Demon

It wasn’t silent at all! I was falling and seemed to fall forever. A deafening pulse filled my ears, reverberated through my body as if through the taut skin of a drum. I staggered, blinded by the throbbing in my head that jarred my vision as though with the beat of one giant heart. But then that thrum slowed and lengthened, stretching like a coil pulled straight until I thought I couldn’t stand it, feeling that if it stopped I might die, as one dies with the last beat of a heart. And then it was not a sound at all but a wave of energy, surging as an ocean crashing upon a stony shore.

As it receded, that rocking quickened, rolling over itself, picking up speed until it was a taut vibrato, until it had become the vibrant hum that was energy itself—there! A burst of light! A bright highway of light shot out before me like a ribbon road to eternity. And somewhere that was both above and below and behind me came the heralding din of horns that were not horns, having to them a stringed quality that could not be strings. It crescendoed until I thought my eardrums would burst—or that my heart would. And in that sound I heard the cadence of unrest, the meter of a ticking timepiece, fulminating seconds, the phrasing of an impending end.

It fell away sharply at the single cry of a baby.

I was grasping the edge of the table, my skull feeling too small to hold the sound that had just burst within it. I thought I might vomit.

Nearby, someone had opened a music box. It plinked away a toy version of “Greensleeves” one tin note at a time, but I could still hear the throbbing in my ears.

“You—you did this,” I said to the demon as she put a surprisingly strong arm around me.

“No,” she said. “You started to black out. Come on. We’ll get you a cookie.”

IN THE FOOD COURT I sipped soda and picked at a giant cookie. The nausea and light-headedness had left me, leaving me as weak as if I had vomited off and on for an hour.

“There had been rumors. Prophets ranting about saviors.” The demon’s perennial cup of tea sat steaming in front of her, neglected. “Well, we have prophets, too, and they spout plenty of things, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all going to happen. Plenty of people have purported to be messiahs. So we didn’t worry about it much. Regardless, some of the clay people watched for him, eyes to the world. They hailed him, sight unseen, as a king. They hoped, and the hope was disconcerting to us. Hope changes the hearts of a people, lengthens their vision beyond their petty, everyday lives.”

“Lengthens their vision.” I considered that.

The old woman sat forward. “The day Adam ate mortal judgment to his body, he also ate scales to his eyes and myopia to his soul and to that of his children as well. Like one who views stars through the lens of astigmatism or through Depression glass, you can’t see clearly. It’s why you wonder why bad things happen to so-called good people, why there is violence, disease, the senseless things on the news, what have you. You’re shortsighted, focused only on your immediate surroundings, your immediate timeframe. Is it any wonder that the world doesn’t make sense to you?”

“Speaking of which,” I said. “How are your cataracts?”

“Quite the annoyance,” she said with a smirk, as though to say, “Touché.”

She propped her elbow on the table then and leaned her chin on a wrinkled but soft-looking hand covered with random liver spots like stars.

“I had a frightening thought the other day. Even though I never ate from that tree, I wonder if I’ve fallen as surely as your first man. I wonder if I, too, am not quite seeing the world as it is, if my vision plays me false at times without my knowing it. I wonder even now if I’m looking through some watery glass of an eye, like a mirror hung too long on the wall.” She squinted one eye shut and peered past me with the other. “If it, too, has warped in the age since my innocence.” The lone eye turned on me.

“Then we’re even.”

“Oh no.” She opened her other eye and sat back, reaching up to pat her feathery hair. “We may carry a great grudge and misplaced alliance, but being around since the beginning has a way of giving one insight. But it’s so difficult for you to venture beyond the boundaries of your mortal world and comprehend the scope of truth—truth and eternity. After all, your life transpires in a blink. You’re driven by the things you see, that you can touch and smell. By what you feel. Things as temporal as you are.

“But with all this talk of a messiah, a few Jews began to see beyond their everyday lives. And the longer they waited, the more we wondered. After all, if you watch someone look expectantly at the door long enough, you eventually start to wonder if someone is going to walk through it. So, in spite of ourselves, we started to watch, too. And then the news came: A messiah was imminent.”

“How did you feel about that?”