Demon

“You were promised more?”

He’d been right that first night in the cafe: I hadn’t forgotten a phrase, a detail. While I’d never had an eidetic memory, his words came back to me with such repetitive insistence that the only way I could exorcise them from my consciousness was to write them down. Even now his last words on the street echoed in my mind and, I suspected, would continue to do so until I was at my desk.

He ignored me, and I thought about prompting him again, but just then he did something so subtle as to wring at reason: He pursed his lips, the chapped skin creasing reluctantly, dry as a newly fallen leaf. And I marveled at the mundane aspects of his humanity, against which I must remember the truth of what he was: Demon. All around me life hummed along like a machine, oblivious to any sound but its own, as unaware of the interloper among its cogs and wheels as the diners in the cafe had been that first night, deafened by the drone of the everyday.

“With the clock on the wall over there ticking so loudly,” he said, “I’ve just realized I can’t tell you how long it went on like that—my life before. Isn’t that funny? I just can’t say. You can point to the calendar and say you were born on such-and-such a date and married for five years. But as for me, I could not begin to guess. Eons must have passed. Millennia. Ages. Or maybe it was really only a moment. I don’t know. When one pre-exists time, an epoch can pass like a day, and who would know it? It’s so cliche, a trite line from novels about lovers: ‘Time had no meaning.’ But that’s how we were: enrapt, enthralled with our very situation, with every aspect of our circumstances, our whole purpose for being. It was the golden age of ages—of which every age since has been only the palest shadow.”

He took the tea ball from the saucer, squeezed the hinges together just enough to crack the sphere open but not enough to let the mass of sodden leaves fall out. “It all ended with a glance.”

“What do you mean, ‘a glance’?”

“How does anything new begin? How does an extramarital affair begin?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He looked up at me. “Then I’ll tell you. With a glance. A thought. And the possibility of that thought acted upon. Even your Narcissus of legend, who might most resemble my master in this account, started his own infatuation with a glance into a pool where he found . . . himself.”

He dropped the tea ball into his cup. He was silent for a moment, stirring the tea that had gone, so far, unsampled. “Clay, I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you a secret. One I hardly dare whisper. When you write down this conversation and append it to the others, this is the page I would condemn to molder first were it not so central to everything.”

I had a sudden vision of a demonic Pied Piper luring me not with music but with words and story to some unknown end.

“I was swept up in the ecstasy of worship, of praising Elohim for all that he was and had been and was yet to be. And I had lifted my arm to shield my eyes—the Shekinah glory is too great even for us. And I had wept with it, with the fervency of it, until my tears nearly choked me. My awareness of God was, in that moment, so great that I was overwhelmed. It was always that way.” He didn’t so much look at me as through me. “But this time, as I lowered my arm, the tears hung like prisms in my eyes, like crystals held up to the brilliance of the sun. And I gaped at the beauty of the garden, at the refracted beauty of my own kind filling it. Suddenly, one thing stood out to me as more brilliant than all the rest of that dazzling host, blinding me through the lens of my tears so that I wiped them from my eyes like scales.”

“Lucifer,” I whispered.

“Yes. Our prince and governor come down to walk among us like so much wheat in an open field. I was dazzled! So help me, I stared and thought myself blinded. Can you fathom it? Can you possibly understand? His head was more brilliant than your sun. His wings, like a metal so pure that your quicksilver is a pathetic comparison, glimmered like so much pave jewelry, crystals set so closely together as to appear like one winking eye of a diamond. Even his hands and feet were as perfect as unclouded ice, smooth as alabaster. But it was the power, the power and the glamour that overwhelmed me. I knew then, in a way I had not known before, that I stood in the presence of the greatest being under God. I staggered at the sight. Light. Glory. My beautiful one!” He closed his eyes as he spoke, each word falling like a boulder between us.

Lucian leaned his cheek into his hand. “And Lucifer, my prince, heard my heart and turned his eyes to me. It was almost more than I could bear, the direct brunt of that gaze—such a long and considering glance. As for me, I was rapt, seared by the stars, scorched by perfection. I fell down on my face, as I had before El a million times before, but this time to Lucifer. And my heart praised him—not for the work of the Creator in him, or even his office under God, but simply for the sake of his own magnificence. And Lucifer knew it.”

“And that made you a demon?”

“No. The sin isn’t in the temptation.”

I could not help but think of Aubrey. I never knew when she crossed that line. I had tortured myself with trying to pinpoint exactly when she betrayed me—in spirit, if not yet in deed—and at what moment I lost her. Even after she was gone, I scoured phone receipts, credit card statements, the caller ID log. I reconstructed the entire schedule of her off-site meetings and business trips during our last month together, mad with it, obsessed despite the futility.

The demon curled his fingers around his teacup as though to warm his hands—another human gesture I found somehow grotesque—and said, “I sometimes wonder what he must have seen at that moment: a lowly angel, prostrate before him—a being beautiful in its own right but so dull by comparison? Or maybe a reflection of himself, cast back as though from the watery and unworthy mirror of Narcissus. I don’t know. I don’t know why he even looked at me. I suppose he felt my adulation and was pleased by it. In fact, I know he was.”

“How do you know that?”

“I felt it. Keep in mind we aren’t like you. When we share the same purpose, we are a legion of one accord. The perfect army. So I felt it, too, when he looked away from Elohim, and then at me . . . and finally, at himself. And among our perfect awareness, the ripple it caused spread through us like the falling of dominoes, one against the other. But unlike your ivory pieces with their neat and shuffling clinks, the momentum of that disturbance was a roar—thunder—in my ears. You can’t comprehend what it is for an angelic being to hear the fabric of perfection rent.” He rubbed his forehead, pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s deafening . . . deafening. And Lucifer rose up, inspired by that mayhem, his eyes terrible, his bearing resolute. How beautiful, how awful, was the look on his face! I believe the sight of it will be with me forever, burned into the retina of my mind, the sentence of perfect recollection.”

He dropped his hand and abruptly stood up. “More hot water?”