Even for demons?
I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appointment, the words leaping at me as I came to them:
“Had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”
“Why couldn’t you? For that matter, why wouldn’t God?”
“I’ll tell you why: because we were damned!”
I scrolled forward.
“He forgave them.”
I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen.
LATE THAT NIGHT I received a response from Katrina, but the proposal she attached was not one I recognized. Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of Dreaming: A Memoir, by L. LeGeros.
It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic.
16
The demon chose two more plates and pushed them across the table toward me with a short, stocky arm.
“Please stop,” I told him as the woman with the dim sum cart stamped her red symbol on our tab and pushed on. I meant it not only because I was full but because the rapt interest with which he had watched me eat for the last half hour disturbed me. He had inundated me with sweet buns, pork buns, shrimp dumplings, and vegetable packets with tiny green peas perched on the twisted peak of their wrappers. They squatted now in orphaned ones and twos inside their bamboo steamers; I could not possibly accommodate them all.
“Very well.” He folded those arms before him. He had hung his jacket over the back of his chair but, seeing the way his dress shirt strained at the shoulders, I thought he ought to have left it on.
“About your proposal to Katrina . . .” I wasn’t sure how to go about what I meant to say next. I had feigned an e-mail problem, had asked her again to resend it, stating even more carefully that I needed the short one, the additional one she had given me as an afterthought the day she came to my office. But when she resent it, I found myself scrolling again through the scant pages of Dreaming: A Memoir by L. LeGeros.
“What proposal?” He seemed to wink, though his eyelid never moved.
So that was it. Another of his mind tricks. No one had seen the proposal for Demon: A Memoir but me. Katrina had no awareness of the story evolving into a living thing on my desk and hard drive, waiting for me to wake in the morning and come home at night, to feed it the nutriment of my preoccupation. An excitement tapped in my chest, a metronome in time with my heart.
“I see,” I said carefully. More, I thought, though it will risk his anger. “Then in that case, I need to know what happened after El forgave them. The humans, I mean.”
He sat up, fussing with the little teapot, over pouring a small trickle of chrysanthemum tea into his untouched cup. It seemed he could not dive headlong and cold into this topic, so I waited, considering his bushy eyebrows, the unremarkable face with the suggestion of jowls on either side of his thin-lipped mouth. I had thought him vain after our first few encounters, though of late he seemed to care less and less about the beauty of his guises.
“El’s acts of forgiveness became tedious in the way that something routine is tedious. Like a sound that grates on your patience so that where you had only disliked it before, you come to hate even the merest suggestion of it. Like a smell that has the ability to incite nausea. I didn’t know who I was more astounded with—El because he constantly forgave them, or the humans because they made constant and abiding mistakes again and again. With disgust and amazement we pushed ourselves to see how far we could go with them. We dared. And El sat back again in pain amid the chaos of all this teeming life, once so wonderful, multiplying over the great ball of earth and water. But he would not relinquish them. During that time I realized something had happened within me.”
“What do you mean?” I said, surrendering my chopsticks with an overfull sigh.
“Like nerves after they’ve been severed, I could no longer sense El as I had before, even after falling away. But in that same way that I knew myself—better, even—I knew El to be unchanging. For as little as I could perceive of him by then, I understood well his sentiments about all that was happening.”
“And Lucifer?”
“Oh, he had determined to rule over this great, floating ball of land—had, in fact, never given up his claim to it. Now, having snatched Adam’s birthright from him the moment he abdicated it, he threw wide the doors to this world as though to a mansion and invited the humans in, creating banquets of diversions designed just for them: new and bizarre religions, strange philosophies, indulgences for all appetites. He had by then set himself up as all the things he had ever wanted to be: a power, a ruler . . . a god. Gods. He answered to a variety of names, and the humans offered him sacrifices and performed great acts of murder and bloodletting for his sake. It was gory. And grand.”
“So he had what he wanted at last.”
“After a manner, I suppose. You must understand that he didn’t care about the offerings, the blood, or the lives. It was that people did it that delighted him. That with every little betrayal, the people moved farther away from El. Eventually, they forgot him. Those were wild, accelerated days—like a dancer, twirling faster and faster until she falls; like your dreams of falling off buildings, the wind shrieking in your ears. And I watched it all with a sense of inevitability.”
Sometimes when he was like this, when it seemed he was transported back, I wondered if his own memories were as vivid to him as they had been to me the time in the tea shop or that day in the Commons.
As vivid as my memories of Sarah Marshall’s death.
I had almost managed to go a whole day without thinking about it.
“But even the forbearance of El in his grief had limits. And the day came when he could abide it no longer. Of course, I expected him to slam down the heavy fist, but the day came and still he held off. Like a mother giving a child to the count of three, El gave the clay people 120 years to change their ways.”
He sat back and crossed short arms, his shirtsleeves encasing them like sausages. “I was put off! Had he ever been willing to play the suffering parent toward any one of us? Toward Lucifer, first and best-created of El, prince and anointed cherub? But El had not offered him so much as a glimmer of the patience he showed humans. Never so much for any of us.”
As he said this, the distant and disowned look seemed to creep first into one eye and then into the other, like a lizard slithering through his skull.
“Had I been human, I would have considered myself lucky.” He thumped his chest. He was pudgy enough that it didn’t make much of a sound. “But they were oblivious to the indulgence they had been given. They went about their ways as pleased them best. And the years went by.”
“All 120 of them.”
“All 120 of them,” he agreed. “In the end Lucifer crowed his triumph. He had brought about the destruction of El’s world and the spoiling of his clay creatures like so much fruit left on the ground. Now El would be forced to acknowledge him; there would be no more of the clay people to talk with, commune with—and who would want to by now, anyway? Unworthy, fickle, unfaithful. . . . The humans were a failure. It was time to destroy them.”
I shuddered at the slight jeer with which he said this.
“Only you Westerners fancy what happened next as the stuff of myth. Most ancient cultures have taught it as history: water covering the land, swallowing up creation as it had Lucifer’s rock garden an age before.”