“The first glance. Remember it? I did. So did Lucifer. Your eyes will be opened! Lucifer told her. You will be like God. He was sure of himself, but I less so. The woman was brilliant, perceptive in ways that even Adam was not. I thought to myself: She is made in the image of God—she will know what you do. She is made in the image of God! What more can there be for her? She will not choose it. But in the end we were more alike than I had realized. How I wanted to rail at her! Was it not enough that she and her man were the new favorites of God? How greedy they were! How much more did they expect, could they need? And yet I, too, had once known bliss. Still, I began to hate her after that.”
“And so it happened again,” I said.
She nodded slightly. “In Eve’s tempting, all the combined drama of what had gone before played out again, like your play-actors on a miniature stage with the script of a well-known story.
“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.”