"Are you talking about the sun?" I straightened, my patience thin. He was specific when I didn"t want him to be and maddeningly vague when I wanted specifics. And the kicker was that he probably knew it, too.
"Among other things. But you"re missing the point, and it"s this, since I have to spell it out: We had never heard words like that before-wonderful, terrible words. These were more than words of power-they were infused with creation and the giving of life. life. Think about it. What one of us had ever witnessed an act like this? We don"t recall our own beginnings, after all, so this was the first creation we had ever witnessed. And you call an earthquake an act of G.o.d." Think about it. What one of us had ever witnessed an act like this? We don"t recall our own beginnings, after all, so this was the first creation we had ever witnessed. And you call an earthquake an act of G.o.d."
"So this light-"
"It was brilliant, the first of its kind, generated by El himself, exploding out into the heavens. Even Lucifer, who was by now more disdainful than ever, was in awe. Speechless. He could never have done this."
"Wasn"t Lucifer still giving off light?" Perhaps I had found a hole in his story. The inconsistency would never explain the other things-the dreams, the hallucinations, if that"s what they were. Hope surged, and maybe a companion bit of despair, that I might have caught him in an incongruity. "If he was fallen and d.a.m.ned, why was he still giving off light?"
We had come to the footbridge with its pale blue lampposts and railings. The demon leaned a thin shoulder against one of the pillars and crossed his arms. Behind him, the water of the lagoon reflected the brown of maples and elms and the sharp arch of long-limbed willows bowed low to the water"s edge.
"You need to understand something. Outwardly, Lucifer hadn"t changed. Despite the venom he hurled at El, he still illuminated the lower heavens. He was still brilliant. Consider Moses after he came down from Mount Sinai. He glowed from having stood in the presence of El, and that after only forty days in El"s presence and he, a flawed human made of mud-a rather unreflective surface overall."
He smiled blandly. "So you must imagine our Beautiful One, perfect master-work that he was, shining with an infinity infinity of reflected Shekinah glory. Even we, who do not breathe, are breathless at him still." of reflected Shekinah glory. Even we, who do not breathe, are breathless at him still."
"So this was a different kind of light."
"Yes. And when Lucifer left, retreating to the periphery of the lower heavens to look down on the muck of Eden, he took with him the light from the world, which was his own. So when El made this new and spectacular light that chased away darkness so that even the murky waters reflected it like facets of onyx, Lucifer was taken aback. He took it as a personal blow, in fact."
"Because he felt replaced."
"Yes. But El wasn"t finished. Now he did something he had never done: He part.i.tioned time. It sounds so fantastic, so mythical, doesn"t it?" He paused to study my wrinkled brow. "You do understand that time, in the measured sense, had now begun."
"I really don"t," I said at last. "If you"re trying to sell me on seven days of creation, you"ll have to pull a few more tricks out of your demonic bag. That"s folklore."
Of course, the fall of Lucifer had been folklore, too.
He scratched at his temple, and I realized he was just now discovering the hardening scab on his scalp. "I know all manner of theologians and even scientists hold debates about this. How long was a day? Isn"t a thousand years like a day to G.o.d? Isn"t a twenty-four-hour day too literal? Surely G.o.d created evolution. They ship speakers into churches and seminaries and universities to debate it."
He gestured in the general direction of Cambridge. "But what they fail to realize is that creation defies rationality, mathematics, and reason no matter how you try to quantify it. You might as well try to quantify El himself-something you"ll never find me wasting my time on."
I thought of MIT, practically across the street from my office. Of divinity school scholars at Harvard. And I realized then that I could more easily publish the memoirs of a self-professed demon than I could share with another scientific or religious-minded human the truth of my interaction with him. The thought left me feeling alienated, like some frail and sickly member of my species separated from the human herd.
"Listen now," he said, fixing me with a bright gaze. And I saw that same darkness behind it, as though a cloud had pa.s.sed behind the sun. "He called it a day, and the significance is this: There had been no days until this point. For all I know, our revolt might have erupted an eon or an hour before that. Only misery had made it seem like an eternity. But here was this new and revolutionary thing: the day. An invention for all time-literally. Can you understand what it was to us, having languished in our inertia? Can you imagine our relief and fear at once?"
"I think so," I said, lamely. "Conceptually, perhaps." And then: "No."
On the other end of the footbridge, a laughing couple held hands. Joggers ran the path beyond the bronze lantern. The juxtaposition of this modern life-in-process and religious prehistory put me at tenuous odds with reality, and I began to fear that my mind, overwrought in recent weeks, might lose discernment of where between the two extremes reality lay. Maybe I had already lost it. Maybe I was even now doped up and strapped to a bed in a mental ward. I had wondered more than once if I had dreamed up this demon, if somewhere along the line I had developed paranoid schizophrenia.
As I thought all of this, I began to feel a heaviness in my chest, as though I were trying to breathe steam in a sauna that had become too thick, too hot, too fast. Dizzying numbness sank into my skull through my eyes. I clutched at the rail of the footbridge, my heart pounding even as I tried to appear normal in this public place. And I thought, This is how it is to die, to realize that something is wrong and to try to appear as though it is not. This is how it is to die, to realize that something is wrong and to try to appear as though it is not.
"Are you doing this to me?" I managed.
"No." But he watched me intently, in the same way scientists must observe lab rats after infusing their cages with cigarette smoke or injecting them with red dye.
"I feel ill. Something"s wrong." I hauled in a slow, heavy breath, considered my lack of sleep, took inventory of all I had eaten today: cereal, coffee . . . more coffee. Not enough. I was exhausted, and my blood sugar was low.
"How tenuous and tedious it must be, keeping that balance of rest, food, and sleep." He spoke dispa.s.sionately. "Come on. We"ll find something to eat."
We pa.s.sed the bronze statue of George Washington atop his horse and came out through the Garden"s iron gate onto Arlington. Walking seemed to help, as though the motion had reagitated my coagulating blood. I was headed toward Newbury Street to a coffee shop that served gourmet sandwiches and bottles of imported sodas. I veered left, looking for the next crosswalk, thinking I could hear Lucian"s boots half a step behind me.
I was halfway across the walk when I heard the stuttered screech of tires grabbing pavement and a thud off to my right. I started at the sound, braced, stupidly, toward oncoming traffic. Someone screamed.
But it was not me.
Half a block down the street a car was just settling to a stop. Two more abruptly halted behind the first, narrowly avoiding an accident. Pedestrians stood frozen on the sidewalk, hands covering their mouths. More, emerging from the Garden, stopped short.
A man got out of his car, a cell phone in shaking hands. Shouts for an ambulance. Traffic backed up. Someone began to divert it to the far lane where cars filed by, heads swiveling behind the wheel.
I ran on shaky legs toward the car with the crystalline web for a windshield but stopped with a white-hot chill when I saw the crumpled form on the asphalt. I had thought he was behind me.
A bystander announced she had called 9-1-1. A man ran toward the curb, bellowing at someone snapping a picture with a camera phone. A mounted policeman rode out of the Garden, the horse cantering too prettily and far too slowly.
More people joined the clot of onlookers on the Garden side. A young woman in a peacoat hurried to the small cl.u.s.ter on the pavement, obscuring my view, saying she was a nurse.
Get up! I thought, angry, terrified. What was he doing? Making a scene? Playing dead? Could demons die? One of his sneakers rested on the asphalt, some fifteen feet away. I thought, angry, terrified. What was he doing? Making a scene? Playing dead? Could demons die? One of his sneakers rested on the asphalt, some fifteen feet away.
He hadn"t been wearing sneakers.
I pushed through to the knot of people kneeling in the street, unable to hear anything but the thudding in my chest.
It wasn"t him. The leg splayed out in macabre yoga was distinctly female. Blood pooled in an inky blot beneath her head, black against the pavement. It mottled her hair, which had come loose from its ponytail to stick to one side of her face in sticky, crimson-blonde fingers. A shattered pink iPod was still strapped to her arm.
Somewhere bells were ringing, church bells, perhaps from Park Street Church across the Common, maybe from Arlington on the corner. I stumbled back and searched the growing crowd for Lucian. But he was gone.
7.
I was sick with the kind of horror one feels upon realizing he forgot to lock the gun safe-the one from which a neighborhood kid steals a handgun and shoots someone. Or upon waking from a drunk to the realization he"s had unprotected s.e.x with a prost.i.tute. It was the kind of fear in which one realizes he has courted danger under the guise of negligent normalcy.
And now a woman lay dead.
I backed toward the curb, the gruesome bouquet of tire rubber, blood, and urine in my nostrils, as the woman in the peacoat administered CPR. Eventually, she sat back on her heels, breathing heavily, arms dangling on her knees.
A fire truck and then an ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. The way the medics left the body where it lay-the way the police shut down the street, took aside the traumatized driver of the car, interviewed some of the bystanders-it all seemed so haphazard. Like a chaotic game of pickup sticks, as primitive as surgery conducted with sharp stones. I had had such faith in this city, in the civic marvel of emergency response and modern medicine, and a woman had just died on the asphalt.
I lingered even after the ambulance drove off, silent and empty. I fixated on the policemen, trying to gather the courage to say something. To tell them that I knew. That I knew who-what-had killed that woman.
I couldn"t stop thinking of those too-old teenager"s eyes, narrowed at her after his staged fall, those young man"s lips murmuring seemingly to himself.
I never got anything to eat. Instead, I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of merlot-a bottle with a screw cap. I carried it home in its paper bag inside my coat and gulped from it in long, less-than-covert pulls on the T T like a common wino. I hissed and then shouted at random buildings on the walk home, calling Lucian out, calling him a murderer. People walking by gave me wide berth, and I let out one of Lucian"s hysterical laughs in response. like a common wino. I hissed and then shouted at random buildings on the walk home, calling Lucian out, calling him a murderer. People walking by gave me wide berth, and I let out one of Lucian"s hysterical laughs in response.
I WOKE WITH THE cold claws of panic inside my chest. I had been p.r.o.ne to anxiety attacks in the past and could feel the old eddy now, offering to suck me into the spin cycle. Don"t think about that. Get up. Move. Don"t think about that. Get up. Move.
Queasy and unsteady on my feet, I pulled open my apartment door and stumbled down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes inside the foyer. I averted my eyes from the glare of midmorning sun pouring through the gla.s.s double doors; I didn"t want to know what or who I might see standing there, peering in with too-knowing eyes. I s.n.a.t.c.hed one of my neighbors" paper.
Back in my apartment, the door locked firmly behind me, I folded the Globe Globe open on my kitchen counter, paged past the national section to city and region. There it was, page B2, just a tiny mention: open on my kitchen counter, paged past the national section to city and region. There it was, page B2, just a tiny mention: "Woman Dies, Hit by Car." "Woman Dies, Hit by Car."
A woman was struck by a car and killed yesterday on Arlington Street at about 4:48 p.m. She was p.r.o.nounced dead at the scene. The ident.i.ties of both victim and driver were withheld last night pending investigation.
I searched through the rest of the section, but there was nothing more.
I felt infected-by dark words, images, and influences, by my own willingness to expose myself to his particular strain of evil. While his first appearance had been a startling aberration, his presence in my life had become more real, more normal to me than the facts of my everyday existence. Just yesterday I had stepped willingly from the corporeal world into an alien spiritual realm.
What did it mean that a demon could infiltrate my life? And what were the implications for me that I had willingly met with him since? That death followed him even as he spoke of heaven, of G.o.d?
Worst of all, I could not erase the memory of that sound. Of a human thrown into a windshield. It should have been hard, the crack of a body breaking. But it had been sordidly dull, as m.u.f.fled as a gun fired through a silencer.
Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed L. L. again, but at least I"d know if I should answer the door or stay here, trembling and silent. again, but at least I"d know if I should answer the door or stay here, trembling and silent.
I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn"t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building"s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn"t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.
"h.e.l.lo?"
I didn"t move.
"Clay? It"s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?"
I exhaled and moved on slack legs to the door. I had unlocked it and started to pull it open, relieved at the thought of seeing her short gray hair and smooth olive skin, the crow"s feet around her eyes, when I was leveled by a frightening idea: Could Lucian show up as someone familiar to me?
Again the eddy, the cold fingers clutching at my chest.
Panic is an illusion, a small voice inside me said. a small voice inside me said. Open the door and face her-it-whoever it turns out to be. Open the door and face her-it-whoever it turns out to be.
I pulled the door the rest of the way open, ready for anything.
A plate of m.u.f.fins. Blueberry, by the look of them. Across our shared second-floor landing, Mrs. Russo was just closing her door. Upon hearing me, she came back out.
"Well, there you are!" She smiled and retrieved the plate from the mat. I stared, making certain it was the same Mrs. Russo who had brought me lasagna the day I moved in, who had helped me arrange my furniture-which consisted of little more than a few items on sale from Crate & Barrel and a desk my grandfather made for my eleventh birthday-and who had declared the result "elegantly Spartan." Mrs. Russo, the widow whose husband had died of the kind of complication people sued hospitals over-though I don"t think she did that. It would have seemed beneath the woman who often referred to those things that can and can"t be changed, and to the will of G.o.d. Mrs. Russo, whose mail and newspapers I collected when she went to visit her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Russo, who was always baking, warm and homey smells drifting out onto our landing from her apartment as they did now from the plate I accepted from her hands. My stomach cramped.
"Clay, dear, are you all right?"
"I"ve been sick." It wasn"t far from the truth. Dehydration had taken its toll. I was sure that my face was pasty, my eyes shadowed and hollow. My breath was certainly bad enough.
Have you ever been hara.s.sed by a demon? I wanted to blurt. I wanted to blurt.
"Have you? That must explain why I"ve been thinking about you so much these past couple of days." She reached up to lay the back of her hand against my cheek. Her crisp white shirt crinkled when she moved. A double strand of pearls hung in the neckline like a beady smile around her neck. She was made up for the day, her lipstick the color of new bricks. Her hand smelled like Jergen"s lotion.
"Well, you don"t have a fever."
I wanted to tell her everything, from the first meeting in the cafe to the dreams and the accident-the horrible accident-to unload it all like tears spilled in a mother"s lap. But one long, stream-of-conscious sentence out of my mouth and that matronly look would change to alarm or worse. Mrs. Russo would disappear behind her door, and this moment of relative normality would be taken from me as surely as the peace had disappeared from my life that first night in the Bosnian Cafe.
What peace? I had not been at peace before this. But even my discontent and general aimlessness had been better than this. I had not been at peace before this. But even my discontent and general aimlessness had been better than this.
"Are you sure you"re all right?" She frowned, her hand going to her hip. Her camel pants were smartly pressed, and I realized she was about to head out for the day. I nodded, angry at finding myself on the verge of tears.
"I think I need to lie down. Thank you, Mrs. Russo, for the m.u.f.fins," I said. She looked as if she might say more, but I gave her a weak smile, thanked her again, and closed the door, hoping I hadn"t offended her in my graceless haste.
I SPENT ALL DAY thinking about who to go to. Who I could tell without seeming like a lunatic. And I came up with only one answer.
No one.
I LOCKED MYSELF IN my apartment for two days. I slept in fits on my sofa, refused to open my laptop for fear of what I would find on my calendar, and ate Mrs. Russo"s m.u.f.fins. Though I had never suffered from agoraphobia, I began to understand how easily I could become one of those people who refused to leave their home. I wondered if any of them had been stalked by demons.
On the second day I found myself rationalizing what happened in the Garden. Lucian really had tripped. When he murmured, he was merely talking to himself, calling himself clumsy and cursing his human body. Maybe he made an appreciative comment-she had been an attractive blonde, after all. That he disappeared when he did meant nothing; he routinely disappeared when I wasn"t ready or whenever I wasn"t paying close attention.
Anything to explain it. The truth was too appalling.
Sometime into the second day, after calling in sick again, I retrieved the stack of notes from my desk drawer. The summary account of my demonic encounters to date consisted of portions of two notebooks, of random pages stuck inside the cover of one, and the backs of a few pages from the recycle box. The last of these pages was scrawled in wild, volatile script. I had started to write about the Common and the Garden the night of the accident but never finished-mostly because I could not reconcile reality with Lucian"s strange behavior and the events that followed.
The other reason was that I was drunk.
Lying on the sofa and reading through my notes up to that day, I began to feel a strange sense of control-over my words, if nothing else, as though I had captured and contained events that defied rationality. The page brought order, a shape to all experience, the comfort of events scripted into story.
I picked up my pen and began to write, chasing reason, meaning, sanity.
8.