Demon: A Memoir (12 page)

“That day, as I watched Adam and his wife realize for the first time they were naked, I was overcome by sadness—and déjà vu. I cut the strings by which I had vicariously experienced their contentment, unwilling to go through the emotions again. I remembered too well what it was to be exposed—when all the blithe routine of life slips away, and there is only regret and the overpowering knowledge of an irrevocable act.” She sighed. “It was futile, their hiding. We all knew it. And El—”

“Cursed them.”

“Quite the biblical scholar now, aren’t we?” Her brows arched. She looked like the quintessential soccer mom. A scolding soccer mom. “Yes, he cursed them. But I didn’t stay to watch. I could recall too well the shivering grief of that spirit over the deep, crying out in the dark. I couldn’t bear to witness it all again, even as I admitted that a tiny part of me took delight in knowing we weren’t the only ones to fail El. Perhaps I was even a little smug”— she lifted her glass by the stem as if to gauge the color of the wine—“but my satisfaction sweetened nothing.”

“Why not?”

She gazed across the rim of the glass at me. “Because it is a sad tale I’m telling you. Do you weep? No. Of course not. You can’t imagine the loss of perfection. This is the only world you know.” She set the wine glass down on the tablecloth, turned it this way and that. “You literally had to be there—before—to understand the gall of that remorse as it stained . . . the cup . . . of my heart.” Her finger traced the stem, too hard, and the glass toppled over, practically in slow motion.

I started, bumping my hand on the edge of the table as I tried to grab the glass in time. I wasn’t fast enough, and the wine bled out over the tablecloth in a plum-colored blot, creeping in all directions.

“Of course, the remorse has faded some since then,” she said, gazing dispassionately at the blooming stain.

I daubed at the spill, irritated. When the waiter arrived with my salad, he set it on a nearby table and went about cleaning ours, going so far as to remove everything on it and to spread a pressed, pristine white linen across the scratched and worn surface beneath.

Lucian the soccer mom watched all of this with strange impassivity, saying nothing when the waiter assured her it was no problem. I said we were terribly sorry and urged him not to go to all the trouble. As the waiter set everything back, I noted an ironic, if slightly bitter, look on the demon’s face.

After replacing the settings and condiments, he served my salad and carried the dirty linens away.

I picked at my food in silence after that, and she watched me, her chin resting on the back of her hand.

“I supposed El would turn his back on the clay humans,” she said at last. “That he would destroy the garden as he had destroyed Eden once before, leaving them as naked and as miserably at odds with him as we were. And I wondered why El had done it, had put himself through it again—the disappointment of a creation all too free to choose ill. As I sit here with you, I’ve yet to find an answer for that.”

Lucian seemed to be looking through me, as if trying to answer the question for the millionth time.

“Either way, Eden was finished.” I speared a pepper.

“Yes. Though it didn’t come about as I expected. This time it was different.” She rubbed her forearm, as though to smooth away goose bumps. “This time there were consequences.”

“The curses.”

She nodded. “With words that rang prophetic, El cursed the form Lucifer had taken. I didn’t understand it all at the time and would not for some time to come. We had never heard prophecy before. El cursed the ground from which Adam would grow their food and foretold the pain with which the woman would bear children and drove them both out of the garden and into the rest of the world. Those of us watching the human mimicry of our own first Eden pulled away in a corporate shudder. Adam and his woman would die.”

The waiter appeared then with my pasta. He turned to Lucian. “Would you like another glass of wine, ma’am?”

The demon gave a slight smile. “No, thank you. I’ll only spill it again.”

“There’s something I don’t understand.” I wound pasta around my fork. “They didn’t die right away. At least Adam didn’t.” It hadn’t said anything about Eve, but if the biblical account were to be taken literally—and I didn’t see how it could—Adam had lived some nine hundred years.

“Of course not.” She pressed tiny indentations in the tablecloth with the prongs of her fork. “But they changed physically and spiritually. They were marred now, at odds with the world and destined to struggle against it and against themselves. Strife is, after all, the constant companion of imperfection. Even so, it took time for Adam’s body—clay, but genetically perfect by any standard of yours—to submit to the sentence of mortality.”

“Why didn’t God just kill him?”

“Trust me, at the time nine hundred years seemed frighteningly short—it still does. I really don’t know how you cope with your eighty-something life spans, and that’s a best-case scenario, isn’t it?” She gave me a pert little smile, her lips pressed into the shape of a heart. “Suffice it to say, we were horrified by the entire concept of dying, even if we weren’t the ones with the death sentence. None of us had experienced mortality, not even as spectators.”

To have never seen death?
As her story progressed, it sounded less like the biblical account of stodgy old men and more like a SyFy Channel movie.

“Here’s something for you”— she pointed the fork at me—“you asked about the light-bringer, Lucifer. If Adam and his wife were the first and best specimens of your race, slowly but surely giving in to the inevitable, Lucifer, too, had begun to change. On the outside he was still radiant—is to this day—never cursed with mortal death as your kind is, only losing the glamour of the Shekinah glory by miniscule fractions through the ages. But inside he had changed. Even by the time of Adam there was little left of that perfect governor, of that shining prince. He was a new creature. But then, so were we all. And the world changed, too.”

“Why would the world change?”

“Just as one renegade gene creates a new thing, the world had begun to mutate.” Her casual shrug said it was nothing important. “It was the natural order, a trajectory set in motion by a single aberration that signaled perversity to come.”

I thought back to every beautiful place I had ever been—to the red rocks of Utah, the shores of Saint Lucia, the peaks of the Guilin Mountains along the Li River. I thought of Aubrey’s travel books, of Ansel Adams’s black-and-whites.

“Yes, I call your beautiful world mutant and perverse. So would you if you had seen the original. If you had, you would know how far we’ve all veered, how like a cancer things have grown. In fact, I almost felt sympathy for El when I saw how saddened he was again. But I, too, had begun to change.”

She had turned her fork over and was on the verge of pressing another row of indentations into the tablecloth when she started, as though something had caught her eye across the room. For a moment she was still, her eyes narrowed, seeming to peer through booths and walls and kitchen. She reminded me of an animal, ears back, hackles raised, haunches tense. I followed the line of her gaze trying to see who—or what—had captured her attention. But then her posture relaxed, and she was back at the tablecloth with the fork.

“So as I said, the world was mutating,” she said, prick, prick, pricking at the cloth, looking up at me once to make sure, I assume, I was listening. “From the earth sprung hateful and ugly things that flourished amid all that was lush and good. There would be no more accord among the animals now; they would follow a different order, no longer subsisting exclusively on plants but also on one another. Adam’s flesh was no longer the same, though it would take centuries for disease to manifest itself, for bodies so genetically pure that a man could marry his sister to corrupt down through the generations to the point where a man dare not marry even his cousin. In fact, it took, as you have read, 930 years for Adam to die, and his children lived similarly long lives.”

I couldn’t believe it. She had actually made a kind of sense out of something I was sure would prove a faltering point.

“Of course it makes sense.” She lifted her chin. “As surely as the old doctrine of sin handed down from the father to the sons has remained thematic throughout your time. Look around you. See the truth of it manifest today: the imperfection of your eyes, the weakness of your immune systems, the proclivity of some of you for disease and cancer, asthma and allergies, genetic disorders of all kinds.”

I did look around, my gaze settling on the large table of twelve in the center of the small restaurant. They must have been a family, I thought, feeling a slight pang of envy. And now I took tally: At least five of the people sitting at the table wore glasses. One of them, a young man in his twenties, was in a wheelchair. The oldest person at the table was a white-haired lady, her nape bent by a bump. She ate slowly, chewing her food with dogged purpose. I guessed she might be 85.

Eighty-five . . . versus 930. What had Adam looked like at 85?

“He was virile,” she said. “Quite the stallion.”

Now there was a thought that was going to fester.

“It isn’t just you, though. You haven’t had the nutrient wholeness of those first foods in ages. Look at what you pass off as food today. Frankly, I’m surprised you live twenty years on that stuff.” She gestured toward my pasta. “Add to it the fact that you’re missing the full health of the earth as it originally was, and you realize how far things have come. Do you think your ancients went around slathered with sunscreen? Do you think they had to infuse their soil with chemicals?”

I looked at the remainder of my pasta. Just earlier I had congratulated myself on actually eating a hot meal.

“And so the earth itself began to die a little, though like Adam it would survive a long while yet.”

She was looking sidelong at that table of twelve. What was it that had her attention? With an uneasy sense I wondered if I would see someone die tonight. Would that old woman with her white hair choke and fall over, expire as horrified family members performed the Heimlich, CPR?
Please,
I thought, not sure who I thought it to—maybe all this talk of God, of creation and sin was affecting me—
please no.
I needed to hear this, uninterrupted. I needed more. I needed to have this time.

Someone could die tonight, and I’m worried about getting my demonic fix.

“Meanwhile, all over the faltering planet, the clay humans raised up others just like them in a world plagued with aberrations and depravity, fostering a new culture of death,” she said, her eyes on the table.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” But her words called to mind the mummy room at the museum, her comment that all of it had come from those first, original two. And I had thought she had been referring to sophisticated Egyptian culture.

Her mouth curved, her attention solidly fixed on me again. “It does sound grim, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. At least from my point of view. We had learned, by then, to take delight in what we saw, in what we perceived as the prolonged failure of El. Because, you see, if he failed with his new creations, these new heirs, it only served to make us look a little better. CLAY, LOOK AT ME WHILE I’M TALKING TO YOU!”

My attention snapped from the family back to her.

“I’m not here for my own edification! I know this story, remember?” The soccer mom’s voice had raised in angry, demonic glory.

“I-I’m sorry—”

She jabbed her finger into the tablecloth. “Every time you
fail,
it proves something. Every time the humans
failed,
it made us feel better. We reveled in every instance of human ridiculousness,” she said with biting annunciation, her tone lower but intense, her lips pulled back from her teeth.

“I understand.” I wanted her to know I was listening.

“No, you don’t. El didn’t ignore the clay humans. He did not cut them off. Not at all. He took an interest in their daily affairs, though he no longer walked with them in the afternoon. And
that
is significant.” Her blue eyes had come to dark, frightening life.

“He made concessions. He persevered through their constant and abiding imperfections and wrongdoings with more patience than I thought existed in all the created universe. He taught them how to make appropriately bloody, laborious, and horrible sacrifices in symbolic atonement.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to leave it there. But I knew there was more. Knew I wanted to know it. “And?”

“And then he
forgave
them.”

She was staring so intently at me that I found myself averting my gaze as one does from oncoming headlights. When she said nothing more, I glanced up to find her still staring at me, as though the implication of her words were sinking in for her, all over again.

She was seething.

“Think about that.” She reached for her coat, then, with a quick glance toward the other end of the restaurant again, slid out of the booth. “We will have to do this faster.” She put the coat on. “Time is getting away from us.”

She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked out. In the middle of the restaurant, the table of twelve broke into a round of “Happy Birthday,” as the old woman blew out the candle on a piece of ricotta pie.

15

Time is getting away from us?

I committed the encounter to paper, spending the urgent recollection of every word in the act of writing it. When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table. They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper from the recycling bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces of mail—anything that had been near to hand.

I opened my laptop and started to type.

Around 1:00 a.m., as I transcribed the end of our dinner together—my dinner—I found I had missed a major point. I had thought there was something significant about the family at the table, that something about them first drew her interest and then piqued her. But that wasn’t it, the thing that precipitated the moment—that startling, stunning moment—that she snapped at me. It was the coming revelation in her own story. The thing she knew she must say.

“And then he forgave them.”

I had thought nothing about that statement at the time. Forgiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion.

Even for demons?

I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appointment, the words leaping at me as I came to them:

“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? For that matter, why wouldn’t God?”

“I’ll tell you why: because we were
damned!”

I scrolled forward.

“He forgave them.”

I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen.

LATE THAT NIGHT I received a response from Katrina, but the proposal she attached was not one I recognized. Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of
Dreaming: A Memoir,
by L. LeGeros.

It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic.