled, useless wings on his back creasing in the wind. She wondered what had happened to the angels’ wings. Had they been punished for something? Inside her car, the radio broadcast the latest news about the disaster in Burma. When she heard the number of people already counted among the dead, she sighed. Just another inevitable tragedy you heard about on the radio. She tried to remember where Burma was, and all she could think of were those signs they used to have for "Burma Shave."

The bicyclists steered fractions of an inch from her car as she drove, and yet they never made contact. Gwendolyn knew it was pointless to worry, since the bicycles were protected from accidents by the grace of God, and so she tried to ignore the angels, to look away from them, as if they were insects buzzing by her windshield and yet never splattering against it. But she knew they were there. She cringed when she sensed their presence, always feeling a collision was imminent, and yet it never happened. To distract her attention, she looked at the malls along the sides of the highway. "All of them look the same... Now, which one has that store?"

Gwendolyn couldn’t remember which mall it was, so she guessed and drove into the parking lot of a shopping center that looked slightly more familiar than the others. She got out of her car and walked along the sidewalk for a minute, and squinted to see the names of the stores in the distance, but none of them was the one she was looking for. No, this wasn’t the right mall. She stopped walking and stared at the stacks of televisions in the window in front of her, each playing out the same scene on the midday newscast in different shades of pixels: The cameras pulled in for a close-up of Edwin Alger as he desperately attempted to fold the paper. His hands shook so hard he could barely hold the paper, let alone fold it. He broke down, crumpling the page and crying. The televisions cut to another scene. Little Edwin went up the porch into his house. His mother leaned out the front door and made an angry gesture at the camera.

Gwendolyn shook her head and went back to her car. "Poor Edwin. I feel sorry for him, but I do wish he would end this ridiculous ordeal." Her headache made a slight return.

The second mall Gwendolyn chose was the correct one. The store she was looking for was called "We Choose 4 U." Inside the shop, a man in a double-breasted suit said he would help Gwendolyn select a gift for Samantha. "But first, you must tell me something about you and your friend. I must know the giver and the receiver before I choose the correct gift," he said. Gwendolyn opened her mouth to speak, but the man held up his hand to momentarily silence her.

"Before you begin, I will tell you what I’ve already deduced about you. You are going through a time of great distress, are you not?" She nodded numbly, and he continued. "You are dissatisfied with your appearance, although everyone tells you that you shouldn’t be, they say you’re attractive in a quirky kind of way. But you don’t want to be attractive in a quirky kind of way, do you? You want to be outright attractive, like a magazine model. Perhaps your outward appearance wouldn’t be such a concern to you if you were satisfied with your job, but you’re mired down in a dead-end position that falls far short of the expectations you had in college. You studied for a career in business, but the economy was slow when you graduated and so you spent months living in your parents’ house, unable to land even a low-prestige entry-level business position. Finally, you got so sick of living with your mother and father, who were complaining endlessly about the way you had wasted your years in college, that you took a job you considered to be beneath your talents. You became a secretary. A secretary! You cursed yourself every day on the way to work and found yourself staring off into space when you sat at that desk, but it paid just enough money for you to get your own apartment. Now you live alone, and you rarely call your parents anymore. It’s not that you dislike them, or resent them, or anything like that. You love them. But what is there to say to them? You can’t very well talk about your job with them, can you? During your first six months or so as a secretary, you went out on dates with men who were acquaintances of your friends, but none of them seemed really interested in you and you didn’t seem really interested in any of them. You always felt as if the two of you were going out on a date because it would be socially proscribed not to do so. After a while, the dates became less and less frequent. Around the same time, you began watching the television news or listening to the radio during the time slots when you had previously been going out on dates. The news during these times of the day seemed strange and different than it did at other times. The newscasts featured stories that appeared to be trivial at first glance — stories about the everyday travails of people like yourself. For example, that suffering child who cannot figure out how to make a paper airplane. You found yourself relating to news stories more than you ever had in the past, although at the same time you felt the media were acting despicably. And these stories began to convince you there was something terribly wrong with the direction in which this country is heading. No, not just this country, this entire planet. You feel nothing can be done to change the course of events, not even divine intervention. You see examples of God’s existence — I’m a bit unclear about this part, I’m not sure what it is you see exactly that convinces you in the existence of a higher entity—"

"The bicycles!" Gwendolyn said, grasping at the man’s sleeve, seeing how powerful his insights were.

"The bicycles?" he said, his brow furrowing, puzzled. "I’m not sure if understand that... But in any case, despite this evidence of a supreme being, you see no evidence that God is doing anything to protect you or make life better for you and the rest of the human race. You begin to wonder if God is indifferent. And so when you went shopping for a gift for your friend, you thought, ‘What the hell difference does it make what gift I buy if God is indifferent to the fate of us poor, suffering humans?’"

"Yes! Yes!" she cried. "That’s it!"

The man brushed Gwendolyn’s groping hands off his jacket sleeve. "Please, Ms. Goshen."

"How did you figure out so much about me?"

"We are trained to be perceptive," he said. "Now this is going to be difficult choosing a gift for your friend. Can you tell me a little bit about her?"

"About Samantha?" she said, freezing at the thought of describing her friend. "Let’s see... I went to college with her. She’s a biochemist, and she’s an atheist, which is downright weird if you ask me. I mean, with all of those angels riding bicycles... Samantha’s a very quiet girl, shy most of the time. She has brown hair, blue eyes. She’s short." Gwendolyn was quiet for a minute.

"Is that all?" the man said, somewhat indignantly. "Can’t you tell me something about the things she likes to buy, the things she owns?"

"I’m not sure. I guess she likes to read books."

"You guess? What kind of books?"

"I don’t know. We never really talk much about it. I guess they’re historical novels, the romantic type. I was going to buy her one, but she has so many books, and I was afraid I would choose one she already had."

"Yes, yes," the man said. "That’s a common problem. ... I think I have the perfect gift for Samantha." He walked to the back of the store and came back with a box already wrapped in gift paper.

"What is it?"

"I think it’s best perhaps if I don’t tell you, so that it remains a surprise for both of you," he said. "Trust me. She will enjoy this gift like no other and praise your ingenuity for selecting it. That’ll be $35.95."

Gwendolyn paid for the present, hoping the price was not unreasonably high for whatever it was inside the box. The box was surprisingly light, and as she walked out of the store, she worried it might be full of confetti.

Back at her apartment, Gwendolyn set the new box on the bookshelf next to the box filled with confetti, making careful note of which box was which.

Gwendolyn got the afternoon newspaper and was shocked to see a story about herself on Page 1, detailing her headache and her difficulties choosing a gift for Samantha. "Damn reporters! Sticking their noses in everyone’s private lives! I don’t see why — why they even care! Now Samantha will know where I got the present — she’ll even know that I don’t know what it is." It occurred to Gwendolyn that the man inside the store might have known all those things about her because he had read about her in the newspaper. But this newspaper had just come out, and it mentioned her visit to the store, so this article couldn’t have been the one he read. And she didn’t know of any other articles about her. That man had seemed very perceptive, Gwendolyn thought, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something he had forgotten to say when he was describing her.

Gwendolyn flipped through the paper for the latest news about Edwin Alger, but she couldn’t find any. She turned on the TV and saw the little boy, trying once again to fold the paper in the right directions, the correct angles. Finally, the thing looked almost like an airplane. He grasped the central fold of paper and gently threw the plane. But it flopped to the ground, like all of his planes had done before. But instead of crying and giving up as he had done in the previous snippets of video, Edwin got out another sheet of paper and tried again. In the background, a bicycle approached through the classroom door. Gwendolyn could hardly believe her eyes — the angel was getting off the bicycle. "At last those angels are doing something for a change, something worthwhile," she said. For the first time, the angel wings looked healthy, the feathers shining in the same way that human hands glow when they’re held in front of light bulbs. The angel knelt next to Edwin’s desk and pointed a glowing finger each time the boy needed to fold the paper. And the angel smiled as Edwin sent the paper airplane soaring across the classroom. The news anchor broke in on the scene. "A cheer goes up nationwide! Little Edwin has done it!"

Gwendolyn snapped off the TV and sat with her arms folded. She thought her troubles would end when Edwin learned his lesson, but there was still the matter of those people who died in Burma — that was more serious, after all, wasn’t it? — and now she was in the news, too. They would dog her until her headaches went away, until she gave that present to Samantha. And at this very moment, the headache was coming back. Gwendolyn didn’t see any angels coming to lay their fluorescent fingers’ healing touch upon her forehead. Where were they when she needed them?

"It’ll never end," she said. "None of this will ever end."

She looked at the two boxes on the bookshelf and she decided to open the gift from We Choose 4 U for herself. What the hell. Samantha wouldn’t care if she got a box of confetti for her birthday, would she? The box felt so light, almost as if it were empty. As Gwendolyn concentrated on the paisley design of the wrapping paper, her mind raced to guess what was inside and she failed to hear the sound of the approaching angels.