Demon

by Tosca Lee

  “Come on,” he said, pushing back from the table.

  “Where?” I was instantly on my feet.

  He retrieved his coat and slapped a bill—a fifty—on the table.

  BY THE TIME WE left the potpourri of food, stale cigarettes, and urine that was Chinatown behind us, I was breathing hard, my heart beating spastic percussion against my sternum. I towered a good six inches over him, but his short legs were deceptively fast, and I trailed after him like a hapless kid tagging after the schoolyard leader, down Washington Street past St. Francis House.

  On either side of the street, homeless men loitered in ones and twos, smoking, scanning the pedestrians with dull, roving eyes, as if watching a play through a window. Though I had never been homeless, I knew that look, had been that person—the editor cleaning up the prose of would-be writers like a janitor sweeping up the refuse of others, contorting myself to fit my wife’s boxed worldview, going about my life as silently as the Charles, flowing out to sea.

  Lucian kept a brisk pace, looking around us with interest, seeming to enjoy the jaunt. This irritated me. Despite my obvious need for it, I was not here for the exercise.

  “And so?” I said with some difficulty against the cold. “What came after the promises and laws?”

  The heels of his dress shoes tapped against the sidewalk with the rapid staccato of a stopwatch. “The rest is just history, frighteningly dull: wanderings, wars, migrations, judges, priests, kings, and concubines. Actually, the concubines are a little bit interesting. You can read all of that for yourself if you’re simply dying to know. But far be it from me to encourage you to read it. It’s only the history of your race from the beginning. Nothing overly significant, I assure you.”

  I hated it when he was sarcastic. I never knew when it would bloom into a fit of real anger. Each of his outbursts startled and disturbed me a little more—and I felt I could afford them less and less.

  At Tremont, he veered toward a lightbulb-lined marquee and the large, arched entrance of the Majestic Theatre. It glowed from within, a fact hardly discernable beneath the wealth of lightbulbs until we reached the front doors. Lucian pulled one of them open.

  Inside the foyer, dark green ran in lightning bolt veins through burnt orange marble. Ram-horned, Dionysian heads smiled down from the tops of pillars on either side of the main auditorium entrance, and gold cherubs capered above and between them, playing the pan flute. The house was alive, chimes just signaling the end of intermission as though they might have indeed come from those golden pipes. The effect was grand and gauche, but for a moment I thought I saw them crumbling to scagliola plaster and gold paint all around me, as the house in Belmont had caved into a pile of refuse. A woman bumped into me, and the illusion dissipated at the sound of her startled apology. I found Lucian on a low landing, impatiently waving as he started up the stair toward the mezzanine.

  I followed him up and then up again to the balcony, breathing hard, my heart thumping in my ears with each step. Ahead of me, Lucian slipped inside the left balcony entrance with the last of the intermission stragglers.

  The lights lowered as I stepped inside. Blinking in the dark, I caught the stocky form of the demon making his way toward a set of empty seats as the conductor entered to applause.

  “What are we doing?” I hissed, sitting next to him.

  He said nothing, only folded his hands on his lap as the curtain opened on a simple Japanese set.

  I sat stymied through the third act of Madama Butterfly, through the return of Pinkerton and Butterfly’s surprised meeting with his new wife. The soprano might have been outstanding, Suzuki’s mezzo-soprano brilliant—I don’t know. I both heard and did not hear them. The sets—perhaps ingenious—served only to occupy my eye, which roamed the lines of the shoji screens like the corridors of a labyrinth as I paced back through all that the demon had said at the China Pearl, wondering again, as I inevitably did, what this had to do with me.

  By the time Butterfly committed suicide and the red Japanese moon bled down the front of her house in a modern projector trick, I was ready to jump up, to leave here for someplace where the demon might talk just a bit—any bit—more.

  But when the curtain came down on the last ovation and a river of well-dressed bodies took up coats and scarves and shuffled to the exits, Lucian stayed in his seat, gazing thoughtfully at the stage.

  “What a silly story,” he said, finally. “Puccini never got things right.”

  “Why, because his heroines always die?”

  “Yes, and what is left?”

  “Honor?”

  His words were an exasperated exhale. “But that’s so boring. Butterfly should at least murder the second wife.”

  I was the one noting the time now, calculating how late I might be up tonight. I needed to get through the stack on my desk before I allowed myself the indulgence, the release, of transcribing our meeting today. And then there was Helen, expecting to see something soon on this “demon memoir,” still the only viable project I had to give her—not because I didn’t have anything of merit from another author, but because it was the only one that mattered to me.

  “I would think you might enjoy the tragedy.”

  He crossed one leg over the other, brushed at his pants. “Tragedy is this: creating something excellent and having it go wrong . . . and then choosing a new and certainly less-deserving favorite. I had begun, by the time of the receding flood and the birth of El’s favored nation, the Israelites, to see this pattern. And I have seen it repeated now for millennia.”

  The curtain had lifted, and stagehands were pulling apart the set. Beneath us on the mezzanine, ushers patrolled the rows, picking up discarded playbills.

  “But here now, is the crux of it”— he stared at me—“there are those of us damned for one single, failing moment while you have the favor of an utterly partial God, willing to offer second chances again and again and again.”

  THAT NIGHT I FELT my focus like fervor. It was well after 2:00 a.m. by the time I went to bed, spent, never having touched the stack of reading in my bag.

  As I lay in bed calculating the maximum number of hours I could sleep and still get in an hour of reading before leaving for the office, it occurred to me that that was the real demon, the thing I dreaded, to which I gave my reluctant and disinterested eye. It did not move me; I did it because I must.

  Sometime in the last three years, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was a better editor than writer. That I was not destined to see my name in print again except on the acknowledgments page. Now I began to admit to a dancing modicum of hope that I had been wrong. In the last week I had felt more creatively alive—if physically drained—than I had in years, even if the story I sculpted was not my own. Lucian’s story had taken root in the last fertile corner of my imagination, where surviving pieces of hope, ambition, even professional pride had gathered in silent refuge. I felt manipulated, and I still did not understand his motive in telling me any of this. But for the first time in more than a year, I felt a seed of volition in an existence that otherwise had none.

  17

  On the subway, I fought to stay awake. I drifted, my limbs slackening into a rolling lull where neither deadlines nor demons existed, where I was neither editor nor divorcé, where there was nothing but an oblivion that I had not known since infancy.

  I shifted the bottle of Shiraz to the seat next to me. It was wrapped in a gold bag with a piece of evergreen twisted around the top, courtesy of the woman at the liquor store.

  I had initially decided against attending Helen’s party. But after nearly ten hours of staring at twelve-point print, I could no longer pretend to care if my newest author’s manuscript consisted of three long, Dickensian sentences spanning 250 pages. I was weary of coming-of-age stories, of personal pain disguised as literature, of Ayn Rand-esque discourse that would take me as long to get through as it took to write Atlas Shrugged. By five o’clock it was all tasteless.

  Sitting on the subw
ay now, however, I regretted my decision to go. The three hours it would take to attend Helen’s annual holiday function were three hours I might have spent in the accounts of my meetings with Lucian, which had just recently begun to cohere into a single narrative.

  But it was too late. Phil, whom Sheila affectionately called “Philly,” would be waiting at the Newton stop to take me to Helen’s upscale house in her upscale suburb where $520,000 might buy eleven hundred square feet in a hundred-year-old home if you were lucky. Of course, being lucky would mean you were too poor to belong there.

  Aubrey had been enamored with the idea of moving to Newton—once her job in marketing took off and I had written my best seller, she said. Which meant, of course, that it was really just a pipe dream to support and inspire me; we both knew her income would always be the greater of our two. I never spoke about my vision of Belmont—Newton had been her dream, and so it necessarily eclipsed mine. After a while it didn’t matter; even her encouragements had begun to feel like a perpetual list of grievances, and I had retreated into silence.

  Until that night.

  I blamed her, yanked the covers back from the bed where she was sleeping. I yelled at her and called her a whore. But as furious as I was with her, I was angry with myself, incredulous that years of proving reliable, of doing the right thing—of being a good man—had amounted only to this: that I would never be able to do and be those things she required.

  I rubbed my forehead, the back of my neck. At Copley Station I pulled the wine back onto my lap to make room for a woman with several bags. She had a long, gray ponytail that reminded me of my college anthropology professor, a sprightly woman in her fifties who routinely came to class in her dressage boots, smelling of horse sweat and leather.

  My seatmate gave me a slight smile, and I half expected her to address me by name, to begin talking about clay men and Lucifer’s personal vendetta against them. But she got up at the next stop, and I watched her go, thinking of the dressage boots that had carried from the classroom into my fantasy life, regardless of our thirty-year age difference.

  A rough-hewn Asian woman in an army jacket smirked at me from across the car.

  “She does bring to mind Professor Deptula.”

  My heart twitched inside my chest as she came to sit in the seat where the woman with the gray hair had been. Her face was round, the kind of face a Korean friend of mine used to call a “pumpkin.” Her hair spiked in soft black tufts from her head, providing the angles and interesting dimension that her face did not. No fewer than four earrings dotted her earlobe. She was all cargo pants, leather, and camouflage, attractive in a rough-hewn way that refused to chase the classic Asian beauty she could never have achieved at any rate.

  Her presence startled me—not for the fact that it came unannounced but because she had been sitting across from me for two stops before she made herself known. Had Lucian observed me, lurking in plain sight on other occasions? But at least one demon must always have been there for their swarming network to have such ready knowledge of my actions throughout my life. And while I knew this fact in theory, I found the reality of it unsettling.

  “I didn’t see anything on my calendar.”

  “I thought I’d drop by.”

  Yes, unsettling.

  “And what if I had stayed at home?” Every day upon opening my door or stepping from my apartment building, I wondered if someone I did not recognize would be standing there with a too-familiar smile.

  Lucian fell back in the seat, expelled a sigh, then raked a hand through her hair, making it stand up straighter than before. The thick strap of a leather watch was bound around her wrist. “Well, that might have presented a problem.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”

  “I don’t care for your place.”

  This admission stunned me. “Why?”

  “It has a fair amount of, shall we say, spiritual static. Let’s keep it at that.”

  I felt a wash of relief, followed quickly by a flash of anger. How long had I felt as vulnerable as if I lived in a fishbowl?

  “What do you mean, ‘spiritual static’?”

  “Clay, I didn’t come to discuss your apartment’s feng shui. I need to address an issue.” There was warning in her voice, seeming to imply that if I pressed her, she might get up at the next stop, leaving me with no answers but silence.

  That thought frightened me most of all. “What issue?”

  “This debacle of Job.”

  Job? I was only vaguely familiar with the story, and more for literary reasons than biblical ones.

  “Listen. Lucifer’s days of proving his own worthiness and superiority were gone. He was beyond that, delighting only in El’s disappointment, which had become a motivation all its own. To that end, he became fixated on pointing out human shortcomings, even predicting them in advance like a billiard player calling a shot. Lucifer loved this particular game. And the more El favored the human, the more tempting the human—and the game—was to him. He derived great enjoyment from the infidelities of El’s favorites and in pointing out their failures. For these acts Lucifer first received the name Satan—‘Accuser.’”

  As she said this, the fingers of her one hand enclosed the wrist of the other, seeming to check that the leather band of her watch was securely fastened. One of the earrings dangled against the corner of her jaw: a silver knife.

  “Now understand that like your scientists with their mice in their mazes, we knew well the predicted outcome, the percentages, the overwhelming empirical evidence. We have, after all, been there since the beginning and understand something of human proclivities.”

  I thought of the night he waited for me at the Bosnian Café. At Vittorio’s. At the distraction I felt at the sight of her in the bookstore, the smooth skin of her décolleté and the ankh stroking it.

  “During that time Lucifer—brazen, beautiful as ever, brilliant with the light that was still him—became obsessed with the man Job.”

  “Why?”

  “Because El said there was no one on earth like him. And this made Job irresistible to Lucifer, who meant to show El that even the best among the clay people hadn’t the faithfulness to show loyalty in the face of adversity. It’s one thing to love a god who protects you, showers you with wealth and all the worldly things that seem to matter so much in the short space of a lifetime. It’s another thing to love him when those things disappear.

  “Now I’m going to tell you something. In all our work we go where we wish; Lucifer does what he will. But a barricade had been erected around Job, an unbreakable bulwark of protection. The Host were thick upon him, and we couldn’t touch him—until the day that El dispersed the hedge around him, and we were free to do what we would.”

  There was an ominous sound to the lilt of her voice, and though I knew she spoke of the past, I was reluctant to hear what she said next.

  “We spent the wealth, attacked his livestock, killed the servants. And then we targeted his children. I came in as a storm and Belial as a great wind, and the house they were in collapsed and killed them all. We reduced one of the richest, most noteworthy men in the world to nothing in the space of a single day.”

  “In a day?” I echoed with morbid wonder.

  “A day. And the next day Lucifer took his health. Simple, decisive measures with one outcome in mind: for Job to curse El. But he wouldn’t do it. Suffice it to say, Lucifer’s still sore about it.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, fiddling still with the band of her watch. “Mind you, a single failure every now and then still keeps our success rate well over the 99.9 percent mark. Not quite perfect”— her smile was crooked—“but in my humble opinion perfection is overrated. And Job was a freak.”

  “There was no one else exceptional enough for Lucifer to test himself against?”

  “There would be, but he hadn’t come along yet. In the meantime, we grew bored, toyed halfheartedly, and shook our heads at El’s long-suffering. At times I wonde
red what would happen to us, but that uncomfortable sense, that inevitability in my immortal bones, had by then dulled to the phantom ache of a severed limb.

  “When I felt it, I distracted myself by thinking instead about the mud people and what would happen to them. There was talk of judgment after death, and though the details seemed obtuse, this made sense. Surely El must eventually deal with them; this could not go on forever. He would reach an end to his patience. He would, I was certain, see the constancy of human failure—the only consistent thing about them—and destroy them all yet, for they grew worse, not better.”

  She was pulling at the watch now in a way I found strange and distracting. And then I noticed with alarm that she was not toying or fiddling with the watch at all but digging her nails into the skin of her forearm above it so that it rose up in red welts and had even begun, in one place, to bleed.

  Something about the sight of that struck me as particularly destructive—more so than if a human had done it—so that I instantly wanted, needed, to get away from her. I felt unable to breathe in the confined space of the car and got quickly to my feet as the train pulled into the station.

  “Go to your party, Clay,” she called after me. “Go to your party, Clay!”

  There was something about the way she shouted my name that propelled me out the door, the skin on my back pricking as though it expected a knife thrust. I felt her eyes on me even after I hurried up the path to the street and the train receded toward Riverside.

  Standing on the curb, I was glad for the chill, the sound of voices, the idling cars waiting on commuters. Despite the fact that I would not have had this latest portion to add to my account had I stayed in my apartment, I thought I never should have left.

  As I searched for Phil’s gray Honda, I was disturbed, unable to push from my mind the image of her clawing at her skin as though it were a growth, a leech to be pulled away. And now, with that image in my mind, I must make conversation over mini-quiches, crab claws, imported cheeses, and macaroons—ask the appropriate questions of my colleagues’ spouses about their jobs and families. They, knowing of my divorce, would ask me about my work, which I did not want to talk about. I would deflect their questions with inquiries about their children and be regaled with Carolyn’s latest lacrosse accomplishments or Dayle’s college application or little Ravi’s latest rash. And because Helen had a particular talent for being everywhere in a group at once, she would no doubt make up for my deficit of family news by inquiring about the status of my manuscript in front of my peers. And I would have to come up with some way to explain the thing unfurling on my computer, including what it was called and when it would be done. Questions for which I had no answers.