I felt it like a bodily urge—like the irresistible need to cough, to vomit, to use the toilet. The story welled to a sickening head within me. I grabbed a stack of paper from my recycling bin and began to write, the physical act releasing it in fits. Even when I reached the end, I sat back, breathing slowly, deeply, waiting for it to subside, and then bolted upright to add in my thoughts, the description of her hands tearing at her hair, the grotesque moment when I’d asked her about human obliteration, her smile the rictus of a corpse.
Shortly after one in the morning, I went to bed with a headache severe enough to turn my stomach.
At 3:00 A.M. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about something the demon had said. If El mended the rift between the humans and himself . . . what would become . . . of us?
Of me?
I thought of the Genesis account. Of the messianic prophecy and the birth of the baby. Something dawned on me that I had not seen before, something that, even alone in my apartment, made my lips part in wonder: The growing pile of pages on my desk was not the story of a fall. Neither was it a demonic coming-of-age.
It was a love story. Of God for humans.
I supposed, too, it was the story of Lucian’s own love affair and subsequent divorce.
If humans could be reconciled, what about demons? Lucian had said nothing about any hope for himself. At least not yet. Perhaps that was where he meant to go next.
But what if not? What if Lucian were truly disowned? Then he must resent people as much as he claimed. And that must, necessarily, include me.
My sleep that night, all three hours of it, was riddled with restless visions. I dreamed of Pastor Feagan, seeing the deep lines around his eyes, the gold crowns on two of his front teeth, more clearly in dreams than I could in memory. But when he opened his mouth in children’s church, he wasn’t the pastor at all. He was Lucian, spewing his hatred for all things human across the carpeted floor of the sanctuary.
And then I was at my cousin Kole’s house. My father was still alive, and we had driven to Nebraska as a family to see his brother’s family where they lived midway between Lincoln and the western panhandle. My uncle had moved there for some kind of work, and I used to love visiting my cousins there, where they burned their garbage in a big bin out back, and we played tackle-the-man-with-the-ball in their giant front yard. I was six again.
My cousin had, among his toys, a Sesame Street book about Grover, who was afraid of a monster at the end of the book. At each page Grover begged me not to go on, not to turn another page, and of course I couldn’t resist. I was so enamored with the book that I wanted to take it with me on the car ride home. My aunt gamely told me I could have it, and though my parents protested, and my cousin, two years younger than me, started to cry, I wanted that book so much that I made the situation worse by continuing to ask for it. I knew my mother would scold me later, but I didn’t care; I wanted to read it again and again with wild anticipation, Grover begging me at each turn not to go farther.
There’s a monster!
I didn’t care about the last page, when Grover, alone at the end of the book, realized that he was the monster. It was the pages leading up to it that fueled my little heart, that kept me turning, fixated, despite repeated warnings.
And then I dreamed I was at my desk, thumbing through proposals stacked in towers nearly as tall as I, through manuscripts five thousand pages long. Peeking out from between two boxed manuscripts, I saw the thin book with its cartoon Muppet character. I picked it up and began to read.
There’s a monster.