Demon

by Tosca Lee

  “No, no. I’m just worn out.”

  Katrina Dunn Lampe? Worn out? I was speechless. “You sound so different.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going through treatment for a small tumor.”

  I hesitated, having never considered that Katrina might be subject to the same whims of nature as other mortals. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. Why do bad things happen to good people?

  There are no good people.

  “I’m glad you called. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’ve cut back to just a few days here and there.” A dog barked in the background. After someone shushed it, she added, “I’m considering leaving the business, actually.”

  I stared, unsure what to say, what to ask. This was the most I’d ever known about her beyond the artifice of name-brand purses and manicured nails. And there was something remarkably attractive about the moment, and about her in it, despite the circumstances. Something remarkably human.

  We talked for the better part of a half hour. I listened as she said she had gone to Connecticut for a few months to stay with her sister during treatment, that she had taken some time off to heal, to reevaluate.

  “You’ll think it’s wild, Clay, but this experience has really made me think about things like spirituality.”

  She was the last person from whom I ever expected to hear anything of this sort.

  Of course, anyone might have said the same of me.

  I almost said something. I almost told her. But instead I said, lamely, “That’s really great, Katrina.”

  “My friends call me Kat.”

  “Kat. That’s really great.”

  I left the conversation without mentioning my manuscript, but saying I would call her again next week.

  THAT NIGHT, AS I drafted letters of application to a few local publishers, I glanced toward the window. Was he there? Was anyone? For all I knew, with Mrs. Russo gone, Lucian himself might show up at my door at any time.

  But my calendar remained staunchly empty, as bright and impersonal as the face of the moon.

  31

  I went out for coffee every morning. And every morning I looked for the figure on the corner. For people loitering in pairs. For humans with fine watches and glittering intellect in their eyes. Three days after the morning I stood in front of the Gospel Room, I swore I saw a blonde soccer mom walk around the corner of the local Starbucks. Remembering Lucian the day at Vittorio’s, I hurried to get a glimpse of her, but she disappeared a block ahead of me as I tried to catch up to her.

  Two days later I thought I saw the black man who had met me in church the day we saw the Halloween masks. But I lost him when he crossed the street just before an onslaught of cars.

  A week and a half had passed since the day Mrs. Russo left to stay with her grandkids. She didn’t call, and though I might have been able to look them up in Long Island, I took it to mean that she was busy and so left her alone. Meanwhile, I continued to water her plants and collect her mail. I had eaten all of her perishables and regularly went to the co-op for soup and the daily special. My life, my mind, might be falling apart, but I was determined to get my body back together. I rescheduled my appointment with my doctor, the dizziness continuing to plague me despite my improved habits.

  Though I recovered some semblance of routine, I knew other vestiges of my former life had left me forever. Every expensive car that passed me on the street, every new display in the window of Bowl and Board summoned to mind a pile of debris. I found I craved none of these things, all of them equally unpalatable to me.

  I spoke with Katrina a second time, just briefly. She was ill that day, and we had had to keep it short. I told her I had something to show her when she felt up to it, though I knew she had plenty of clients she was already unable to give her time to. She was gracious enough to say she would discuss it with me later.

  Thinking of her health, I felt like a clod. But I needed to sell the book if I could—not for the hope of interviews in the Bristol Lounge, or for the Paris Review, but because I had received my last paycheck from Brooks and Hanover and had yet to hear back on any of my application letters.

  Meanwhile, I continued to stare at the blinking cursor at the end of the story that had once been Lucian’s but was now solely mine.

  RETURNING FROM MY MORNING coffee run four days later, I thought I saw the punk kid from the Commons coming out of a shop. He was half a block down from where I was crossing the street when I saw him. But as with the soccer mom and the black man—and the taxi driver I thought I’d seen just yesterday dropping a passenger at a corner before speeding off, deaf to my hailing—he never turned when I shouted. And I wondered if I was not really the author of Dreaming: A Memoir, having hallucinated this entire series of encounters.

  Still, I looked every day for that cast of guises, for the figure sauntering onto Inman, or leaning against the post of the house across the street.

  That day I arrived back at my apartment to find Mrs. Russo’s door standing open. For the first time in longer than I could remember, my heart lifted with a jittery start induced by hope rather than fear.

  “Mrs. Russo?” I stepped inside. Sounds issued from farther in, shuffling, the crinkling of something being rolled in paper. “Mrs. Russo?”

  Her daughter, Jeanette, who often came to visit with her children, came out of the bedroom. Her face was haggard, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed.

  I halted.

  “Clay.” Jeanette offered a slight smile, and then her mouth crumpled. She lifted her hand to her eyes, and then pushed her hair back from them.

  I stared at her. I could hear someone working in the bedroom and assumed it was her husband, Kevin. My heart took on a ragged rhythm.

  “Mom had a stroke.” It came out in a tight squeak. Behind her Kevin emerged from the bedroom.

  “No. No.” I was unsure if I said it for her or for myself or out of some strange guilt that I felt settling like a load of boulders upon me. Kevin laid an arm around his wife’s shoulders and reached out with his other to clasp my cold hand in greeting.

  “But she went to New York.” I gave Kevin’s hand an absent shake. None of this made sense.

  “They took her to the hospital, but she never regained consciousness,” Kevin said.

  “What does that mean? What happened?” My hands began to shake. Had I contributed to this in some way? Had I brought undue attention to her by the simple fact of hiding in her prayerful shadow, albeit unwittingly, all these months?

  Jeanette laid her hand along my arm, as if she was the one comforting me. “It means God called her,” she said with a tiny smile.

  “Why?” I felt like a child.

  Her smile, just then, was too much like her mother’s, with that hint of serenity amid obvious pain. “Would you want Mom far from you?”

  But I need her here! I wanted to shout. The apartment was collapsing around me, the plants, my new computer, the stairs, into a heap of rubble, of meaninglessness.

  Jeanette squeezed my shoulder. “Mom sure loved you, Clay. On her last visit she brought your name up in church, asking for prayer for you. You were on her heart.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She eventually turned away, her hand over her face.

  I fell back a step, unable to take it all in. Unable to believe Mrs. Russo would not be back, could not go with me to the tiny Gospel Room, tell me the things I needed to know.

  “I have her plants,” I said faintly, stupidly.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with all her things. Rob, my brother, is still recovering from his accident. If you wouldn’t mind keeping them—”

  “No, no, I don’t mind.” I looked around her apartment. She had packed her carry-on bag there on the table, had given me her perishables standing here in the kitchen, had told me to water the plants until water came out the bottom.

  “I’m sorry. If I can do anything to help . . .” I don’t know if I said it more for them or for me.

  INSIDE MY APARTMENT, I reele
d, grabbed at the back of a dining room chair, the table, the wall. I rushed to my desk. I grabbed the top of that stack of mismatched manuscript pages now numbering in the hundreds and, with a long, full motion, ripped them apart. I dropped the fraying halves, caught some of them as they fell from my hands, and tore them in half again. I grabbed another stack and ripped them, too, catching at the pieces, tearing them and then tearing them again.

  “You wanted your memoirs published. I did everything I could, I sacrificed everything! Killer! Murderer!” It occurred to me that anyone hearing me—Jeanette and Kevin, most likely—might think I was crazed. Good. I was.

  I grabbed another stack of pages, but before I could rip them into pieces, palsy stilled my arms. The words jumped off the page at me, the forest of Is, and then the question on the very page in my hand: “What does this have to do with me?”

  I fell onto the floor against the desk and sobbed, torn half pages and quarter pages slipping over the edge and falling around me like ashes drifting from the sky after a fire. I covered my eyes, great heaves shaking my shoulders. If there was a God, I cried out to him, thinking that only he could understand my keen over the deep that had once been my world.

  I STAYED LIKE THAT for a long time. Even once my weeping subsided, I was too exhausted to rub at eyes that had nearly swollen shut.

  I had been unable to escape Lucian before. I could not escape him now, even when he had abandoned me. This was purgatory.

  No, this was hell.

  32

  The apartment building I had once considered homey seemed, overnight, dormlike and shoddy. The industrial carpet on the landings was cold and dirty, the mailboxes impersonal despite the nameplates stamped out on a label-maker.

  I forgot my morning coffee. I stared at Mrs. Russo’s door, now devoid of coffee cake and chocolate-chip cookie smells, of inspirational music and the sound of visitors. I thought of finding the old e-mail, of risking another message to Light1, of calling him out despite the consequences. Of posting a message on a blog site: “Demon encounter? Ever talked to one? Was his name Lucian?”

  But I did none of these things. I decided that when I saw the doctor in three days I would ask for a psychiatric referral, even if I suspected that I was psychologically sound.

  I would also ask for an antianxiety prescription.

  My sleep was harassed by a cast of human faces, each of them jeering in turn, by masks with black rubber horns, the eyes of which were no longer vacant but fixed solidly on me, by watches with faces inside faces in an infinity of time like an image eternally reflected by two mirrors, by the ticking of the second hands, loud as bells tolling in my ear.

  WHEN I AWOKE, THE the bells, ringing like those from the steeple on Park Street, had passed. I had been in bed nearly three days. I made my way to my desk, turned on the computer.

  I stared at the file of my manuscript, my unfinished story. The memoir into which I had funneled every bit of my energy, my life.

  I selected it.

  Just before I hit the command to delete it, a notice appeared in the corner of my screen.

  5:00 p.m.

  L.

  THAT AFTERNOON I PLACED a call to a number I had not expected to dial—not today, perhaps not any day ever.

  The voice on the other end was surprised but not hostile. “This is so unexpected.”

  “I just called to see how you are.”

  “I’m fine. I’m very fine. I’m surprised to hear from you. Is everything all right? Are you all right? You sound tired.”

  “So do you.”

  “I suppose that’s the truth. Are you still seeing that woman we met at the museum?”

  I hesitated. “No. Not really.”

  “You know you’re allowed to, Clay. You deserve that. To be happy.” Her statement reminded me too well of Lucian’s words in the sandwich shop.

  Everyone thinks they deserve happiness.

  “I was wondering: Have you talked to Sheila?”

  “Only once since she moved home. She’s withdrawn. Rather the way you did, I suppose.”

  “She called me before she left. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sensitive. Actually, I was rude.”

  “She told me. She thought you’d be able to help her. More than I could.” She gave a slight, mirthless sound that wasn’t really a laugh.

  “Why would she think I could help her?” I thought of the day in my office, the call to my hotel in Cabo San Lucas.

  “Didn’t she tell you why they’re separated?”

  “Not—no. Not in so many words.”

  “Dan left her, Clay.”

  I stared off toward the bedroom without seeing it or anything but the look of Sheila in my office that day, asking if I would speak to him, wringing her hands and looking like a bird about to pull her own feathers out. I felt ill.

  “Yes, but—”

  “She came by the house several evenings, worried that he might be seeing someone. I wasn’t the best friend to her, Clay. I was too ashamed to tell her that everything she said made sense. And he was, too—he was seeing someone from work. One of the women in the office e-mailed her and asked to talk to her. She told her everything.”

  The night she returned my text message from a friend’s house. The “have to see you” e-mail on her computer. Lucian had alluded to her affair without saying it, and once I believed it, he had not dissuaded me.

  Fiend! I felt worse than horrible. I felt responsible. “I need to call her, Aubrey. Can you give me her number?”

  I took it down, not sure when I would call or what I would say.

  “Aubrey?” I said, at the end of the call. “What was it that was never enough for you? Was it money? What I did for a living?”

  “Don’t.” I heard a tremor in her voice. “Don’t do that. You did everything right.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “Yes, you did. You’re a good man.”

  I hated those words. I hated hearing them. Being a good man had won me nothing. Lucian’s words echoed somewhere between my brain and the phone line.

  I ask you, what is good, really, Clay?

  And I knew the answer: not good enough.

  But I thanked her anyway, knowing she meant well, and asked her again if she was well.

  “I am. I’m pregnant.”

  And with those words, I felt her fall irrevocably away from me. All the hope I had harbored, but had been afraid to admit even to myself, slipped away like coins through a grate.

  “That’s wonderful, Aubrey. That’s really something.” My voice was hollow. I wished her well again and we hung up.

  It seemed so unfair. She would have the house, the children, the life I had wanted with her. She would never endure what I had, would never know what those months had been for me.

  It was unfair, but it had tethered me too long. And despite our reasons and expectations—realistic or not—I had surely let her down as much as she had betrayed and abandoned me. I was a good man, but I was no better than she.

  I forgave her.

  I HAD NOT BEEN to Esad’s since that first night. The strap of bells against the glass sounded sharp and metallic, too loud. The smell of the grill, the chicken and burgers and gyros, flooded my nostrils and I was there again, that night in October.

  But tonight I was a different man.

  The Mediterranean stranger was there, sitting at the same table. This time I did not wait for him to summon me but walked directly to his table and sat down.

  “You let me believe lies.”

  His hair curled over his forehead as it had before, though this time I did not find his looks enviable. His wool trousers did not summon to mind cognac, yachts, or Cohíbas.

  His watch, stainless, heavy, and surely expensive, did not interest me.

  He studied me, his eyes darting across my face as though he were reading a book. He smiled slightly. “But I never lied.” He picked at his slacks, at the cuff of his cashmere sweater. It reminded me of Richard, struck me as fastidious a
nd affected.

  “And Mrs. Russo?”

  “What business is it to you?”

  He was right. I supposed that was between her and her God. I did not expect to get a straight answer from Lucian now, anyway. Besides, asking would not return her to me, grant me retribution, or help me now.

  The demon looked away, deflecting my gaze.

  “The story isn’t finished,” I said.

  “Ah, the story,” he said coldly. He tapped his chin in a mockery of thinking and sat back, regarding me over his slightly hooked nose. “How about this. I had a dream—if demons truly dream—the other night. I dreamed I stood before a great mirror—one that distorted all the things I once thought beautiful, recasting them in ghoulish images, casting me into an ugly mold I have known only in my own mind. And it threw Lucifer into such grotesque state that I barely recognized him except by his eyes and that presence I know to be his. And when I shook free of it, my strange waking dream, it occurred to me that I was not looking at a mirror at all but into the reflection of all things as they are, for all things must be seen in their true light when held up to the mirror of Truth.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” My anger, my grief, my outrage bubbled up all at once.

  His mouth formed a tight line. “I saw Lucifer the other day. Still brilliant, my Prince. Still beautiful. Perhaps not quite as stunning as before—it may be that the millennia are finally working their wear upon him, as the shining cloth wears at last upon the finish of an antique, as even kisses wear down the gold leaf of an icon. But he’s lovely yet.” His eyes shone with terrible light. “It’s almost more than I can stand, remembering him in the long idyll of first Eden, before, though I have long since come to terms with all that has happened since. To look upon him now is still amazing, though he is not—will never again be—the perfect creature he once was. But then, none of us are what we were. Even you, Clay.” He looked at me, clearly expectant.