Trying to get away from my home before the appointed time, I noticed the church down the street with new eyes, saw it for perhaps the first time as more than scenery on the way elsewhere. A moment later I was checking the doors—it was Saturday, after all. But they admitted me easily, and I found myself loitering in the narthex until, with some hesitation, I entered the sanctuary.
I chose a creaky pew toward the back.
I immediately felt out of place. I hadn’t been to church in years, and then only for holidays or weddings. I was conscious of every sound, of the still postures of those few sitting or kneeling in the pews ahead of me. I wondered if, having been in the presence of a demon, I would conversely better notice the presence of God.
But I felt nothing.
In the last week I’d been tempted to search through the boxes remaining in my spare room for my old confirmation certificate. But I couldn’t bear the idea of discovering something of Aubrey’s, of even seeing her writing on the side of the box from the first time it had been used, when we moved in together. Ultimately, I decided a weathered certificate would shed light on nothing. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I couldn’t remember Pastor Feagan ever teaching about demons, or even the devil, except in the vaguest terms.
Not that God had been a specific notion to me, either. God was as real as the gravity on Jupiter or the expansion of the universe. Conceptually significant, yes—especially if one studied astronomy or lived on Jupiter—but nothing I expected to know much about, firsthand, in this world. I had always subscribed to the more modern belief that religion was fraught with contradictions, the product of an overgrown oral tradition that only the fanatical tried to package as one tries to tame kudzu.
And, as Lucian had aptly observed, I’d never needed religion to be a good person. My father brought that out in me on his own, his temper ready to erupt at the first sign of any misdeed or bad grade. Silence was a good sign, no news always the good kind. With an upbringing like that, there had been no need for God.
A stretch of afternoon light angled across several pews as the church door opened. A moment later a black man in a denim jacket entered my pew from the other side and sat down next to me. He smelled like sandalwood and soap. My gaze slid to my watch.
4:15 P.M.
“I wondered if you’d be able to walk through the door.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the altar, on the cross atop it.
“Lucifer himself has access to the throne room of God. Do you think a church is any problem for me?” His voice was a warm baritone that did not need to whisper to remain between us.
“How can that be?”
“Why would it not be? Neither of us is evil by design.”
“Because you were angels, you mean.”
“I was. Lucifer is a cherub.”
With some confusion I conjured winged children in diapers and practically heard his answering scowl. “It isn’t what you’re thinking,” he said, more loudly than before. “The cherubim are the highest of our order, the most powerful of us all. Know that, on Lucifer’s creation, El called him perfect.”
I turned toward him, openly studying him now. He had a broad forehead and long, high cheekbones. The angular lines of a short mustache exactly delineated the curve of his upper lip, which was perfectly matched to the lower one. A hint of stubble smattered his chin and neck, like lichen growing on a great, smooth stone.
“He called him perfect with good reason,” he said, gazing at the windows above the altar. “Lucifer was his masterwork. He was powerful, anointed by God, and so very beautiful.”
I thought I heard him sigh.
“Then what about seraphim?” I asked, not because of any spectacular knowledge of my own, but, according to literary lore, cherubim and seraphim had once been the license plates on Anne Rice’s two limousines.
“The seraphim are fearsome fighters, but the cherubim outrank them. And then there are the archangels. You’ve heard of Gabriel and Michael—”
There was a slight, just-perceptible intonation to his words when he spoke these names, as well as the name of Lucifer, and even his own name. Not quite an accent, it was more an elongation on the tongue, as though the pure names in another language might be unpronounceable in ours. Hearing it now, I remembered it in the speech of the woman in the bookstore and of the man in the café.
“I won’t go into detail about all the various kinds of cherubim and seraphim. It’s better that I not describe them, lest, with all those faces and wings, you think us a spiritual freak show.”
Beyond his profile, a stained-glass saint stared down at us with hollow, fractured eyes. “And you? What about you?”
“Ah, me.” He spread his hands on his lap. They were lighter-colored on the inside, the creases in them dark. The calluses on his palms struck me as aberrant. A stainless-steel watch peered from beneath the edge of his cuff. “I was a member of the Host. A shining light, mere and marvelous.”
“How did it happen, then—your change, I mean?” The question tasted surreal on my lips.
Lucian reached up to rub the back of his neck. I had seen Sheila do the same at the onset of her migraines. “I should tell that story from the beginning. But this place isn’t conducive to talking.”
“Because of the crosses?”
“No, because the praying of those people is giving me a headache.”
“The crosses don’t bother you?”
“They should bother you a great deal more,” he said, looking at me. “They were used to kill humans.”
I had not thought of that.
“Stay if you like, but I’m going.” He rose and moved down the length of the pew to the side aisle where he’d entered. Two weeks ago I would have gladly let him go. I would have camped out, in fact, in the front pew and inquired about moving in. But now I needed to know what this had to do with me.
It was the question that had niggled at me these last two weeks.
We stepped out, blinking, into the cold afternoon light. Now I could see the wiry gray hairs above his ears, the dark spots dotting his cheeks, betraying his age. He had a presence about him, an unflappability that I found slightly unsettling. He was casually dressed, his pants not dissimilar to mine that day in the bookstore, albeit softer around the knees. To any other eye he might have been a local academic out for a casual weekend. An accountant on his day off. A tourist.
“So you popped up from hell to meet me in church.” I shoved my hands into my pockets.
“I’ve never been there.”
“To church?”
“To hell.”
I squinted at him.
“You’ve got so much of this wrong, Clay. Your conventional wisdom lacks one thing: wisdom. None of us have been to hell.”
“So it doesn’t really exist.”
“Not now, no.”
“So you mean you haven’t been to hell yet.”
He flashed me such a baleful glance that my heart tripped in my chest. I started down the street, stiffly, my shoulders having risen toward my ears in the chill. A moment later, the demon fell into step beside me.
“To begin my story, I should say that my beginning predates yours by a brief infinity.”
“You’re not making sense.” I didn’t look at him.
“The beginning of the world is only the beginning of time. Your Scriptures, being written for your benefit, begin at the point where you enter history. But my beginning came long before.”
“In heaven, I suppose.”
“No, Eden.”
“What, the garden of Eden?”
“Yes. That garden, the green one, was in Eden. And Eden is here. This.” He spread his hands out toward the expanse of sidewalk in front of us. “Eden preexisted that garden and the first of your kind. It was Lucifer’s—and my—home first.”
I raised my brows.
“What—you thought the world was full of nothingness before your creation?” He gave a short laugh. “Rather ethnocentric of you, isn’t it? Do you believe the earth is flat, too? Listen to me: Elohim created Eden. He also created us. And that includes Lucifer—which is important because no creation is equal to the creator. What that means for you is that, contrary to popular myth, Lucifer is no evil opposite of God.”
“I thought Lucifer was God’s nemesis.”
He stopped. “Clay, for this to work you have to let go of a few things. This is not your so-called classic human tale of the struggle between good and evil. Hades, but you humans always have a way of distorting the truth into something utterly simplistic and banal—not to mention trite.”
We walked again, and for several moments there was nothing but the steady sound of our heels on the sidewalk and the occasional brittle leaf that skittered across it, joined from time to time by the orphaned bits of conversations from passing pedestrians and the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. In the distance a church bell chimed the half hour.
At length he said, “Elohim was my god before you ever existed. We called him that—‘Mighty God and Creator’—though the name implies so much more. I say this for you because the fearful names we have known since those first days cannot be formed by human tongues.”
I thought again of the barely perceptible lilt of his words that I had noticed earlier.
“El made a garden in Eden and lavished Lucifer with everything—all government, total power. He lived there like a favorite first son, the hawk to our sparrows, the jewel to our quartz.”
“So why did he make you? Especially if he knew you would turn out . . . like this.”
“I could ask you the same thing.” But he didn’t. “Why El made us, I’ve never known. One could surmise that El was lonely, but the fact is that he didn’t really need us. You, created in his image, might actually have more insight into that question than I do. We’re not so privileged as you in that way. As for me, my purpose for living, my role in this great scheme, was clear to me from the first: to fall down, to worship, to praise, to wait upon the word of El.”
“That sounds really boring.”
“Really? Imagine the bliss of fulfilling one’s created purpose.”
I couldn’t. “Why do you call him El?”
“Here is where your language fails you utterly. El means ‘Mighty God,’ though that does the meaning no justice. Elohim implies more, including plurality—‘the God of gods,’ you might say. Regardless of what you call him, he was all things to us then, which is very different from what he may be to you. Not a father—no, never that for us—but the reason for our very existence. The Great Initiator. Ever Enduring. Alpha and Omega.” The demon sighed. “As for us, we were a sight to behold, glorious, unequivocal, each of us distinctly individual but of one purpose. Shining, more than brilliant; we had spent a brief infinity reflecting Shekinah glory like so many polished mirrors. How radiant we were! It was my happiest, most glorious moment. For a small eternity—if you can fathom such a thing—I was happy.”
There was poignancy in the rich timbre of his voice. Walking with me like this, he might have been any man retelling the tale of a happy, thirty-year marriage before his wife died. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “So why did you turn your back on it?”
He tilted his head skyward, narrowed his eyes. “I was promised more.”
We were on Brattle Street and had come to a drugstore advertising a post-Halloween sale. Masks hung in the window, a motley assortment of Klingons, zombies, and former presidents—the presidents looking too much like the zombies for any zombie’s comfort. In the corner a red-faced Satan peered out between Yoda and Spider-Man. The sight of it startled me, as though Lucifer himself, having heard his name, had come to eavesdrop on us.
Lucian stopped before the red face, the stubby, polyurethane horns that protruded from the forehead. He studied it so thoughtfully I wondered if it were possible he hadn’t ever seen one like it before.
“I remember the first time I ever saw a rendering of one of my kind,” he said, finally, seeming to gaze beyond the glass, beyond even the store. “Belial took me to see it with such passion and insistence that I expected a wonder, a thing of marvel—anything but the hideous vision before me with the man’s body and bird’s taloned feet. It was covered with fur like a mangy goat and had dark and hideous wings. I was stupefied and not a little offended. ‘What kind of abomination is that supposed to be?’ I demanded. Belial, finding this uproariously funny, bowed and pointed. ‘Behold, the fearsome Belial!’ he said, which was ridiculous, as he has always been beautiful.”
He turned a baffled look on me. “I thought your mad and genius artists were supposed to succumb to higher visions beyond the corporeal world. But there you are, still painting your devils red with horns, making Lucifer, our shining star, into a grotesque goat-man. And these are the images that remain to this day: ugly, marred, toppling from heaven, herded toward hell by the swords of shining blond men with stoic faces and bleached togas—Michael and Gabriel, I presume.” He turned away.
“Just think,” I said, in a moment of facetiousness, “you can dress up as a devil on Halloween and no one will recognize you.” I regretted my recklessness the moment I said it.
“Just think,” he said, too lightly, “you might pass me in the street and never know it. If I wished, you might even want me.”
He glanced sidelong at me, and I shrank back at the memory of copper hair, of a silver ankh pointing at the pert breasts beneath.
“Why do you show up like this, in these different guises?” I hated the feeling of being caught always unawares.
“I like the feel of trying them out,” he said, as though they were nothing more than new shoes or a bicycle.
I thought of the calluses on his hands, the telltale record of a history not his own. I wondered if they belonged to someone, or once had.
I shook the thought away. I might be a seeker, but there were some things I did not want to know.
One block farther, Lucian stopped in front of a tea shop. “They have a good oolong here. Didn’t you take a fancy to oolong in China?” He pushed through the glass-paned door of the shop.
I had never mentioned the trip I had taken nearly twenty years ago. I had fallen in love with the country and, at one point in our marriage, even suggested adopting a baby from China.
Of course, that was all moot now.
In a show of defiance, I ordered not oolong but decaffeinated Earl Grey. The demon, for his part, preferred jasmine.
The wall at the back of the shop was plastered with academic, activist, and personal notices, ads seeking dog-sitters and lesbian roommates, and flyers for yoga classes and colonic irrigation. Lucian was silent as he plucked the tea ball from his cup and set it aside on the saucer. It occurred to me then, with a sense of strange intuition and even stranger incredulity, that he was procrastinating.
“You were promised more,” I said.
He ignored me, and I thought about prompting him again, but just then he did something so subtle as to wring at reason: He pursed his lips, the chapped skin creasing reluctantly, dry as a newly fallen leaf. And I marveled at the mundane aspect of his humanity, against which I must remember the truth of what he was: demon. All around me life hummed along like a machine, oblivious to any sound but its own, deafened by the drone of the everyday.
“With the clock on the wall over there ticking so loudly,” he said, “I’ve just realized I can’t tell you how long it went on like that—my life before. Isn’t that funny? I just can’t say. You can point to the calendar and say you were born on such-and-such a date and married for five years. But as for me, I couldn’t begin to guess. Aeons must have passed. Millennia. Ages. Or maybe it was really only a moment. I don’t know. When one preexists time, an epoch can pass like a day, and who would know it? It’s so cliché, a trite line from novels about lovers. ‘Time had no meaning.’ But that’s how we were: enrapt, enthralled with our very situation, with every aspect of our circumstances, our whole purpose for being. It was the golden age of ages—of which every age since has been only the palest shadow.”
He took the tea ball from the saucer, squeezed the hinges together just enough to crack the sphere open but not enough to let the mass of sodden leaves fall out. “It all ended with a glance.”
“What do you mean, ‘a glance’?”
“How does anything new begin? How does an affair begin?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, biting the words out.
He looked up at me. “Then I’ll tell you. With a glance. A thought. And the possibility of that thought acted upon. Even your Narcissus of legend, who might most resemble my master in this account, started his own infatuation with a glance into a pool where he found . . . himself.”
He dropped the tea ball into his cup. He was silent for a moment, stirring the tea that had gone, so far, unsampled. “Clay, I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you a secret. One I hardly dare whisper. When you write down this conversation and append it to the others, this is the page I would condemn to molder first were it not so central to everything.”
I had a sudden vision of a demonic Pied Piper luring me not with music but with words and story to some unknown end.
“I was swept up in the ecstasy of worship, of praising Elohim for all that he was and had been and was yet to be. And I had lifted my arm to shield my eyes—the Shekinah glory is too great even for us. And I had wept with it, with the fervency of it, until my tears nearly choked me. My awareness of God was, in that moment, so great that I was overwhelmed. It was always that way.” He didn’t so much look at me as through me. “But this time, as I lowered my arm, the tears hung like prisms in my eyes, like crystals held up to the brilliance of the sun. And I gaped at the beauty of the garden, at the refracted beauty of my own kind filling it. Suddenly, one thing stood out to me as more brilliant than all the rest of that dazzling host, blinding me through the lens of my tears so that I wiped them from my eyes like scales.”
“Lucifer,” I whispered.
“Yes. Our prince and governor come down to walk among us like so much wheat in an open field. I was dazzled! So help me, I stared and thought myself blinded. Can you fathom it? Can you possibly understand? His head was more brilliant than your sun. His wings, like a metal so pure that your quicksilver is a pathetic comparison, glimmered like crystals set so closely together as to appear like one winking eye of a diamond. Even his hands and feet were as perfect as unclouded ice. But it was the power, the power and the glamour, that overwhelmed me. I knew then, in a way I had not known before, that I stood in the presence of the greatest being under God. I staggered at the sight. Light. Glory. My beautiful one!” He closed his eyes as he spoke, each word falling like a boulder between us.
Lucian leaned his cheek into his hand. “And Lucifer, my prince, heard my heart and turned his eyes to me. It was almost more than I could bear, the direct brunt of that gaze—such a long and considering glance. As for me, I was rapt, seared by the stars, scorched by perfection. I fell down on my face, as I had before El a million times before, but this time to Lucifer. And my heart praised him—not for the work of the Creator in him, or even his office under God, but simply for the sake of his own magnificence. And Lucifer knew it.”
“And that made you a demon?”
“No. The sin isn’t in the temptation.”
I could not help but think of Aubrey. I never knew when she crossed that line. I had tortured myself with trying to pinpoint exactly when she betrayed me—in spirit, if not yet in deed—and at what moment I lost her. Even after she was gone, I scoured phone receipts, credit card statements, the caller ID log. I reconstructed the entire schedule of her off-site meetings and business trips during our last month together, obsessed despite futility.
The demon curled his fingers around his teacup as though to warm his hands—another human gesture I found grotesque—and said, “I sometimes wonder what he must have seen at that moment: a lowly angel, prostrate before him—a being beautiful in its own right but so dull by comparison . . . or a reflection of himself, cast back as though from the watery and unworthy mirror of Narcissus. I don’t know. I don’t know why he even looked at me. I suppose he felt my adulation and was pleased by it. In fact, I know he was.”
“How do you know that?”
“I felt it. Keep in mind we aren’t like you. When we share the same purpose, we are a legion of one accord. The perfect army. So I felt it, too, when he looked away from Elohim and then at me . . . and, finally, at himself. Among our perfect awareness, the ripple it caused spread through us like the falling of dominoes, one against the other. But unlike your ivory pieces with their neat and shuffling clinks, the momentum of that disturbance was a roar—thunder—in my ears. You can’t comprehend what it is for an angelic being to hear the fabric of perfection torn.” He rubbed his forehead, pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s deafening . . . deafening. And Lucifer rose up, inspired by that mayhem, his eyes terrible, his bearing resolute. How beautiful, how awful, was the look on his face! I believe the sight of it will be with me forever, burned into the retina of my mind, the sentence of perfect recollection.”
He dropped his hand and abruptly stood up. “More hot water?”