Demon

by Tosca Lee

  The demon squinted at it through the passenger window, his forearm resting on the steering wheel. I expected him to crow his knowledge of my having come here, to regale me with the story of how I made out with Deanna Blair in an upstairs bedroom, then drop the bomb that she was dead or paralyzed or kidnapped in Colombia. But he was silent. I found it unnerving.

  “Why are we here?”

  He turned in the seat and regarded me. “I’ve thought a long time about telling you this, gone back and forth on it. I’m not sure about it, even now, but look—we’re here, and I promised to tell you everything.”

  He seemed to wait for some indication of my understanding.

  “The world is not as you see it,” he said finally. “Look at that house. So grand, so very upper-crust.”

  “That it is,” I said warily.

  “But here’s the thing: That house, the cars, the old furniture and interior decorating, even the landscaping—this physical world—is nothing but window dressing. Beneath all of that lies another realm altogether.

  “The distinction between our two worlds is important for you to understand. It’s important for you to know that beneath the aesthetics of every temporal veneer lies a stratum of infallible truth: a spiritual realm, the world wiped clean of cosmetics.”

  Now, as I looked again at that house, the heavy brick began to fall away, translucent as a frame in a ghost movie. And then the two upper levels silently collapsed, caving in the middle so that the stately old furniture, tables, and consoles with their curving legs and claw feet slid and then toppled through the crumbling floors. I had experienced Lucian’s tampering with my brain before in visions and dreams, but this—here, with my eyes bearing open witness to the very thing before me—was disconcerting. I jerked in my seat, but it, too, had become transparent. And then we were no longer seated in a cab but standing on a street that was no longer paved, in front of a yard that was nothing but earth and rock.

  In my vision, my waking hallucination, he turned to me. “I’m aware of every detail you’ve admired about that place: the great deck out back, the vaulted ceilings, the crystal light fixtures, and old oak floors. The grandeur, the status, the sheer custom cost of it all. But I see nothing more than your fancy tissue paper: brightly colored but fragile, fading, and easily torn, not to endure very well even the short span of your lifetime.”

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, where the house, the raised flower beds, the turret spire, and the iron gate had been, there was nothing but a pile of brick and rubble, dry dirt and stone. On the ground perhaps ten feet from me lay the splintered foot of a Queen Anne table, the cabriole wizened as though a century had had its inevitable way with it in the space of that instant.

  A car motored past us on the street, and we were in the cab once more as a postman pulled over in front of the bronze mailbox. The house was restored to its opulence, secure in its legacy, anchored in privilege to the manicured lawn.

  The demon tilted his head back against the window. “I see beyond the comforts of the amenities you seek all your life—the money, the hobbies, the alluring distractions that promise temporal gratification. Though humans claim to plumb the depths in search of meaning, I find they tend to settle for whatever drifts across the surface.”

  He had given me something. I knew that, for whatever reason, he had granted me a concession in showing me this thing, without which he might have shared his story just as cohesively and in a more expedient fashion. And I wondered why. To unsettle me? I was indeed unsettled—seeing the embodiment of my dreams ravaged before me resonated with strong, discordant notes.

  He raised a finger. “Granted, every now and then a human comes along with extraordinary discernment, a gift for seeing the world—if only for momentary glimpses—with near-angelic acumen. It’s unnerving.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s like peering into a roomful of shadows and having one of them step forward to look you directly in the face. Humans shouldn’t see so clearly.”

  “Do you think angels—demons, whatever—have a monopoly on truth?” I asked, not without defensiveness.

  He sat up, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “No. We’re simply better equipped to see it. Why? Because we aren’t looking at the world through soft and pulpous eyes like you, but through the iris of truth. It is neither obscured from us nor spared us.”

  “I want to know what this has to do with me.”

  “I’m coming to that.”

  Just then the two-way radio on the dash crackled with static. Though no voice came through, Lucian tilted his head as I had seen him do before to the invisible swarm of insects near his ear.

  We had been wending through the country club area, but now he turned around with a curse.

  “Helen’s been asking about you at the office. When you get back, tell her you had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “That’s lying.”

  “It’s on your calendar.”

  “It’s not on my cal—” I stopped, aggravated. “Why did we even come here if you were going to take me right back?” Though I had been antsy about the time away from the office, I now had mixed feelings about returning.

  “I didn’t know they’d be talking that much about your absence.”

  “I thought you knew things.”

  “I hear things. I observe. I’m not omniscient.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, as though the very act of talking to me gave him a headache.

  “We have a little bit of time left,” he said, checking his watch and then tapping the clock on the dash as if it had stopped. “So now listen: The world was new. All the creatures were vegetarian. The rending of flesh was yet to come. Creation enthralled and amazed us.”

  “Vegetarian?” I remembered his T-shirt that day in the Common—and then, inevitably, the shattered pink iPod strapped to a sickeningly skewed arm.

  “By design. You weren’t made to eat meat. Of course, you weren’t made to die, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll come to that. For now, you need to know something more about Elohim: He is the ultimate force of creativity. He is the author of diversity. The richness of creation has been lost on your kind for centuries. Millennia. But it wasn’t lost on us. Even Lucifer stared in amazement. Light. Earth. Water. Life. It was base and gorgeous. It was extravagant. We had never seen the earth like this, a swarming symphony of life. I heard with angel ears every call of bird and whale, the murmur of water, the rustle of tree. I thrilled to the sound of crickets, the collective pulse of mortal vein and plant stem. It was a visual feast as well, and I consumed it in long, wondering stares: the jade of glaciers, the desert art of sand dune, the simmer of lava, the effusive glow of firefly.”

  His voice fell and drifted off. When he spoke next, his words were distant, in that way in which we go back to our past to gratify or torture ourselves.

  “I was intoxicated by the activity of the day but returned almost every night to the shore, to walk beneath the gentle light of the moon, which forgave in shadow everything the sun so harshly laid bare. I could have spent millennia like that, days and nights walking the earth, sating my senses.”

  I was, for a moment, moved. And though he had not cast me into the illusion of his memory, I stood vicariously beside him on the shores of Saint Lucia, where I had gone on my honeymoon.

  “We longed for this world. We coveted it, and we hoped. Even Lucifer, though he wouldn’t say it, looked on with greed-softened eyes, infatuated. I deluded myself into thinking that yes, perhaps Elohim had taken him back. Perhaps Elohim had forgotten all, would set him up as a god over this rich and wild new world. The next blessings to come from El would be his, and ours.” He shook his head with a brittle laugh, the sound slightly too high-pitched for such a big man.

  We had skirted the MIT campus to arrive on Main, a block from my office building.

  “And why weren’t they? Why couldn’t they be?”

  He pulled over, put the c
ar in park, and turned to look at me.

  “Because then he created them.”

  “Them?”

  “You.”

  10

  Ascending the stairs to my apartment that evening, I felt drained but calmer than I had been in days.

  The incident outside the Garden still haunted me. I heard, in unexpected moments, the sound of that impact, saw again the splayed and broken limbs of that woman. I have something he wants, I reminded myself before that tendril of panic could tease my composure. And I knew that I needed something from him in return.

  I planned to spend the bulk of my evening writing by hand every bit of our conversation. I could feel the urge of it already, demanding release like an overfull bladder. But I hesitated on the landing and, on a sudden whim, went over and knocked on Mrs. Russo’s door. Now that I was composed, I wanted to thank her for the muffins, for her friendship and her concern. Her timing had been uncanny and, considering my state yesterday, I wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking I might be on drugs.

  Standing on her threshold, I wondered if her keen discernment would sense—and recoil from—any lingering trace of the company I had been in today. And so I was relieved when, after waiting another moment, there was no answer.

  That night, as I sat at my desk, my pen moving across the page, one thing in particular set my mind on edge: his capricious moods, especially in relation to me. Or rather, to humans. I returned again and again to his near-violent response—for a moment he really had looked possessed—to my question about why he never ate. To the way he had called humans them, as though we were a vile species.

  Or a hated enemy.

  11

  A few years ago I considered becoming a member of the Museum of Fine Arts. It was where Aubrey and I liked to spend days holding hands, standing with our arms around each other in front of the exhibits, murmuring into each other’s ears. I had planned to take her here for our anniversary last year. Instead, here I was on yet another stop of my Location Reclamation Project.

  A piece of calligraphy in the long Islamic gallery caught my eye. The Arabic was written in the shape of a boat. The placard translated: “I seek God’s protection from the cursed devil.” I wondered at the symbolism of the boat—but wondered more what had prompted the writer’s need for protection.

  I wandered into the Asian gallery, past busts from Angkor with curling hair and wide, broad lips, past Indian cave paintings faded into soft palettes of color, past the statue of an Indonesian demon with bulging eyes and a broad-lipped smile full of fanged teeth. The placard read: “The demon Manisha.”

  Demons everywhere. Why had I never noticed this commonality between cultures before? Why had I assumed demons to be property of the Christian church? I suddenly felt, as a modern and educated man, that I might be living proof of retrograde enlightenment.

  Beyond the marble statue of infant Moses and his mother lay the Nubian gallery, the room typically rushed through en route to the morbid Egyptian collection. Even the museum guide had printed, beneath “Egyptian Funerary Arts,” the parenthetical “(Mummies)” for those who had come here solely to see dead people. Aubrey had always found the idea gauche, so we never invested much time there; the impressionists, existential and vibrant, were much more romantic.

  I was considering the pieced-together shards of a bowl that had been buried with the wife of a king when a woman in her fifties came to stand next to me. “Nothing lasts, does it? It all turns to dust.”

  “I suppose you’d know.”

  In my peripheral vision I saw her turn and stare at me as I realized my mistake too late.

  “I beg your pardon!” The skin between her chin and neck shook as she said it. I imagine it did, too, when she walked deliberately out the direction I had just come in from.

  Across the small exhibition hall, I heard soft laughter. The crimson stain was still on my face when the source of the sound, a caramel-skinned woman, strolled toward me, mirth and the devil dancing in her eyes.

  “Not one of your smoother moments,” she said, still chuckling. Her hair fell in a wave past her shoulders, and I inwardly groaned at the sight of it, even as I found myself wanting to touch it. She was tall, svelte, her peacoat not reaching the hem of the short skirt that bared her knees. They were coltish, those legs, skin showing through the open weave of her tights like sun through a thousand tiny windows. She had turned her heart-shaped face to the broken bits of bowl, but I was staring at the profile of her mouth, at the pouty curve of her upper lip. She was the kind of beauty other women seemed to hate on principle.

  “This is quite old, in terms of your history. Though it seems like yesterday to me. I’m dating myself, aren’t I?”

  “I hate it when you do that.” I turned away.

  “Do what?”

  “Make your smug demon jokes.”

  “What else can I do in this divine comedy that sums up your human existence? It is a joke! It’s all a joke.”

  Together we wandered past gold necklaces, amulets designed to protect the wearer from evil—Lucian seemed unfazed by any of these—past scarabs and Eyes of Horus to a collection of ninth-century BC jewelry.

  She studied a weathered gold ring. “This is much closer.”

  “Closer to what?”

  “The time when God came to Eden.”

  “Came to Eden?”

  She looped her arm through mine. “We had no idea what he was doing,” she said in a low, seductive tone. “Everything so far had appeared by word, had come into existence by the sheer will of God. But now El came down to this new Eden. We felt him moving over the land, rushing upon meadow and valley, the animals excited in his wake, their chorus raised to the sky. In the garden I felt him, circling as one paces upon the ground in consideration. He came to the edge of the river and lingered there, roaming through the reeds.” She looked at me, her eyes luminous and wild.

  “Why? What was he doing?”

  “The unthinkable!” she said in a whisper. She seemed unusually convivial today. “There now, by the river, the earth was gathering upon itself, forming up from the ground as though El himself had bent down and scooped up mounds of the foul stuff in his hands.” She covered her mouth, a strange half laugh seeming to escape her of its own volition, inadvertent as a hiccup, the sound of it peculiar and cracked.

  “We on the periphery lingered in the humid air. What was he doing? There was God, doing something in the muck. We looked at each other. Even Lucifer stared, dumbfounded. You should have seen the look on his face!”

  She broke out in sudden, trilling laughter. There again was that slight hint of mania. And as before, the abruptness with which she regained her composure startled me nearly as much as how quickly she had lost it. It occurred to me that anyone overhearing her—the way her voice shot up in register and lowered to a whisper and then broke out in laughter—might have thought she was unbalanced.

  She steered me toward an exhibit of gold bracelets and rings, preserved all these years in a Nubian tomb. I was conflicted by her casual contact and thought about pulling away from her whispered words, stirring the tiny hairs in my ear.

  “El was sculpting the earth into some thing, some likeness, creating this time not by word . . . but in person.” When I said nothing, she gestured imperatively, vainly, as one groping for words. “In person, Clay. As though by hand!”

  I looked at her, baffled.

  “We were all staring, gape-mouthed as you, by then. And then he surrounded this thing. He was everywhere around it, as if he had gathered the dirty thing in his arms and cupped it by the head. And then I heard it.”

  She was clutching my arm, her fingers biting into my flesh so that I was glad I had worn a sweater, sure that she would have left half-moon punctures with her nails in my forearm.

  “The sound, it was the same expectant sound at the dawn of all the world. A breath exhaled into the mud! Given to the mud thing as surely as if he had set his mouth against those dirty lips and breathed.

&nb
sp; “Oh, divine exhale! It was himself. Much more than life, it was everything—the awareness, all the emotion, the propensity to love, to nurture, to create. And he endowed it all upon this new creature made of mud.” The plush mouth contorted. Behind her irises, the unnatural light I had noted before blazed like a black nova. “And the clay chest filled, and expanded, and warmed. The man coughed and fell down, alive.”

  I stared. “But you’re saying—”

  “Yes, Clay”—her mouth smoothed into a chilly smile—“Image of El, breath of God. In such an unworthy vessel. Something far more precious than diamonds, denied even to us but entrusted to a container of mud.”

  “I take it Lucifer was as thrilled as you seem.”

  Again the brittle laugh. “His jealousy exploded in a fiery blast, the fallout infecting us with his cancer.”

  She shrugged out of her coat, and I instinctively moved to help her. She wore a sleeveless turtleneck beneath, and the skin of her arms was smooth, luminous. I wanted to touch it.

  “Eden, once the seat of his government, had been made anew, raised up and recreated lush and living—and prepared for another.” She took the coat from me and draped it over her arm, a delicate silver watch on her wrist catching the light. “No more stones like mirrors—this was a handcrafted cradle for no creature of our kind.”

  “So he—El—made it for Adam. I assume that’s the man you’re talking about.”

  “Yes. This new garden, planted by Elohim, became his home. The former throne of Lucifer now belonged to a cherished new creature made of mud.”

  “You said yourself that Lucifer didn’t want it anymore.”

  “Not as it was. Not ruined. But El had done something special and made it anew—and given it away. Worse yet, El himself deigned to go there. He went down from the heavens daily. He left the mount and moved among the creatures, speaking with the man, walking with him in the shade and telling him things beneath the trees. Oh, intimate whispers! How my soul suddenly longed to be a clay creature!”