Demon

by Tosca Lee

  “That sounds really boring.”

  “Really? Imagine the bliss of fulfilling one’s created purpose.”

  I couldn’t. “Why do you sometimes call him El—irreverence?”

  “Here is where your language fails you utterly. El means ‘Mighty God’, though that does the meaning no justice. Elohim implies more, including plurality—‘the God of gods,’ you might say. Regardless of what you call him, he was all things to us then, which is very different from what he may be to you. Not a father—no, never that for us—but the reason for our very existence. The Great Initiator. Ever Enduring. Alpha and Omega.” The demon sighed. “As for us, we were a sight to behold, glorious, unequivocal, each of us distinctly individual but of one purpose. Shining, more than brilliant; we had spent a brief infinity reflecting Shekinah glory like so many polished mirrors. How radiant we were! It was my happiest, most glorious moment. For a small eternity—if you can fathom such a thing—I was happy.”

  There was poignancy in the rich timbre of his voice. Walking with me like this, he might have been any man retelling the tale of a happy, thirty-year marriage before his wife died. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him. “So why did you turn your back on it?”

  He tilted his head skyward, narrowed his eyes. “I was promised more.”

  We were on Brattle Street and had come to a drugstore advertising a post-Halloween sale. Masks hung in the window, a motley assortment of orcs, Klingons, zombies, and former presidents—the presidents looking too much like the zombies for any zombie’s comfort. In the corner a red-faced Satan peered out between Yoda and Spider-Man. The sight of it startled me, as though Lucifer himself, having heard his name, had come to eavesdrop on us.

  Lucian stopped before the red face, the stubby, polyurethane horns that protruded from the forehead. He studied it so thoughtfully I wondered if it were possible he hadn’t ever seen one like it before.

  “I remember the first time I ever saw a rendering of one of my kind,” he said, finally, seeming to gaze beyond the glass, beyond even the store. “Belial took me to see it with such passion and insistence that I expected a wonder, a thing of marvel—anything but the hideous vision before me with the man’s body and bird’s taloned feet. It was covered with fur like a mangy goat and had dark and hideous wings. I was stupefied and not a little offended. ‘What kind of abomination was that supposed to be?’ I demanded. Belial, finding this uproariously funny, bowed and pointed. ‘Behold, the fearsome Belial!’ he said, which was ridiculous, as he has always been beautiful.”

  He turned a baffled look on me. “I thought your mad and genius artists were supposed to succumb to higher visions beyond the corporeal world. But there you are, still painting your devils red with horns, making Lucifer, our shining star, into a grotesque goat-man. And these are the images that remain to this day: ugly, marred, toppling from heaven, herded toward hell by the swords of shining blond men with stoic faces and bleached togas—Michael and Gabriel, I presume.” He turned away.

  “Just think,” I said, in a moment of facetiousness, “you can dress up as a devil on Halloween and no one will recognize you.” I regretted my recklessness the moment I said it.

  “Just think,” he said, too lightly, “you might pass me in the street and never know it. If I wished, you might even feel lust for me.”

  He glanced sidelong at me, and I shrank back at the memory of copper hair, of a silver ankh swinging against smooth skin, pointing at the breasts beneath.

  “Why do you show up like this, in these different guises?” I hated the feeling of being caught always unawares.

  “I like the feel of trying them out,” he said, as though they were nothing more than new shoes or a bicycle.

  I thought of the calluses on his hands, the telltale record of a history not his own. I wondered if they belonged to someone, or once had.

  I shook the thought away. I might be a seeker, but there were some things I did not want to know.

  ONE BLOCK FARTHER, LUCIAN stopped in front of a tea shop. “They have a good oolong here. Didn’t you take a fancy to oolong in China?” He pushed through the glass-paned door of the shop.

  I knew I had never mentioned the trip I had taken nearly twenty years ago. I had fallen in love with the country, and, at one point in our marriage, even suggested adopting a baby from China.

  Of course, that was all moot now.

  In a show of defiance, I did not order oolong but decaffeinated Earl Grey. The demon, for his part, preferred jasmine.

  The wall at the back of the shop was plastered with academic, activist, and personal notices, ads seeking dog-sitters and lesbian roommates and advertisements for Pilates instruction and colonic irrigation. Lucian was silent as he plucked the tea ball from his cup and set it aside on the saucer. It occurred to me then, with a sense of strange intuition and even stranger incredulity, that he was procrastinating.

  “You were promised more?”

  He’d been right that first night in the café: I hadn’t forgotten a phrase, a detail. While I’d never had an eidetic memory, his words came back to me with such repetitive insistence that the only way I could exorcise them from my consciousness was to write them down. Even now his last words on the street echoed in my mind and, I suspected, would continue to do so until I was at my desk.

  He ignored me, and I thought about prompting him again, but just then he did something so subtle as to wring at reason: He pursed his lips, the chapped skin creasing reluctantly, dry as a newly fallen leaf. And I marveled at the mundane aspects of his humanity, against which I must remember the truth of what he was: Demon. All around me life hummed along like a machine, oblivious to any sound but its own, as unaware of the interloper among its cogs and wheels as the diners in the café had been that first night, deafened by the drone of the everyday.

  “With the clock on the wall over there ticking so loudly,” he said, “I’ve just realized I can’t tell you how long it went on like that—my life before. Isn’t that funny? I just can’t say. You can point to the calendar and say you were born on such-and-such a date and married for five years. But as for me, I could not begin to guess. Eons must have passed. Millennia. Ages. Or maybe it was really only a moment. I don’t know. When one pre-exists time, an epoch can pass like a day, and who would know it? It’s so cliché, a trite line from novels about lovers: ‘Time had no meaning.’ But that’s how we were: enrapt, enthralled with our very situation, with every aspect of our circumstances, our whole purpose for being. It was the golden age of ages—of which every age since has been only the palest shadow.”

  He took the tea ball from the saucer, squeezed the hinges together just enough to crack the sphere open but not enough to let the mass of sodden leaves fall out. “It all ended with a glance.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a glance’?”

  “How does anything new begin? How does an extramarital affair begin?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He looked up at me. “Then I’ll tell you. With a glance. A thought. And the possibility of that thought acted upon. Even your Narcissus of legend, who might most resemble my master in this account, started his own infatuation with a glance into a pool where he found . . . himself.”

  He dropped the tea ball into his cup. He was silent for a moment, stirring the tea that had gone, so far, unsampled. “Clay, I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you a secret. One I hardly dare whisper. When you write down this conversation and append it to the others, this is the page I would condemn to molder first were it not so central to everything.”

  I had a sudden vision of a demonic Pied Piper luring me not with music but with words and story to some unknown end.

  “I was swept up in the ecstasy of worship, of praising Elohim for all that he was and had been and was yet to be. And I had lifted my arm to shield my eyes—the Shekinah glory is too great even for us. And I had wept with it, with the fervency of it, until my tears nearly choked me. My awareness of God was, in that moment, so
great that I was overwhelmed. It was always that way.” He didn’t so much look at me as through me. “But this time, as I lowered my arm, the tears hung like prisms in my eyes, like crystals held up to the brilliance of the sun. And I gaped at the beauty of the garden, at the refracted beauty of my own kind filling it. Suddenly, one thing stood out to me as more brilliant than all the rest of that dazzling host, blinding me through the lens of my tears so that I wiped them from my eyes like scales.”

  “Lucifer,” I whispered.

  “Yes. Our prince and governor come down to walk among us like so much wheat in an open field. I was dazzled! So help me, I stared and thought myself blinded. Can you fathom it? Can you possibly understand? His head was more brilliant than your sun. His wings, like a metal so pure that your quicksilver is a pathetic comparison, glimmered like so much pavé jewelry, crystals set so closely together as to appear like one winking eye of a diamond. Even his hands and feet were as perfect as unclouded ice, smooth as alabaster. But it was the power, the power and the glamour that overwhelmed me. I knew then, in a way I had not known before, that I stood in the presence of the greatest being under God. I staggered at the sight. Light. Glory. My beautiful one!” He closed his eyes as he spoke, each word falling like a boulder between us.

  Lucian leaned his cheek into his hand. “And Lucifer, my prince, heard my heart and turned his eyes to me. It was almost more than I could bear, the direct brunt of that gaze—such a long and considering glance. As for me, I was rapt, seared by the stars, scorched by perfection. I fell down on my face, as I had before El a million times before, but this time to Lucifer. And my heart praised him—not for the work of the Creator in him, or even his office under God, but simply for the sake of his own magnificence. And Lucifer knew it.”

  “And that made you a demon?”

  “No. The sin isn’t in the temptation.”

  I could not help but think of Aubrey. I never knew when she crossed that line. I had tortured myself with trying to pinpoint exactly when she betrayed me—in spirit, if not yet in deed—and at what moment I lost her. Even after she was gone, I scoured phone receipts, credit card statements, the caller ID log. I reconstructed the entire schedule of her off-site meetings and business trips during our last month together, mad with it, obsessed despite the futility.

  The demon curled his fingers around his teacup as though to warm his hands—another human gesture I found somehow grotesque—and said, “I sometimes wonder what he must have seen at that moment: a lowly angel, prostrate before him—a being beautiful in its own right but so dull by comparison? Or maybe a reflection of himself, cast back as though from the watery and unworthy mirror of Narcissus. I don’t know. I don’t know why he even looked at me. I suppose he felt my adulation and was pleased by it. In fact, I know he was.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I felt it. Keep in mind we aren’t like you. When we share the same purpose, we are a legion of one accord. The perfect army. So I felt it, too, when he looked away from Elohim, and then at me . . . and finally, at himself. And among our perfect awareness, the ripple it caused spread through us like the falling of dominoes, one against the other. But unlike your ivory pieces with their neat and shuffling clinks, the momentum of that disturbance was a roar—thunder—in my ears. You can’t comprehend what it is for an angelic being to hear the fabric of perfection rent.” He rubbed his forehead, pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s deafening . . . deafening. And Lucifer rose up, inspired by that mayhem, his eyes terrible, his bearing resolute. How beautiful, how awful, was the look on his face! I believe the sight of it will be with me forever, burned into the retina of my mind, the sentence of perfect recollection.”

  He dropped his hand and abruptly stood up. “More hot water?”

  4

  As he rounded the bend of the front counter, I fully expected that he might not return. To my surprise, though, he came back a moment later with a small pot of water. He refilled my cup before pouring a drop into his own—all the cup would allow, as he had never drunk any of it.

  I looked at my teacup.

  “Go on—” he gestured at it—“I want to watch you enjoy it.”

  “As though you haven’t seen people doing this for centuries.”

  “Millennia. But I’ll never tire of it. I like to wonder what it must be to take pleasure in something so short-lived.”

  I took a sip. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Of course.” He reseated himself with a magnanimous tilt of his head.

  “It’s obvious you haven’t liked telling me this part of your”— I fumbled for a moment—“background. So why do it?”

  I had a strange sense then—the same one I used to have as a boy when I ran up the basement steps, chased by shadows—that coalesced into this thought: Were his compatriots here? Did they know, and would they approve of his coming to me like this?

  “Are you with him now?” I added, on impulse.

  “What, this minute?”

  I nodded.

  He gave me a queer look. “Are you serious? Oh, you are. No, of course not. Like you—and like him—I can be in only one place at a time. Really, you watch too much television.” He glanced at his watch, seeming to weigh the time.

  A surge of anxiety streaked toward my heart. But the demon, normally so well tuned to my discomfort, seemed to be in conference with his own thoughts. Finally, he crossed his arms. “When people talk about this story, they make it so idiotic: ‘Lucifer was proud, he wanted to be like God. When he rebelled, a third of the angels followed him.’ I’ve heard all the stories—yes, even in your churches. But you have to understand: We were all proud. And Lucifer—he was the governor of the mount of God. So how natural and right it seemed that when he held out his hands like a liege accepting fealty, we would give it.

  “For a moment—whatever that can be without the boundaries of time—we forgot El. And I heard Lucifer’s thoughts then as clearly as if he had exercised his voice, raised up his fist, and shouted. And why shouldn’t you praise me? Why not bow down? Am I not your perfect prince, with strength a thousand times a thousand of you, with beauty a thousand times greater, with power beyond measure? Watch now! I will go up to heaven. I will raise my throne beyond the stars of El. I will sit upon the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the clouds of glory. I will make myself like the Most High!”

  His gaze had left me again, and I knew that a part of him was back in that place, in Eden then. There was a curl to his lips, but the smile was not congenial.

  “A moment, an eternity earlier, I would have known it for blasphemy, for damning ambition, independent of Heaven. I would have known! But in that instant his logic was perfect. How could anything less come from such a creature? In the shadow of Elohim, he seemed worthy to do it. He seemed like a god. His glamour was so great; I wanted him to be God.”

  Lucian picked up the tea ball and stabbed it into his cup, sloshing water into the saucer.

  “Did he know it?”

  “How could he not? The assumption was—unspoken, of course, but put forth in suggestive and sultry thought—that those of us who followed him would be something greater as well. He would be a god, and we would become like him.

  “The bulk of the Host stood stunned at the discordant thunder of this break. Still, I bowed to him, as did many others like me. And with that, the fate of a legion was set in motion. Time, not yet created, had begun its phantom tick for us alone. Not that we knew it then; we were caught up. We rushed the throne of Lucifer in all its shining estate there in Eden. It was the seat of a government outgrown, and we rose up, ready for our new order. And we seized the throne, determined to move it. I can remember the feel of it in my hands still. Can you understand, Clay? No, of course you can’t!”

  Before I realized what he meant to do, he grabbed my hand, his skin tingling against my palm. I started, but as in the bookstore, his grip tightened. I couldn’t pull away.

  “The gold of it was hot, burning glory—the
glory of Lucifer. It branded me the moment I touched it”— he squeezed my hand tighter—“melding flesh with metal like skin melting on an iron. But instead of letting go, I clasped it tighter, reveling in the white-hot burning of my flesh, the happy cost of my metamorphosis.”

  The tingling in my hands turned to pain. His palms seemed inhumanly hot. And then I felt it: a rush of power, thudding through my veins like adrenaline. The drum of my heart roared in my ears, faster—faster. In another minute I was sure I would have a heart attack.

  Or that I could run a marathon.

  I heard the demon from a distance now: “I, too, would become something more than the mere angel I was. And this would be my transfiguration. This searing was not pain but alchemy!”

  The track lighting, the fliers on the wall, the bins full of exotic teas faded into my periphery. Once, back in college, when I had torn a groin muscle while running hurdles, simple shock and the rush of blood to the injury had caused me to nearly black out. I felt the same way now, except that I was not nauseous, and my vision had not narrowed to a tunnel. In fact, it had expanded, pushing reality to the fringes of my consciousness like curtains sliding into the wings of a stage.

  Now came a distant rustle. It grew in volume into the beating of a thousand wings, as though I had entered an aviary ten miles wide, crowded with giant, winged creatures, the bodies too dense above and around me to see anything but intermittent shards of light. Voices deafened my ears, galvanized my heart.

  Lucian’s voice came to me: “Our fervor intoxicated me. We would have another god, one who walked among us, granted favors—one of our spirit kind risen to the third heaven where he was permitted but never resided. And we, the interlopers, would rise up with him and set up his throne there. We would come into the presence of our new god, walk upright and proud at his side.”