Demon

That day, as I returned to the account of my meetings with Lucian, I was disturbed by the fragility of the paper it was written on, the fraying edges of the notebook pages, the bloated ink where I had set a glass of water on one of them. I recalled the shambles of the house in Belmont, the splintered table leg. Tissue paper, he had called it.

I immediately decided that I should type the entire thing, commit it to a more lasting medium.

When I finished, it was well past dark. I sat back, considered the last line of my account, which ended in the museum with Aubrey and me parting ways again. With Lucifer searching for the weakness in man.

On impulse, I pulled up an online Bible and then faltered. There were at least two dozen translations to pick from. We had read the King James in confirmation, the “thees” and “thous” as mysterious to me as God himself. I randomly chose a more modern version.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

It was so bare-boned. The image of God hovering over the water that had made Lucian shudder was recounted here with all the emotion of a recipe. I read through the days of creation, and though I found no inconsistencies between this account and the demon’s, I found no mention of the angelic host or Lucifer, of the fall that precipitated the earth’s emptiness. I read through the creation of animals and man. I found it retold in the next chapter, this time with more detail, even down to the exact rivers flowing into the garden. The specificity surprised me, as though one might actually locate the place on a map. I read the first two chapters again, this time with a writer’s appreciation for the omniscient point of view, the declarative sentences, the repetition.

Still it seemed much the same as it had been thirty years ago in Sunday school: dry and rote, down to the repetition of the days coming and going in numbered sequence. I was disappointed, tired, and very hungry. My mouse hovered over the X that would close the online Bible, but then something happened: I heard the echo of past conversations with Lucian coming back to me now in fragments like the lyrics of a half-forgotten song.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

. . . the way a sculptor’s fingers roam a block of marble . . .

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.”

All those strange green things had within them the power to create . . . manufacturing miniature versions of themselves.

So God created man in his own image.

. . . the awareness, all the emotion, the propensity to love . . .

“Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

He gave the animals to the man and told him to rule over them.

“It is not good for the man to be alone.”

And he was lonely.

The one thing the demon had not yet mentioned was the tree in the second chapter. I scrolled to Genesis 3.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.

He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic . . . searching for the slightest weakness.

It now came vividly alive. I scrolled ahead, excited, looking for more. But I found only Cain and Abel, followed by an entire genealogy of men who became fathers in their old age and supposedly lived for centuries. Lucian had said nothing of this part, having come only, as far as I could tell, to the end of Genesis 2. Looking at the screen, I thought with some alarm of the thick, dusty, leather- bound book on the shelf at home when I was growing up. Is that what he meant every time he said time was short—that it could take an entire lifetime to recount the whole thing?

I rethought my obsession, not sure if I was up for all of that. I was exhausted, hungry, and preoccupied—and Lucian had barely covered the first two pages of that dusty book. Did he mean to recount his observation of or participation in every event in the Bible?

And what did any of this have to do, as he contended, with me?

Something scratched at the back of my mind.

And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

Time, not yet created, had begun its phantom tick for us alone. Where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.

And then I knew.

The demon’s obsession with time wasn’t about getting through the entire Bible. It was about his own limited quantity of it. In our conversation upon leaving the church that day weeks ago, he said he had never been to hell.

Yet.

On a whim I searched the Internet for Lucian.

Back came Lucian of Samosata, the rhetorician, author of Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead. How fitting. Lucian of Antioch, the saint. Why would a demon take the name of a saint? Lucian Freud, the painter. Various blogs, designers, an actor, even a boxer.

Well, what’s in a name anyway?

I typed: “Name meanings: Lucian.”

I received: Lucian: Latin. “Light.”

Light?

I searched for Lucifer. I felt strange, deviant doing it.

Lucifer: “bringer of light.”

I toggled back to the file containing my notes and scrolled to Lucian’s retelling of Lucifer’s attempted ascent, of the darkness after its failure. And then before that, to the flashing stones of Eden that reflected the light of its