The taxi waited on the tree-lined east side of my office building. I stared at it until the driver leaned over and opened the passenger door. “Get in. We have to talk.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
“Just get in!”
When I didn’t move, he leaned farther across the front seat. He was ruddy-skinned and thickset. His head was shaved and his brows might as well have been; they were so pale that they hardly appeared on his face except when the light caught them. A thick stainless-steel watch escaped the ribbed cuff of his leather bomber jacket. “I tried to delay her. Startling her was supposed to slow her down.”
I thought again of his strange stumble that day in the Garden.
“And prevent her getting killed?”
“That was the idea.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I didn’t want it interfering with our time together.”
“You’re not even going to pretend that you cared about saving her life.”
He paused. “No.”
I believed him. That the expediency of his purpose and his personal convenience took precedence over a life was both brutal and, I believed, the truth. The bald admission triggered something irrevocable within me, and I knew then I could no sooner walk away than I could return to my former life—be it the one with Aubrey or my aimless existence since.
There were things I needed to know. Would I kill for meaning? No. Would I accept that my informant, teacher—whatever he was to me—was a party to murder?
I got in the car.
“You were tracking her,” I said.
“I only provided her location.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t my mission.”
“Then whose mission was it?”
A muscle in his jaw tightened. The hands on the steering wheel looked better suited to punching people than to driving a car. I tried to reconcile them with the slender fingers of the redhead, with the fastidiousness of the man in the café picking at the lint on his trousers. I couldn’t—until he glanced into the rearview mirror and I saw the murky shadow behind his eyes.
“Think about who you’re talking to and remember that we have our own chains of command. Our ranks and hierarchies. Must I remind you that I answer to an order, that I am, as you say, ‘low man on the totem pole’?”
“You say it like you’re in a war.”
He said it quietly. “We are.”
We drove in silence along the Charles. In the middle of the river, a crew team skimmed along the water like an insect skating on the surface of a pond.
“It seems somehow too cliché for you, killing innocent people.” I had found a follow-up mention in the next day’s paper: Sarah Marshall, a native of Michigan, was 35. She is survived by her husband and infant son. The rest of the story had been about controversy surrounding placement of the crosswalks on Arlington.
“No one is innocent, Clay.”
“Am I going to end up smattered on someone’s windshield?” I saw again the blood in the crackled glass—blood and blond hair.
“I told you. You’re very important to me right now. Besides, they’re not concerned about you.”
“They who?”
“The Legion.”
I hesitated before asking, “Why not?”
“Because you pose no threat.”
“And that blond runner did?”
“I promise you’ll understand soon.”
I sat back against the leather seat and waited, but he made no effort to explain. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something,” he said, speeding down Memorial Drive.
I gazed out at the aluminum sky, the lusterless yolk of sun. Lucian’s account had left off with the creation of that very body, with the coming and going of a day.
The demon nodded as though I had spoken. “After that, El drew back the darkness covering Eden like a dusty cloth from forgotten furniture. It had been formless since the rebellion, a watery wasteland. Now he separated those waters, lifting a canopy of them into the sky. And then he parted the deep, raising Eden up from beneath the water.
“Lucifer began to take interest in that planet for the first time since the great stones toppled like Titans into the murky ocean. My heart quickened. I knew what Lucifer must think: that El had seen the merit of a second god. And maybe even now he restored the earth for us—no, made it into a new and better thing. We would be happy there again. Our star would ascend after all, even if we never entered the throne room of Elohim ourselves. I didn’t care about any of that anymore. All that mattered was the relief flooding my taut immortal veins. El was going to take us back.”
“I know. And if I had thought about it at the time, I would have known it was impossible. He could no sooner welcome us back than he could change his own character—righteous, perfect. And we, as we had become—we were changed. No, that’s a pallid euphemism for the truth, which was this: We were ruined. More ruined than the wasted earth mere days—an age—before. Still, we hovered nearby, hopeful, waiting to see what would become of it. And Lucifer stood stoic witness, waiting to see what El would create for him. The earth, after all, was his.”
He was quiet for several minutes before he said softly, “It was tremendous. It surpassed imagination. We had seen Lucifer’s garden. We knew what we expected, though there really was no reason for El to reproduce it. And he didn’t; this was an entirely different work, this new Eden. Earth and water, deep and mountain. We watched, despite ourselves, fascinated with what El might do next, trying with our vast minds to anticipate the impossible. But even we couldn’t predict the green things that sprang up from the earth. You have to understand the revelation of this great wash of green.”
“It was a novelty to you,” I said, almost to myself.
“Of course! This was no rock garden but a rich and lush new world, teeming with life! Who could have fathomed such delicate complexity? It awed us. And for another reason, too: All those strange green things had within them the power to create, to reproduce, each of them manufacturing miniature versions of itself. Imagine!”
It had never occurred to me what a bizarre concept reproduction might seem to a race of finite number.
“I was enthralled by the veins on the backs of leaves, by the seeds growing inside fruit and pod,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel as though to hold—as he must have held—each leaf between his fingers, each pod, broken apart to reveal the seeds within. “The sticky pollen on the stamens. It was bizarre. It was awesome. This was beyond your science fiction to us. I had never even dreamed such things. And by the look on Lucifer’s face, neither had he.
“There were new and foreign bodies in the heavens now, too, their courses charted for millennia to come. And the water, once dark and stagnant, moved by the pull of the new moon. I was instantly in love and left the others to walk by the muted light. I stood by the shore and watched the tides leave their skeletal treasures on the sand, lulled by the rhythm of a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. I longed for it, for all that was within it, and to be a part of it.”
We had turned off Memorial onto Mount Auburn, and I was gazing at the scratched Plexiglas divider between us, seeing in its surface the mottled white of the moon, when a Lexus abruptly cut in front of us. Lucian hit the brakes and gave the driver the finger.
“Don’t do that!” I said, alarmed. “For all you know he has a gun!”
“He doesn’t have a gun,” he said and did it again. Some time after the car had sped on ahead, the demon continued. “These new celestial bodies took on great meaning to us. It was like watching the creation of an hourglass and all the sands within it. Sands within an hourglass are measured, a closed set, a finite amount. And they were now set in motion. I would never look at the heavens the same way; where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.”
“Who says time has to be finite?” I studied him in the rearview mirror. He had a faint scar against one temple, again suggesting a history that was not his. I wondered if it was the demon equivalent to designer jeans, faded and pre-ripped right off the hanger.
“Things with beginnings also have ends. The beginning of time is also the beginning of an end. And so that great hourglass to me was like your fabled Doomsday clock, ticking, ticking, every grain one in a too-limited series, the granule of an instant, passing and lost forever. I understood that things now and hereafter set in motion would be things of consequence, of inevitability. The passing of every moment since has disconcerted me. See the clock on the dash?” He tapped it. “You’re deaf to it, to the death of each second. But I am not.”
I had thought his fixation on time and timepieces a fetish until now. Now I thought I understood the preoccupation, the compulsive checking. Every timepiece I had ever seen him wear had been expensive. Was it that time was precious?
And to think that in the last year I had done nothing but pass time since my separation and divorce, tossing first days and then weeks and months at the iterant routine of work, of the T. Drinking past the pain, and then waiting for the day that something shoved me from inertia.
And something had.
The demon was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other fingering his watch with more thoughtful delicacy than I would have thought those hands capable of. “I didn’t understand it yet, of course. I was preoccupied, if unsettled. Each new day brought new wonders to Eden. The next day El spoke again, and the water swarmed—and so did the air.”
“Are you talking about fish—fish and birds?” I saw the distinct image of my own hands—small, as they had been when I was a boy—pasting animals onto a paper earth in Sunday school, something I had forgotten until this moment.
“Yes, and we had never seen anything like them. These were no spirit-beings but strange and alien creatures, swimming in the water and flying through the sky. So queer and diverse. Even Lucifer watched, stark-eyed, beside himself with amazement. And I knew, with a vestige of that single accord that we had once shared, that he coveted this strange new world and all the things inside it. He had wanted to be a god, but in that moment I believe he remembered why he was not.
“But now, a stinging blow! El did something he had never done before: He blessed them. Never before had I heard such things spoken, even to Lucifer, and he had been the anointed one. Coveted words! And then, to these creatures, these base and strange new things, he gave license to create more of their own for as long and often as they dared. Imagine!”
In the rearview mirror I saw fever in his eyes.
“These were no gods—no spiritual beings even—these creatures. But they had been given the power to create.”
I had never seen him this emotional.
“We had no such power! They had been blessed. We had no such blessing. Can you understand?”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking how a firstborn must feel at the birth of a younger sibling—how I had felt at the birth of my sister when I was six years old.
“That day,” he said, at a stoplight now, his hand a fist on his chest, “another new thing sprouted, this time inside me, its roots embedded in the soil of my changed heart. By nightfall, jealousy had wound its tendrils through my innards, choking me from the inside. From Lucifer’s face I knew I was not the only one.
“And now, with the passing of another day, there came new creations more exotic than before, walking on legs, many of them without wings, roaming over the land. By any logic they should have been miserable—censured, condemned to swim, to roam on land without flying, to fly and not swim. I wanted them to be miserable. But they fascinated us with their strangeness and variety. And they ate things.”
He chuckled, but the sound was hollow. “Never before had we seen such a phenomenon. Terrible, fascinating—the devouring of green, living things for the sake of a too-mortal body. Mesmerizing. Horrifying. We watched them do it for hours, transfixed—mouthfuls of green, leaf and branch, fruit and seed, even the tiny plankton of the sea—all devoured by bodies with appetites we did not understand. So strange, so novel. We couldn’t get enough of it.”
I thought back to the coffee in the café, the scone at the bookstore, the demon’s eyes on me. Even in the tea shop, he hadn’t drunk from his cup but watched me lift it to my lips so intently I had wondered if he had poisoned it.
“Yes!” He laughed. “So now you know why I will never tire of watching you consume things.”
This struck me as being as deviant as a foot fetish. “Then why don’t you ever eat?”
His expression slowly twisted. In the rearview mirror, acid leaked into his eyes. “Because it all tastes like the dirt you come from!”
I fell back against the seat, startled into silence as he drove on, eyes boring into the road before us.
We entered a residential area of large, rolling yards. Iron fences enclosed wooded drives, old elms screened houses buttoned tight by latched iron gates. I recognized this Belmont neighborhood; in college I had attended a party here at the family home of a friend of a friend. I had been struck by the sheer size of the house, awed by the French table clocks, chinoiserie secretaries, and mahogany sideboards that whispered “heirloom” and “old money,” each of them at anachronistic odds with the modern security and sound system panels, the oversize television screens. Someone had set a sweating beer bottle on top of a Queen Anne table and I had discreetly removed it, trying to save the old walnut the indignity of a ring.
For years I returned whenever I found myself in the area, to admire the gabled roofs and columned porticoes, the dark shutters and diamond-paned windows, to tell myself that when I got caught up at work, I would pull out one of my own manuscripts and finish it. And when that day came—the one with the six-figure advance and movie deal—I would buy a place here where my kids could play on the lawn or ride their Big Wheels in front of the garage, where our two family cars—one of them an SUV and the other an Audi sedan—were parked inside. When the kids were old enough, they could go off to the local private school, complete with its own ice hockey rink.
I did indeed finish the manuscript and sold it in a three-book deal as the Coming Home series. But I never bought the house. The first book sold fewer than 3,500 copies, and the series was canceled after the release of the second. Had it stayed in print long enough, I was sure it would have done better, but the unsold copies returned too quickly, their shelf space surrendered to higher-volume tenants.
Lucian pulled over in front of a stately brick Tudor covered with ivy. I was not surprised to recognize the curved front entry, the door like an upside-down U, the turret—complete with a spire—running up the front of the house, the steeply pitched roof. It was the same house I had visited nearly two decades ago, the same one that had informed my every image of success, of a life worthy of Aubrey’s expectations. A mark I had fallen short of.
The demon squinted at it through the passenger window, his forearm resting on the steering wheel. I expected him to crow his knowledge of my having come here, to regale me with the story of how I made out with Breanna Blair in an upstairs bedroom, then drop the bomb that she was dead or paralyzed or kidnapped in Colombia. But he was silent. I found it unnerving.
“Why are we here?”
He turned in the seat and regarded me. “I’ve thought a long time about telling you this, gone back and forth on it. I’m not sure about it, even now, but look—we’re here, and I promised to tell you everything.”
He seemed to wait for some indication of my understanding.
“The world is not as you see it,” he said finally. “Look at that house. So grand, so very upper-crust.”
“That it is,” I said warily.
“But here’s the thing: That house, the cars, the old furniture and interior decorating, even the landscaping—this physical world—is nothing but window dressing. Beneath all of that lies another realm altogether.
“The distinction between our two worlds is important for you to understand. It’s important for you to know that beneath the aesthetics of every temporal veneer lies a stratum of infallible truth: a spiritual realm, the world wiped clean of cosmetics.”
Now, as I looked again at that house, the heavy brick began to fall away, translucent as a frame in a ghost movie. And then the two upper levels silently collapsed, caving in in the middle so that the stately old furniture, tables, and consoles with their curving legs and claw feet slid and then toppled through the crumbling floors. I had experienced Lucian’s tampering with my brain before in visions and dreams, but this—here, with my eyes bearing open witness to the very thing before me—was disconcerting. I jerked in my seat, but it, too, had become transparent. And then we were no longer seated in a cab but standing on a street that was no longer paved, in front of a yard that was nothing but earth and rock.
In my vision, my waking hallucination, he turned to me. “I’m aware of every detail you’ve admired about this place: the great deck out back, the vaulted ceilings, the crystal light fixtures, and old oak floors. The grandeur, the status, the sheer custom cost of it all. But I see nothing more than your fancy tissue paper: brightly colored but fragile, fading, and easily torn, not to endure very well even the short span of your lifetime.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, where the house, the raised flower beds, the turret spire, and the iron gate had been, there was nothing but a pile of brick and rubble. On the ground perhaps ten feet from me lay the splintered foot of a Queen Anne table, the cabriole wizened as though a century had had its inevitable way with it in the space of that instant.
A car rambled past us on the street, and we were in the cab once more as a postman pulled over in front of the bronze mailbox. The house was restored to its opulence, secure in its legacy, anchored in privilege to the manicured lawn.
The demon tilted his head back against the window. “I see beyond the comforts of the amenities you seek all your life—the money, the hobbies, the alluring distractions that promise temporal gratification. Though humans claim to plumb the depths in search of meaning, I find they tend to settle for whatever drifts across the surface.”
He had given me something. I knew that, for whatever reason, he had granted me a concession in showing me this thing, without which he might have shared his story just as cohesively and in a more expedient fashion. And I wondered why. To unsettle me? I was indeed unsettled—seeing the embodiment of my dreams ravaged before me resonated with strong, discordant notes.
He raised a finger. “Granted, every now and then a human comes along with extraordinary discernment, a gift for seeing the world—if only for momentary glimpses—with near-angelic acumen. It’s unnerving.”
“Why?”
“It’s like peering into a roomful of shadows and having one of them step forward to look you directly in the face. Humans shouldn’t see so clearly.”
“Do you think angels—demons, whatever—have a monopoly on truth?” I asked, not without defensiveness.
He sat up, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “No. We’re simply better equipped to see it. Why? Because we aren’t looking at the world through soft and pulpous eyes like you, but through the iris of truth. It is neither obscured from us nor spared us.”
“I want to know what this has to do with me.”
“I’m coming to that.”
Just then the two-way radio on the dash crackled with static. Though no voice came through, Lucian tilted his head as I had seen him do toward the invisible swarm of insects near his ear before.
We had been wending through the country club area, but now he turned around with a curse.
“Helen’s been asking about you at the office. When you get back, tell her you had a doctor’s appointment.”
“That’s lying.”
“It’s on your calendar.”
“It’s not on my cal—” I stopped, aggravated. “Why did we even come here if you were going to take me right back?” Though I had been antsy about the time away from the office, I now had mixed feelings about returning.
“I didn’t know they’d be talking that much about your absence.”
“I thought you knew things.”
“I hear things. I observe. I’m not omniscient.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, as though the very act of talking to me gave him a headache.
“We have a little bit of time left,” he said, checking his watch and then tapping the clock on the dash as if it had stopped. “So now listen: The world was new. All the creatures were vegetarian. The rending of flesh was yet to come. Creation enthralled and amazed us.”
“Vegetarian?” I remembered his T-shirt that day in the Common—and then, inevitably, the shattered pink iPod strapped to a sickeningly skewed arm.
“By design. You weren’t made to eat meat. Of course, you weren’t made to die, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll come to that. For now, you need to know something more about Elohim: He is the ultimate force of creativity. He is the author of diversity. The richness of creation has been lost on your kind for centuries. Millennia. But it wasn’t lost on us. Even Lucifer stared in amazement. Light. Earth. Water. Life. It was base and gorgeous. It was extravagant. We had never seen the earth like this, a swarming symphony of life. I heard with angel ears every call of bird and whale, the murmur of water, the rustle of tree. I thrilled to the sound of crickets, the collective pulse of mortal vein and plant stem. It was a visual feast as well, and I consumed it in long, wondering stares: the jade of glaciers, the desert art of sand dune, the simmer of lava, the effusive glow of firefly.”
His voice fell and drifted off. When he spoke next, his words were distant.
“I was intoxicated by the activity of the day but returned almost every night to the shore to walk beneath the gentle light of the moon, which forgave in shadow everything the sun so harshly laid bare. I could have spent millennia like that, days and nights walking the earth, sating my senses.”
I was, for a moment, moved. And though he had not cast me into the illusion of his memory, I stood vicariously beside him on the shores of Saint Lucia, where I had gone on my honeymoon.
“We longed for this world. We coveted it, and we hoped. Even Lucifer, though he wouldn’t say it, looked on with greed-softened eyes, infatuated. I deluded myself into thinking that, yes, perhaps Elohim had taken him back. Perhaps Elohim had forgotten all, would set him up as a god over this rich and wild new world. The next blessings to come from El would be his, and ours.” He shook his head with a brittle laugh, the sound slightly too high-pitched for such a big man.
We had skirted the MIT campus to arrive on Main, a block from my office building.
“And why weren’t they? Why couldn’t they be?”
He pulled over, put the car in park, and turned to look at me.
“Because then he created them.”
“Them?”
“You.”