“I don’t understand.”
“The spilling of blood—it was the spilling of blood.” His voice cracked.
“Why do you keep saying that? What was it about the blood?”
“Idiot!” He was on his feet, walking away so that I stared after him—as did others in the café, heads snapping up from their companions and laptops. I started to rise, but he came striding back, shoved his weight into the chair and leaned over the table until it creaked and threatened to tip. His hair was disheveled, his skullcap missing. He wiped a hand over his beard and blurted, “Passover! The Passover lamb!” He was beyond himself, and I searched for something to say to calm him down. The man at the café counter was tense, and I knew we were on the verge of being told to leave.
“Death had come to every firstborn in Egypt—animal, king, slave—except in the homes of those Israelites who had painted the blood of perfect lambs on their doors. Death passed over those doors. Now here it was, running down the legs and arms of that God-man, the blood like that of those perfect lambs, their veins drained into basins, that vital, crimson reparation, the blood of atonement, once smeared on the doorframes of the Passover . . . now etched on the heart of man.”
I had heard the phrase “Lamb of God” in hymns. I had heard the Jesus freaks saying he died for their sins. I had never understood what they meant.
Until now.
“I howled a banshee cry, but it was too late. They did the unspeakable. They hauled him off to a public execution. In my ears and all around me was the motley fervor of Legion. And Satan had eyes for nothing but the son—that part of Elohim that had formed the cosmos and reshaped the terra and, most importantly, refused him—broken, as wretched as a human can be before a mortal body cries out, too broken to hold its own spirit.”
I remembered the broken body of the jogger, cracked beyond life.
“‘It is done,’ he said. And I thought, Yes. It is. And the hourglass that had come into existence for me on that first day when time was created, that had signaled the measure of time until an unknown and inevitable end, was jolted, a wealth of sand—precious grains of limited time—tumbling through that channel, gone forever. I felt I could gather the crumbs of my future in one palm.”
I saw now the rugged, multidial watch on his wrist, time in all its measurements, time measured and captured, no farther than arm’s length. Time, owned and on occasion even stopped in the mechanism of that fine chronograph.
“Yes. Now you understand. And there it is.” The watch was frozen, the second hand in mid-stutter, unmoving.
“As he died, I felt it—his departure, though I had become accustomed to the sense of him here, moving about the earth as flesh, and I had become numbed to it, too. The effect was that while I did not feel with acute awareness his presence here, I felt acutely the moment he departed. Felt it more deeply than the mortals who fell back as the sky went black. And when it did, I, without corporeal body, shivered, felt in my bones El’s withdrawal from that place, like the sun fleeing a wasteland of ice.
“Around me, my comrades fell silent one by one, cries dying on their lips, giving way to a shifting, uneasy silence. I wanted to strike them all! What did they think would happen? Had no one listened, no one heard? But they had been caught up in their bloodlust, fueled by the rage and fervor of Lucifer even as Lucifer had surely come to the same realization as I had, too late. And now that it was done, as the broken body that barely resembled a body except in the most macabre of ways hung limply upon that tree, all we could do was stand and look on at the wreck of our design.
“That moment was, in all, the eeriest moment of my life since the day Lucifer’s throne careened from violent, heaven-hungry hands, since the night darkness consumed Eden and water swallowed the earth.”
I was silent. I had questions. But there was a hollowness in his eyes that made the dark light inside them look like twin black holes. I looked away from him, taking in the little tables, the people hunched over their laptops, their sandwiches and lattes—needing the comfort of their preoccupation, to hear the sound of the coffee machine, to regain the present. I did it in the way that one comes out of a theater, blinking in the light after a matinee horror movie, glad for the sun, the sound of the cars on the street. But Lucian pulled me back, and again I thought his eyes looked like holes.
“This was more than the shattering of ambition, of any last shred of our hope, however twisted and dark. This was what it meant to be damned. This was what it felt like to know that one already was—had been for eons—damned. Gall rose inside me, acrid and virulent. Terror beat at my heart. I writhed, grasping for some kind of resolution. I couldn’t stand it. I hinged on madness. I craved malice, rage, the sound of Lucifer, our prince—the majestic Satan—howling his indignation, lashing out. Anything but this.”
“And did he?” My voice sounded too loud, too crude, too human.
“Just as he had led us nowhere when Eden went black, he led us nowhere now. He did nothing. Our general, our prince stared on in silence. And what could I do but wonder at this new sense of the inevitable, this dread embalming my spirit? All was not well with me. All was not well.”
His head snapped up toward the entrance of the store, and he straightened as though startled.
“What? What is it?” I twisted, trying to see what it was, but a thick grocery aisle blocked my view. Lucian craned his thick neck, as though to stare straight through it.
“We don’t have much time.”
“You’ve said that since our first appointment.”
“No.” He snapped his gaze to me and pushed his chair back with a skid against the tiles. “It’s getting shorter.”
It chilled me, the way he left, taking a long side aisle toward the door. I got up, made a show of throwing my plate and juice bottle away, tried to see who might have alarmed him so much. But there was no one in the store entrance or even down the middle aisle and only one patron in each of the three checkout lanes.
I loitered near the front of the store as cashiers scanned containers of rice chips and vegetable broth, of soy yogurt and tofu ice cream, each item registering with an electronic blip. Frustrated by Lucian’s erratic behavior and uncharacteristic display of emotion, I left.
Fewer than five steps beyond the door, I ran into Mrs. Russo. She was wrapped up in her camel coat and carried her canvas shopping bag. Running into her shouldn’t have seemed odd. She was, after all, the one who had told me about the co-op when I first moved in.
“Well, Clay! Hello dear!” She clasped me by the arm with a gloved hand, and I tried to smile. “Did you come for some nice lunch?”
“I did. Wild salmon and broccolini.” As I said it, my mind began to exercise a strange new thought.
“Oh, delicious. I might have to have some, too. It’s a pity you’ve already eaten, or you could join me.” She smiled, and I felt caught between wanting to pull away and longing to sit down with her over a plate of her famous lemon bars. There was something comforting about her presence, as though no harm could possibly come to me as long as one was with her.
“We’ll have lunch together another time, Mrs. Russo. Have you just come from church by chance?” By way of explanation, I added, “You look so nice.”
“No, dear. I’m meeting my small group tonight though. Is everything all right? You’ve been on my heart so much.”
There was a time when I’d found her religiousness the only irritating thing about her, when I’d been as leery of her invitations to church or Bible group as I was of Amway. But now I bit my lip, feeling as if a wall that had both protected and alienated me might crack. “Everything’s all right.”