He paused. “No.”
I believed him. That the expediency of his purpose and his personal convenience took precedence over a life was both brutal and, I believed, the truth. The bald admission triggered something irrevocable within me, and I knew then I could no sooner walk away than I could return to my former life—be it the one with Aubrey or my aimless existence since.
There were things I needed to know. Would I kill for meaning? No. Would I accept that my informant, teacher—whatever he was to me—was a party to murder?
I got in the car.
“You were tracking her,” I said.
“I only provided her location.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t my mission.”
“Then whose mission was it?”
A muscle in his jaw tightened. The hand on the steering wheel looked better suited to fixing a sink or punching someone than driving a car. I tried to reconcile them with the slender fingers of the redhead, with the fastidiousness of the man in the café picking at the lint on his trousers. I couldn’t—until he glanced into the rearview mirror and I saw the murky shadow behind his eyes.
“Think about who you’re talking to and remember that we have our own chains of command. Our ranks and hierarchies. Must I remind you that I answer to an order, that I am, as you say, ‘low man on the totem pole’?”
“You say it like you’re in a war.”
“We are!” And then, more quietly, “We are.”
We drove in silence along the Charles. In the middle of the river, a crew team skimmed along the water like an insect skating on the surface of a pond.
“It seems somehow too cliché for you, killing innocent people.” I had found a follow-up mention in the next day’s paper: Sarah Marshall, a native of Michigan, was 35. She is survived by her husband and infant son. The rest of the story had been about placement of the crosswalks on Arlington.
“No one is innocent, Clay.”
“Am I going to end up smattered on someone’s windshield?” I saw again the blood in the crackled glass—blood and blonde hair.
“I told you; you’re very important to me right now. Besides, they’re not concerned about you.”
“They who?”
“The Legion.”
I hesitated before asking, “Why not?”
“Because you pose no threat.”
“And that blonde runner did?”
“I promise you’ll understand soon.”
I sat back against the leather seat and waited, but he made no effort to explain. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something,” he said, speeding down Memorial Drive.
I gazed out at the aluminum sky, the lusterless yolk of sun. Lucian’s account had left off with the creation of that very body, with the coming and going of a day.
The demon nodded as though I had spoken. “After that, El drew back the darkness covering Eden like a dusty cloth from forgotten furniture. It had been formless since the rebellion, a watery wasteland. Now he separated those waters, lifting a canopy of them into the sky. And then he parted the deep, raising Eden up from beneath the water.
“Lucifer began to take interest in that planet for the first time since the great stones toppled like Titans into the murky ocean. My heart quickened. I knew what Lucifer must think: that El had seen the merit of a second god. And maybe even now he restored the earth for us—no, made it into a new and better thing. We would be happy there again. Our star would ascend after all, even if we never entered the throne room of Elohim ourselves. I didn’t care about any of that anymore. All that mattered was the relief flooding my taut immortal veins. El was going to take us back.”
“But how could he? You said—”
“I know. And if I had thought about it at the time, I would have known it was impossible. He could no sooner welcome us back than he could change his own character—righteous, perfect. And we, as we had become—we were changed. No, that’s a pallid euphemism for the truth, which was this: We were ruined. More ruined than the wasted earth mere days—an age—before. Still, we hovered nearby, hopeful, waiting to see what would become of it. And Lucifer stood stoic witness, waiting to see what El would create for him. The earth, after all, was his.”
He was quiet for several minutes before he said softly, “It was tremendous. It surpassed imagination. We had seen Lucifer’s garden. We knew what we expected, though there really was no reason for El to reproduce it. And he didn’t; this was an entirely different work, this new Eden. Earth and water, deep and mountain. We watched, despite ourselves, fascinated with what El might do next, trying with our vast minds to anticipate the impossible. But even we couldn’t predict the green things that sprang up from the earth. You have to understand the revelation of this great wash of green.”
“It was a novelty to you,” I said, almost to myself.
“Of course! This was no rock garden but a rich and lush new world, teeming with life! Who could have fathomed such delicate complexity? It awed us. And for another reason, too: All those strange green things had within them the power to create, to reproduce, each of them manufacturing miniature versions of themselves. Imagine!”
It had never occurred to me what a bizarre concept reproduction might seem to a race of finite number.
“I was enthralled by the veins on the back of leaves, by the seeds growing inside fruit and pod,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel as though to hold—as he must have held—each leaf between his fingers, each pod, broken apart to reveal the seeds within. “The sticky pollen on the stamens. It was bizarre. It was awesome. This was beyond your science fiction to us. I had never even dreamed such things. And by the look on Lucifer’s face, neither had he.
“There were new and foreign bodies in the heavens now, too, their courses precharted for millennia to come. And the water, once dark and stagnant, moved by the pull of the new moon. I was instantly in love and left the others to walk by the muted light. I stood by the shore and watched the tides leave their skeletal treasures on the sand, lulled by the rhythm of a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. I longed for it, for all that was within it, and to be a part of it.”
We had turned off Memorial onto Mount Auburn, and I was gazing at the scratched Plexiglas divider between us, seeing in its surface the mottled white of the moon, when a Lexus abruptly cut in front of us. Lucian hit the breaks and flashed a distinct bird over the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that!” I said, alarmed. “For all you know he has a gun!”
“He doesn’t have a gun,” he said, and flashed it again. Some time after the car had sped on ahead, the demon continued. “These new celestial bodies took on great meaning to us. It was like watching the creation of an hourglass and all the sands within it. Sands within an hourglass are measured a closed set, a finite amount. And they were now set in motion. I would never look at the heavens the same; where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.”
“Who says time has to be finite?” I studied him in the rearview mirror. He had a faint scar against one temple, again suggesting a history that was not his. I wondered if it was the demon equivalent to designer jeans, faded and pre-ripped right off the hanger.
“Things with beginnings also have ends. The beginning of time is also the beginning of an end. And so that great hourglass to me was like your fabled Doomsday clock, ticking, ticking, every grain one in a too-limited series, the granule of an instant, passing and lost forever. I understood that things now and hereafter set in motion would be things of consequence, of inevitability. The passing of every moment since has disconcerted me. See the clock on the dash?” He tapped it. “You’re deaf to it, to the death of each second. But I am not.”
I had thought his fixation with time and timepieces a fetish until now. Now I thought I understood the preoccupation, the compulsive checking. Every timepiece I had ever seen him wear had been expensive. Was it that time was precious?