“I wouldn’t know.”
He looked up at me. “Then I’ll tell you. With a glance. A thought. And the possibility of that thought acted upon. Even your Narcissus of legend, who might most resemble my master in this account, started his own infatuation with a glance into a pool where he found . . . himself.”
He dropped the tea ball into his cup. He was silent for a moment, stirring the tea that had gone, so far, unsampled. “Clay, I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you a secret. One I hardly dare whisper. When you write down this conversation and append it to the others, this is the page I would condemn to molder first were it not so central to everything.”
I had a sudden vision of a demonic Pied Piper luring me not with music but with words and story to some unknown end.
“I was swept up in the ecstasy of worship, of praising Elohim for all that he was and had been and was yet to be. And I had lifted my arm to shield my eyes—the Shekinah glory is too great even for us. And I had wept with it, with the fervency of it, until my tears nearly choked me. My awareness of God was, in that moment, so great that I was overwhelmed. It was always that way.” He didn’t so much look at me as through me. “But this time, as I lowered my arm, the tears hung like prisms in my eyes, like crystals held up to the brilliance of the sun. And I gaped at the beauty of the garden, at the refracted beauty of my own kind filling it. Suddenly, one thing stood out to me as more brilliant than all the rest of that dazzling host, blinding me through the lens of my tears so that I wiped them from my eyes like scales.”
“Lucifer,” I whispered.
“Yes. Our prince and governor come down to walk among us like so much wheat in an open field. I was dazzled! So help me, I stared and thought myself blinded. Can you fathom it? Can you possibly understand? His head was more brilliant than your sun. His wings, like a metal so pure that your quicksilver is a pathetic comparison, glimmered like so much pavé jewelry, crystals set so closely together as to appear like one winking eye of a diamond. Even his hands and feet were as perfect as unclouded ice, smooth as alabaster. But it was the power, the power and the glamour that overwhelmed me. I knew then, in a way I had not known before, that I stood in the presence of the greatest being under God. I staggered at the sight. Light. Glory. My beautiful one!” He closed his eyes as he spoke, each word falling like a boulder between us.
Lucian leaned his cheek into his hand. “And Lucifer, my prince, heard my heart and turned his eyes to me. It was almost more than I could bear, the direct brunt of that gaze—such a long and considering glance. As for me, I was rapt, seared by the stars, scorched by perfection. I fell down on my face, as I had before El a million times before, but this time to Lucifer. And my heart praised him—not for the work of the Creator in him, or even his office under God, but simply for the sake of his own magnificence. And Lucifer knew it.”
“And that made you a demon?”
“No. The sin isn’t in the temptation.”
I could not help but think of Aubrey. I never knew when she crossed that line. I had tortured myself with trying to pinpoint exactly when she betrayed me—in spirit, if not yet in deed—and at what moment I lost her. Even after she was gone, I scoured phone receipts, credit card statements, the caller ID log. I reconstructed the entire schedule of her off-site meetings and business trips during our last month together, mad with it, obsessed despite the futility.
The demon curled his fingers around his teacup as though to warm his hands—another human gesture I found somehow grotesque—and said, “I sometimes wonder what he must have seen at that moment: a lowly angel, prostrate before him—a being beautiful in its own right but so dull by comparison? Or maybe a reflection of himself, cast back as though from the watery and unworthy mirror of Narcissus. I don’t know. I don’t know why he even looked at me. I suppose he felt my adulation and was pleased by it. In fact, I know he was.”
“How do you know that?”
“I felt it. Keep in mind we aren’t like you. When we share the same purpose, we are a legion of one accord. The perfect army. So I felt it, too, when he looked away from Elohim, and then at me . . . and finally, at himself. And among our perfect awareness, the ripple it caused spread through us like the falling of dominoes, one against the other. But unlike your ivory pieces with their neat and shuffling clinks, the momentum of that disturbance was a roar—thunder—in my ears. You can’t comprehend what it is for an angelic being to hear the fabric of perfection rent.” He rubbed his forehead, pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s deafening . . . deafening. And Lucifer rose up, inspired by that mayhem, his eyes terrible, his bearing resolute. How beautiful, how awful, was the look on his face! I believe the sight of it will be with me forever, burned into the retina of my mind, the sentence of perfect recollection.”
He dropped his hand and abruptly stood up. “More hot water?”
4
As he rounded the bend of the front counter, I fully expected that he might not return. To my surprise, though, he came back a moment later with a small pot of water. He refilled my cup before pouring a drop into his own—all the cup would allow, as he had never drunk any of it.
I looked at my teacup.
“Go on—” he gestured at it—“I want to watch you enjoy it.”
“As though you haven’t seen people doing this for centuries.”
“Millennia. But I’ll never tire of it. I like to wonder what it must be to take pleasure in something so short-lived.”
I took a sip. “Let me ask you something.”
“Of course.” He reseated himself with a magnanimous tilt of his head.
“It’s obvious you haven’t liked telling me this part of your”— I fumbled for a moment—“background. So why do it?”
I had a strange sense then—the same one I used to have as a boy when I ran up the basement steps, chased by shadows—that coalesced into this thought: Were his compatriots here? Did they know, and would they approve of his coming to me like this?
“Are you with him now?” I added, on impulse.
“What, this minute?”
I nodded.
He gave me a queer look. “Are you serious? Oh, you are. No, of course not. Like you—and like him—I can be in only one place at a time. Really, you watch too much television.” He glanced at his watch, seeming to weigh the time.
A surge of anxiety streaked toward my heart. But the demon, normally so well tuned to my discomfort, seemed to be in conference with his own thoughts. Finally, he crossed his arms. “When people talk about this story, they make it so idiotic: ‘Lucifer was proud, he wanted to be like God. When he rebelled, a third of the angels followed him.’ I’ve heard all the stories—yes, even in your churches. But you have to understand: We were all proud. And Lucifer—he was the governor of the mount of God. So how natural and right it seemed that when he held out his hands like a liege accepting fealty, we would give it.
“For a moment—whatever that can be without the boundaries of time—we forgot El. And I heard Lucifer’s thoughts then as clearly as if he had exercised his voice, raised up his fist, and shouted. And why shouldn’t you praise me? Why not bow down? Am I not your perfect prince, with strength a thousand times a thousand of you, with beauty a thousand times greater, with power beyond measure? Watch now! I will go up to heaven. I will raise my throne beyond the stars of El. I will sit upon the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the clouds of glory. I will make myself like the Most High!”
His gaze had left me again, and I knew that a part of him was back in that place, in Eden then. There was a curl to his lips, but the smile was not congenial.