For the next two days, I kept to my office and home. I stared at my monitor by day and at my ceiling at night in bed, trying to dissect how someone with enough research, a talent for suggestion, and a few lucky guesses might pretend to be a demon with seeming credibility to the point where I might actually believe I was in the presence of evil. And while I decided it was possible, the one thing I could not answer was why?
Of course my mind went first to my ex, Aubrey. But to think that she would direct so much energy my way—even out of cruelty—seemed pure vanity on my part. I had given her no cause for vendetta, having stepped aside with near silence once her resolve to leave was clear.
I briefly considered Sheila, who was not only our office manager but the wife of my college roommate. It was through her that I first met Aubrey. She had also been the one to alert me to the position at Brooks and Hanover when my predecessor left to join Random House. And she was the only one in the office with ready access to my calendar. But while our conversations had been stilted, if polite, since the divorce, such a scheme was so far beyond and beneath her that I rejected the idea immediately.
That left three options. The first was Richard, but I could think of no reason for him to take the trouble. He already had what he wanted—my wife. Still, he had the resources and access to a storehouse of information about my history via Aubrey.
The second was, again, that Lucian was a writer. And while I had heard stories of writers tracking editors like crazed fans stalking movie stars, I had to wonder why anyone would direct so much interest my way when editors for the Five Titans, as I called them, were a train ride away in New York City.
The third was that Lucian had targeted me for more mysterious reasons of his own. This was the most disturbing possibility of all.
On Thursday afternoon I put in a call to Esad to ask if he remembered the man I had been sitting with that night. “Yes!” He raised his voice over the sear of the grill in the background. I could practically smell cooking onions. “Very nice!”
“Do you know him?” I asked, feeling foolish.
“No, no, it’s the first time to meet him. Bring him back. I make something special!”
I had no intention of doing that. Further, I determined that if this Lucian pursued me again, I would go to the police.
New York literary agent Katrina Dunn Lampe was a polished, vivacious woman who sapped my energy. But because she represented talented clients, I tried to meet her for lunch whenever she came to town. And so I was shifting time blocks in my schedule like square pieces in a puzzle box, trying to find that doable—preferably short—lunch slot during the two days she would be in town, when the appointment materialized in the corner of my screen.
6:00 p.m.: L.
Tonight.
I got up, hardly able to take my eyes off it, not trusting that it wouldn’t disappear the minute I blinked. Forcing myself away, I strode out of my office and down the hallway. Sheila was missing from her desk. I sat down in her chair and tapped her keypad, bringing her screen to life. I closed an open e-mail, but not before catching the subject line: Have to see you. I noted it wasn’t from her husband, Dan. Opening the group schedules, I found my own, scrolled through it.
It wasn’t there.
I went back to my office and stared at my monitor.
L.
What did it mean? Did he just expect me to show up at Esad’s again? Or did he plan to follow me when I left work? Was he waiting, watching for me even now?
I sat like a ghost through a last-minute titling meeting. Stared at the sandwich I had brought from home without eating it. Shifted manuscript pages on my desk without reading them. Watched the clock.
I distracted myself by thinking of Sheila’s mysterious e-mail. A part of me wished I had noted the sender. A part of me wished I hadn’t seen it at all. I couldn’t help but remember Lucian’s insinuation. I hoped for Dan’s sake it wasn’t true.
By five o’clock I was useless. I shut down my laptop, shoved it along with a stack of proposals into my bag, grabbed my coat, and left.
Outside on the street, I realized I had no idea where I was going. But one thing I did know: I was not going to Esad’s. Neither did I want to risk anyone following me home. For a moment I actually considered going to Carmichael’s, once my favorite watering hole. I quickly discarded the idea—not for my three months on the wagon so much as for the thought that my supposedly preternatural acquaintance might find it pathetic.
Which just made me mad.
If he was what he claimed to be, the last thing he should want was for me to stay sober. And the last thing I should want was to care what he thought. But here I was, a flustered wreck, having doubted my experience and second-guessed myself a thousand times since Tuesday.
I descended into Kendall station. I normally hated the claustrophobic press of rush hour, but today there was something comforting about the electric lights, the subterranean warmth, the flow of bodies to and from the T.
On the train I did something I rarely do: I studied the people around me. I took note of faces, clothing, skin color, but saw no one resembling the Mediterranean stranger. Packed in the Red Line car, I considered the distant dullness of the commuters’ eyes, even of those playing games on their phones or jacked into iPods, of the book readers who had all but escaped their bodies for the ride.
How long had I been one of them?
I filed out and up onto Park Street, one in a milling flotsam of bodies. I often felt lost in this current, everyone around me having places to be and going there with a purposeful intent I envied.
But not tonight.
Tonight I meant to end these three days of anxiety—days during which I had somehow forgotten that I was a rational and intelligent person. Despite how I had felt in the past, I was not at the complete whim of circumstance—or of any other phenomena.
I walked down School Street in the brisk cold of pre-twilight and entered the bookstore.
There was a time when this sheer volume of books—shiny in their crisp dust jackets, stacked along the new arrivals section or, better yet, orphaned on the bargain table—was as intoxicating to me as any wine. That was before I entered the business. Now I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here—only that it had been with Aubrey.
I took the stairs up a half level toward the back of the store. Passing between shelves like labyrinth corridors, I veered off between Women’s Studies and Sexuality and found myself, ironically, in Spirituality. There I sequestered myself at the end of a row housing books on guides, angels, and psychics.
Demons, too.
Five-forty. I felt a spike of anxiety but reminded myself that, tucked away here, I was the colloquial needle in the haystack. Six o’clock would come and go, and here I’d be, my nose in a book on psychic healers. By seven o’clock I’d be taking dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, perhaps contemplating writing an essay about the lengths desperate writers will go to to get published, or at least requesting that our technical team put up a better firewall.
I had a second reason for coming here—one that had more to do with the exorcism of Aubrey than with disproving the authenticity of demons. Sometime last summer I realized that, in moving to Cambridge, I had penned myself into a safe cage and that the city I first loved for its culture, for its civic and intellectual history, had become a connect-the-dots of locations infused with painful memories. So I had started the slow, deliberate process of reclaiming those places I had frequented with Aubrey and of putting new pins in my map that were solely my own.
It was difficult. Even today, walking in through the oversize double doors and passing the coffee bar, I remembered the soy lattes that Aubrey used to drink, the way she drifted up that stair to wander the travel section, there to pick up books on Africa, Italy, and Mongolia, to point out the exotic locations where one could hike to the summit of Kilimanjaro, walk through ruined Pompeii, or overnight in felt yurts—all trips I agreed should go on our list of future places to see. All places I knew I could not afford to take her.
Walking up that half flight of steps tonight, I recalled the collection of Eyewitness Guides she had kept on our bookshelf—a constant reminder of unfulfilled hopes and my own shortfalls as a provider. A detail I had forgotten until now. But it came upon me, reflexively and fully formed, the way the smell of a hospital room could conjure my dying father.
It was always like that. I might open a box—there were several in my apartment, still unpacked—and find one of her long, dark hairs still clinging to a spare set of towels or even one of my sweaters. They used to stick to our pillows and sheets, adhere in tangled twists to the lint collector in the dryer. I still expected to see them there sometimes, still smoothed their phantom presence off the pillow before I lay down, just as I still got out of bed in the morning without pulling back the covers.
I slid three books from the shelf and then—on a whim—set up camp in the middle of the aisle as I had done as a college student in the Amherst library. As I folded my legs, I noticed that the hem of my pants was fraying. That surprised me as I considered these pants relatively new, but then I realized that they were simply among the last pieces of clothing Aubrey had chosen for me.
The thought summoned a small surge of panic. As much as I was on a mission to mark the corners of all our old haunts, I did not like the idea of her presence disappearing from my life altogether. The long hairs clinging to the sheets were gone. Soon the clothes she had chosen for me would be palmed off to a charity and worn by another man.
I forced my attention to the book in my hands.
I was camped there, well into the first chapter of Unseen Hands: Discovering Your Guardian Angels, when a woman tried to sidle past my makeshift roadblock.
I apologized, tried to scoot to the side, and then gave up and got to my feet.
“Sorry.” I nudged my bag out of the way. But instead of passing, she bent down and retrieved two of the books I had left on the floor. Long, curly hair the color of new pennies fell over her shoulder. When she straightened, I saw that she was pert-featured and curve-lipped, her skin devoid of the freckles I expected. A tiny diamond winked from the side of her nose as she tilted her head one way and then the other to read the titles in her hands. No wedding ring.
“What do we have here? Unleashing the God Within and Angelic Voices. Well, it’s official”—she returned them to me—“you’re a seeker.” She smiled, the bow of her lips stretching in a generous curve. She was wearing a burgundy coat—velvet—and a low-cut top beneath it. A silver ankh hung in the open neckline against a smooth expanse of skin. She would have stood out anywhere, but she did so especially here, where the local dress code seemed to be anything black.
She was possibly the most beautiful woman I had seen in years.
“Actually, I’m a Republican,” I said, with a stupid grin.
“In this town?” She arched a sleek brow at me. “Then you’ll need all the guardian angels you can get.”
Was she flirting?
“Are you volunteering? Because I make a good charity case. Obviously.”
Was I flirting?
She fingered the thin chain at her neck, the ankh dancing like a body on a hangman’s noose. Her hands were slender, almost girlish, and I found myself wondering if she was a pianist. “Well, as fate would have it, I just happen to be between appointments.”
I looked around. Not a well-groomed Mediterranean in sight. I glanced at my watch—it was just past six o’clock. “Would you be willing to discuss terms over coffee?”
“It’s a deal,” she said, laughing. The sound was warm, like sun against my chest.
Downstairs, I ordered coffee and scones—a snack to tide me over until dinner. Who knew, maybe I wouldn’t be dining alone.
Now that was an odd thought. It occurred to me that such an event would constitute my first real date since my divorce, frayed pant hems and all.
At the table I watched with some curiosity as she emptied no fewer than six sugars into her mug, the ankh drawing my attention back to the skin beneath it every time it swayed on its silvery chain.
“So, how is the guardian angel business these days?”
She traced the handle of her mug with a fingertip. “Well, for one, the pay is horrible.”
“Sounds like editing.” I chuckled. “My name is Clayton, by the way.”
“I know,” she said, her hazel gaze leveled upon me.
“Guardian angel intuition?”
“No, Clay, because I know everything about you.”
I hesitated. “You didn’t tell me your name,” I said, slowly.
“Yes, I did.” She was no longer smiling.
“You did?” But I knew she hadn’t. Then I saw it: the dark intelligence behind her eyes. Every capillary under my skin bloomed to startled life. She glanced at her wrist. An expensive-looking watch peeked out from beneath her sleeve. “You were early today.”
My heart beat at my ribs like a cudgel. I flashed back to the office I had left an hour ago, my hesitation on the street, the fact that even as I entered the T station I had not known for certain where I was headed. Had she been following me? I would have noticed looks like hers on the train.
I stared, trying to reconcile what I knew to be possible and had formerly thought impossible. Fear, like a pickax. “This can’t be real. How can this be real?”
“This is real. So calm down and listen to me.”
“I can’t calm down! This can’t be real. No! I refuse to accept it. Who put you up to this? Was it Richard? He has my wife—what more does he want?” I was trembling, my mind splattered in too many directions at once: Richard, Aubrey, the Mediterranean stranger, the dark presence—and now I felt it, as I had in the café—cloaked in the flawless skin before me. “Tell me why you’re doing this!”
She muttered in a language I didn’t recognize. Suddenly she lunged forward, copper coils splayed over her shoulder, the color at odds with the burgundy of her coat. The effect struck me for an insane moment as fire-like.
She grabbed my hand. “I told you,” she said, as though I were unintelligent or a child, or both. “To tell you my story.”
Warmth spread like something injected into my bloodstream, crept up my arm to my shoulder. I tried to pull away, but as in the café three nights ago, the demon’s grip brooked no argument. The warmth spread into my chest. My heart rate slackened. It was still too fast—I don’t think any power could have quelled it in that moment—but even as I thought this, I felt my alarm, the intensity of my fear, smooth out into something more placid. Anxiously alert, but at least within my control.
“I don’t have time for your breakdown, Clay. There are things I need you to know, and at the rate you’re going, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack, and then you won’t be any good to either one of us.” Her voice was as smooth as a hypnotist’s, and I thought again of my theory that this was, in fact, a hoax, that it was merely the power of suggestion working its way through my muscles and veins, which even now had relaxed back into the chair.
Then I remembered that for suggestion to work, the subject had to be willing.
My gaze dropped to the table, to her hand, holding mine. Ten minutes ago I had considered the possibility of this very circumstance. Now that it had come to pass, though not in any way I might have imagined, something inside me splintered. With the same kind of spontaneous recall with which I had remembered Aubrey and the travel guides, I returned to that night in our apartment when, long after she was asleep, I crept out of bed, careful not to uncover her. And I saw again the e-mail on her account from Richard, a man I didn’t know, saying that he loved her, that he would be thinking of her tomorrow as she told me she was leaving, and that he would be waiting up for her with warm arms afterward. And I knew that night that nothing would ever be the same again.
I knew the same thing now.
Were it not for the unnatural tranquility that had probably saved me a public scene here in the bookstore coffee bar, I might have been overcome by the uncontrollable urge to shout like a madman, to lash out at her with a fist, or even to bury my head in my arms and weep.
But I did none of these things. And the woman—the demon—nodded as though satisfied and let go of my fingers. The calm ebbed, but only slightly, when our contact was broken.
“Your body simply needs some time to adjust to what your mind knows. Meanwhile, no. Richard didn’t send me. He could no sooner send me than he could call down rocks from heaven. I am here of my own volition, and I have much to tell you.”
“Am I going to hell?” I asked, ashamed at the smallness of my voice. “Is that why you’re here?”
She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck, rolling her head slightly in an all-too-human way. “I don’t know the answer to that right now.”
No comfort there. And while my visceral self had returned to semi-normalcy, my mind was as frenetic as before, in ways that would have been impossible had my calm been the result of any conventional means, like a drug. I desperately tried to remember what, if anything, I had learned about demons in eighth-grade confirmation class.
Something, like a shiny bit of pottery mired in the mud of a shipwreck, caught the eye of memory: Father of Lies.
“If you’re a demon, why should I believe anything you say?”
She nodded, making no apparent effort to pass it off. “You raise a very good point. So let’s get this issue of credibility out of the way right now. I won’t waste my time telling you I’m not a liar because that, in itself, would be a lie. But I tell you, lying to you now will not serve my purpose.”
“What purpose is that? And why should I care or listen to anything you say?”
“Finally an interesting question!” the demon said with what nearly sounded like relief. “The first answer is that I want to set the record straight. To shatter a few myths about my kind. The second answer is because I believe you’ll find it to be of personal interest.”
“Why, because I’m a seeker?” I didn’t hold back the bitterness.
“Because my story is ultimately about you.”
Something in me recoiled. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
She folded her arms on the edge of the table. “When you were growing up, you honestly believed in the morals of stories, in the integrity of comic-book heroes, of Batman on television, didn’t you? And it had a greater impact on you than having morality drummed into your psyche by a church telling you to please an angry and distant God. You were good on principle. And yet here you are, without a wife or kids, or the success that being good was supposed to win you. Am I right? I am. And so you’re on a quest for new meaning because the alternative is only this: that goodness has won you nothing but pain. And you’re not willing to accept that.”
“No,” I said faintly.
“You need a sense of context, that larger picture. As I said before, I can give you that. But you have to hear me out.”
As she said all of this, I found myself drawn to her in a wholly different way than I had before, against judgment, against instinct. And perhaps this was the grandest seduction of it all: that she was right.
“Don’t worry about anything else. Simply write down what I tell you. Each word. Everything. And then you’ll know this is real and you are sane.”
“Write it down? My mind is shattered, can’t you tell?” But even as I said this, I knew I could recite that first conversation verbatim if I wanted to. Even now the full flow of that conversation came over me, as though summoned by the mere act of thinking of it, our exchanges of that night and this one intertwining and overlapping like competing melodies in my mind.
“You’ll remember.”
She glanced at her watch and frowned. The ankh swung in the window of her neckline as she gathered her coat. I had been transfixed by that view before, but found I could hardly look at it now.
She . . . he . . . it left, as it had before, without preamble. I’ve come to you at great risk, Lucian had said the first night. What, exactly, had the demon meant by that?
I spent the next two weeks going through the motions of a job that seemed suddenly meaningless. I checked the time, the date, my calendar, with a regularity that bordered on obsession. I wrote down and read—and then reread—my record of both encounters, though I didn’t need to. As promised, I hadn’t forgotten one word of either. I began to think that this was the real demonic trick: to trap me in this limbo—less dead than before, not quite alive.