Bodies flowed around me in Park Street station like water around a stone. Some regarded me with passing curiosity. Some of them looked me directly in the eye. I stared back, half fearful that I would find recognition in their eyes, half afraid that I would not.
I’m going crazy.
A woman in her fifties paused to assess me. “Are you lost, hon?” she asked with frank kindness. “Do you need some help?”
Is that you, Lucian, you devil? I sought the dark glint behind her eyes—that hint of shadow—but jerked away when she might have touched my sleeve. She shook her head and left me there, even as my attention landed on a man in a trench coat. Was he wearing an expensive watch? Or there—that young mother with the curly-haired toddler. Or the tourist studying the T map . . . or that woman with the circles under her eyes. Her hands were cracked. Perhaps she worked as a maid in one of the inns off Newbury Street. She looked tired and worn. Was she ever visited by demons?
I eventually became aware of a young man studying me from several feet away. The faint hint of a mustache dirtied his lip. He was as pale as a computer junkie—he had that fueled-by-Fritos-and-Red-Bull look about him. A brown, stubby ponytail spurted from the back of his head, half obscured by the rumpled collar of his long, open jacket. It hung loosely on his shoulders, oversize on his thin frame. Skinny, dressed straight from a thrift shop, he should have looked like a charity case, but he managed to come off grunge-band cool, his unflappability as much a part of his ensemble as his faded ANIMALS TASTE GOOD T-shirt. I had been intimidated by that brand of tattered-jeans confidence in others when I was his age. As he dragged an appraising look up and down over me like a store checkout scanner, I found that the feeling carried into adulthood. I suddenly felt grossly inadequate—not to mention pretentious—in my Eddie Bauer jacket and loafers.
“Are we going to stand here all day?” he asked.
I searched for a witty comeback, but I hadn’t had one when Jake Salter had picked on me in high school, and I didn’t have one now. I followed him up the stairs, onto Tremont.
“You needn’t worry any more about Jake.” His speech and the slight, strange accent were at weird odds with his human mundane. “He died a few years ago.”
I had been on the verge of railing at him for hijacking my dreams but faltered at this news.
“I didn’t know.” The Jake Salters of the world still seemed untouchable to me, their flannel shirts and combat boots armor against a society in which the greatest peril was a white-collar eventuality.
The demon shrugged. “Why would you?”
“How?” I envisioned a drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, a motorcycle crash. A knife fight.
He cocked his head toward the same invisible horde of insects I had noticed that first night at Esad’s. I shuddered.
“A boating accident. On the Missouri River. He drowned and left a wife. Ah, and three children. Would you like to know more?”
“No,” I said, numb, and then again, “No.” Family. Kids. Even Jake Salter had his act together. I couldn’t even stay married five years. And then I felt guilty. Act together or not, Jake was dead. Why did it always seem to happen like that?
“It always does seem to happen like that,” he said, far too young in human years to utter such words, far too dispassionate regardless of his true age.
“Stop it! Stop reading my mind! And what was that with the dreams? How dare you!” A couple stopped to stare as I turned on him. I had become one of those people I always steered clear of.
“Do you think I could have done that differently? I couldn’t have. I need you to know. It was the only way.” He had said something similar that first night at the café. I heard the echo of it now, bits and pieces of that first conversation flitting along with it.
“How about just telling me next time?” I said over the iteration and counterpart of our first conversations, as someone shouts with headphones on. I clutched at my head, realized with belated awareness that I was close to hysteria. I hadn’t slept well. I had lost enough weight in the last two weeks that my pants were loose—something I would normally be glad of but under the circumstances found slightly alarming—and was so behind at work that I had started to wonder if my job might be in jeopardy. It had been well over two months since I had brought any proposals to the editorial committee, and I was behind in getting the ones that had made it through ready for the publishing board with sales and marketing. The slush pile on my desk—the queries and manuscript samples sent in by agents and would-be writers—had grown to such a proportion that I had been forced to clear a space on my bookshelf to accommodate what wouldn’t fit on my credenza. I had more than a hundred e-mails in my in-box and fourteen voice mails that I repeatedly resaved under the delusion that I would return them before week’s end.
To top it all off, I had just noticed this morning that I had begun to sprout bumpy hives on my chest, underarms, and back.
“I have so much to tell you, Clay. And we’ve so little time,” he said, the echoes of prior conversations subsiding with this statement. There was nothing youthful in the shake of his head.
“You’re obsessed with time, you know that?”
“You would be, too. Maybe you should be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Come on. It’s a lovely day.”
The Common was alive with the desperate festivity that comes with the last warm day of the season. Couples pushed children in strollers. Brownstone Brahmins walked their dogs, and couples dozed, curled up in quilts. A coed football game was in progress on the lawn, and leaves were everywhere, the trees having thrown their autumnal parade seemingly overnight, leaving behind a strew of red, yellow, and orange confetti.
I hadn’t been to the Common since last year’s July 4, when we—Dan, Sheila, Aubrey, and I—had decided to camp out on a patch of grass to get a good view of the fireworks over the river. Aubrey was distant that day, and her moodiness had irritated me. Two days later, I found the e-mail from Richard.
Now here I was again, this time with either a demon or a psychopathic, albeit talented, hypnotist—part of me clung to the shrinking possibility that an explanation might still be found in this corporeal world—and last year’s Fourth of July seemed as surreal a life as my new one had become.
We were walking toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in the direction of the Public Garden, but even now I could see the blackness of Eden, the blaze of light that was Lucifer, the trailing stream of angels that followed him in a fleeing Milky Way of bright bodies. But before I would hear more, I wanted something.
“You said that first night that you came at great risk.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the risk?”
Lucian sighed heavily, as though it would take great effort to explain. “Is it not enough that I have assumed it?”
I was silent.
“I’m sure you would agree that this is highly unconventional,” he said at last.
To say the least.
“It would not be looked well upon, my talking with you.”
“By whom?”
“By just about any of them. Us. Enough now. This does not serve my purpose.”
“Your purpose? What about mine? I’ve spent an entire night falling from heaven, and you know what? I’m exhausted.”
“What do you want, Clay?” He sounded weary, and this aggravated me even more.
“I want to know why! If this is dangerous for you—and I have no idea what kind of ramifications this will have for me—I want at least to know why you’re doing it.”
“I told you you were safe. Any ‘ramifications,’ as you call them, will be those of your own making. As for why I’m doing this, I’ve already told you that as well. I’m not going to waste our time answering the same question twice.”
I had hoped, if he answered it again, that I might glean some small detail more because, although I had heard his reasons, I did not understand them. Why would a demon want his memoir published? And why by me? He had laughed at my first notion, that he was here to strike a devil’s bargain. But despite his irritation at my asking again, I could not help feeling that there was something more.
“I saw Lucifer leading you away, but I didn’t see where he took you.”
The demon tromped alongside me, his pasty skin and black boots a decided 180 after the stylish redhead, the dignified black man. “We assumed he would lead us to a place of our own. A place of his making—as though he had truly become, in that short time, a god. As though he cared for us and would re-create that garden and walk in it among us. But he led us nowhere.” He looked up toward the tops of the trees, their branches like sparse hairs on the scalps of aging men.
“There was no other place to go. We hovered on the edge of the earth in fear—fear and silence. And I longed for Eden, settling even then beneath those murky waters, the beautiful facets of the gems within it reflecting nothing but darkness. I was sick for it, would have given anything—if I had had anything to give—to have it all back as it was.”
I remembered the day Aubrey left our apartment.
“But here was the most terrible thing: El went down to Eden and laid himself out over the waters, there to brood in trembling sorrow. And it infused me, this sorrow. It saturated my being. Beside me, seraphim huddled with long faces. Some of them wept. I had never seen such tears before—dark, remorseful, bereft of joy. There was only sadness and dread, that terrible sense that, had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”
“Why couldn’t you?” I said. “For that matter, why couldn’t God?”
The kid gave a jolt of laughter that sounded slightly hysterical, and then his lips curled back from his teeth, and spittle flew out with his words. “I’ll tell you why: because we were damned! Oh, not that I knew it then—how could I? There was no precedent for any of it. Wrong had never existed. Lucifer had to manufacture that first aberration himself. Until then, there had been one law dictated by the sole fact of our creation: Worship the Creator. And now, as surely as Lucifer’s throne had broken into a thousand splinters, we had violated that order.”
“I thought Adam was the original sinner.”
“You humans always like to think of yourselves as the first at everything.”
I ignored his open sneer. “What if you had apologized?”
“Apologized.” He spat onto the edge of the path. “Let me tell you something: Apologies are funny things. Half the time they’re insincere. And even when they aren’t, there’s nothing a person can do to undo whatever he did. Oops, I ran over your cat. So sorry. Meanwhile, the cat’s dead, entrails oozing out of its mouth. Now, I can buy you a new cat, but it hasn’t changed anything except that I have an opportunity to run over your new cat as well. If Aubrey had apologized, would it have made it all better?”
I didn’t answer that.
“Besides, even though we knew we had committed something, we had no idea how irrevocable our actions were. Not yet. So there was only remorse—black, clinging like tar, eating like acid.
“Meanwhile, there was the shaking of El’s spirit like the keening of a banshee, as though the whole world had died. And I suppose it had. It was unbearable, that sound—a pain without end or even the hope of death to escape it. I could not watch, was unable to stand the sight of that spirit hovering over the darkness, though I couldn’t block out the sound of it.
“But this was the most terrible thing of all: El had turned away.” He tried to tuck a rogue strand of hair behind his ear. When it wouldn’t stay put but teased along the edge of his cheek, he yanked it out with a savage pull. I stared as the patch along the side of his temple sprouted angry red dots against the white of his scalp.
“I didn’t know why.” He seemed not to notice the deviance of his own actions as he flicked the hair off his fingers. “I didn’t understand that we had opened an unbridgeable chasm between us. All I knew was that he couldn’t stand to look at us. Oh, but to know that everything is wrong with the universe, and to know that you had a part in that irrevocable drama, is just about too much for any mind to take. I had lived always for the moment—that was, after all, all there had been—and now I could see no end to it. Regret ate at me like a ravenous worm. Had I been human, I would have gone insane.”
Are you sure you didn’t? I remembered his strange laughter but said only, “Obviously it did end.”
He shrugged. “Eventually. And I might have spent only an epoch like that. But it felt like an eternity.”
We walked in silence. What did one say to something like that—I’m sorry?
I had almost forgotten who I was talking to.
The demon pointed down the hill. “Look! The Frog Pond. When winter sets in, we should go ice skating there.”
Despite my limited knowledge of Lucifer, I couldn’t picture him—her, it, whatever the devil was—sitting idle after that. When I asked Lucian about it, he shook his youthful head.
“He kept to himself and wouldn’t even look at Eden. He was like a child who abandons a toy after he’s broken it. What was Eden to him now? Even if it had still been perfect, it might as well have been ruined; he had set his eyes on heaven. As for us, we no more existed to him than Eden did in those days . . . those nights. It was all one night to me, those hours like years, as Lucifer raised his head to heaven and narrowed his eyes at God.”
The demon squinted at the sun. “We huddled on the fringes of Lucifer’s light—all the rest of the world was darkness but for him—never venturing any closer for fear of his anger or any farther away for fear of the darkness. And all the while there was that terrible, shuddering spirit of El.
“Meanwhile, Lucifer grew bolder by the day. He blasted El with sharp, serrated words. I thought for sure the Host would come for us, that El would send us away or worse, scatter us like salt over a field.”
“Did you think he would obliterate you?”
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 blond ponytail 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. He grabbed at my shoulder even as he fell into the woman’s path. It was bizarre; 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, while Lucian nearly took me down with him. I stumbled, shoving the demon’s hand away, and saw the alarm on the woman’s face. As we more or less righted ourselves, she seemed to decide that Lucian was neither attacker nor injured. With a backward glance at us, 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 Public 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 Common 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 flower beds 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 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 somehow I knew he would not have allowed me to see so 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 masterwork 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. “Time, in the measured sense, had now begun.”
“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, at 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 memoir 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 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 aeon 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 worry 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 I imagined scientists observed 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 on 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 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 the 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. There were 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 911. 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 cluster 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.
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 her face in crimson-blond fingers. A shattered pink iPod was still strapped to her arm.
Somewhere bells were ringing. Church bells from across the Common. I stumbled back and searched the growing crowd for Lucian. But he was gone.