Demon

I didn’t turn it on. I told myself that I should welcome this limbo. I had languished in purgatory through my separation, in between appointments with Lucian, nearly every moment of the last three months. Now, perhaps on the cusp of something—some new direction—I should sit here during this layover and savor the feeling of truly being in transit. In between.

I put the phone in my bag, shoved it toward the bottom, pulled out a pen and the last few pages of one of the manuscripts I had taken with me. My legs felt swollen again, the skin tight across my calves. I had meant to walk around for a little while, but they would only swell again on the next flight, and I had promised myself I would return home with every piece of work I had brought with me finished. Every piece except my own.

My pen hovered above the page as, with the same apprehension with which I noticed Aubrey’s increasingly frequent absences in the months leading up to my discovery of her affair, I wondered where Lucian could be, where he went when he was not with me.

That’s so pathetic.

Someone was staring at me—a woman, sitting in a row of boarding area seats across from mine and one row over. Her legs were crossed beneath a long, stretchy skirt. Her brown hair was slightly frizzy, pulled back into a ponytail that gave her a girlish appearance, though a closer look at the lines around her eyes and mouth put her, I guessed, in her forties. She wore one of those fabricated pieces of jewelry they sold at women’s stores, the kind Aubrey used to disdain for looking like an antique or an art piece, though they were mass-produced and sold at exorbitant prices. Except for the jewelry, she would have fit in perfectly in Boston; she was wearing all black.

“Look at that sunburn,” she said to me, the furrow above her lip marred by a thin scar. “The committee loved what we gave them, by the way.”

I almost dropped the pages on my lap, so great was my relief. It was quickly followed by anger. “Where have you been?” I hated how transparent I was, how desperate I sounded.

“Roaming.” She pursed her lips into a little kitten mouth. “I thought you deserved a vacation before things got busy.”

“Busy? What do you mean busy? You said our time was short.”

She came over to sit next to me. She was broad-hipped but not ungainly, her nails manicured with those square, white tips, the appeal of which I had never understood.

“They called it compelling, brilliant. They compared you to Poe, to Blake’s Urizen.”

I exhaled a silent exclamation, unable to speak.

“I’d ask for a slightly larger advance than what they’re offering, but otherwise, I think we’re almost set.”

It was happening. It would happen. I fell back against the seat, papers sliding to the floor around me. And then I lowered my head to my hand. And laughed. It bubbled out of me, grew in volume until I was laughing so hard that the sound came out with the same near-hysteria I had noted in Lucian—and then I laughed harder.

Long moments later, that wild, roiling laugh still in my ears, Lucian regarded me with patronizing calm before reminding me that my story was not finished.

“You’re right. And I have”—I checked my watch, which struck me as so ironic I almost laughed again—“a half hour before I board.”

“Then calm down and listen.”

I was going to publish. The advance didn’t matter. But I would negotiate anyway.

“As you’ve noticed, I’m something of a philosopher. Now, after the ascension of the God-man and the conversion of these believers, I thought perhaps he was tired of being abandoned by the strongest of his creations, the most favored of his people. Who can guess the reasoning of El? I only know this: He is the author of the paradigm of the unlikely. Clay, listen!”

“I’m listening.” I could buy a new table. I would get some new pants. I would go out on dates. Would Aubrey hear? Would she call to congratulate me?

“I’ve said Israel was special to El. But now something happened. Up until those days there was a great separation between the Jews and everyone else. The Jews were set apart by law and favor of El, and the rest of the world was on its own unless someone converted. El was a faithful lover of his people. But now these new believers were going out and giving this message indiscriminately to anyone they met, Jew and non-Jew alike. The rich man, the widow, the priest, the fishwife, the orphaned beggar on the street.

“Let me tell you something, these non-Jews, upon hearing and believing and accepting this new grace, this new gift, looked exactly the same as the other believers to my eye. All those shining stones like luminescent pearls in the muddied waters.”

I recalled my vision on the beach. I had thought it a daydream.