The parade was on TV. Apparently it was Thanksgiving. But all I knew or cared about was that it had been five days. Five days, and nothing. I sifted through the stack of pages constituting my record as an archaeologist brushes dirt through a sieve, searching for details, meaning, reason. I have lost it. I was obsessed. The fact that I had not replayed my encounter with Aubrey at the museum to death was proof of that. I had thought I would be compelled to drink, break down, or at least stew for a few days, reliving the years of our marital routine, the arguments, the silent specters between us. But I did none of these, having already transferred my best energies to the account growing on the corner of my desk.
My pulse throbbed in my temple. I was more conscious of it of late, imagining that I felt its thumping shiver through the mattress beneath me as I lay in bed at night. This experience had drained me, and yet I checked my schedule by the hour—sometimes more often—lingering at the keyboard like a lover waiting by a silent phone.
I looked up articles on Horus, searched for pictures of the falcon-headed god to see if I saw anything of the demonic scowl in the ancient idol’s eyes. I scoured the Internet long past midnight. Dozing in my chair before dawn, I dreamed convoluted dreams of bird-headed deities with clay bodies, of sarcophagi with wide-eyed funeral masks, of a woman the color of bone singing by the pale light of Lucian’s moon.
I woke up in the afternoon, raked my hands through my hair, scrubbed at the stubble on my cheeks, and realized the holiday had passed. It was the weekend.
That day, as I returned to the account of my meetings with Lucian, I was disturbed by the fragility of the paper it was written on, the fraying edges of the notebook pages, the bloated ink where I had set a glass of water on one of them. I recalled the shambles of the house in Belmont, the splintered table leg. Tissue paper, he had called it.
I immediately decided that I should type the entire thing, commit it to a more lasting medium.
When I finished, it was well past dark. I sat back, considered the last line of my account, which ended in the museum with Aubrey and me parting ways again. With Lucifer searching for the weakness in man.
On impulse, I pulled up an online Bible.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
So bare-boned—the image of God hovering over the water that had made Lucian shudder recounted with all the emotion of a recipe. I scanned through the days of creation, and though I found no inconsistencies between this account and the demon’s, I found no mention of the angelic host or Lucifer, of the fall that precipitated the earth’s emptiness. I read through the creation of animals and man retold in the next chapter. It seemed dry and rote, down to the repetition of the days coming and going in numbered sequence. I was disappointed, tired, and very hungry. My mouse hovered over the X that would close the online Bible, but then something happened: the echo of past conversations with Lucian came back to me like the lyrics of a half-forgotten song.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
. . . the way a sculptor’s fingers roam a block of marble . . .
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.”
All those strange green things had within them the power to create . . . each of them manufacturing miniature versions of itself.
So God created man in his own image.
. . . the awareness, all the emotion, the propensity to love . . .
“Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
He gave the animals to the man and told him to rule over them.
“It is not good for the man to be alone.”
And he was lonely.
The one thing the demon had not yet mentioned was the tree in the second chapter. I scrolled to Genesis 3.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.
He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic . . . searching for the slightest weakness.
It came vividly alive. I scrolled ahead, excited, looking for more. But I found only Cain and Abel, followed by an entire genealogy of men who became fathers in their old age and supposedly lived for centuries. Lucian had said nothing of this part, having come only, as far as I could tell, to the end of Genesis 2. Looking at the screen, I thought with some alarm of the thick, dusty, leather-bound book on the shelf at home when I was growing up. Was that what he meant every time he said time was short—that it could take an entire lifetime to recount the whole thing?
I rethought my obsession, not sure if I was up for all of that. I was exhausted, preoccupied to the point of paranoia—and Lucian had barely covered the first two pages of that dusty book. Did he mean to recount his observation of or participation in every event in the Bible? And what did any of this have to do, as he contended, with me?
Something scratched at the back of my mind.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. . . And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. . . And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
Time, not yet created, had begun its phantom tick for us alone.
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.
And then I knew.
The demon’s obsession with time wasn’t about getting through the entire Bible. It was about his own limited quantity of it. In our conversation upon leaving the church that day weeks ago, he said he had never been to hell.
Yet.
On a whim I searched the Internet for “Lucian.”
Back came Lucian of Samosata, the rhetorician, author of Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead. How fitting. Lucian of Antioch, the saint. Why would a demon take the name of a saint? Lucian Freud, the painter. Various blogs, designers, an actor, even a boxer.
Well, what’s in a name anyway?
I typed: “Name meanings: Lucian.”
I received: Lucian: Latin. “Light.”
Light?
I searched for “Lucifer.” I felt strange, deviant doing it.
Lucifer: “bringer of light.”
I toggled back to the file containing my notes and scrolled to Lucian’s retelling of Lucifer’s attempted ascent, of the darkness after its failure. And then before that, to the flashing stones of Eden that reflected the light of its governor. It had all been noticeably missing from the account in Genesis.
Returning to the online Bible, I searched for “Lucifer.” The only linked passage that came back was a reference from Isaiah:
How you have fallen from heaven,
O morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
I searched next for “Eden.” An entire list of references scrolled before my eyes. Nothing snagged my attention . . . until this:
You were in Eden,
every precious stone adorned you.
I scrolled down through the passage from Ezekiel.
You were anointed as a guardian cherub,
for so I ordained you.
You were on the holy mount of God;
you walked among the fiery stones.
You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created
till wickedness was found in you.
Through your widespread trade
you were filled with violence,
and you sinned.
So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God,
and I expelled you, O guardian cherub,
from among the fiery stones.
I grabbed my notes and reread them, my heart accelerating. It was the same story except that, as before, the demon’s account was more fantastic. More compelling.
I had sworn I would not publish his story even if he were J. D. Salinger incarnate.
Salinger never wrote a story like this.
And again I had to wonder: Why me? I was no high-profile editor. Brooks and Hanover was a small publishing house. With titans like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House in New York—with Houghton Mifflin, even, right here in Boston—why choose me?
It drifted back to me from the pile of pages: My story is very closely connected to yours.
How could that be?
I searched for “Satan,” half expecting to see a warning flash across my screen.
Satan:
“Accuser.”
I read and reread that single word.
I slept, finally, around three in the morning but woke again just after five-thirty.
I couldn’t go on like this. I pictured myself short years into the future, a skeleton of a man, my eyes sunken into my skull, dark circles like black halos on pallid, sun-forsaken skin, ranting on street corners, and no doubt jobless.
I got up for water, thinking I ought to return to bed, try to sleep some more. But instead I sat down at my computer, setting the glass atop a pile of proposals I had read the night before, the content of which I could no longer remember.
I touched the pad on my laptop. A page of links on Satan and Satan-related topics sprang to pixilated life. Mere weeks ago I would have found this creepy and aberrant. And now here I was with a bookmark on him.
Lucian claimed he didn’t know where I was meant to spend eternity. Staring at the screen, I wondered: Was I sealing my own fate with every hour, every minute I passed listening to his story? I felt the cold fingers again, scraping the inside of my chest. Could one be damned by association?
Stop it. You’ll make yourself crazy.
I looked out my window onto the darkness of Norfolk Street. All around me I was surrounded by so-called normal people chasing normal aspirations—money, relationships, weight loss. People who went home to families or empty apartments and went to bed worrying about the same, normal things.
I wondered if I would ever return to that life. Assuming Lucian never appeared again, could I ever purge myself of this more vivid reality and go back, reset . . . reboot?
Just as I lifted my finger to the power button, a new meeting notice appeared in the corner of my screen.