14

That Tuesday, Helen, my editorial director, called me into her office.

Helen Ness was a strange mixture of steely, old-school-style politics and a frozen-in-time femininity that, having manifested itself in young adulthood, had never quite progressed into the next thirty years. As I entered her office, she pulled off her glasses. They hung on a beaded chain and dropped down against her sweatered bust. I took a seat in one of the two chairs in front of her heavy oak desk. From here I could see that the lines at the corners of her mouth had directed bits of color from her lipstick away from her lips like tiny irrigation canals.

“I’m worried about you, Clay. Even when you’re here, you don’t seem here. Your skin is pasty, you look thin and worn out. You look terrible.” She smoothed a strand of hair from her forehead. Shoulder-length, curled under at the ends. I doubted it had changed style since her days at Smith College. “I don’t know if it’s your divorce or your health or what. Sheila said you’ve been to the doctor a few times.”

Well, see there’s this demon.

“But I need you to let me know what’s going on.”

He’s following me, and I’m pretty sure he had that runner on Arlington killed.

“Let me help, Clay.”

I’m compiling the story of our encounters, which, by the way, has a nice subplot about Satan.

“I understand. I’ve—” I raked a hand through my hair. It needed a cut. “I’m just run down.”

“I’ve had one viable project of yours make it through the committee in the last three months,” she said.

That’s because the editorial committee can’t make up their minds. Despite my sick days and missed meetings, I knew for a fact I had three proposals stuck in committee limbo.

“I need a big project to fill a hole—something we can get into production by spring, summer at the latest.” She dropped her hands to her desk. “Do you have anything you can get me? Help me out here, Clay. I know Katrina’s been sending things your way.”

Don’t even suggest it, Clay. But I could think of nothing else. “Actually, Helen, I’ve been working on something,” I heard myself say. “A novel about a fallen angel—a memoir-style story told from the viewpoint of a demon.” Inwardly, I cursed myself.

“Clay”— a slow, appreciative smile eased across her features—“I had no idea you had gone back to writing.”

Since the failure of Coming Home, you mean.

“Sounds intriguing. Religious fiction is getting hotter, and you do know we get first right of refusal.”

I’m an idiot. “I know.”

“Give it to Phil or Anu, and we’ll take it to committee.” She replaced the glasses, sliding them down her nose.

“It’s not quite finished—”

“Just get us something to look at.” She smiled, a second reminder that the meeting was over.

I thanked her, eager to get out of her office, to figure out what I had just done. Eager to get on with the day and to my appointment that evening.

I passed Sheila in the hallway, and the sight of her startled me. She looked drawn, thinner than I had ever seen her, and I realized it had been weeks since we’d had a real conversation. I had never seen her look quite like this—she was practically gaunt, and her lavender twin-set matched the smudges beneath her eyes.

“Clay, how are you? I talked to Aubrey over the holiday. She said she saw you. And that you’re seeing someone.” She smiled slightly.

That struck me as hilarious—in a manic, high-pitched laughing kind of way. “It’s, uh, a casual thing. And you? How are you?” I thought of Helen and her “you look terrible.” Apparently it was going around; I had never seen Sheila look so unattractive. I had never seen her look unattractive, period.

She took a long, shaky sigh. “Oh, Dan and I are separated.”

“I’m so sorry.” I said it because it was the proper thing to say. It was the thing I had grown sick of hearing from others about this time last year. But I wasn’t sorry, not really. Despite her haggard appearance, I had a hard time summoning any compassion for her. Thinking back to what Lucian had told me, to the “have to see you” e-mail, I found my sympathies rested solidly with Dan. What was it with Sheila and Aubrey, the adultery twins? I should call Dan. I ought to be having this conversation with him.

“Yeah.” She glanced down at the papers in her hand. She appeared to have been en route to the copy machine. “It’s difficult. I don’t know what will happen.”

“Well, if there’s anything I can do . . .” But not only was I sure there was nothing I could do—I was fairly certain I wouldn’t do anything for her if I could.

“I’m glad you’re seeing someone, Clay. I’m not sure Aubrey realizes yet how much she lost.”

I thanked her and excused myself.

Her words stayed with me the rest of the day, as powerful, almost, as Lucian’s.

I REALIZED AFTER MEETING with Helen that I might have a problem. I had just proposed a story based on the memoir that Lucian had apparently submitted—or gotten through otherwise demonic means—to Katrina. Maybe the stack of papers on my desk bore little enough resemblance to the scant pages Katrina had given me that it wouldn’t be an issue, but I couldn’t find the proposal she had given me to know for sure. And I did not like the idea that I was walking what felt like a thin ethical line, especially considering on whose behalf I walked it.

Closing my office door, I phoned Katrina, but she wasn’t in. Not wanting to draw more attention to the matter than necessary and not wanting to talk to her assistant, I sent her an e-mail asking for electronic copies of the proposals she had given me on her visit two weeks before.

That was all I could do. That, and worry.

THE AROMAS OF WARM bread mingled with garlic, salami, and olives. It had once been an endurance test for me to make it to Prince Street without getting sidelined by every temptation on Salem. When Aubrey and I used to come to the North End for dinner, we would stop afterward at the twenty-four-hour bakery to buy turnovers and semolina bread for lunch the next day. In our last year of marriage, we still perused these streets for new restaurants, but the discussions we once had over pasta and veal dwindled to the clinking chatter of our cutlery, and we often forgot the bakery.

On the corner of Prince and Hanover, I paused before the iron gates of Saint Leonard’s, which bore the emblem of nail-scarred hands folded in front of a cross. In the summer, especially on feast days, church ladies sold Saint Anthony’s oil and religious icons at a table around the corner. Tonight the heavy wooden doors beyond the gate were locked tight, as though against sin itself—in addition to editors who cavorted with demons and spent entire nights contemplating Satan. Standing before the crumbling plaster of the church, I felt like more of a stranger to that churchgoing world of my youth than I did to Lucian’s spirit-inhabited realm.

But most unsettling, I felt less and less a part of the secular world in which I lived.

It was nearly seven o’clock. I hurried down Hanover, the smell of the ocean briny in my nose. In summer the restaurants—barely more than little open-kitchen joints boasting no more than eight tables apiece—threw open their doors, spilling tables onto the sidewalk to catch the influx of tourists and saints’ feasts celebrants. Tonight they were closed up against the coastal chill, menus peering out from windows, the flames of tiny candles dancing on the tabletops inside.

On the second-floor entrance of Vittorio’s, I experienced a brief moment of déjà vu when the host informed me my party was already waiting, and again when he led me to a candlelit booth where a woman in her thirties waved at me.

She was a wholesome, if average-looking woman. A gold chain and single diamond pendant dangled over the folded neck of her navy blue turtleneck. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

I slid into the booth and took the menu from the host. When he had gone, I said, “If Aubrey is going to show up, tell me now.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Not as far as I know.”

I shrugged out of my coat, still winded from the walk, my ears tingling from the cold. Then I noticed the glass of red wine on the table. Had she ordered it for me, to antagonize me? Did she know about my night with the bottle of cheap red wine that day after the walk through the Commons?

I ignored the wine, saying little as the waiter brought us bread and took orders for dinner. “Mussels Fra Diavolo,” I said, gazing at the woman across from me. Lucian rolled her eyes.

“Your name means ‘light,’” I said without preamble when the waiter had gone.

“Yes.”

I tried to see past the faint laugh lines around her eyes, the diamond stud earrings, the indentations through her sweater where bra straps bit into her shoulders, the wedding ring on her finger.

Such elaborate lengths, I thought, slightly sickened. “An angel of light?”

“Sometimes I still take that form.”

I tried to imagine what an angel of light would look like, but it was like trying to summon a modern-day leprechaun.

“You can’t fathom it, so don’t bother.” She leaned back.

“How long will this go on?”

She tilted her head and seemed, for the first time, to have no ready answer. Finally, she said, “Until it’s finished. Or we run out of time.”

“Until what’s finished?”

“Your story.”

“You mean your story.” I thought of my discussion with Helen, of the proposal from Katrina. I needed time to sort it all through, to figure out how much of a hole I had dug for myself and how I would get myself out. Meanwhile, the only thing that mattered was having more of her story to take home with my leftover pasta tonight.

“Tell me about Adam.” I began the mental calculation of when I might get home and how late I might stay up scribbling, perhaps even in bed, and how many hours of sleep I might get. Helen’s blunt conversation with me today had returned at least a portion of my focus to the routine necessities of my job, no matter how empty they were to me these days.

“All right,” she said, tracing the edge of the table through the tablecloth. “About Adam . . .”

“Wait. How do you know the Bible so well?”

She laughed then and seemed surprised. “Because I lived it! I understand Scripture intrinsically and intellectually better than any of your so-called enlightened churchgoers. Lucifer himself is a master theologian. Better than any of your preachers or seminarians, I assure you.”

Intrinsic understanding. A theological master. It was the claim of thousands of spiritual gurus, self-proclaimed prophets, Kool-Aid killers, and Branch Davidian leaders.

“Now, about Adam”—she propped her chin in her hand—“history and popular myth have done him a great disservice. Let me tell you that Adam was perhaps the best-looking man I have ever seen. Of course, at that time, there was nothing to compare him to, and for the better part of a few centuries, humans were all clay freaks to me. I guarantee you, if your backyard compost pile suddenly got up and started taking over your house, you would feel the same. But in retrospect I can honestly say he was handsome.”

I wondered if I should point out that I didn’t have a backyard, which reminded me—

“How come you’ve never shown up at my apartment?”

Her impatience turned into a moue of distaste. “Please. I’m trying to tell you something. Can we come back to this later? Listen to me now: Adam was an admirable man. For as much as I resented him, I also found myself drawn to him. Sure, the plants were nice to look at, and the animals were entertaining, albeit predictable—all that eating and rutting—but Adam . . . he was dynamic. I never tired of watching him, and neither did Lucifer. Of course, Lucifer hated him because of who he was and who had made him. Adam not only bore the Creator’s stamp; he bore his likeness. He was a brilliant thinker, a creature of reason. He observed the things around him. He was a scientist. He was also an agriculturalist, a botanist, a zoologist, and a horticulturist,” she said, ticking all the “ists” off on her fingers. “He was a husband, a man with responsibility: He cared for the garden; he ruled the animals; he was a family man. And he walked with God. Literally.”

As she spoke, I noticed that she moved differently than she had as the woman in the museum. It reminded me of the effect costumes had on actors.

“And what about Eve?”

She stroked the stem of the glass, silent for a moment. “In Eve,” she said softly, “of all creatures, I saw something that might have inspired me. Something with which I could most identify. She was second-generation mud, of course, but she was intelligent, intuitive, and beautiful—striking in fact. She reminded me a little of myself.”

One of the cooks in the small kitchen had started singing. I recognized the strains of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”:

Depart, O night!

Set, you stars!

At dawn, I shall win.

She propped her chin on the back of her hand. “Life then was beautifully predictable and secure. Oh, the bliss of that age! I watched and dreamed and experienced peace vicariously.” She glanced down at the tablecloth, scratching at it with her finger. “But Lucifer remained vigilant, a spider on the periphery of his beautiful web.

“The first glance. Remember it? I did. So did Lucifer. Your eyes will be opened! Lucifer told her. You will be like God. He was sure of himself, but I less so. The woman was brilliant, perceptive in ways that even Adam was not. I thought to myself: She is made in the image of God—she will know what you do. She is made in the image of God! What more can there be for her? She will not choose it. But in the end we were more alike than I had realized. How I wanted to rail at her! Was it not enough that she and her man were the new favorites of God? How greedy they were! How much more did they expect, could they need? And yet I, too, had once known bliss. Still, I began to hate her after that.”

“And so it happened again,” I said.

She nodded slightly. “In Eve’s tempting, all the combined drama of what had gone before played out again, like your play-actors on a miniature stage with the script of a well-known story.

“That day, as I watched Adam and his wife realize for the first time they were naked, I was overcome by sadness—and déjà vu. I cut the strings by which I had vicariously experienced their contentment, unwilling to go through the emotions again. I remembered too well what it was to be exposed—when all the blithe routine of life slips away, and there is only regret and the overpowering knowledge of an irrevocable act.” She sighed. “It was futile, their hiding. We all knew it. And El—”

“Cursed them.”

“Quite the biblical scholar now, aren’t we?” Her brows arched. She looked like the quintessential soccer mom. A scolding soccer mom. “Yes, he cursed them. But I didn’t stay to watch. I could recall too well the shivering grief of that spirit over the deep, crying out in the dark. I couldn’t bear to witness it all again, even as I admitted that a tiny part of me took delight in knowing we weren’t the only ones to fail El. Perhaps I was even a little smug”— she lifted her glass by the stem as if to gauge the color of the wine—“but my satisfaction sweetened nothing.”

“Why not?”

She gazed across the rim of the glass at me. “Because it is a sad tale I’m telling you. Do you weep? No. Of course not. You can’t imagine the loss of perfection. This is the only world you know.” She set the wine glass down on the tablecloth, turned it this way and that. “You literally had to be there—before—to understand the gall of that remorse as it stained . . . the cup . . . of my heart.” Her finger traced the stem, too hard, and the glass toppled over, practically in slow motion.

I started, bumping my hand on the edge of the table as I tried to grab the glass in time. I wasn’t fast enough, and the wine bled out over the tablecloth in a plum-colored blot, creeping in all directions.

“Of course, the remorse has faded some since then,” she said, gazing dispassionately at the blooming stain.

I daubed at the spill, irritated. When the waiter arrived with my salad, he set it on a nearby table and went about cleaning ours, going so far as to remove everything on it and to spread a pressed, pristine white linen across the scratched and worn surface beneath.

Lucian the soccer mom watched all of this with strange impassivity, saying nothing when the waiter assured her it was no problem. I said we were terribly sorry and urged him not to go to all the trouble. As the waiter set everything back, I noted an ironic, if slightly bitter, look on the demon’s face.

After replacing the settings and condiments, he served my salad and carried the dirty linens away.

I picked at my food in silence after that, and she watched me, her chin resting on the back of her hand.

“I supposed El would turn his back on the clay humans,” she said at last. “That he would destroy the garden as he had destroyed Eden once before, leaving them as naked and as miserably at odds with him as we were. And I wondered why El had done it, had put himself through it again—the disappointment of a creation all too free to choose ill. As I sit here with you, I’ve yet to find an answer for that.”

Lucian seemed to be looking through me, as if trying to answer the question for the millionth time.

“Either way, Eden was finished.” I speared a pepper.

“Yes. Though it didn’t come about as I expected. This time it was different.” She rubbed her forearm, as though to smooth away goose bumps. “This time there were consequences.”

“The curses.”

She nodded. “With words that rang prophetic, El cursed the form Lucifer had taken. I didn’t understand it all at the time and would not for some time to come. We had never heard prophecy before. El cursed the ground from which Adam would grow their food and foretold the pain with which the woman would bear children and drove them both out of the garden and into the rest of the world. Those of us watching the human mimicry of our own first Eden pulled away in a corporate shudder. Adam and his woman would die.”

The waiter appeared then with my pasta. He turned to Lucian. “Would you like another glass of wine, ma’am?”

The demon gave a slight smile. “No, thank you. I’ll only spill it again.”

“There’s something I don’t understand.” I wound pasta around my fork. “They didn’t die right away. At least Adam didn’t.” It hadn’t said anything about Eve, but if the biblical account were to be taken literally—and I didn’t see how it could—Adam had lived some nine hundred years.

“Of course not.” She pressed tiny indentations in the tablecloth with the prongs of her fork. “But they changed physically and spiritually. They were marred now, at odds with the world and destined to struggle against it and against themselves. Strife is, after all, the constant companion of imperfection. Even so, it took time for Adam’s body—clay, but genetically perfect by any standard of yours—to submit to the sentence of mortality.”

“Why didn’t God just kill him?”

“Trust me, at the time nine hundred years seemed frighteningly short—it still does. I really don’t know how you cope with your eighty-something life spans, and that’s a best-case scenario, isn’t it?” She gave me a pert little smile, her lips pressed into the shape of a heart. “Suffice it to say, we were horrified by the entire concept of dying, even if we weren’t the ones with the death sentence. None of us had experienced mortality, not even as spectators.”

To have never seen death? As her story progressed, it sounded less like the biblical account of stodgy old men and more like a SyFy Channel movie.

“Here’s something for you”— she pointed the fork at me—“you asked about the light-bringer, Lucifer. If Adam and his wife were the first and best specimens of your race, slowly but surely giving in to the inevitable, Lucifer, too, had begun to change. On the outside he was still radiant—is to this day—never cursed with mortal death as your kind is, only losing the glamour of the Shekinah glory by miniscule fractions through the ages. But inside he had changed. Even by the time of Adam there was little left of that perfect governor, of that shining prince. He was a new creature. But then, so were we all. And the world changed, too.”

“Why would the world change?”

“Just as one renegade gene creates a new thing, the world had begun to mutate.” Her casual shrug said it was nothing important. “It was the natural order, a trajectory set in motion by a single aberration that signaled perversity to come.”

I thought back to every beautiful place I had ever been—to the red rocks of Utah, the shores of Saint Lucia, the peaks of the Guilin Mountains along the Li River. I thought of Aubrey’s travel books, of Ansel Adams’s black-and-whites.

“Yes, I call your beautiful world mutant and perverse. So would you if you had seen the original. If you had, you would know how far we’ve all veered, how like a cancer things have grown. In fact, I almost felt sympathy for El when I saw how saddened he was again. But I, too, had begun to change.”

She had turned her fork over and was on the verge of pressing another row of indentations into the tablecloth when she started, as though something had caught her eye across the room. For a moment she was still, her eyes narrowed, seeming to peer through booths and walls and kitchen. She reminded me of an animal, ears back, hackles raised, haunches tense. I followed the line of her gaze trying to see who—or what—had captured her attention. But then her posture relaxed, and she was back at the tablecloth with the fork.

“So as I said, the world was mutating,” she said, prick, prick, pricking at the cloth, looking up at me once to make sure, I assume, I was listening. “From the earth sprung hateful and ugly things that flourished amid all that was lush and good. There would be no more accord among the animals now; they would follow a different order, no longer subsisting exclusively on plants but also on one another. Adam’s flesh was no longer the same, though it would take centuries for disease to manifest itself, for bodies so genetically pure that a man could marry his sister to corrupt down through the generations to the point where a man dare not marry even his cousin. In fact, it took, as you have read, 930 years for Adam to die, and his children lived similarly long lives.”

I couldn’t believe it. She had actually made a kind of sense out of something I was sure would prove a faltering point.

“Of course it makes sense.” She lifted her chin. “As surely as the old doctrine of sin handed down from the father to the sons has remained thematic throughout your time. Look around you. See the truth of it manifest today: the imperfection of your eyes, the weakness of your immune systems, the proclivity of some of you for disease and cancer, asthma and allergies, genetic disorders of all kinds.”

I did look around, my gaze settling on the large table of twelve in the center of the small restaurant. They must have been a family, I thought, feeling a slight pang of envy. And now I took tally: At least five of the people sitting at the table wore glasses. One of them, a young man in his twenties, was in a wheelchair. The oldest person at the table was a white-haired lady, her nape bent by a bump. She ate slowly, chewing her food with dogged purpose. I guessed she might be 85.

Eighty-five . . . versus 930. What had Adam looked like at 85?

“He was virile,” she said. “Quite the stallion.”

Now there was a thought that was going to fester.

“It isn’t just you, though. You haven’t had the nutrient wholeness of those first foods in ages. Look at what you pass off as food today. Frankly, I’m surprised you live twenty years on that stuff.” She gestured toward my pasta. “Add to it the fact that you’re missing the full health of the earth as it originally was, and you realize how far things have come. Do you think your ancients went around slathered with sunscreen? Do you think they had to infuse their soil with chemicals?”

I looked at the remainder of my pasta. Just earlier I had congratulated myself on actually eating a hot meal.

“And so the earth itself began to die a little, though like Adam it would survive a long while yet.”

She was looking sidelong at that table of twelve. What was it that had her attention? With an uneasy sense I wondered if I would see someone die tonight. Would that old woman with her white hair choke and fall over, expire as horrified family members performed the Heimlich, CPR? Please, I thought, not sure who I thought it to—maybe all this talk of God, of creation and sin was affecting me—please no. I needed to hear this, uninterrupted. I needed more. I needed to have this time.

Someone could die tonight, and I’m worried about getting my demonic fix.

“Meanwhile, all over the faltering planet, the clay humans raised up others just like them in a world plagued with aberrations and depravity, fostering a new culture of death,” she said, her eyes on the table.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” But her words called to mind the mummy room at the museum, her comment that all of it had come from those first, original two. And I had thought she had been referring to sophisticated Egyptian culture.

Her mouth curved, her attention solidly fixed on me again. “It does sound grim, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. At least from my point of view. We had learned, by then, to take delight in what we saw, in what we perceived as the prolonged failure of El. Because, you see, if he failed with his new creations, these new heirs, it only served to make us look a little better. CLAY, LOOK AT ME WHILE I’M TALKING TO YOU!”

My attention snapped from the family back to her.

“I’m not here for my own edification! I know this story, remember?” The soccer mom’s voice had raised in angry, demonic glory.

“I-I’m sorry—”

She jabbed her finger into the tablecloth. “Every time you fail, it proves something. Every time the humans failed, it made us feel better. We reveled in every instance of human ridiculousness,” she said with biting annunciation, her tone lower but intense, her lips pulled back from her teeth.

“I understand.” I wanted her to know I was listening.

“No, you don’t. El didn’t ignore the clay humans. He did not cut them off. Not at all. He took an interest in their daily affairs, though he no longer walked with them in the afternoon. And that is significant.” Her blue eyes had come to dark, frightening life.

“He made concessions. He persevered through their constant and abiding imperfections and wrongdoings with more patience than I thought existed in all the created universe. He taught them how to make appropriately bloody, laborious, and horrible sacrifices in symbolic atonement.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to leave it there. But I knew there was more. Knew I wanted to know it. “And?”

“And then he forgave them.”

She was staring so intently at me that I found myself averting my gaze as one does from oncoming headlights. When she said nothing more, I glanced up to find her still staring at me, as though the implication of her words were sinking in for her, all over again.

She was seething.

“Think about that.” She reached for her coat, then, with a quick glance toward the other end of the restaurant again, slid out of the booth. “We will have to do this faster.” She put the coat on. “Time is getting away from us.”

She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked out. In the middle of the restaurant, the table of twelve broke into a round of “Happy Birthday,” as the old woman blew out the candle on a piece of ricotta pie.