Demon

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.

“THINGS OBVIOUSLY DIDN’T END there,” he said, nudging the plate of gelatinous custard closer to me. It was surrounded by a moat of syrup, and I accepted it without any intention to eat it. He was amicable again, as congenial as a round-faced elf. I found the increasing capriciousness of his moods more and more unsettling, as though indeed I walked on a thin layer of ice over a coursing black current.

“On the contrary, the Flood marked a new beginning. And when it was over and the family had survived, El did something he had never done before: He made a promise—not to us but to the clay people. He promised never to destroy the earth with water again. And he gave them a sign, like a token given to a favorite friend.

“Now let me say that not one of us has ever received such a token. What’s more, it was the first promise of many. In subsequent generations he blessed them again, named a branch of them Israel, and made them his special nation.”

Now he lifted his empty hands. “Promises . . . tokens . . . blessings. Who was God to be accountable to men? Who was man, to procure a promise from God? And then he gave them laws, specific rules for living, since they seemed to need things spelled out for them. He taught them intricate rites of atonement and for communing with an all-perfect God so that despite their wrongs, their tainted lineage, he could stand to be near them.

“But it wasn’t just that he tolerated them. They had done the irreparable in separating themselves from him forever, and it was as if he couldn’t bear to be apart from them.”

Though he maintained the same even tone as he said this, it was too controlled, so that rather than seeming genuine, the effect was one of moderated effort.