Demon

“I saw this with appalled fascination. I laughed like a fool, much like you just now, and heard something wild in my voice. Why not? Why not. Tell them all. How like El to be so extravagant and so longsuffering. Why limit his affection—and now it had grown to a great and totally undeserved gift—to any one race? Soon enough the entire ball of earth would be populated with pardoned, shining souls, a great deposit of glowing stones, imperfect yet brought into the fold of that relationship as only that first man and woman had experienced so long ago.

“I was manic, despairing. El had bestowed upon these believers the rights of his own children, authority over all fallen things, if they wanted it. Over me.” She shoved a square-tipped fingernail into her sternum. “Imagine! And now I was being ordered about, told to leave, cast out of homes and presences by an authority belonging only to El himself.”

I had never, in a thousand years, thought of this. And now my thoughts returned to Mrs. Russo, to the steeliness about her the day at the co-op, at the seeming sanctuary of our apartment building.

“I had found my place with Lucifer, and among you. How could I bear to be ordered about, ruled over by humans so frail and filthy and base?” At some point she had gripped my arm, and now those square nails dug into it. I remembered again the sight of her on the T, pulling at her skin as though it were covered with fungus.

“But I need not have worried. Lucifer, clever prince, had a plan. His efforts until then were paltry by comparison. We had been a haphazard force at best, only tenuously united—if you haven’t noticed, loyalty and devotion are not our strong suits. Now Lucifer unleashed a great storm of demons, myself among them, a battery of guerilla assaults, and attacked the children of El with every imaginable weapon.” Her eyes were mad, her lips animated by a terrible smile.

“How he hated these new children of El! They might be assured of a future, but they were mortal yet.”

“What did you do?” I sat very still.

“We killed many of them. A dead believer is a believer who cannot spread the word of redemption to any others. And I’m certain their ends made a good many humans think twice about making the same choice.”

In my mind I saw the slain woman, the blood mottling her blonde hair on the pavement. My jubilation over my manuscript sobered.

“Lucifer conscripted us all. He would show the Almighty how quickly the redeemed would forget him, how little this covenant would change anything. The clay people were a miserable disappointment, and so they would continue to be, redeemed or not. They would scoff at El’s great act of grace, and Lucifer would see to it. Lucifer, the accuser called Satan, declared war.”

A rustle of gray passed in the periphery of my vision. Two nuns in orthopedic shoes and stockings were looking for seats. Lucian stood up and, with a gracious smile and flash of a white watch face on her wrist, indicated her seat and the empty one next to it. “Sisters, please.”

The nuns thanked her, and Lucian, demurring, glared at me over a perfect smile.

26

My burn had turned to a tan in some places—and a moist, bubbling peeling in others—the day Helen called me in to her office.

“Clay, you did something here. It’s really amazing.” She gestured to the pile of pages on her desk, my manuscript—my book. It seemed such a part of me, now severed and handed over, that it might as well have been my arm in front of her, my hand with the crooked pinky and calloused middle finger. And I felt both pride and bereavement, staring at it as she told me Anu would get me a contract to look over by Friday, that they’d like to release it in next year’s second season if I thought I could finish it in the next two months. Unable to take my eyes off it, I asked for five thousand dollars more than what I knew they would offer me, and Helen shrugged, saying she didn’t see why they couldn’t make that happen.

“Marketing is excited about this one. I think they’re going to have a heyday with it.”

I smiled as one who comes out of a dream.

“Sheila wasn’t at her desk,” I said as I was about to leave. I had spent my short morning commute wondering what I would say to her, if I should even acknowledge our strange conversation or if she might be embarrassed by it, as I was by my lack of sensitivity. I had since realized that it wasn’t just her call that had been so disturbing but her alarming emotional state. She had always been the one to listen with limpid gaze and sympathetic tilt of her head, the one who communicated as much by her silence as her simple words.

Of late those blue eyes, the girlish curves of her face and peak of her chin had struck me as somehow dangerous, a weapon wielded as recklessly as a sleepwalker with a gun. But after talking with her, I worried and wondered whether I ought to have invited her to call me back later, whether I should have called her the next morning to see how she was.