On board Flight 865 to Cabo San Lucas, I closed my eyes. I had worked straight through Christmas, marking the season with a roast-beef sandwich—homemade, no less—and a call to my niece, Jozlyn, during which she thanked me for the Chronicles of Narnia set that I had ordered and sent straight from Amazon. Afterward, I talked to my sister for a few rare minutes.
Despite my productivity in those quiet days alone on the second floor of my building—Mrs. Russo had gone to her daughter’s house in Haverhill—I wasn’t going on this so-called vacation without my laptop and the handwritten transcriptions of every meeting since that first night. I would have felt less compelled to carry so much with me had the majority of my work over the holiday been for my actual job. But I had been preoccupied with the memoir on my laptop hard drive, currently 78,000 words and growing.
I looked out the window from seat 21A onto a heavenly floor of clouds worthy of a fabric softener commercial, disappointed that I could not see the earth. On my trip to China in college, I had lifted my window shade midflight. And there, as the rest of the dimly lit plane slept, watched a movie, or worked by seat lights, I gazed down onto what I calculated to be Siberia. Chalky rivers snaked through stunted mountains like veins in marble; pasty snow spackled crevices in the landscape like filling in the pores of travertine. I must have stared for half an hour at that fawn gray and virgin desolation, my breath fogging the glass as I wondered if, like Isak Dinesen, I was seeing “a glimpse of the world through God’s eye.” Did I look down on any spot of land previously untouched by any eye but God’s?
It was the closest I had ever come to a religious experience, and though I had requested window seats and looked down on the earth from cruising altitude on nearly every flight since, I never saw anything like it again.
The man next to me—a short Asian with black, feathery brows and a hairline that had receded to the crown—leaned across the armrest between us to peer out as well.
“ ‘And I thought, yes, I see, this is the way it was intended,’ ” he said, quoting Dinesen.
We were bound by the story, needing one another in our own ways, but in that moment I realized I hated him, too. Again I wondered what would happen when we both got what we wanted from this arrangement and what would become of us, of this contemptuous codependency.
The demon removed his shoes and tucked them beneath the seat in front of him. He was wearing GoldToe socks.
“What made you leave the co-op? What’s been distracting you?” I asked without preamble.
He tilted his seat back and stretched his short legs. “I told you there are those who would not look well upon our time together.”
I remembered. I also recalled that he had sidestepped the question, saying it did not serve his purpose.
“Who? The Host?”
He sucked at his teeth. His smooth skin belied his age, the few age spots on his face the only clue that he was, I guessed, close to sixty years old. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Did you see them?”
“Let it be, Clay. You don’t know what you’re delving into.”
“What does this have to do with Mrs. Russo?”
His expression sharpened into a glower. “Stay away from her.”
“If you don’t want to jeopardize the time we have left, do as I say.”
I thought of the two men in the mall, the ladies at the bar in the Bristol Lounge. “What was it at Vittorio’s?” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“But—”
“We don’t have time for me to explain this to you. I’ve answered your questions. With the committee meeting in your absence, I would think you’d be more focused on getting to the end of your book.”
There’s a monster.
I tilted my head back against the headrest, but it seemed to curve the wrong way and only succeeded in making me more uncomfortable. “They killed him,” I said, but I was scouring our last meeting for oddities, recalculating the time of his nervous departure and Mrs. Russo’s appearance in her camel coat. Mrs. Russo, who went faithfully to church and sometimes hosted a Bible group in her apartment.
Spiritual static, he called it.
“They wondered at his rising from the dead, but that didn’t amaze me. I knew better than any mortal who this God-man was. Of course his power extended over death as well.”
This brought my attention back to him. “You’re saying he really rose from the dead.”
“Yes, really. By then I knew for gospel fact, if you’ll pardon the expression, that it would happen. Everything was coming to horrible fruition. I also knew El would call back that part of him to himself, and this God-man would ascend to heaven. Later, it struck me as ironic that he had achieved with ease the thing Lucifer attempted so long before—ascension to heaven and a seat at the right hand of the Almighty. Lucifer took it as a blow, but the reality was harsher than that: Lucifer’s star had been eclipsed by a new Son.
“The followers of Jesus scattered to spread the news about what had happened. And people began to believe with an insight that incensed and amazed me. It was one thing for us to know that this Jewish carpenter had been more than a religious fanatic, but it was an altogether different thing for the clay humans to believe it.”
“What did it matter to you?”
He sighed, and the Shadow Creek logo on his polo stretched and slumped back into a wrinkle. “Ordinary men, hitherto blind, began to see this redemptive blood for what it was and this man, this Messiah, for what he was. And they saw it because El gave them yet another thing: guiding discernment, the gift of his own Spirit, given first to the God-man before the spilling of his messianic blood and freely offered afterward. To anyone. It was awful. Gone were the days of Israel’s elite, the heyday of the Jew. Anyone could have this ‘Holy Spirit’ freely for the asking.” He dropped his head back, reached up to adjust the airflow.
“I’ll never forget the first human I watched receive it, this gift. Before my very eyes, he changed from a shattered thing of darkness, like a mirror reflecting nothing but shadows no matter which way its fractured surface turned, into something whole, reflecting El’s radiance, so that I had to—could not help but—turn away. When I recovered, I saw that it was true; my eyes had not played me false. On the outside he was still flawed. But the soul inside had come alive, as though all defects had been erased. There was only that loveliness, that light, shining in him.”
“But he was still human.”
“Yes, but here was the difference: El drew close to those people who called to him as he had with Adam in the garden. Not only did he walk with them, he began to change them. And in them I saw more than the uncanny resemblance to that first man and woman. I saw something beyond what they were originally meant to be: ‘Children,’ he called them.”
“Children of God,” I said, with some wonder.
“I hated them! Never had I dared to aspire so high. Never had I imagined any such thing. Hades, I’m so tired of saying that I’d never fathomed this or that. But I hadn’t. It surpassed any angel’s dream, any human’s deserving. How I craved it, jealous of your inheritance. Like Cain to your Abel, wanting you to die.”
His last words jarred me, and I remembered the final line of his e-mail.
“For the first time, I saw the ill effects of the ages upon Lucifer, his waning brilliance, the wearing of the years taking its toll upon him like the first wrinkles of your human age. The moment I saw that, I wanted to hate him, too. Disdain and rage came naturally to me by then, and this time they came with such force I thought I would kill him had I only the power to do it.”
“You used to adore him.” Echoes of our first conversations washed over me like waves on a tranquil shore. “My beautiful one!”
Lucian’s laugh was hard. Gone was the slight mania, the high-pitched sound. “What reward had I gained in following him? What prize but the forfeiture of my soul? But even my hatred could not save me from misery. The more I looked upon these followers, these renewed people, these believers—and their numbers were growing—the more wretched I became. But as much as I wanted to kill Lucifer that day, I also wanted to rip from every one of those believers the brilliant vestige of their new souls, knowing El had no such designs for us. For me.”
I searched for something to say as a beverage cart stopped in the aisle. Over the top of Lucian’s head, a flight attendant smiled and asked if she could get us something to drink.
He was silent after that, not looking at me. I gazed out the window, sipping tomato juice and wishing it were a Bloody Mary, his words still reverberating between us.
El had no such designs for us. For me.
Shortly before we landed, he unbuckled his seat belt and got up, ostensibly to go to the lavatory. He never came back. As the plane taxied to the terminal, I noted his shoes, still under the seat in front of us.