I couldn’t believe it. She had actually made a kind of sense out of something I was sure would prove a faltering point.
“Of course it makes sense.” She lifted her chin. “As surely as the old doctrine of sin handed down from the father to the sons has remained thematic throughout your time. Look around you. See the truth of it manifest today: the imperfection of your eyes, the weakness of your immune systems, the proclivity of some of you for disease and cancer, asthma and allergies, genetic disorders of all kinds.”
I did look around, my gaze settling on the large table of twelve in the center of the small restaurant. They must have been a family, I thought, feeling a slight pang of envy. And now I took tally: At least five of the people sitting at the table wore glasses. One of them, a young man in his twenties, was in a wheelchair. The oldest person at the table was a white-haired lady, her nape bent by a bump. She ate slowly, chewing her food with dogged purpose. I guessed she might be 85.
Eighty-five . . . versus 930. What had Adam looked like at 85?
“He was virile,” she said. “Quite the stallion.”
Now there was a thought that was going to fester.
“It isn’t just you, though. You haven’t had the nutrient wholeness of those first foods in ages. Look at what you pass off as food today. Frankly, I’m surprised you live twenty years on that stuff.” She gestured toward my pasta. “Add to it the fact that you’re missing the full health of the earth as it originally was, and you realize how far things have come. Do you think your ancients went around slathered with sunscreen? Do you think they had to infuse their soil with chemicals?”
I looked at the remainder of my pasta. Just earlier I had congratulated myself on actually eating a hot meal.
“And so the earth itself began to die a little, though like Adam it would survive a long while yet.”
She was looking sidelong at that table of twelve. What was it that had her attention? With an uneasy sense I wondered if I would see someone die tonight. Would that old woman with her white hair choke and fall over, expire as horrified family members performed the Heimlich, CPR? Please, I thought, not sure who I thought it to—maybe all this talk of God, of creation and sin was affecting me—please no. I needed to hear this, uninterrupted. I needed more. I needed to have this time.
Someone could die tonight, and I’m worried about getting my demonic fix.
“Meanwhile, all over the faltering planet, the clay humans raised up others just like them in a world plagued with aberrations and depravity, fostering a new culture of death,” she said, her eyes on the table.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” But her words called to mind the mummy room at the museum, her comment that all of it had come from those first, original two. And I had thought she had been referring to sophisticated Egyptian culture.
Her mouth curved, her attention solidly fixed on me again. “It does sound grim, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. At least from my point of view. We had learned, by then, to take delight in what we saw, in what we perceived as the prolonged failure of El. Because, you see, if he failed with his new creations, these new heirs, it only served to make us look a little better. CLAY, LOOK AT ME WHILE I’M TALKING TO YOU!”
My attention snapped from the family back to her.
“I’m not here for my own edification! I know this story, remember?” The soccer mom’s voice had raised in angry, demonic glory.
“I-I’m sorry—”
She jabbed her finger into the tablecloth. “Every time you fail, it proves something. Every time the humans failed, it made us feel better. We reveled in every instance of human ridiculousness,” she said with biting annunciation, her tone lower but intense, her lips pulled back from her teeth.
“I understand.” I wanted her to know I was listening.
“No, you don’t. El didn’t ignore the clay humans. He did not cut them off. Not at all. He took an interest in their daily affairs, though he no longer walked with them in the afternoon. And that is significant.” Her blue eyes had come to dark, frightening life.
“He made concessions. He persevered through their constant and abiding imperfections and wrongdoings with more patience than I thought existed in all the created universe. He taught them how to make appropriately bloody, laborious, and horrible sacrifices in symbolic atonement.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to leave it there. But I knew there was more. Knew I wanted to know it. “And?”
“And then he forgave them.”
She was staring so intently at me that I found myself averting my gaze as one does from oncoming headlights. When she said nothing more, I glanced up to find her still staring at me, as though the implication of her words were sinking in for her, all over again.
She was seething.
“Think about that.” She reached for her coat, then, with a quick glance toward the other end of the restaurant again, slid out of the booth. “We will have to do this faster.” She put the coat on. “Time is getting away from us.”
She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked out. In the middle of the restaurant, the table of twelve broke into a round of “Happy Birthday,” as the old woman blew out the candle on a piece of ricotta pie.
15
Time is getting away from us?
I committed the encounter to paper, spending the urgent recollection of every word in the act of writing it. When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table. They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper from the recycling bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces of mail—anything that had been near to hand.
I opened my laptop and started to type.
Around 1:00 a.m., as I transcribed the end of our dinner together—my dinner—I found I had missed a major point. I had thought there was something significant about the family at the table, that something about them first drew her interest and then piqued her. But that wasn’t it, the thing that precipitated the moment—that startling, stunning moment—that she snapped at me. It was the coming revelation in her own story. The thing she knew she must say.
“And then he forgave them.”
I had thought nothing about that statement at the time. Forgiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion.
Even for demons?
I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appointment, the words leaping at me as I came to them:
“Had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”
“Why couldn’t you? For that matter, why wouldn’t God?”
“I’ll tell you why: because we were damned!”
I scrolled forward.
“He forgave them.”
I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen.
LATE THAT NIGHT I received a response from Katrina, but the proposal she attached was not one I recognized. Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of Dreaming: A Memoir, by L. LeGeros.
It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic.
16
The demon chose two more plates and pushed them across the table toward me with a short, stocky arm.
“Please stop,” I told him as the woman with the dim sum cart stamped her red symbol on our tab and pushed on. I meant it not only because I was full but because the rapt interest with which he had watched me eat for the last half hour disturbed me. He had inundated me with sweet buns, pork buns, shrimp dumplings, and vegetable packets with tiny green peas perched on the twisted peak of their wrappers. They squatted now in orphaned ones and twos inside their bamboo steamers; I could not possibly accommodate them all.
“Very well.” He folded those arms before him. He had hung his jacket over the back of his chair but, seeing the way his dress shirt strained at the shoulders, I thought he ought to have left it on.
“About your proposal to Katrina . . .” I wasn’t sure how to go about what I meant to say next. I had feigned an e-mail problem, had as
ked her again to resend it, stating even more carefully that I needed the short one, the additional one she had given me as an afterthought the day she came to my office. But when she resent it, I found myself scrolling again through the scant pages of Dreaming: A Memoir by L. LeGeros.
“What proposal?” He seemed to wink, though his eyelid never moved.
So that was it. Another of his mind tricks. No one had seen the proposal for Demon: A Memoir but me. Katrina had no awareness of the story evolving into a living thing on my desk and hard drive, waiting for me to wake in the morning and come home at night, to feed it the nutriment of my preoccupation. An excitement tapped in my chest, a metronome in time with my heart.
“I see,” I said carefully. More, I thought, though it will risk his anger. “Then in that case, I need to know what happened after El forgave them. The humans, I mean.”
He sat up, fussing with the little teapot, over pouring a small trickle of chrysanthemum tea into his untouched cup. It seemed he could not dive headlong and cold into this topic, so I waited, considering his bushy eyebrows, the unremarkable face with the suggestion of jowls on either side of his thin-lipped mouth. I had thought him vain after our first few encounters, though of late he seemed to care less and less about the beauty of his guises.
“El’s acts of forgiveness became tedious in the way that something routine is tedious. Like a sound that grates on your patience so that where you had only disliked it before, you come to hate even the merest suggestion of it. Like a smell that has the ability to incite nausea. I didn’t know who I was more astounded with—El because he constantly forgave them, or the humans because they made constant and abiding mistakes again and again. With disgust and amazement we pushed ourselves to see how far we could go with them. We dared. And El sat back again in pain amid the chaos of all this teeming life, once so wonderful, multiplying over the great ball of earth and water. But he would not relinquish them. During that time I realized something had happened within me.”
“What do you mean?” I said, surrendering my chopsticks with an overfull sigh.
“Like nerves after they’ve been severed, I could no longer sense El as I had before, even after falling away. But in that same way that I knew myself—better, even—I knew El to be unchanging. For as little as I could perceive of him by then, I understood well his sentiments about all that was happening.”
“And Lucifer?”
“Oh, he had determined to rule over this great, floating ball of land—had, in fact, never given up his claim to it. Now, having snatched Adam’s birthright from him the moment he abdicated it, he threw wide the doors to this world as though to a mansion and invited the humans in, creating banquets of diversions designed just for them: new and bizarre religions, strange philosophies, indulgences for all appetites. He had by then set himself up as all the things he had ever wanted to be: a power, a ruler . . . a god. Gods. He answered to a variety of names, and the humans offered him sacrifices and performed great acts of murder and bloodletting for his sake. It was gory. And grand.”
“So he had what he wanted at last.”
“After a manner, I suppose. You must understand that he didn’t care about the offerings, the blood, or the lives. It was that people did it that delighted him. That with every little betrayal, the people moved farther away from El. Eventually, they forgot him. Those were wild, accelerated days—like a dancer, twirling faster and faster until she falls; like your dreams of falling off buildings, the wind shrieking in your ears. And I watched it all with a sense of inevitability.”
Sometimes when he was like this, when it seemed he was transported back, I wondered if his own memories were as vivid to him as they had been to me the time in the tea shop or that day in the Commons.
As vivid as my memories of Sarah Marshall’s death.
I had almost managed to go a whole day without thinking about it.
“But even the forbearance of El in his grief had limits. And the day came when he could abide it no longer. Of course, I expected him to slam down the heavy fist, but the day came and still he held off. Like a mother giving a child to the count of three, El gave the clay people 120 years to change their ways.”
He sat back and crossed short arms, his shirtsleeves encasing them like sausages. “I was put off! Had he ever been willing to play the suffering parent toward any one of us? Toward Lucifer, first and best-created of El, prince and anointed cherub? But El had not offered him so much as a glimmer of the patience he showed humans. Never so much for any of us.”
As he said this, the distant and disowned look seemed to creep first into one eye and then into the other, like a lizard slithering through his skull.
“Had I been human, I would have considered myself lucky.” He thumped his chest. He was pudgy enough that it didn’t make much of a sound. “But they were oblivious to the indulgence they had been given. They went about their ways as pleased them best. And the years went by.”
“All 120 of them.”
“All 120 of them,” he agreed. “In the end Lucifer crowed his triumph. He had brought about the destruction of El’s world and the spoiling of his clay creatures like so much fruit left on the ground. Now El would be forced to acknowledge him; there would be no more of the clay people to talk with, commune with—and who would want to by now, anyway? Unworthy, fickle, unfaithful. . . . The humans were a failure. It was time to destroy them.”
I shuddered at the slight jeer with which he said this.
“Only you Westerners fancy what happened next as the stuff of myth. Most ancient cultures have taught it as history: water covering the land, swallowing up creation as it had Lucifer’s rock garden an age before.”
Indeed, I was having trouble reconciling the picture-book accounts of animals two-by-two with this story of failed humans, gleeful devils, and a forbearing God. “So Eden was destroyed again.”
Lucian’s brows drew together. “But it didn’t exactly happen as I thought it would—as it had before. The deep didn’t swallow up the land, and El didn’t hover over the deep. Nor did he put out the sun or destroy my beloved moon. I didn’t have the experience to know then what I know now: that El is unlikely to do anything twice or predictably. That he spared an entire family was unpredictable indeed.” He lifted his cuff to glance at the elegantly thin timepiece on his wrist.
“Noah’s family,” I said, feeling as though I vied with time itself for his attention.
He dropped his arm back to the table. “I was indignant! Why bother? What was the point? For those forty short days that Noah’s little boat bobbed about on the flooded earth like a piece of cork on a lake, I agonized over it. And when the rain was over and the water subsided and the people crawled out of the boat and made yet another sacrifice, I realized something: Here was El’s weakness, if ever he had one. He loved these creatures, these people made of mud. They had failed and he had grieved. He had punished them and they had died, but he couldn’t bear to obliterate them all.”
Ice crystallized in his eyes, like the frozen surface of a pond under too much weight—or the shattered windshield of a car on Arlington.
Just then the cart lady appeared again, pushing a large wooden vat. She waved a flat golden spoon as though it were a fan. “Hot almond pudding?” she asked, smiling at Lucian.
“THINGS OBVIOUSLY DIDN’T END there,” he said, nudging the plate of gelatinous custard closer to me. It was surrounded by a moat of syrup, and I accepted it without any intention to eat it. He was amicable again, as congenial as a round-faced elf. I found the increasing capriciousness of his moods more and more unsettling, as though indeed I walked on a thin layer of ice over a coursing black current.
“On the contrary, the Flood marked a new beginning. And when it was over and the family had survived, El did something he had never done before: He made a promise—not to us but to the clay people. He promised never to destroy the earth with water again. And he gave them a sign, like a token given to a favorite friend.
“Now l
et me say that not one of us has ever received such a token. What’s more, it was the first promise of many. In subsequent generations he blessed them again, named a branch of them Israel, and made them his special nation.”
Now he lifted his empty hands. “Promises . . . tokens . . . blessings. Who was God to be accountable to men? Who was man, to procure a promise from God? And then he gave them laws, specific rules for living, since they seemed to need things spelled out for them. He taught them intricate rites of atonement and for communing with an all-perfect God so that despite their wrongs, their tainted lineage, he could stand to be near them.
“But it wasn’t just that he tolerated them. They had done the irreparable in separating themselves from him forever, and it was as if he couldn’t bear to be apart from them.”
Though he maintained the same even tone as he said this, it was too controlled, so that rather than seeming genuine, the effect was one of moderated effort.
“Do you hate humans?” The instant I said it, something dark slithered into his gaze with the silent stealth of a reptile entering the murk of a swamp.
“Compared to Lucifer’s, my hate is nothing. His odium, his grudge against El grew—grows—by the day.” He checked his watch.
No, not yet.