Demon

“Do you hate humans?” The instant I said it, something dark slithered into his gaze with the silent stealth of a reptile entering the murk of a swamp.

“Compared to Lucifer’s, my hate is nothing. His odium, his grudge against El grew—grows—by the day.” He checked his watch.

No, not yet.

“Come on,” he said, pushing back from the table.

“Where?” I was instantly on my feet.

He retrieved his coat and slapped a bill—a fifty—on the table.

BY THE TIME WE left the potpourri of food, stale cigarettes, and urine that was Chinatown behind us, I was breathing hard, my heart beating spastic percussion against my sternum. I towered a good six inches over him, but his short legs were deceptively fast, and I trailed after him like a hapless kid tagging after the schoolyard leader, down Washington Street past St. Francis House.

On either side of the street, homeless men loitered in ones and twos, smoking, scanning the pedestrians with dull, roving eyes, as if watching a play through a window. Though I had never been homeless, I knew that look, had been that person—the editor cleaning up the prose of would-be writers like a janitor sweeping up the refuse of others, contorting myself to fit my wife’s boxed worldview, going about my life as silently as the Charles, flowing out to sea.

Lucian kept a brisk pace, looking around us with interest, seeming to enjoy the jaunt. This irritated me. Despite my obvious need for it, I was not here for the exercise.

“And so?” I said with some difficulty against the cold. “What came after the promises and laws?”

The heels of his dress shoes tapped against the sidewalk with the rapid staccato of a stopwatch. “The rest is just history, frighteningly dull: wanderings, wars, migrations, judges, priests, kings, and concubines. Actually, the concubines are a little bit interesting. You can read all of that for yourself if you’re simply dying to know. But far be it from me to encourage you to read it. It’s only the history of your race from the beginning. Nothing overly significant, I assure you.”

I hated it when he was sarcastic. I never knew when it would bloom into a fit of real anger. Each of his outbursts startled and disturbed me a little more—and I felt I could afford them less and less.

At Tremont, he veered toward a lightbulb-lined marquee and the large, arched entrance of the Majestic Theatre. It glowed from within, a fact hardly discernable beneath the wealth of lightbulbs until we reached the front doors. Lucian pulled one of them open.

Inside the foyer, dark green ran in lightning bolt veins through burnt orange marble. Ram-horned, Dionysian heads smiled down from the tops of pillars on either side of the main auditorium entrance, and gold cherubs capered above and between them, playing the pan flute. The house was alive, chimes just signaling the end of intermission as though they might have indeed come from those golden pipes. The effect was grand and gauche, but for a moment I thought I saw them crumbling to scagliola plaster and gold paint all around me, as the house in Belmont had caved into a pile of refuse. A woman bumped into me, and the illusion dissipated at the sound of her startled apology. I found Lucian on a low landing, impatiently waving as he started up the stair toward the mezzanine.

I followed him up and then up again to the balcony, breathing hard, my heart thumping in my ears with each step. Ahead of me, Lucian slipped inside the left balcony entrance with the last of the intermission stragglers.

The lights lowered as I stepped inside. Blinking in the dark, I caught the stocky form of the demon making his way toward a set of empty seats as the conductor entered to applause.

“What are we doing?” I hissed, sitting next to him.

He said nothing, only folded his hands on his lap as the curtain opened on a simple Japanese set.

I sat stymied through the third act of Madama Butterfly, through the return of Pinkerton and Butterfly’s surprised meeting with his new wife. The soprano might have been outstanding, Suzuki’s mezzo-soprano brilliant—I don’t know. I both heard and did not hear them. The sets—perhaps ingenious—served only to occupy my eye, which roamed the lines of the shoji screens like the corridors of a labyrinth as I paced back through all that the demon had said at the China Pearl, wondering again, as I inevitably did, what this had to do with me.

By the time Butterfly committed suicide and the red Japanese moon bled down the front of her house in a modern projector trick, I was ready to jump up, to leave here for someplace where the demon might talk just a bit—any bit—more.

But when the curtain came down on the last ovation and a river of well-dressed bodies took up coats and scarves and shuffled to the exits, Lucian stayed in his seat, gazing thoughtfully at the stage.

“What a silly story,” he said, finally. “Puccini never got things right.”

“Why, because his heroines always die?”

“Yes, and what is left?”

“Honor?”