Demon

“I see,” I said carefully. More, I thought, though it will risk his anger. “Then in that case, I need to know what happened after El forgave them. The humans, I mean.”

He sat up, fussing with the little teapot, over pouring a small trickle of chrysanthemum tea into his untouched cup. It seemed he could not dive headlong and cold into this topic, so I waited, considering his bushy eyebrows, the unremarkable face with the suggestion of jowls on either side of his thin-lipped mouth. I had thought him vain after our first few encounters, though of late he seemed to care less and less about the beauty of his guises.

“El’s acts of forgiveness became tedious in the way that something routine is tedious. Like a sound that grates on your patience so that where you had only disliked it before, you come to hate even the merest suggestion of it. Like a smell that has the ability to incite nausea. I didn’t know who I was more astounded with—El because he constantly forgave them, or the humans because they made constant and abiding mistakes again and again. With disgust and amazement we pushed ourselves to see how far we could go with them. We dared. And El sat back again in pain amid the chaos of all this teeming life, once so wonderful, multiplying over the great ball of earth and water. But he would not relinquish them. During that time I realized something had happened within me.”

“What do you mean?” I said, surrendering my chopsticks with an overfull sigh.

“Like nerves after they’ve been severed, I could no longer sense El as I had before, even after falling away. But in that same way that I knew myself—better, even—I knew El to be unchanging. For as little as I could perceive of him by then, I understood well his sentiments about all that was happening.”

“And Lucifer?”

“Oh, he had determined to rule over this great, floating ball of land—had, in fact, never given up his claim to it. Now, having snatched Adam’s birthright from him the moment he abdicated it, he threw wide the doors to this world as though to a mansion and invited the humans in, creating banquets of diversions designed just for them: new and bizarre religions, strange philosophies, indulgences for all appetites. He had by then set himself up as all the things he had ever wanted to be: a power, a ruler . . . a god. Gods. He answered to a variety of names, and the humans offered him sacrifices and performed great acts of murder and bloodletting for his sake. It was gory. And grand.”

“So he had what he wanted at last.”

“After a manner, I suppose. You must understand that he didn’t care about the offerings, the blood, or the lives. It was that people did it that delighted him. That with every little betrayal, the people moved farther away from El. Eventually, they forgot him. Those were wild, accelerated days—like a dancer, twirling faster and faster until she falls; like your dreams of falling off buildings, the wind shrieking in your ears. And I watched it all with a sense of inevitability.”

Sometimes when he was like this, when it seemed he was transported back, I wondered if his own memories were as vivid to him as they had been to me the time in the tea shop or that day in the Commons.

As vivid as my memories of Sarah Marshall’s death.

I had almost managed to go a whole day without thinking about it.

“But even the forbearance of El in his grief had limits. And the day came when he could abide it no longer. Of course, I expected him to slam down the heavy fist, but the day came and still he held off. Like a mother giving a child to the count of three, El gave the clay people 120 years to change their ways.”

He sat back and crossed short arms, his shirtsleeves encasing them like sausages. “I was put off! Had he ever been willing to play the suffering parent toward any one of us? Toward Lucifer, first and best-created of El, prince and anointed cherub? But El had not offered him so much as a glimmer of the patience he showed humans. Never so much for any of us.”

As he said this, the distant and disowned look seemed to creep first into one eye and then into the other, like a lizard slithering through his skull.

“Had I been human, I would have considered myself lucky.” He thumped his chest. He was pudgy enough that it didn’t make much of a sound. “But they were oblivious to the indulgence they had been given. They went about their ways as pleased them best. And the years went by.”

“All 120 of them.”

“All 120 of them,” he agreed. “In the end Lucifer crowed his triumph. He had brought about the destruction of El’s world and the spoiling of his clay creatures like so much fruit left on the ground. Now El would be forced to acknowledge him; there would be no more of the clay people to talk with, commune with—and who would want to by now, anyway? Unworthy, fickle, unfaithful. . . . The humans were a failure. It was time to destroy them.”

I shuddered at the slight jeer with which he said this.

“Only you Westerners fancy what happened next as the stuff of myth. Most ancient cultures have taught it as history: water covering the land, swallowing up creation as it had Lucifer’s rock garden an age before.”

Indeed, I was having trouble reconciling the picture-book accounts of animals two-by-two with this story of failed humans, gleeful devils, and a forbearing God. “So Eden was destroyed again.”

Lucian’s brows drew together. “But it didn’t exactly happen as I thought it would—as it had before. The deep didn’t swallow up the land, and El didn’t hover over the deep. Nor did he put out the sun or destroy my beloved moon. I didn’t have the experience to know then what I know now: that El is unlikely to do anything twice or predictably. That he spared an entire family was unpredictable indeed.” He lifted his cuff to glance at the elegantly thin timepiece on his wrist.

“Noah’s family,” I said, feeling as though I vied with time itself for his attention.

He dropped his arm back to the table. “I was indignant! Why bother? What was the point? For those forty short days that Noah’s little boat bobbed about on the flooded earth like a piece of cork on a lake, I agonized over it. And when the rain was over and the water subsided and the people crawled out of the boat and made yet another sacrifice, I realized something: Here was El’s weakness, if ever he had one. He loved these creatures, these people made of mud. They had failed and he had grieved. He had punished them and they had died, but he couldn’t bear to obliterate them all.”

Ice crystallized in his eyes, like the frozen surface of a pond under too much weight—or the shattered windshield of a car on Arlington.

Just then the cart lady appeared again, pushing a large wooden vat. She waved a flat golden spoon as though it were a fan. “Hot almond pudding?” she asked, smiling at Lucian.