“El was making a clay child in the womb of some ordinary girl with a boring name. Not a queen, this mother of the new king. Not even a princess or woman of stature. An unremarkable virgin—and not even the best-looking girl I’d ever seen—pledged to marry some carpenter or another in some insignificant town. Suffice it to say, it didn’t look promising.” I felt now a strange tension in her, in the stooped back and the milky gaze, a tautness at odds with the withering body. “I thought Lucifer would laugh himself silly, would find this insanely funny. It became the brunt of our jokes. Really, El had gone too far with this one. He was making a buffoon of himself.”
“He didn’t laugh, did he?” Never once had the demon portrayed Lucifer as anything other than brilliant.
“No.” She rubbed and then picked at an age spot on her hand. “He stood off, alone, silent. I had never seen him like this before. As he stared with fixed eyes, his hauteur slipped from his shoulders like a robe. And as the reason finally became clear, we realized El’s plan was far more extravagant and unimaginable than anything we could have fathomed.”
I felt the faintest aftershock of that rush of energy, the echo of that deafening roar.
“And as I huddled on the periphery of that night, I saw a shot of light, heard the heralding Host. The pulse of the world fell silent, one sound only filling the void where that deafening announcement had been: the first wail of a newborn human.”
The babe. I had heard it.
She lowered her head to clutch at a soft tuft of white hair. “Had I blood, it would have frozen in my veins, for I recognized the voice in that human cry. And the knowledge of it rushed upon me all at once: Elohim, Creator Almighty, had sent that part of himself, the very part that had provided the light of that first and re-created Eden, the part that had spoken the words for the forming of the cosmos before my inception and for my own creation, had planted himself in the womb of an insignificant girl. He had arrived now in person.”
Inside my sweater, the hair on my arms stood out from my skin.
“Do you understand? Flesh! He had taken on flesh. Not flesh in feel and appearance as I have done, or Lucifer might do, as members of the Host have done since the early days, but true flesh! The sentence of humanity. Why? Why!” Her arms jerked like a puppet’s, and I saw pieces of her white hair sticking to her fingers, matted to them like blood on a windshield. “I racked my brain. I writhed with it. Why would El go to such lengths for these creatures—go so far as to demean himself by becoming one of them? I burned with it.
“And I could only hazard a guess about how Lucifer felt—the best-created, most favored of El—abandoned by his great benefactor, his God-King having turned his back on him for the sake of a race of clay people. How it must feel to watch these insane lengths El was willing to go to prove his love for their terminal souls!” Drops of white spittle came out of her mouth as she spoke, clinging in sticky strings to the corner of her lip, her chin.
“It came to me then with the howling force of a freight train: He had never loved us so much. And then: He had never loved even Lucifer so much! Had he ever made even the slightest concession for any of us, let alone the shining cherub? But there seemed to be no end to what he would do for the humans. But here, now, was the thing:”—she raised her finger, albino strands falling from it—“If El mended the rift between the humans and himself in this sordid love affair, what would become of Lucifer? Of us?” She held out her hands. “Of me?”
Had I heard those words from an old woman’s lips in another time or place, it might have evoked pathos in me. But I had to remember: Never had Lucian seemed anything less than capable, crafty, and always more than he—she—purported to be. There was a latent cunning beneath the surface of everything she said, a taut power. And when she raised her eyes to me now, I saw something move like a shadow behind their clouded curtain, as one in the street sees a figure in a third-story window, looking down in silence, watching. And again I felt that surge of anxiety that I was missing something entirely.
“Then, with another squalling rush of clarity, I understood: There would be no new creation. He would not discard these mud people to begin anew with a greater or meeker brand of creature. He would offer his all to these mortals because they were the ones he loved.”
“All this time you had been waiting for El to destroy us?” I said faintly.
Now that mouth, which had gone slack, spread wide, revealing crags of stained teeth. “Oh, yes.” And the sibilance of that word was more menacing than if she had shouted, for I realized she had waited to revel in that very thing. Now she leaned back in her chair, tilting her head at an angle I found unnatural, especially for an old woman, as though she wouldn’t mind at all breaking her own neck.
“And yet we were not without means. The world was Lucifer’s kingdom, and El had just entered it in the flesh of a human. And as I held out hope, it lengthened my own, demonic vision.”
I had hardly ever heard her refer to herself in this way except at the beginning, so it struck me with ominous force to hear it now.
“Our Jewish king, so carefully chosen and strategically placed, was ruthless. It was enough that this would-be king threatened his reign, and so he sought to kill the child.”
“I take it he didn’t find him.”
That’s when something strange happened. The demon became distracted, staring with squinted eyes off in the direction of a store somewhere beyond the food court. Following her gaze, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, only shoppers coming in and out of the store, two men standing outside it like disenfranchised husbands waiting on their wives.
“What is it?”
“He had every boy in the area under two years old butchered.” Lucian’s eyes darted this way and that, a dry tongue snaking out to lick at her lips.
I thought again of the nativity scene, so serene and idyllic.
“Not that it helped. Obviously, the baby survived.”
20
I felt it like a bodily urge—like the irresistible need to cough, to vomit, to use the toilet. The story welled to a sickening head within me. I grabbed a stack of paper from my recycling bin and began to write, the physical act releasing it in fits. Even when I reached the end, I sat back, breathing slowly, deeply, waiting for it to subside, and then bolted upright to add in my thoughts, the description of her hands tearing at her hair, the grotesque moment when I’d asked her about human obliteration, her smile the rictus of a corpse.
Shortly after one in the morning, I went to bed with a headache severe enough to turn my stomach.
At 3:00 a.m. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about something the demon had said. If El mended the rift between humans and himself, what would become of us?
Of me?
I thought of the Genesis account. Of the messianic prophecy and the birth of the baby. Something dawned on me that I had not seen before, something that, even alone in my apartment, made my lips part in wonder: The growing pile of pages on my desk was not the story of a fall. Neither was it a demonic coming-of-age.
It was a love story. Of God for humans.
I supposed, too, it was the story of Lucian’s own love affair and subsequent divorce.
If humans could be reconciled, what about demons? Lucian had said nothing about any hope for himself. At least not yet. Perhaps that was where he meant to go next.
But what if not? What if Lucian were truly disowned? Then he must resent people as much as he claimed. And that must, necessarily, include me.
MY SLEEP THAT NIGHT, all three hours of it, was riddled with restless visions. I dreamed of Pastor Feagan, seeing the deep lines around his eyes, the gold crowns on two of his front teeth, more clearly in dreams than I could in memory. But when he opened his mouth in children’s church, he wasn’t the pastor at all. He was Lucian, spewing his hatred for all things human across the carpeted floor of the sanctuary.