Demon

“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.

“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.”