I didn’t answer that.
“Besides, even though we knew we had committed some thing, we had no idea how irrevocable our actions were. Not yet. So there was only remorse—black, clinging like tar, eating like acid.
“Meanwhile, there was the shaking of El’s spirit like the keening of a banshee, as though the whole world had died. And I suppose it had. It was unbearable, that sound—a pain without end or even the hope of death to escape it. I could not watch, was unable to stand the sight of that spirit hovering over the darkness, though I couldn’t block out the sound of it.
“But this was the most terrible thing of alclass="underline" El had turned away.” He tried to tuck a rogue strand of hair behind his ear. When it wouldn’t stay put but teased along the edge of his cheek, he yanked it out with a savage pull. I stared as the patch along the side of his temple sprouted angry red dots against the white of his scalp.
“I didn’t know why.” He seemed not to notice the deviance of his own actions as he flicked the hair off his fingers. “I didn’t understand that we had opened an unbridgeable chasm between us. All I knew was that he couldn’t stand to look at us. Oh, but to know that everything is wrong with the universe, and to know that you had a part in that irrevocable drama, is just about too much for any mind to take. I had lived always for the moment—that was, after all, all there had been—and now I could see no end to it. Regret ate at me like a ravenous worm. Had I been human, I would have gone insane.”
Are you sure you didn’t? I remembered his strange laughter but said only, “Obviously it did end.”
He shrugged. “Eventually. And I might have spent only an epoch like that. But it felt like an eternity.”
We walked in silence. What did one say to something like that—I’m sorry?
I had almost forgotten who I was talking to.
The demon pointed down the hill. “Look! The Frog Pond. When winter sets in, we should go ice skating there.”
DESPITE MY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE of Lucifer, I couldn’t picture him—her, it, whatever the devil was—sitting idle after that. When I asked Lucian about it, he shook his youthful head.
“He kept to himself and wouldn’t even look at Eden. He was like a child who abandons a toy after he’s broken it. What was Eden to him now? Even if it had still been perfect, it might as well have been ruined; he had set his eyes on heaven. As for us, we no more existed to him than Eden did in those days . . . those nights. It was all one night to me, those hours like years, as Lucifer raised his head to heaven and narrowed his eyes at God.”
The demon squinted at the sun. “We huddled on the fringes of Lucifer’s light—all the rest of the world was darkness but for him—never venturing any closer for fear of his anger or any farther away for fear of the darkness. And all the while there was that terrible, shuddering spirit of El.
“Meanwhile, Lucifer grew bolder by the day. He blasted El with sharp, serrated words. I thought for sure the Host would come for us, that El would send us away or worse, scatter us like salt over a field.”
“Did you think he would obliterate you?”
The kid shrugged. “I had no concept of death, though I will say I expected something terrible. And I even thought by then that I might welcome it. But El was absorbed by grief, which only seemed to incense Lucifer.”
“Why wasn’t he afraid? He had been the favorite; he had the most to lose.”
“Exactly. El had never ignored the voice of his favorite before. And as his silence continued, Lucifer grew more venomous. I had never seen this kind of resentment. The violence of our uprising seemed like children’s quarrels by comparison.”
Children’s quarrels? The horrible face of the seraph in my dream hovered before me.
“Lucifer ranted and stalked. And we trailed him like ermine on the train of a king. Then, just when I thought he had forgotten us, El broke his silence.”
We were nearing Charles Street. What happened next was something I would replay over and over in my mind for weeks. A woman jogger was running toward us. She was all blonde hair and black running pants, a hot pink iPod strapped to her arm. I thought with some irony that this was the extent of my social life of late: appreciation of women going the other way.
Assuming, of course, that they were not demons in bookstores.
Just as she was about to pass us, Lucian tripped, his hand grabbing at my shoulder as he practically fell into the woman’s path. It was such a queer incident; I had never seen him anything other than fully composed. The startled jogger, for her part, managed to skirt him just in time to avoid a collision that might have kneecapped her, and Lucian escaped the fall, thanks to his pulling at my shoulder which nearly took me down with him. As I stumbled, shoving the demon’s hand away, I saw alarm and confusion on the woman’s face. But, as we more or less righted ourselves, she seemed to decide that Lucian was neither an attacker nor injured, and she ran on.
Lucian stared after her with slatted eyes. He murmured something under his breath.
“What was that about?” I demanded. It was bad enough that he looked like a punk. Did he have to act like one, too?
“You wanted her.”
It was close enough to the truth to shut me up.
I would come back again and again to this interchange, would remember that narrowed look on Lucian’s face for weeks and months to come.
OUTSIDE THE GATE OF the Garden, a bearded man played an electric guitar. It was plugged into an amp, and now I realized the source of the music we had heard from the Commons softball field. As we crossed Charles Street, I asked, “What kind of special curse does one reserve for someone who has ruined everything?”
“We’re talking about Lucifer, not Aubrey. And El didn’t curse Lucifer.” He pulled a cigarette out of his coat pocket.
It was bizarre, seeing him light up. It was the first time I had actually seen him ingest anything.
“He didn’t strike us down, either.”
“So what did he do?”
“He drew breath.” He exhaled a stream of smoke that drifted before and then over us, diffusing like ectoplasm. “And with that inaugural sound we, with keen immortal perception, knew that something was about to happen. Something different.”
“How could you tell?”
“How can I explain this?” He kicked a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, an escapee from a nearby trash bin. “It was a pregnant sound. Expectant, like a hesitation on the verge of speech. It vibrated throughout the universe like the tight pulse of a tuning fork.” He flicked his fingers, sending a ripple of invisible energy into the air and a spatter of ash toward the ground.
We veered down a small path toward roped-off flowerbeds and domed shrubs. I thought back to my nightmare, to the vision of the newly fallen drifting away, fading into the residue of sleep. I didn’t know what happened next. I had to know. I was jonesing, pure and simple. I stopped. “Show me.”
His brows rose, as though he were waiting for a punch line.
“Show me,” I said again.
He pulled the cigarette from between his lips and flicked it away. “I will never understand humans,” he said and then grabbed me by the upper arm.
My experience the night before had been birthed into the warm vessel of sleep. But this was an electrifying jolt, like the first chug of a roller coaster on a track. Just as I felt I had reached the apex of that first hill, the universe unfurled before me, as though I were standing in the narrow part of a funnel looking out toward the opening of everything. I was aware of the vastness of it, the infinite amplifications of space before me, the stars. And I knew, somehow, that each of them had a name known to El.