by Tosca Lee
“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.
And then I was at my cousin’s house. My father was still alive, and we had driven to Nebraska as a family to see his brother’s family where they lived midway between Lincoln and the western panhandle. My uncle had moved there for some kind of work, and I used to love visiting my cousins there, where they burned their garbage in a big bin out back, and we played Kill-the-Carrier in their giant front yard. I was six again.
My cousin had, among his toys, a Sesame Street book about Grover, who was afraid of a monster at the end of the book. At each page Grover begged me not to go on, not to turn another page, and of course I couldn’t resist. I was so enamored with the book that I wanted to take it with me on the car ride home. My aunt gamely told me I could have it, and though my parents protested, and my cousin, two years younger than me, started to cry, I wanted that book so much that I made the situation worse by continuing to ask for it. I knew my mother would scold me later, but I didn’t care; I wanted to read it again and again with wild anticipation, Grover begging me at each turn not to go farther.
There’s a monster!
I didn’t care about the last page when Grover, alone at the end of the book, realized that he was the monster. It was the pages leading up to it that fueled my little heart, that kept me turning, fixated, despite repeated wa
rnings.
And then I dreamed I was at my desk, thumbing through proposals stacked in towers nearly as tall as I, through manuscripts five thousand pages long. Peeking out from between two boxed manuscripts, I saw the thin book with its cartoon Muppet character. I picked it up and began to read.
There’s a monster.
21
Voices drifted from the Bristol Lounge, punctuated every few seconds by the trilling laugh of a woman. I ambled toward that sound, feeling like an outsider.
I had loved to come to the Four Seasons in my first years as an editor. I was writing the Coming Home books then and used to imagine the day when I would spend every Friday afternoon in the Bristol Lounge’s overstuffed chairs, perhaps in front of the fireplace if it were cold outside, expensive brandy rolling inside the snifter in my hand. There I would take drinks with fellow writers or my own editor—perhaps even an interviewer from the Paris Review.
It was four years now since I had last been here to take Aubrey’s mother to enjoy salmon sandwiches, miniature tarts, and scones with clotted cream, all part of a high tea that we could barely afford.
I half expected the hostess to give me a polite but distant look, to say that they were full, so sorry, that I might try the Irish pub down the street. But she smiled and led me to an out-of-the-way nook just off the bar lined by a long, red leather seat. Between the bronze upholstery tacks along the back of the seat and the book-lined shelves above it, the polished cherry wood of the table and the attendant cozy chairs pulled up on the other side, the little nook gave off the flavor of an elegant personal library.
In another life, one filled with editor and writer friends, I could have claimed this corner as my own, reserved it each week to hold court and take that brandy, to grant that rare interview.
Tonight there would be no editors, no interviews, no brandy.
But there would be, at least, dessert. I ordered coffee and then got up to drift between tables of tortes and pastries and cheesecake and ice creams at that famous dessert buffet, returning ultimately with a glorious bowl of hot pumpkin bread pudding that was even now melting a scoop of maple ice cream into a white moat in the dish.
From where I sat, I had a direct view of the grouping of cushy chairs in front of the piano, where five women exchanged Christmas gifts over likewise melting desserts. The gift bags and boxes were wrapped with tulle and sprigs of fresh evergreen and yielded items like silver bowls, a polished wooden jewelry box, a Hermes-style scarf. On the hand of every woman was a rock so large I could see it from my corner, shining like a beacon.
Beyond the group, a long expanse of windows looked out onto the street and into the Public Garden beyond. I used to love the order of those flower beds with their iron ropes, the manicured lawns and spiral-cut shrubs. But now they seemed as meticulous and indifferent as a cemetery, as unnatural as the perfectly embalmed visage of a corpse.
“I’m afraid I’m the late one this time.” A young man hurried into my morbid reverie and pulled out one of the cozy chairs. He was dapper in navy blue pants and a button-down shirt, his tie loosened so that it hung askew in a way that reminded me faintly of a noose. He might have been an intern fresh out of college; he had the mischievous, spring-faced look of an Ivy League a capella singer, a Harvard Din and Tonic or a Brown Derby. His hair, a light chestnut, curled around his face and over his ears in a way that might have looked like a dirty halo if the wind caught it just right. Like a doll-faced cherub. When he sat down, he crossed his ankle over his knee and fell back into the leather as though, at the ripe age of—what, twenty-one?—he had had a long day.
“Why are you so tired?” I said, a bit put out. I had come straight from eleven hours at the office on only five hours of sleep the night before.
“I’m a busy man,” he said, smiling at me. He had a dimple in his left cheek, and his skin was flushed pink. He looked like a young man in the throes of infatuation. I had never seen him like this.
“I don’t need to tell you the committee liked what I gave them, do I?”
“Of course they liked it.” He smiled again and looked around. “I haven’t been here since they expanded.” A waitress came for his order. He smiled at her and, with a look at my cup, asked for coffee.
“Helen assumes the content is mine, and that it’s fiction,” I said, shaving the corner off the bread pudding, taking just enough ice cream with it.
“But of course.”
“It feels dishonest.”
He shrugged. “If you want to put ‘as told to’ before your name, be my guest, though it won’t do wonders for your credibility.”
“I plan to use a pen name.” It would be my concession to a conscience that knew it could not claim full credit for Lucian’s story—only my own.
“A nom de plume? How mysterious.”
I did not say that it was also practical, a means of separating this work from my former, failed attempts at publishing.
The demon seemed to be elsewhere, just disengaged enough from our conversation to be unflappable, which bothered me. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
“I’m comfortable with knowing how it ends.” It came out more calmly than I expected.
“Soon,” he said. “You’ll know. I promise.” He returned his focus to me with an absent smile.
“What you don’t seem to understand is that I can’t even finish a synopsis without”— I stopped as the waitress reappeared. Lucian smiled up at her, and I considered my soggy bread pudding, not wanting to follow their small talk. I wasn’t in the mood to witness any kind of interaction that I had not had since—since Lucian’s trick in the bookstore.
“Don’t be so sour, Clay,” he said after she left.
“I’m not sour.”
“You will be when you see . . . this,” he said, lifting a scrap of paper from the table with a triumphant flick of his hand. I stared, exasperated, at a number with the name Nikki scribbled next to it.
“I’m trying to discuss this memoir that is so important to you, and you’re collecting phone numbers?”
He tucked it inside his jacket. I couldn’t help wondering what would become of that number—and the woman it belonged to.
“All right, you want to get to the end of the book.”
The skin on my arms prickled.
There’s a monster.
I suddenly wondered if I might have done better to stay home. I needed sleep. Television. A movie. I needed to focus on something normal—nothing, in other words—like any other anesthetized human for once. But I knew I wouldn’t trade being here for sleep or time in front of a television I had not turned on for more than a month.
Lucian settled into his chair as though getting down to business and lifted his coffee cup. I gave him a quizzical look.
“First, a toast.”
“To what?” I was almost afraid to know.
“To you, Clay. They’re going to love your story,” he said. “You’ll have a contract within three months—not to mention a nice little advance.”
Something lurched inside me, scrabbling at his words like pennies on the ground. I wanted to believe him. How I wanted to believe him! “You said you’re not omniscient.” But I lifted my coffee cup. He clinked it, sloshing coffee over the edges of both our rims.
“I’m not. But as you know, I play the percentages. And I would bet money on it.”
I took a tentative sip, trying not to think about it, but it was too late; my heart had started a desperate little dance.
I had to admit I could use the money. Moving my books and sparse belongings to Cambridge and trying to replace the furniture I had given to Aubrey had not done wonders for my checkbook. I supposed I had Lucian to thank for providing me other matters to focus on than the minimalist décor of my apartment that Mrs. Russo had so generously called “Spartan.”
“Speaking of which, you should look into some of those last-minute vacation specials.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“Put it on you
r credit card. You deserve it. You can finish the story on the beach.”
I dropped my head, slid my hands over my hair. The beach. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a beach or taken a vacation.
“Meanwhile, if we have a book to write, we’d better get to it. Now then . . .” He scrubbed the back of his head.
“The Messiah was born,” I said slowly, not wanting to remember the look of that withered face again, contorted in that terrible smile.
“Of course,” he said, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together, “by the time of that horrible, eerie night, Lucifer had made tempting the faithful and bringing them before El like so many unruly children his life’s work. Not that it brought Lucifer much joy.”
“It’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?”
“He seemed less and less satisfied by it, his tolerance and appetite had grown so great. So what else was there for Lucifer—for us—to do except dwell on our less-favored status, to watch our own dwindling hope sinking deeper and deeper beneath the surface of a black bog, out of reach? Actually, the more we dared to hope for El’s renewed favor, the more we felt compelled to show these humans for the disappointments they were. And the more we carried out the commission of Lucifer—now Satan—the more out of favor we fell.”
“Talk about diminishing returns.”
“Exactly. And eventually, I suppose, the less we cared. By then the means had become an end in itself—a way of life, a purpose.
“This had already been the case with Satan for some time, but then he had always been a creature of mission, a dark visionary. And now his vision ignited a new and unholy fire in us as well. I found myself less melancholy and more wholly focused on a new trade: no more to glorify Creator Elohim—never that again—but to degrade and despoil all his favored people in ways unknown before. Now there was true pleasure. Don’t recoil like that.”
“I didn’t,” I lied.
“It’s not as though you’ve never wandered a step—and then ten more, each one easier than the last—down a path you had never thought yourself capable of taking. Did you ever once think you’d spend every night of almost four months drunk? That you’d wake up after a three-day binge to realize you were practically broke and still alone?”
