Demon: A Memoir (6 page)

The kid shrugged. “I had no concept of death, though I will say I expected something terrible. And I even thought by then that I might welcome it. But El was absorbed by grief, which only seemed to incense Lucifer.”

“Why wasn’t he afraid? He had been the favorite; he had the most to lose.”

“Exactly. El had never ignored the voice of his favorite before. And as his silence continued, Lucifer grew more venomous. I had never seen this kind of resentment. The violence of our uprising seemed like children’s quarrels by comparison.”

Children’s quarrels?
The horrible face of the seraph in my dream hovered before me.

“Lucifer ranted and stalked. And we trailed him like ermine on the train of a king. Then, just when I thought he had forgotten us, El broke his silence.”

We were nearing Charles Street. What happened next was something I would replay over and over in my mind for weeks. A woman jogger was running toward us. She was all blonde hair and black running pants, a hot pink iPod strapped to her arm. I thought with some irony that this was the extent of my social life of late: appreciation of women going the other way.

Assuming, of course, that they were not demons in bookstores.

Just as she was about to pass us, Lucian tripped, his hand grabbing at my shoulder as he practically fell into the woman’s path. It was such a queer incident; I had never seen him anything other than fully composed. The startled jogger, for her part, managed to skirt him just in time to avoid a collision that might have kneecapped her, and Lucian escaped the fall, thanks to his pulling at my shoulder which nearly took me down with him. As I stumbled, shoving the demon’s hand away, I saw alarm and confusion on the woman’s face. But, as we more or less righted ourselves, she seemed to decide that Lucian was neither an attacker nor injured, and she ran on.

Lucian stared after her with slatted eyes. He murmured something under his breath.

“What was that about?” I demanded. It was bad enough that he looked like a punk. Did he have to act like one, too?

“You wanted her.”

It was close enough to the truth to shut me up.

I would come back again and again to this interchange, would remember that narrowed look on Lucian’s face for weeks and months to come.

OUTSIDE THE GATE OF the Garden, a bearded man played an electric guitar. It was plugged into an amp, and now I realized the source of the music we had heard from the Commons softball field. As we crossed Charles Street, I asked, “What kind of special curse does one reserve for someone who has ruined everything?”

“We’re talking about Lucifer, not Aubrey. And El didn’t curse Lucifer.” He pulled a cigarette out of his coat pocket.

It was bizarre, seeing him light up. It was the first time I had actually seen him ingest anything.

“He didn’t strike us down, either.”

“So what did he do?”

“He drew breath.” He exhaled a stream of smoke that drifted before and then over us, diffusing like ectoplasm. “And with that inaugural sound we, with keen immortal perception, knew that something was about to happen. Something
different.
”

“How could you tell?”

“How can I explain this?” He kicked a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, an escapee from a nearby trash bin. “It was a pregnant sound. Expectant, like a hesitation on the verge of speech. It vibrated throughout the universe like the tight pulse of a tuning fork.” He flicked his fingers, sending a ripple of invisible energy into the air and a spatter of ash toward the ground.

We veered down a small path toward roped-off flowerbeds and domed shrubs. I thought back to my nightmare, to the vision of the newly fallen drifting away, fading into the residue of sleep. I didn’t know what happened next. I had to know. I was jonesing, pure and simple. I stopped. “Show me.”

His brows rose, as though he were waiting for a punch line.

“Show me,” I said again.

He pulled the cigarette from between his lips and flicked it away. “I will never understand humans,” he said and then grabbed me by the upper arm.

My experience the night before had been birthed into the warm vessel of sleep. But this was an electrifying jolt, like the first chug of a roller coaster on a track. Just as I felt I had reached the apex of that first hill, the universe unfurled before me, as though I were standing in the narrow part of a funnel looking out toward the opening of
everything.
I was aware of the vastness of it, the infinite amplifications of space before me, the stars. And I knew, somehow, that each of them had a name known to El.

There was Eden. When I dreamed it—no, when I
saw
it—the darkness had been a moving thing, a living tar creeping across the rocks and flashing stones. It was as black now as a shroud, vacant as an eye in a corpse’s head. I heard a sound like a sob and recognized my own voice. Eden, infused with sorrow, stood ruined, a monument of grief covered by a dark and terrible presence trembling on the water.

The spirit of El himself.

I pulled away, unable to endure another moment of it, and doubled over on the lawn, sucking breath.

“Did you hear it? The keening?” the demon asked from above me.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Human ears,” he said, the way a debutante might dismiss a bottle blonde.

“What did I miss?”

“Didn’t you see the shifting over the water?”

I shook my head.

“Did you see anything?”

“Dark Eden. And space.”

He rolled his eyes. “What you missed, my dear”—the words were thoroughly odd coming from him in this getup— “was the sense of his hands. El’s. Covering the vast wreck of the world the way a sculptor’s fingers roam a block of marble, carving with the inner eye before touching the chisel. You missed that sense of him moving over the surface of the deep, as though there was no memory of Lucifer’s cherished garden, ruined beneath the chaos of violence like an insect trapped in amber. You missed that this was no longer a ruined Eden but an Eden roiling with the potential for a new thing. And you missed when he spoke.”

I regretted having pulled away so quickly from the vision, though I knew he would not have allowed me to see this far.

“Spoke?”

“He called for light.”

“As in, ‘Let there be light’?”

“As in.”

“‘Let there be light.’ You’re telling me it actually started that way,” I said, my hands on my knees.

“Actually, we weren’t sure what was happening. All I knew then was that upon hearing that voice—that beloved and awesome timbre—I wanted to weep. Only then did I realize how much I had longed for it, how strong and reassuring it was to the fibers of my heart. And, because of what we had done, how foreboding.”

“I thought you said there had already been light. That Lucifer gave off light.”

“This was new light—different from that of my master,” he said, gazing past the footbridge toward the statue of Washington. High-rises jutted up like teeth into the sky beyond the statue. “And light, as you know, is many things. Energy, for one.”

“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.
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 God.”

“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 damned, 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
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 partitioned 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 God? Isn’t a twenty-four-hour day too literal? Surely God 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 passed 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.

“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 dispassionately. “Come on. We’ll find something to eat.”

We passed 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.