Demon

She jabbed her finger into the tablecloth. “Every time you fail, it proves something. Every time the humans failed, it made us feel better. We reveled in every instance of human ridiculousness,” she said with biting annunciation, her tone lower but intense, her lips pulled back from her teeth.

“I understand.” I wanted her to know I was listening.

“No, you don’t. El didn’t ignore the clay humans. He did not cut them off. Not at all. He took an interest in their daily affairs, though he no longer walked with them in the afternoon. And that is significant.” Her blue eyes had come to dark, frightening life.

“He made concessions. He persevered through their constant and abiding imperfections and wrongdoings with more patience than I thought existed in all the created universe. He taught them how to make appropriately bloody, laborious, and horrible sacrifices in symbolic atonement.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to leave it there. But I knew there was more. Knew I wanted to know it. “And?”

“And then he forgave them.”

She was staring so intently at me that I found myself averting my gaze as one does from oncoming headlights. When she said nothing more, I glanced up to find her still staring at me, as though the implication of her words were sinking in for her, all over again.

She was seething.

“Think about that.” She reached for her coat, then, with a quick glance toward the other end of the restaurant again, slid out of the booth. “We will have to do this faster.” She put the coat on. “Time is getting away from us.”

She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked out. In the middle of the restaurant, the table of twelve broke into a round of “Happy Birthday,” as the old woman blew out the candle on a piece of ricotta pie.

15

Time is getting away from us?

I committed the encounter to paper, spending the urgent recollection of every word in the act of writing it. When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table. They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper from the recycling bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces of mail—anything that had been near to hand.

I opened my laptop and started to type.

Around 1:00 a.m., as I transcribed the end of our dinner together—my dinner—I found I had missed a major point. I had thought there was something significant about the family at the table, that something about them first drew her interest and then piqued her. But that wasn’t it, the thing that precipitated the moment—that startling, stunning moment—that she snapped at me. It was the coming revelation in her own story. The thing she knew she must say.

“And then he forgave them.”

I had thought nothing about that statement at the time. Forgiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion.

Even for demons?

I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appointment, the words leaping at me as I came to them:

“Had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”

“Why couldn’t you? For that matter, why wouldn’t God?”

“I’ll tell you why: because we were damned!”

I scrolled forward.

“He forgave them.”

I sat back in my chair, staring at the screen.

LATE THAT NIGHT I received a response from Katrina, but the proposal she attached was not one I recognized. Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of Dreaming: A Memoir, by L. LeGeros.

It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic.

16

The demon chose two more plates and pushed them across the table toward me with a short, stocky arm.

“Please stop,” I told him as the woman with the dim sum cart stamped her red symbol on our tab and pushed on. I meant it not only because I was full but because the rapt interest with which he had watched me eat for the last half hour disturbed me. He had inundated me with sweet buns, pork buns, shrimp dumplings, and vegetable packets with tiny green peas perched on the twisted peak of their wrappers. They squatted now in orphaned ones and twos inside their bamboo steamers; I could not possibly accommodate them all.

“Very well.” He folded those arms before him. He had hung his jacket over the back of his chair but, seeing the way his dress shirt strained at the shoulders, I thought he ought to have left it on.

“About your proposal to Katrina . . .” I wasn’t sure how to go about what I meant to say next. I had feigned an e-mail problem, had asked her again to resend it, stating even more carefully that I needed the short one, the additional one she had given me as an afterthought the day she came to my office. But when she resent it, I found myself scrolling again through the scant pages of Dreaming: A Memoir by L. LeGeros.

“What proposal?” He seemed to wink, though his eyelid never moved.

So that was it. Another of his mind tricks. No one had seen the proposal for Demon: A Memoir but me. Katrina had no awareness of the story evolving into a living thing on my desk and hard drive, waiting for me to wake in the morning and come home at night, to feed it the nutriment of my preoccupation. An excitement tapped in my chest, a metronome in time with my heart.