Demon

“I’m coming to that.”

Just then the two-way radio on the dash crackled with static. Though no voice came through, Lucian tilted his head as I had seen him do before to the invisible swarm of insects near his ear.

We had been wending through the country club area, but now he turned around with a curse.

“Helen’s been asking about you at the office. When you get back, tell her you had a doctor’s appointment.”

“That’s lying.”

“It’s on your calendar.”

“It’s not on my cal—” I stopped, aggravated. “Why did we even come here if you were going to take me right back?” Though I had been antsy about the time away from the office, I now had mixed feelings about returning.

“I didn’t know they’d be talking that much about your absence.”

“I thought you knew things.”

“I hear things. I observe. I’m not omniscient.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, as though the very act of talking to me gave him a headache.

“We have a little bit of time left,” he said, checking his watch and then tapping the clock on the dash as if it had stopped. “So now listen: The world was new. All the creatures were vegetarian. The rending of flesh was yet to come. Creation enthralled and amazed us.”

“Vegetarian?” I remembered his T-shirt that day in the Common—and then, inevitably, the shattered pink iPod strapped to a sickeningly skewed arm.

“By design. You weren’t made to eat meat. Of course, you weren’t made to die, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll come to that. For now, you need to know something more about Elohim: He is the ultimate force of creativity. He is the author of diversity. The richness of creation has been lost on your kind for centuries. Millennia. But it wasn’t lost on us. Even Lucifer stared in amazement. Light. Earth. Water. Life. It was base and gorgeous. It was extravagant. We had never seen the earth like this, a swarming symphony of life. I heard with angel ears every call of bird and whale, the murmur of water, the rustle of tree. I thrilled to the sound of crickets, the collective pulse of mortal vein and plant stem. It was a visual feast as well, and I consumed it in long, wondering stares: the jade of glaciers, the desert art of sand dune, the simmer of lava, the effusive glow of firefly.”

His voice fell and drifted off. When he spoke next, his words were distant, in that way in which we go back to our past to gratify or torture ourselves.

“I was intoxicated by the activity of the day but returned almost every night to the shore, to walk beneath the gentle light of the moon, which forgave in shadow everything the sun so harshly laid bare. I could have spent millennia like that, days and nights walking the earth, sating my senses.”

I was, for a moment, moved. And though he had not cast me into the illusion of his memory, I stood vicariously beside him on the shores of Saint Lucia, where I had gone on my honeymoon.

“We longed for this world. We coveted it, and we hoped. Even Lucifer, though he wouldn’t say it, looked on with greed-softened eyes, infatuated. I deluded myself into thinking that yes, perhaps Elohim had taken him back. Perhaps Elohim had forgotten all, would set him up as a god over this rich and wild new world. The next blessings to come from El would be his, and ours.” He shook his head with a brittle laugh, the sound slightly too high-pitched for such a big man.

We had skirted the MIT campus to arrive on Main, a block from my office building.

“And why weren’t they? Why couldn’t they be?”

He pulled over, put the car in park, and turned to look at me.

“Because then he created them.”

“Them?”

“You.”

10

Ascending the stairs to my apartment that evening, I felt drained but calmer than I had been in days.

The incident outside the Garden still haunted me. I heard, in unexpected moments, the sound of that impact, saw again the splayed and broken limbs of that woman. I have something he wants, I reminded myself before that tendril of panic could tease my composure. And I knew that I needed something from him in return.

I planned to spend the bulk of my evening writing by hand every bit of our conversation. I could feel the urge of it already, demanding release like an overfull bladder. But I hesitated on the landing and, on a sudden whim, went over and knocked on Mrs. Russo’s door. Now that I was composed, I wanted to thank her for the muffins, for her friendship and her concern. Her timing had been uncanny and, considering my state yesterday, I wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking I might be on drugs.

Standing on her threshold, I wondered if her keen discernment would sense—and recoil from—any lingering trace of the company I had been in today. And so I was relieved when, after waiting another moment, there was no answer.

That night, as I sat at my desk, my pen moving across the page, one thing in particular set my mind on edge: his capricious moods, especially in relation to me. Or rather, to humans. I returned again and again to his near- violent response—for a moment he really had looked possessed—to my question about why he never ate. To the way he had called humans them, as though we were a vile species.

Or a hated enemy.