Demon

“I think that went quite well.” She let go of me. I stared past the funerary mask of the dead princess, quite unable to believe that it had finally happened and happened so uneventfully that they were even now walking into Bravo, the upstairs restaurant, as I stood blinking in the middle of the mummy room.

But now that it was over, I was angry. Angry at Aubrey’s detachment, at being caught off-guard, at Richard’s heroics. I hated Richard for stepping in the way he had, first into our marriage and now today, for saving her from the need to answer for herself, as though to protect her from me.

“Is that why we were here?” I asked Lucian finally.

“You chose to come here, Clay.” She was smoothing her hair back in a way that reminded me of a Siamese cat. She peered up at me, then, her expression indulgent, the smile I hated was back again.

12

I could not sleep the night after the museum— not until I transcribed every word and expelled every nuance of that otherworldly drama from my memory. This process, normally focused to the exclusion of even hunger and fatigue, was interrupted regularly that night as I stared out the window or at the wall, seeing neither, seeing only the image of Aubrey’s hand on Richard’s arm, the pink curve of her lips over those perfect teeth, the imperfect shape of Richard’s face, Aubrey’s gaze fluttering between Lucian and me. And I searched that memory for any glint of her reaction to the sight of Lucian and me together.

Richard had called her “Bree.” Aubrey used to hate that.

I replayed the scene in my mind, outfitting it with every witty rejoinder, smug comment, and cryptic well-wish I had rehearsed for months. But finally, upon contemplating yet again the distance in Aubrey’s gaze, the fixed front tooth, I decided that she had retreated too far beyond me to be touched by any of them.

The image of them together, of the formerly faceless Richard, had preyed upon me in waking and dreaming moments for more than a year. But now that it was over, I found something disappointingly unremarkable about the reality.

I had always assumed he and Aubrey had no chance of making it, having started the way they had. But thinking back to Richard’s quick rescues, I wasn’t so sure. She had seemed in utter possession of the situation despite his protection of her. And I found something pathetic in his safeguarding her, in his willingness to be fitted into the mold of her expectations like a mummy in a coffin made for someone else.

I WENT TO WORK and sat in meetings. But even as I did, my mind roamed the heavens, walked the shore by moonlight, passed among the reeds on the bank of Eden’s river.

At home I made my way through manuscript chapters, jacket copy, and e-mail, my gaze wandering often to that pile of pages, scratched in frantic pen and harried pencil, growing on the corner of my desk, to the rumpled receipt I had saved from the Bosnian Cafe that first night. It seemed a year, an age ago.

“I’m going to tell you my story, and you’re going to publish it.”

Staring at the pile, I considered the narrative tension of his story, the larger-than-life qualities of his characters (and how could they be otherwise when they included both God and the devil?), the unlikely point of view—like the monster of John Gardner’s Grendel telling the tale of Beowulf ripping off his arm. A stepsister’s account of being born ugly. A tale turned on its head, a sympathetic character from an unsympathetic source.

No. There was nothing sympathetic or likable about this teller. I thought again of Sarah Marshall, her hair matted on the pavement.

If it was a hoax, it was the most elaborate one I had ever heard of. And if it was, I found that a part of me did not want my disbelief proven, for through it the wheels of my creative mechanism, which I’d feared indefinitely jammed, had begun a familiar, albeit creaky, new motion in me.

I thought of Katrina’s proposal. L. Legion. How clever. I tried to locate it, but it was apparently buried beneath a ream of paper-clipped proposals and sample chapters.

Later, well past 1:00 a.m., I returned to my account. I had combed it a dozen times in the last week but left each time feeling that something was missing. Even as he took me speeding through the heavens and introduced me to Eden, he was coy, refusing to put me at the edge of his understanding as I demanded my authors do in their narratives, holding back some vital piece of information.

I checked my calendar.

The blank grid stared back.

13

The parade was on TV. Apparently it was Thanksgiving. But all I knew or cared about was that it had been five days. Five days, and nothing. I sifted through the stack of pages comprising my record as an archaeologist brushes dirt through a sieve, searching for details, meaning, reason. I have lost it. At best, I was obsessed. The fact that I had not replayed to death my encounter with Aubrey at the museum was proof of that. I had thought I would be compelled to drink, break down, or at least stew for a few days, reliving the years of our marital routine, the arguments, the silent specters between us. But I did none of these, having already transferred my best energies to the account growing on the corner of my desk.

My pulse throbbed in my temple. I was more conscious of it of late, imagining that I felt its thumping shiver through the mattress beneath me as I lay in bed at night. This experience had drained me, this thing that I had fallen victim or privy to.

I checked my schedule by the hour—sometimes more often—lingering at the keyboard like a lover waiting by a silent phone.

In these idling moments of distracted nonproductivity, I looked up articles on Horus, searched for pictures of the falcon-headed god to see if I saw anything of the demonic scowl in the ancient idol’s eyes. In dark, postmidnight hours, I browsed the Internet, following the links through a pantheon of Egyptian gods until, dozing in my chair before dawn, I dreamed convoluted dreams of bird-headed deities with clay bodies, of sarcophagi with wide-eyed funeral masks, of a woman the color of bone singing by the pale light of Lucian’s moon.

I woke up in the afternoon, raked my hands through my hair, scrubbed at the stubble on my cheeks, and realized the holiday had passed. It was the weekend.