Demon: A Memoir (16 page)

“And yet we were not without means. The world was Lucifer’s kingdom, and El had just entered it in the flesh of a human. And as I held out hope, it lengthened my own, demonic vision.”

I had hardly ever heard her refer to herself in this way except at the beginning, so it struck me with ominous force to hear it now.

“Our Jewish king, so carefully chosen and strategically placed, was ruthless. It was enough that this would-be king threatened his reign, and so he sought to kill the child.”

“I take it he didn’t find him.”

That’s when something strange happened. The demon became distracted, staring with squinted eyes off in the direction of a store somewhere beyond the food court. Following her gaze, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, only shoppers coming in and out of the store, two men standing outside it like disenfranchised husbands waiting on their wives.

“What is it?”

“He had every boy in the area under two years old butchered.” Lucian’s eyes darted this way and that, a dry tongue snaking out to lick at her lips.

I thought again of the nativity scene, so serene and idyllic.

“Not that it helped. Obviously, the baby survived.”

20

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 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’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 Kill-the-Carrier 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.

21

Voices drifted from the Bristol Lounge, punctuated every few seconds by the trilling laugh of a woman. I ambled toward that sound, feeling like an outsider.

I had loved to come to the Four Seasons in my first years as an editor. I was writing the Coming Home books then and used to imagine the day when I would spend every Friday afternoon in the Bristol Lounge’s overstuffed chairs, perhaps in front of the fireplace if it were cold outside, expensive brandy rolling inside the snifter in my hand. There I would take drinks with fellow writers or my own editor—perhaps even an interviewer from the
Paris Review.

It was four years now since I had last been here to take Aubrey’s mother to enjoy salmon sandwiches, miniature tarts, and scones with clotted cream, all part of a high tea that we could barely afford.

I half expected the hostess to give me a polite but distant look, to say that they were full, so sorry, that I might try the Irish pub down the street. But she smiled and led me to an out-of-the-way nook just off the bar lined by a long, red leather seat. Between the bronze upholstery tacks along the back of the seat and the book-lined shelves above it, the polished cherry wood of the table and the attendant cozy chairs pulled up on the other side, the little nook gave off the flavor of an elegant personal library.

In another life, one filled with editor and writer friends, I could have claimed this corner as my own, reserved it each week to hold court and take that brandy, to grant that rare interview.

Tonight there would be no editors, no interviews, no brandy.

But there would be, at least, dessert. I ordered coffee and then got up to drift between tables of tortes and pastries and cheesecake and ice creams at that famous dessert buffet, returning ultimately with a glorious bowl of hot pumpkin bread pudding that was even now melting a scoop of maple ice cream into a white moat in the dish.

From where I sat, I had a direct view of the grouping of cushy chairs in front of the piano, where five women exchanged Christmas gifts over likewise melting desserts. The gift bags and boxes were wrapped with tulle and sprigs of fresh evergreen and yielded items like silver bowls, a polished wooden jewelry box, a Hermes-style scarf. On the hand of every woman was a rock so large I could see it from my corner, shining like a beacon.

Beyond the group, a long expanse of windows looked out onto the street and into the Public Garden beyond. I used to love the order of those flower beds with their iron ropes, the manicured lawns and spiral-cut shrubs. But now they seemed as meticulous and indifferent as a cemetery, as unnatural as the perfectly embalmed visage of a corpse.

“I’m afraid I’m the late one this time.” A young man hurried into my morbid reverie and pulled out one of the cozy chairs. He was dapper in navy blue pants and a button-down shirt, his tie loosened so that it hung askew in a way that reminded me faintly of a noose. He might have been an intern fresh out of college; he had the mischievous, spring-faced look of an Ivy League a capella singer, a Harvard Din and Tonic or a Brown Derby. His hair, a light chestnut, curled around his face and over his ears in a way that might have looked like a dirty halo if the wind caught it just right.
Like a doll-faced cherub.
When he sat down, he crossed his ankle over his knee and fell back into the leather as though, at the ripe age of—what, twenty-one?—he had had a long day.

“Why are you so tired?” I said, a bit put out. I had come straight from eleven hours at the office on only five hours of sleep the night before.

“I’m a busy man,” he said, smiling at me. He had a dimple in his left cheek, and his skin was flushed pink. He looked like a young man in the throes of infatuation. I had never seen him like this.

“I don’t need to tell you the committee liked what I gave them, do I?”

“Of course they liked it.” He smiled again and looked around. “I haven’t been here since they expanded.” A waitress came for his order. He smiled at her and, with a look at my cup, asked for coffee.

“Helen assumes the content is mine, and that it’s fiction,” I said, shaving the corner off the bread pudding, taking just enough ice cream with it.

“But of course.”

“It feels dishonest.”

He shrugged. “If you want to put ‘as told to’ before your name, be my guest, though it won’t do wonders for your credibility.”

“I plan to use a pen name.” It would be my concession to a conscience that knew it could not claim full credit for Lucian’s story—only my own.

“A nom de plume? How mysterious.”

I did not say that it was also practical, a means of separating this work from my former, failed attempts at publishing.

The demon seemed to be elsewhere, just disengaged enough from our conversation to be unflappable, which bothered me. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“I’m comfortable with knowing how it ends.” It came out more calmly than I expected.

“Soon,” he said. “You’ll know. I promise.” He returned his focus to me with an absent smile.

“What you don’t seem to understand is that I can’t even finish a synopsis without”— I stopped as the waitress reappeared. Lucian smiled up at her, and I considered my soggy bread pudding, not wanting to follow their small talk. I wasn’t in the mood to witness any kind of interaction that I had not had since—since Lucian’s trick in the bookstore.

“Don’t be so sour, Clay,” he said after she left.

“I’m not sour.”

“You will be when you see . . . this,” he said, lifting a scrap of paper from the table with a triumphant flick of his hand. I stared, exasperated, at a number with the name
Nikki
scribbled next to it.

“I’m trying to discuss this memoir that is so important to you, and you’re collecting phone numbers?”

He tucked it inside his jacket. I couldn’t help wondering what would become of that number—and the woman it belonged to.

“All right, you want to get to the end of the book.”

The skin on my arms prickled.

There’s a monster.

I suddenly wondered if I might have done better to stay home. I needed sleep. Television. A movie. I needed to focus on something normal—nothing, in other words—like any other anesthetized human for once. But I knew I wouldn’t trade being here for sleep or time in front of a television I had not turned on for more than a month.

Lucian settled into his chair as though getting down to business and lifted his coffee cup. I gave him a quizzical look.

“First, a toast.”

“To what?” I was almost afraid to know.

“To you, Clay. They’re going to love your story,” he said. “You’ll have a contract within three months—not to mention a nice little advance.”

Something lurched inside me, scrabbling at his words like pennies on the ground. I wanted to believe him. How I wanted to believe him! “You said you’re not omniscient.” But I lifted my coffee cup. He clinked it, sloshing coffee over the edges of both our rims.

“I’m not. But as you know, I play the percentages. And I would bet money on it.”

I took a tentative sip, trying not to think about it, but it was too late; my heart had started a desperate little dance.

I had to admit I could use the money. Moving my books and sparse belongings to Cambridge and trying to replace the furniture I had given to Aubrey had not done wonders for my checkbook. I supposed I had Lucian to thank for providing me other matters to focus on than the minimalist décor of my apartment that Mrs. Russo had so generously called “Spartan.”

“Speaking of which, you should look into some of those last-minute vacation specials.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“Put it on your credit card. You deserve it. You can finish the story on the beach.”

I dropped my head, slid my hands over my hair. The beach. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a beach or taken a vacation.

“Meanwhile, if we have a book to write, we’d better get to it. Now then . . .” He scrubbed the back of his head.

“The Messiah was born,” I said slowly, not wanting to remember the look of that withered face again, contorted in that terrible smile.

“Of course,” he said, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together, “by the time of that horrible, eerie night, Lucifer had made tempting the faithful and bringing them before El like so many unruly children his life’s work. Not that it brought Lucifer much joy.”

“It’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?”

“He seemed less and less satisfied by it, his tolerance and appetite had grown so great. So what else was there for Lucifer—for us—to do except dwell on our less-favored status, to watch our own dwindling hope sinking deeper and deeper beneath the surface of a black bog, out of reach? Actually, the more we dared to hope for El’s renewed favor, the more we felt compelled to show these humans for the disappointments they were. And the more we carried out the commission of Lucifer—now Satan—the more out of favor we fell.”

“Talk about diminishing returns.”

“Exactly. And eventually, I suppose, the less we cared. By then the means had become an end in itself—a way of life, a purpose.

“This had already been the case with Satan for some time, but then he had always been a creature of mission, a dark visionary. And now his vision ignited a new and unholy fire in us as well. I found myself less melancholy and more wholly focused on a new trade: no more to glorify Creator Elohim—never that again—but to degrade and despoil all his favored people in ways unknown before. Now there was true pleasure. Don’t recoil like that.”

“I didn’t,” I lied.

“It’s not as though you’ve never wandered a step—and then ten more, each one easier than the last—down a path you had never thought yourself capable of taking. Did you ever once think you’d spend every night of almost four months drunk? That you’d wake up after a three-day binge to realize you were practically broke and still alone?”

I looked away. It was not a memory I wanted to recall, the weeks of drinking, the mad sobbing on my kitchen floor. A retaliatory one-night stand. Or two.

“But I’m not here to judge you. I’m only making a point.”

I retreated into my cup, realizing I had forgotten the bread pudding. It was cold now, a sodden, lopsided heap.

“Lucifer is a creature of method. Since his first failed attempt to raise his throne and then that business of Job, he had grown allergic to failure. Even in the garden of the first man and woman, he devoted long years to observing the humans, studying behaviors, weighing their tendencies, watching them like exotic creatures in their habitat. He is the master of risk reduction. Never impulsive, his plans ferment a long time in the darkness of his heart. The Great Inventor meditates at length on his craft, always the innovator. It is the reason he so rarely fails.

“Now at last was a venture worthy of him. It set him on edge so that he craved it to the exclusion of everything else. He was insanely preoccupied, shut up like a scientist in his laboratory, a beast pacing behind the arena gate.”

I thought I might know something about that kind of preoccupation. “And what was that challenge?”

“The spirit of the Almighty. God himself in the clay body of a man.
Elohim come to earth.
”

I felt my forehead wrinkle. “So you really mean it when you say he was God. Literally God and man.” I was aware of my dubious tone. I had always placed Jesus in the echelon reserved for Gandhi, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr. But they were all mortal men.

The look on the demon’s face perplexed me. His lips were parted, turned up in just the hint of a smile. I felt he was somehow waiting on me, poised to see what I might say next.

Nikki, our waitress, stepped in, breaking the taut wire between us. I looked away as she refreshed my cup, cleaned up the coffee spilled from our toast. I was glad for the reprieve, unsure what had just happened between us.

When she left, he sat forward again, steepled his fingers. “Clay, what I tell you, I need you to hear. If you can’t believe it, then consider it a part of the story, and I’ll be content with that. I would be very content with that, in fact.” His smile was a quirk on just one side of his mouth.

Of course. It only matters that it is part of the story.

“Right now you need to know that this God-man was too big a prize for Lucifer. Too tempting, shall we say.” He laughed, and the dimple on his cheek squinted. I waited out the laughter as I had on other occasions. When it suddenly and disconcertingly stopped, he considered his hands, turning them over this way and that, as though he had not taken the time to examine them until now. “To thwart the son is to thwart the will of Elohim. This was too precious a goal for Lucifer to stand idly by. Too vital to Lucifer’s state of mind. It was to be the summation of his life’s work.”

“You’re saying he meant to tempt God.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that impossible?”

“Not entirely.” He looked and sounded, to all appearances, like the young scholar. He might have been a seminary student, ruddy cheeked and idealistic. “The clay body was the crux of it. No man, no soul in a clay body has ever been immune to temptation. In fact, every clay person since the first one had succumbed to temptation at some time or another, had experienced moral failure by El’s standards at some point in his or her life. But here, suddenly, was the unfathomable combination: the perfection of El in a fallible mud body. Perfection and weakness fused together.”

“Do you ever see anything redeeming in humans?”

He seemed on the verge of saying something then rerouted his response at the last instant. “It’s the nature of the vessel, Clay: cracked. Something that, once ruined, should have been thrown from the potter’s wheel to the refuse pile long ago. And what better way to prove it than to humiliate El with his own failure as one of them? He had
chosen
to become one of you. He chose the terms. If he wanted to fight with one hand tied behind his back, well then . . .” He shrugged.

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem quite fair.”

“He was as much flesh as he was El. But he was still El. And though Lucifer was practically foaming at the mouth, he chose his moment carefully. He waited until the God-man was fasting in the desert. Until he was hungry. There Lucifer exploited his hunger like a general attacking the weakest defense of the enemy. He questioned his identity.
If you are the Son of God,
he said. He is an expert rhetorician, experienced and so suggestive.
Why not turn these stones into bread?