Demon: A Memoir (20 page)

26

My burn had turned to a tan in some places—and a moist, bubbling peeling in others—the day Helen called me in to her office.

“Clay, you did something here. It’s really amazing.” She gestured to the pile of pages on her desk, my manuscript—my book. It seemed such a part of me, now severed and handed over, that it might as well have been my arm in front of her, my hand with the crooked pinky and calloused middle finger. And I felt both pride and bereavement, staring at it as she told me Anu would get me a contract to look over by Friday, that they’d like to release it in next year’s second season if I thought I could finish it in the next two months. Unable to take my eyes off it, I asked for five thousand dollars more than what I knew they would offer me, and Helen shrugged, saying she didn’t see why they couldn’t make that happen.

“Marketing is excited about this one. I think they’re going to have a heyday with it.”

I smiled as one who comes out of a dream.

“Sheila wasn’t at her desk,” I said as I was about to leave. I had spent my short morning commute wondering what I would say to her, if I should even acknowledge our strange conversation or if she might be embarrassed by it, as I was by my lack of sensitivity. I had since realized that it wasn’t just her call that had been so disturbing but her alarming emotional state. She had always been the one to listen with limpid gaze and sympathetic tilt of her head, the one who communicated as much by her silence as her simple words.

Of late those blue eyes, the girlish curves of her face and peak of her chin had struck me as somehow dangerous, a weapon wielded as recklessly as a sleepwalker with a gun. But after talking with her, I worried and wondered whether I ought to have invited her to call me back later, whether I should have called her the next morning to see how she was.

“She’s taking a few days off for personal reasons,” Helen said with a slight smile that seemed to say she knew exactly what those personal reasons were, that it was good of me to ask, though she had no intention of telling me.

As I turned at the door to thank her, I found the small floral back pillow abandoned on her chair and Helen coming toward me, her glasses swaying on their chain against her breasts. I could not remember when Helen had actually gotten up from her chair to hold the door for me and see me out. I could not remember the last time I had actually felt respected for my work as an editor or a writer.

But I liked it.

Inside the men’s room, Phil stared bleakly into the mirror as he washed his hands. He looked beyond tired, which was strange. Always upbeat, even through his divorce and whirlwind wedding and birth of his son only a year and a half later, he had been the first—the only one, actually—to invite me out after my separation from Aubrey. We had drunk a few beers together at a couple of Red Sox games, but it had felt mechanical, our arranged camaraderie, and I had politely declined his invitations since.

“You all right?”

He nodded. “A lot happened while you were gone.”

“Yeah?” I asked, trying to sound interested. “Helen said Sheila took a few days off. Is she doing all right?”

Phil sighed, tugged a paper towel from the dispenser. “She went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning a few nights ago.”

I stared, my stomach contracting in on itself. “What?” In my mind I calculated the days, thinking back to the night she called. I felt guilty and not a little reprehensible.

“She’s going to be all right, though I guess it was close. If Dan hadn’t come back to pick up Amanda’s epilepsy pills, who knows.”

“I can’t believe it. It’s so uncharacteristic of her,” I said woodenly. “It’s the last thing Dan needs right now.”

Phil looked at me strangely. “She’s going through a tough time right now, Clay. People do stupid things at times like this.” I didn’t know whether he meant to insinuate it or not, but I remembered my own drinking after Aubrey left.

“I guess you’re right.” But I didn’t believe our situations were similar at all.

“We’ve been helping with the kids so Dan can get some work done.”

Now I understood the look of fatigue. Sheila’s three children were, if I remembered correctly, between the ages of two and eight.

I almost said to let me know if I could do anything to help, but I stopped. “I’m sorry to hear all of this,” I said instead.

“Hey, I meant to tell you, your manuscript is something. You need to get that thing finished, man, because I can’t wait to see how it ends.”

Me, too.

MY VISION SPECKLED AS I paused on the first floor, midway up from the basement laundry. My legs felt swollen, tight, and wooden. I caught my breath.

I need to get more exercise.
And while that was true, I also knew I was neither overweight nor terribly out of shape. When I was done with this manuscript, when I finished and it was out the door, I would see a doctor.

As I let myself back into my apartment, I wondered again if Lucian, once he had accomplished his mission, would disappear from my life. Or would he loiter, watching me without my knowing it, as he had on the
T
? There was a time when I could not imagine enduring his intrusions. Now I found I could not imagine a life without them.

That night I stayed up well past two o’clock working on my book.

By the time I went to bed, I tallied more than 300 pages, over 85,000 words—a perfectly respectable length for a book. It needed nothing now but an ending. But my calendar remained empty.

Our time was getting shorter, he had said. Then where was he?

TWO DAYS LATER SHEILA’S desk stood empty. Not only empty of Sheila herself and the perennial cardigan on the back of her chair but of the framed photos of her family, the pencil holder her son Justin made out of a frozen juice can, the painted rock frog paperweight with googly eyes and Caleb’s name carefully painted on the side. Only her candy dish remained.

When I asked Phil what had happened, he said she had given her notice, that she was taking the kids and moving to South Carolina where her parents had retired to a golf course.

“Has anyone called Dan?” I felt vaguely like a schmuck. I should have done it myself, had thought I should many times.

“I’ve tried, but he won’t answer. I don’t think he wants to talk.”

I knew that feeling. And I didn’t blame him.

FOUR DAYS. IT HAD been four days.

That evening I tried to work in spite of my gnawing anxiety and annoyance, but there was nothing more to add to the manuscript. I felt powerless, creatively stunted, and my calendar remained empty.

I tried to finish editing jacket copy for next season’s releases, to remember what I had loved about a new author’s manuscript enough to go to bat for a larger advance . . . and then went back to my book, to tinker with grammar, rephrase sentences that had nothing wrong with them, check for overuse of hyphens—a writing tic I had only recently discovered that I possessed. I did all of this with growing disquiet, merely for the sake of doing it, unable to quell the unease snaking through my gut.

And then I remembered the e-mail.

I scrolled through my deleted folder and found it, the one about the temple curtain from “Light1.” It did not give the full address—only the Light1 moniker—but on a whim I clicked Reply.

I wrote three words:

Where are you?

SOMETIME PAST 3:00 A.M. I fell asleep on my couch, dreaming of blood on doorways, wine in the Passover cup, of damnation like the closing of a vault, the tolling of a bell, of bells ringing over Arlington Street, bells slapping against the door of a café, bells . . .

My cell phone was ringing.

I rummaged through my pants and then fumbled through the pockets of the jacket I had left on the kitchen table. Finding the phone, I noted the caller: “Private.” I thought of Sheila. I would be kinder, I thought. I had not realized how volatile, how precarious, her mind-set was.

“Hello?”

The voice, when it came, was gritty. “Hello, Clay.” It might have been a man’s or an older woman’s. I did not recognize it.

“Lucian?”

Silence. I was impatient and anxious, ready to grab my coat now and meet him anywhere. “Is that you? Did you get my e-mail?”

Another pause. And then: “Were you expecting Lucian?”

A chill crawled from my shoulders to my nape.

“Is that you?” I whispered, my heart so loud in my ears I wondered if I’d be able to hear the reply. It came, with a soft rasp.

“No.” And then, “No,
Clay.
”

I clapped the phone shut, my heart drumming against my ribs.

I sat very still. My door was locked. My computer had gone into energy-save mode, and both living room lamps were on. I stared out past the window, at the black, predawn night.

I made myself stand and walk first to one lamp and then the other, turning each of them off with a quiet click. In the darkness I felt vulnerable, blind. I closed my eyes and slowly opened them, made out the shapes of my desk, my sofa, the television on its stand, the casement of the window. I made myself walk to the sill. I grasped it with one hand. The window looked out at the space between my apartment building and the house next door. I leaned against the frame and craned my neck, looking out toward the street.

At first I didn’t see it—not until I swept my gaze away from the curb. There. A lone figure, leaning against the porch post of a house across the street, black against the darkness, looking up at me.

I knew, instinctively, that it was not Lucian. I jerked back from the window.

I hurried into my bedroom, shut and locked the door behind me, climbed beneath the covers on my bed, and listened to the percussion of my own heart.

WITH ONE GLANCE AT my clock, I shoved out of bed in a panic. It was Tuesday; I was missing my weekly editorial meeting. I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

For a moment I stood dumb in the middle of my bathroom, remembering the phone call, the rasping voice.

The figure across the street.

It was daylight now. Emboldened, I walked straight to the window—not in my living room but in the spare room that faced the street. I pulled the shade.

There was the house, the apartment building next to it, and farther down, Saint Mary’s, the liturgies of which I often heard drifting from the open windows of the church in summer. A mother and her young son passed along the sidewalk, bundled up in coats and scarves, toward Massachusetts Avenue. There was no one else.

I hurried to shower, shave, dress. I hesitated a moment before pocketing my cell phone and another moment upon stepping outside my door. Music was coming from Mrs. Russo’s apartment, a soaring female voice that reminded me of Barbara Streisand. I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound of it, like the daylight, heartened me.

On the single short ride from Central to Kendall Station, one of the train car’s few passengers was holding onto the rail to my left and studying me. He looked at least fifty-five and wore a faded Carhartt jacket. His hair was orangish, in the way of men who colored their hair long after it was gray. His large, thick glasses took up the upper third of his face. An “I didn’t vote for him” bumper sticker with a picture of the president was wrapped around his sleeve like an armband. As far as I could tell, he wore no watch.

“Can I ask you something?” He swayed with the car. Was he a tourist? No, generally they held maps folded open to red and green diagrams of the
T
, as though they were the complex capillaries of an organism and not five simple lines named after colors.

“Sure.” I prepared to tell him he could switch to the Green Line two stops after Kendall.

“Has someone been talking to you? Contacting you?”

I froze. And then I studied the man more acutely: the faint age spots on his face and the edge of his upper lip, the flannel shirt under his jacket, the too-straight line of his hair across his forehead that indicated a comb-over.

“Don’t be afraid.” He regarded me through sagging eyelids magnified by those glasses. “Has someone been talking to you? Someone not like you?”

The chill and ensuing sweat of the night before returned to me—along with the same need to flee, to shut myself behind a door. The train slowed with a squeal of brakes, and I jumped up, grabbing for the rail near the door as it stopped completely. I squeezed past the doors as soon as they opened, hurried out into the station and up the stairs. Only on the street did I look behind me to confirm that he had not followed me.

I needed to talk to Lucian.

I went into the meeting late, flustered, unprepared. I contributed little, unable to think of anything but the man on the train, the voice on the phone. Were other members of the legion aware of what Lucian was up to, his ambition to have his story—and theirs—outed? Could they interfere?

Helen pulled me aside in the hallway after the meeting. “Clay, I know you’re working on a brilliant piece of writing. And it is brilliant. But I can’t have you doing it at the expense of your responsibilities. It’s all right if it takes longer to finish. You and Anu are still working out the contract particulars, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” I’d forgotten the contract.

“Then give yourself the time you need to do your job in the meantime. Please.”

I nodded, embarrassed and a little resentful at being openly chastised outside the conference room. I went into my office, shoved the door shut with more force than I meant to, dropped the stack of packets from the meeting onto my desk.

I went to the window and looked out at the people walking by, headed somewhere with a purpose I had once envied.

Returning to my desk, I unpacked my bag, pretending it was any usual day—not that I had had a usual day since early October—putting the packets on the corner of my desk, docking my laptop.

I signed in to the company server, opened my calendar, and faltered.

There. Five o’clock tonight:
L.
But that was not what caused me to hesitate. Below that, a line across the time block read:

Don’t EVER try to contact me again.