Demon

“I think so,” I said, lamely. “Conceptually, perhaps.” And then: “No.”

On the other end of the footbridge, a laughing couple held hands. Joggers ran the path beyond the bronze lantern. The juxtaposition of this modern life-in-process and religious prehistory put me at tenuous odds with reality, and I began to fear that my mind, overwrought in recent weeks, might lose discernment of where between the two extremes reality lay. Maybe I had already lost it. Maybe I was even now doped up and strapped to a bed in a mental ward. I had wondered more than once if I had dreamed up this demon, if somewhere along the line I had developed paranoid schizophrenia.

As I thought all of this, I began to feel a heaviness in my chest, as though I were trying to breathe steam in a sauna that had become too thick, too hot, too fast. Dizzying numbness sank into my skull through my eyes. I clutched at the rail of the footbridge, my heart pounding even as I tried to appear normal in this public place. And I thought, This is how it is to die, to realize that something is wrong and to try to appear as though it is not.

“Are you doing this to me?” I managed.

“No.” But he watched me intently, in the same way scientists must observe lab rats after infusing their cages with cigarette smoke or injecting them with red dye.

“I feel ill. Something’s wrong.” I hauled in a slow, heavy breath, considered my lack of sleep, took inventory of all I had eaten today: cereal, coffee . . . more coffee. Not enough. I was exhausted, and my blood sugar was low.

“How tenuous and tedious it must be, keeping that balance of rest, food, and sleep.” He spoke dispassionately. “Come on. We’ll find something to eat.”

We passed the bronze statue of George Washington atop his horse and came out through the Garden’s iron gate onto Arlington. Walking seemed to help, as though the motion had reagitated my coagulating blood. I was headed toward Newbury Street to a coffee shop that served gourmet sandwiches and bottles of imported sodas. I veered left, looking for the next crosswalk, thinking I could hear Lucian’s boots half a step behind me.

I was halfway across the walk when I heard the stuttered screech of tires grabbing pavement and a thud off to my right. I started at the sound, braced, stupidly, toward oncoming traffic. Someone screamed.

But it was not me.

Half a block down the street a car was just settling to a stop. Two more abruptly halted behind the first, narrowly avoiding an accident. Pedestrians stood frozen on the sidewalk, hands covering their mouths. More, emerging from the Garden, stopped short.

A man got out of his car, a cell phone in shaking hands. Shouts for an ambulance. Traffic backed up. Someone began to divert it to the far lane where cars filed by, heads swiveling behind the wheel.

I ran on shaky legs toward the car with the crystalline web for a windshield but stopped with a white-hot chill when I saw the crumpled form on the asphalt. I had thought he was behind me.

A bystander announced she had called 9-1-1. A man ran toward the curb, bellowing at someone snapping a picture with a camera phone. A mounted policeman rode out of the Garden, the horse cantering too prettily and far too slowly.

More people joined the clot of onlookers on the Garden side. A young woman in a peacoat hurried to the small cluster on the pavement, obscuring my view, saying she was a nurse.

Get up! I thought, angry, terrified. What was he doing? Making a scene? Playing dead? Could demons die? One of his sneakers rested on the asphalt, some fifteen feet away.

He hadn’t been wearing sneakers.

I pushed through to the knot of people kneeling in the street, unable to hear anything but the thudding in my chest.

It wasn’t him. The leg splayed out in macabre yoga was distinctly female. Blood pooled in an inky blot beneath her head, black against the pavement. It mottled her hair, which had come loose from its ponytail to stick to one side of her face in sticky, crimson-blonde fingers. A shattered pink iPod was still strapped to her arm.

Somewhere bells were ringing, church bells, perhaps from Park Street Church across the Common, maybe from Arlington on the corner. I stumbled back and searched the growing crowd for Lucian. But he was gone.

7

I was sick with the kind of horror one feels upon realizing he forgot to lock the gun safe—the one from which a neighborhood kid steals a handgun and shoots someone. Or upon waking from a drunk to the realization he’s had unprotected sex with a prostitute. It was the kind of fear in which one realizes he has courted danger under the guise of negligent normalcy.

And now a woman lay dead.

I backed toward the curb, the gruesome bouquet of tire rubber, blood, and urine in my nostrils, as the woman in the peacoat administered CPR. Eventually, she sat back on her heels, breathing heavily, arms dangling on her knees.

A fire truck and then an ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. The way the medics left the body where it lay—the way the police shut down the street, took aside the traumatized driver of the car, interviewed some of the bystanders—it all seemed so haphazard. Like a chaotic game of pickup sticks, as primitive as surgery conducted with sharp stones. I had had such faith in this city, in the civic marvel of emergency response and modern medicine, and a woman had just died on the asphalt.

I lingered even after the ambulance drove off, silent and empty. I fixated on the policemen, trying to gather the courage to say something. To tell them that I knew. That I knew who—what—had killed that woman.

I couldn’t stop thinking of those too-old teenager’s eyes, narrowed at her after his staged fall, those young man’s lips murmuring seemingly to himself.

I never got anything to eat. Instead, I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of merlot—a bottle with a screw cap. I carried it home in its paper bag inside my coat and gulped from it in long, less-than-covert pulls on the T like a common wino. I hissed and then shouted at random buildings on the walk home, calling Lucian out, calling him a murderer. People walking by gave me wide berth, and I let out one of Lucian’s