In my vision, my waking hallucination, he turned to me. “I’m aware of every detail you’ve admired about that place: the great deck out back, the vaulted ceilings, the crystal light fixtures, and old oak floors. The grandeur, the status, the sheer custom cost of it all. But I see nothing more than your fancy tissue paper: brightly colored but fragile, fading, and easily torn, not to endure very well even the short span of your lifetime.”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, where the house, the raised flower beds, the turret spire, and the iron gate had been, there was nothing but a pile of brick and rubble, dry dirt and stone. On the ground perhaps ten feet from me lay the splintered foot of a Queen Anne table, the cabriole wizened as though a century had had its inevitable way with it in the space of that instant.
A car motored past us on the street, and we were in the cab once more as a postman pulled over in front of the bronze mailbox. The house was restored to its opulence, secure in its legacy, anchored in privilege to the manicured lawn.
The demon tilted his head back against the window. “I see beyond the comforts of the amenities you seek all your life—the money, the hobbies, the alluring distractions that promise temporal gratification. Though humans claim to plumb the depths in search of meaning, I find they tend to settle for whatever drifts across the surface.”
He had given me something. I knew that, for whatever reason, he had granted me a concession in showing me this thing, without which he might have shared his story just as cohesively and in a more expedient fashion. And I wondered why. To unsettle me? I was indeed unsettled—seeing the embodiment of my dreams ravaged before me resonated with strong, discordant notes.
He raised a finger. “Granted, every now and then a human comes along with extraordinary discernment, a gift for seeing the world—if only for momentary glimpses—with near-angelic acumen. It’s unnerving.”
“Why?”
“It’s like peering into a roomful of shadows and having one of them step forward to look you directly in the face. Humans shouldn’t see so clearly.”
“Do you think angels—demons, whatever—have a monopoly on truth?” I asked, not without defensiveness.
He sat up, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “No. We’re simply better equipped to see it. Why? Because we aren’t looking at the world through soft and pulpous eyes like you, but through the iris of truth. It is neither obscured from us nor spared us.”
“I want to know what this has to do with me.”
“I’m coming to that.”
Just then the two-way radio on the dash crackled with static. Though no voice came through, Lucian tilted his head as I had seen him do before to the invisible swarm of insects near his ear.
We had been wending through the country club area, but now he turned around with a curse.
“Helen’s been asking about you at the office. When you get back, tell her you had a doctor’s appointment.”
“That’s lying.”
“It’s on your calendar.”
“It’s not on my cal—” I stopped, aggravated. “Why did we even come here if you were going to take me right back?” Though I had been antsy about the time away from the office, I now had mixed feelings about returning.
“I didn’t know they’d be talking that much about your absence.”
“I thought you knew things.”
“I hear things. I observe. I’m not omniscient.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, as though the very act of talking to me gave him a headache.
“We have a little bit of time left,” he said, checking his watch and then tapping the clock on the dash as if it had stopped. “So now listen: The world was new. All the creatures were vegetarian. The rending of flesh was yet to come. Creation enthralled and amazed us.”
“Vegetarian?” I remembered his T-shirt that day in the Common—and then, inevitably, the shattered pink iPod strapped to a sickeningly skewed arm.
“By design. You weren’t made to eat meat. Of course, you weren’t made to die, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll come to that. For now, you need to know something more about Elohim: He is the ultimate force of creativity. He is the author of diversity. The richness of creation has been lost on your kind for centuries. Millennia. But it wasn’t lost on us. Even Lucifer stared in amazement. Light. Earth. Water. Life. It was base and gorgeous. It was extravagant. We had never seen the earth like this, a swarming symphony of life. I heard with angel ears every call of bird and whale, the murmur of water, the rustle of tree. I thrilled to the sound of crickets, the collective pulse of mortal vein and plant stem. It was a visual feast as well, and I consumed it in long, wondering stares: the jade of glaciers, the desert art of sand dune, the simmer of lava, the effusive glow of firefly.”
His voice fell and drifted off. When he spoke next, his words were distant, in that way in which we go back to our past to gratify or torture ourselves.
“I was intoxicated by the activity of the day but returned almost every night to the shore, to walk beneath the gentle light of the moon, which forgave in shadow everything the sun so harshly laid bare. I could have spent millennia like that, days and nights walking the earth, sating my senses.”
I was, for a moment, moved. And though he had not cast me into the illusion of his memory, I stood vicariously beside him on the shores of Saint Lucia, where I had gone on my honeymoon.
“We longed for this world. We coveted it, and we hoped. Even Lucifer, though he wouldn’t say it, looked on with greed-softened eyes, infatuated. I deluded myself into thinking that yes, perhaps Elohim had taken him back. Perhaps Elohim had forgotten all, would set him up as a god over this rich and wild new world. The next blessings to come from El would be his, and ours.” He shook his head with a brittle laugh, the sound slightly too high-pitched for such a big man.
We had skirted the MIT campus to arrive on Main, a block from my office building.
“And why weren’t they? Why couldn’t they be?”
He pulled over, put the car in park, and turned to look at me.
“Because then he created them.”
“Them?”
“You.”
10
Ascending the stairs to my apartment that evening, I felt drained but calmer than I had been in days.
The incident outside the Garden still haunted me. I heard, in unexpected moments, the sound of that impact, saw again the splayed and broken limbs of that woman. I have something he wants, I reminded myself before that tendril of panic could tease my composure. And I knew that I needed something from him in return.
I planned to spend the bulk of my evening writing by hand every bit of our conversation. I could feel the urge of it already, demanding release like an overfull bladder. But I hesitated on the landing and, on a sudden whim, went over and knocked on Mrs. Russo’s door. Now that I was composed, I wanted to thank her for the muffins, for her friendship and her concern. Her timing had been uncanny and, considering my state yesterday, I wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking I might be on drugs.
Standing on her threshold, I wondered if her keen discernment would sense—and recoil from—any lingering trace of the company I had been in today. And so I was relieved when, after waiting another moment, there was no answer.
That night, as I sat at my desk, my pen moving across the page, one thing in particular set my mind on edge: his capricious moods, especially in relation to me. Or rather, to humans. I returned again and again to his near-violent response—for a moment he really had looked possessed—to my question about why he never ate. To the way he had called humans them, as though we were a vile species.