Demon

by Tosca Lee

  It was none of these.

  From: Light1

  Sent: 12:18 a.m.

  To: BandHClay@brooksandhanover.com

  Subject: More

  I have to tell you one other significant thing that happened.

  In the Jewish temple, El’s spirit resided in the Holy of Holies. Do an Internet search if you don’t know what I mean. All you really need to know is that it was the most sacred place on earth. Only the high priest could enter it and then only once a year and bearing the blood of atonement—one of El’s many concessions to the clay people. The curtain concealing the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple was heavy, requiring more than a hundred men to move it. There was no mistaken entry, and the symbolism was blatant: There had been no open communion with El since those days in the garden.

  This is what you need to know: As the God-man, hanging on the cross like a common criminal, died, the curtain ripped. Access to God, so long denied to any but the appointed, was now laid open to anyone, the blood of atonement having been paid in full according to the old law. The heavy partition that had separated the spirit of El from the fallen soul of man was broken forever.

  I hate you.

  I stared at that last line for a long time.

  23

  On board flight 865 to Cabo San Lucas, I closed my eyes. I had worked straight through Christmas, marking the season with a roast-beef sandwich—homemade, no less—and a call to my niece, Susanna, during which she thanked me for the Chronicles of Narnia set that I had ordered and sent straight from Amazon. Afterward, I talked to my sister for a few rare minutes.

  Despite my productivity in those quiet days alone on the second floor of my building—Mrs. Russo had gone to her daughter’s house in Haverhill—I wasn’t going on this so-called vacation without my laptop and the handwritten transcriptions of every meeting since that first night. I would have felt less compelled to carry so much with me—I brought along two manuscripts as well—had the majority of my work over the holiday been for my actual job. But I had been preoccupied with the memoir on my laptop hard drive, currently seventy-eight thousand words and growing.

  I looked out the window from seat 21A onto a heavenly floor of clouds worthy of a fabric softener commercial, disappointed that I could not see the earth. On my trip to China in college, I had lifted my window shade midflight. And there, as the rest of the dimly lit plane slept, watched a movie, or worked by seat lights, I gazed down onto what I calculated to be Siberia. Chalky rivers snaked through stunted mountains like veins in marble, pasty snow-spackled crevices in the landscape like filling in the pores of travertine. I must have stared for half an hour at that fawn gray and virgin desolation, my breath fogging the glass as I wondered if, like Isak Dinesen, I was seeing “a glimpse of the world through God’s eye.” Did I look down on any spot of land previously untouched by any eye but God’s?

  It was the closest I had ever come to a religious experience, and though I had requested window seats and looked down on the earth from cruising altitude on nearly every flight since, I never saw anything like it again.

  The man next to me—a short Asian with black, feathery brows and a hairline that had receded to the crown—leaned across the armrest between us to peer out as well.

  “‘And I thought, yes, I see, this is the way it was intended,’” he said, quoting Dinesen.

  We were bound by the story, needing one another in our own ways, but in that moment I realized I hated him, too. Again I wondered what would happen when we both got what we wanted from this arrangement and what would become of us, of this contemptuous codependency.

  The demon removed his shoes and tucked them beneath the seat in front of him. He was wearing GoldToe socks.

  “What made you leave the co-op? What’s been distracting you?” I asked without preamble.

  He tilted his seat back and stretched his short legs. “I told you there were those who would not look well upon our time together.”

  I remembered. I also recalled that he had sidestepped the question, saying it did not serve his purpose.

  “Who? The Host?”

  He sucked at his teeth. His smooth skin belied his age, the few age spots on his face the only clue that he was, I guessed, close to sixty years old. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “Did you see them?”

  “Let it be, Clay. You don’t know what you’re delving into.”

  “What does this have to do with Mrs. Russo?”

  His expression sharpened into a glower. “Stay away from her.”

  “Why?”

  “If you don’t want to jeopardize the time we have left, do as I say.”

  I thought of the two men in the mall, the ladies at the bar in the Bristol Lounge. “What was it at Vittorio’s?” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “You wouldn’t have.”

  “But—”

  “We don’t have time for me to explain this to you. I’ve answered your questions. With the committee meeting in your absence, I would think you’d be more focused on getting to the end of your book.”

  There’s a monster.

  I tilted my head back against the headrest, but it seemed to curve the wrong way and only succeeded in making me more uncomfortable. “They killed him,” I said, but I was scouring our last meeting for oddities, recalculating the time of his nervous departure and Mrs. Russo’s appearance in her camel coat. Mrs. Russo, who went faithfully to church and sometimes hosted a Bible group in her apartment.

  Spiritual static, he called it.

  “They wondered at his rising from the dead, but that didn’t amaze me. I knew better than any mortal who this God-man was. Of course his power extended over death as well.”

  This brought my attention back to him. “You’re saying he really rose from the dead.”

  “Yes, really. By then I knew for gospel fact, if you’ll pardon the expression, that it would happen. Everything was coming to horrible fruition. I also knew El would call back that part of him to himself, and this God-man would ascend to heaven. Later, it struck me as ironic that he had achieved with ease the thing Lucifer attempted so long before—ascension to heaven and a seat at the right hand of the Almighty. Lucifer took it as a blow, but the reality was harsher than that: Lucifer’s star had been eclipsed by a new Son.

  “The followers of Jesus scattered to spread the news about what had happened. And people began to believe with an insight that incensed and amazed me. It was one thing for us to know that this Jewish carpenter had been more than a religious fanatic, but it was an altogether different thing for the clay humans to believe it.”

  “What did it matter to you?”

  He sighed, and the Shadow Creek logo on his polo stretched and slumped back into a wrinkle. “Ordinary men, hitherto blind, began to see this redemptive blood for what it was and this man, this Messiah, for what he was. And they saw it because El gave them yet another thing: guiding discernment, the gift of his own Spirit, given first to the God-man before the spilling of his messianic blood and freely offered afterward. To anyone. It was awful. Gone were the days of Israel’s elite, the heyday of the Jew. Anyone could have this ‘Holy Spirit’ freely for the asking.” He dropped his head back, reached up to adjust the airflow.

  “I’ll never forget the first human I watched receive it, this gift. Before my very eyes, he changed from a shattered thing of darkness, like a mirror reflecting nothing but shadows no matter which way its fractured surface turned, into something whole, reflecting El’s radiance, so that I had to—could not help but—turn away. When I recovered, I saw that it was true; my eyes had not played me false. On the outside he was still flawed. But the soul inside had come alive, as though all defects had been erased. There was only that loveliness, that light, shining in him.”

  “But he was still human.”

  “Yes, but here was the difference: El drew close to those people who called to him as he had with Adam in the garden. Not only did he walk with them, he began to change them. And
in them I saw more than the uncanny resemblance to that first man and woman. I saw something beyond what they were originally meant to be: ‘Children,’ he called them.”

  “Children of God,” I said, with some wonder.

  “I hated them! Never had I dared to aspire so high. Never had I imagined any such thing. Hades, I’m so tired of saying that I’d never fathomed this or that. But I hadn’t. It surpassed any angel’s dream, any human’s deserving. How I craved it, jealous of your inheritance. Like Cain to your Abel, wanting you to die.”

  His last words jarred me, and I remembered the final line of his e-mail.

  “For the first time, I saw the ill effects of the ages upon Lucifer, his waning brilliance, the wearing of the years taking its toll upon him like the first wrinkles of your human age. The moment I saw that, I wanted to hate him, too. Disdain and rage came naturally to me by then, and this time they came with such force I thought I would kill him had I only the power to do it.”

  “You used to adore him.” Echoes of our first conversations washed over me like waves on a tranquil shore. “Oh, my Beautiful One!”

  Lucian’s laugh was hard. Gone was the slight mania, the high-pitched sound. “What reward had I gained in following him? What prize but the forfeiture of my soul? But even my hatred could not save me from misery. Every moment I looked upon these followers, these renewed people, these believers—and their numbers were growing—the more wretched I became. But as much as I wanted to kill Lucifer that day, I also wanted to rip from every one of those believers the brilliant vestige of their new souls, knowing El had no such designs for us. For me.”

  I searched for something to say as a beverage cart stopped in the aisle. Over the top of Lucian’s head, a flight attendant smiled and asked if she could get us something to drink.

  HE WAS SILENT AFTER that, not looking at me. I gazed out the window, sipping tomato juice and wishing it were a Bloody Mary, his words still reverberating between us.

  “El had no such designs for us. For me.”

  Shortly before we landed, he unbuckled his seat belt and got up, ostensibly to go to the lavatory, but he never came back. As the plane taxied to the terminal, I noted his shoes, still under the seat in front of us.

  24

  I lay on the beach beneath an umbrella, the skin of my chest and back too pink to withstand the sun. That had happened the first day despite 45 SPF lotion. Between the sunburn and the swelling in my legs from the flights, I bore a stunning resemblance to a hotdog. But none of this mattered; I was glad to be out of Boston, to feel the air on my arms and chest, to sit with my laptop at the breakfast buffet and read—even with pen in hand—by the side of the pool. I could get used to wearing swim trunks every day, eschewing underwear, ambling over to the grill for a burger whenever the mood struck, and watching the bikini-clad scenery.

  I passed on the Coronas and Dos Equis, which was no hardship, never having been a beer drinker, but a shot of tequila had never sounded so good.

  I didn’t need it. I had run up my credit card getting here, but it was worth every all-inclusive penny. The only thing missing was Lucian. It was almost as though he had truly disappeared on the plane that day, leaving only his shoes behind. I tried not to think about it; doing so sent my heart into strange stutters even when I was at rest. Obviously, I needed this reprieve. And I deserve it, I thought, as I gazed out over the pale turquoise water. Out toward the Cabo San Lucas arch where the Sea of Cortez met the mighty Pacific, wave runners scored the surface with raised white welts, and the sun dappled the water with platinum as they receded.

  I want to show you something. Do you know what they look like, these believers?

  I saw the daubing brushstrokes of the sun on the ocean—except that it was no longer an ocean. The water was running too swiftly, and I could see the bottom. It was a brook, a creek, and the stones of the bed shone beneath it. They were iridescent, glittering through water that ran clear in the middle but muddy in the eddies. A clump of dirt broke off from the side of the stream, and the water clouded, but several of the shining pebbles glinted through the mud and debris.

  A child ran pell-mell toward the water, chased by his mother. The sound jolted me, and I realized I had drifted into reverie.

  Sometime later I looked out at the water and thought of Lucian walking along the beach by the light of the moon. As I considered the water, the bright blue of the ocean, a cloud passed before the sun, dimming it. I could not see from beneath my umbrella that it was a thunderhead.

  THAT EVENING, RAIN PELTED the balcony of room 408. A rare storm, they called it. So unusual this time of year, the hotel workers said. But nothing seemed usual or unusual to me anymore, the words having become meaningless to me.

  I was, however, troubled by Lucian’s near silence. I expected him to show up by the minute—every day, tonight even—to ramble at length into my internal tape recorder. I expected, alone at night, to purge myself of every word here, at this desk, before weaving them into the fabric of my manuscript like a bright thread. But despite his constant assertions that our time was short—was growing shorter, even—he never showed.

  During the daylight, with burgers by the pool and smooth bodies lounging on chairs to distract me with thoughts comfortingly base, I could manage not to think about it too much. But by my fourth day I saw through the beautiful drinks on poolside trays to the cheap, plastic glasses and recognized the second-rate nature of the evening entertainment on the stage beside the outdoor bar as I ate my dinner from a scratched Fiestaware plate. I became aware of the fraying hems of the flamenco dancers’ costumes, the gauche makeup of the girls. And I began to notice the plaster peeling from the edge of the stage itself, the painted gold scrollwork chipped where careless workers had run into it, the cracking Mexican tile beneath the staircases.

  I could not help but think of the home in Belmont, once so grand, reduced to a pile of rubble.

  One night as I ate my dinner outside, I observed a man and a woman sitting at a table off to the side of the stage. They appeared neither raucously drunk nor so old that they applauded the dancers in the way that grandparents did at dance recitals.

  In fact, there were no drinks on the table in front of them at all. And though the man—I judged him to be in his thirties—looked perfectly at ease in his Billabong T-shirt and cargo shorts, and the woman was elegant in her beaded halter, they reminded me of the men at the mall, of the two women at the bar in the Four Seasons Hotel, so that I finished my dinner in a rush, wondering if I only imagined the weight of their gazes upon my back as I strode across the pool area toward my room.

  The next night my room seemed too dark, the light of the lamps insufficient and sallow against the moonless night, the black of the ocean seeming to encroach upon the beach. I was edgy, irritated, checking the clock, the calendar on my laptop.

  The wind shifted, and water pelted the casing of the sliding glass door. I got up to close it, and as I did, the phone rang. The sound, so electric, so mechanical against the backdrop of rain, of the waves I was able to hear from my bed at night, startled me. I had not heard the ringing of a phone in four days.

  I frowned. The tour desk had tried relentlessly to sell me any number of day excursions, all of which I had declined—could they have taken to phoning my room? But it was well past ten o’clock, the time when most hotel guests were out dancing, drinking, or in town at the Cabo Wabo Cantina hoping for an appearance by Sammy Hagar.

  When I answered, the voice on the other end of the phone was thick and so emotive that I barely made out the sound of my own name.

  “Hello?”

  “Clay? How did you do it?”

  “Sheila?” I said, confused. I had left the number of my resort with her in case anything came up at work—or if the committee felt compelled to rush me any good news that couldn’t wait until I returned. In fact, Sheila was the only one with my hotel number, as Mrs. Russo had not yet returned from Haverhill.

  I thought again of Lucian’s wa
rning to keep away from Mrs. Russo.

  “How—how did you do it? How do you get by?” Her voice caught repeatedly as she spoke, making her sound like a child that had cried too hard to talk except in hiccupping gulps.

  “Sheila, what’s going on?” My alarm mingled with impatience. I was in Cabo. I had come here from the opposite coast on two long flights in a carefully researched package deal to get away from the office, from my single life in Boston, and from the winter.

  I had come here to write.

  “How did you do it?” she choked between staggering breaths.

  “Do what, Sheila?”

  “Get by. After Aubrey left.” The last word was a sob.

  “What do you mean, how did I do it? Sheila, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know how to do it.”

  My impatience sparked annoyance. The last thing I felt like dealing with was Sheila’s self-inflicted turmoil. “I just did, Sheila.”

  “He just doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.” Her voice squeaked up an octave.

  I’d never heard Sheila like this before—Sheila with her empathetic ear, who had never demanded much, if anything, of Dan, who turned the warm light of her love so readily on her family and children and friends.

  “He doesn’t know what? What’s happened?”

  “He’s left. He left.”