Gremory once laid waste to an entire city-state in Sumer and made its rivers flow with gore. He’s calmed down a bit now, and I think he’s happier for it. I’m envious.
The last of the sun is dipping its sucked-sherbet into the sugary sky over Oxford Street. We watch it disappear.
“Mastodon are playing in Brixton tonight,” says Gremory, after a while. “You want to come?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I say. “I think I’ll head on back upstairs.”
“See, you say that, my friend,” says Grem, tapping out his spliff and tucking the end in the pocket of his denim jacket, “but you know and I know that you’re going to wait till I’m gone, then get all hopped up on Dexedrine and find something long-haired and broken to fuck you into oblivion.”
I don’t say anything. We all have our demons. Mine just knows me a bit too well.
“Hey,” he says, “no judge. Everyone’s got their poison. See you tomorrow. Stay cool.”
He flips me the two-horned finger salute and jumps off the roof, turning into a pigeon as he falls. Then he flaps away toward Brixton.
As soon as he’s gone, I go straight to Heaven.
Somewhere around the middle of the eighteenth century, I decided I should give up the tragic poets and doomed revolutionaries and, if I couldn’t abstain completely, at least settle down with someone relatively normal.
And so I married a country pastor.
He was surprised when I showed up in his study with my shining eyes, naked as the day I was never born.
I thought we would at least have some shared interests. But he was one of those men of faith who looks away from the altar when he speaks his sermons, avoiding the eyes of an unwelcome houseguest.
We were married in the springtime. He preferred me in my women’s weeds, white and perfect as the shepherdesses in the pastoral paintings he would not allow in the house. He was good to me, in his way. He was gentle, and never beat me.
He would make love to me gingerly between his sheets, thrusting blindly in the dark, trying to touch as little of my body as possible. He said that that was God’s way. I tried to tell him that the God I knew was fire and passion and cared not at all about how humans choose to fuck.
In the mornings I would boil him a single egg and watch him crack the shell with his short nails, not damaging the hard white jelly at all, leaving a pure and perfect oval so sinless that he sometimes couldn’t bear to bite into it.
I thought it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t in love with him.
It did.
One night I came to him in my gown. So many layers in those days, especially in bed. I made my husband lie on top of the coverlet and lit the oil lamp.
Then I took everything off. Every stitch. He watched me while I stepped out of my gown, my night stays, dirty-white lace dropping to the floor. The bloomers; the ribbons in my hair.
Then I kept going. I took off my skin and hung it on a nail behind the door. I peeled away layers of flesh and bone until I stood there in my true form, burning and spinning, the rush in my ears so fierce I could hardly hear my husband scream.
Then I left him.
I hear he ended in a madhouse.
There are worse places.
You can’t just walk into Heaven. There’s a dress code, and a door charge, too, unless you’re on the guest list. We’re not allowed to handle money, so I slip into something that’ll let me walk straight in.
Black jeans. Black lipstick. Black heels. A tight black mesh top. Snow-white hair dipped in eggshell blue. Smooth skin, a whisper of something Asian in the eyes. Soft fat layered in the right places over rigid muscle.
God, I look fantastic.
The girl taking tickets has a pair of angel wings tattooed on her back. I tell her I’m with the band.
She looks me up and down and nods me in.
Inside Heaven, it’s all sweat and warm beer and the chill trails of cigarette smoke from the nicotine pen outside. There’s static in the air. The roadies have just finished setting up.
I get someone to buy me a Diet Coke at the bar, then lurk at the back, looking mysterious, while dying-robot music stutters frantic over a slow bass heartbeat. I like it.
I’m not fallen. I never fell. I’m just slumming it.
In the twenty minutes before the band, I send three creeps careening for the exit, muttering prayers they haven’t spoken since childhood.
Then the band comes on. Just a drummer, a keyboardist in a tight silver skirt, and him.
His eyes are large and blue and sad. His cheekbones were carved in marble by a crazed sculptor to drive women mad.
But I am not a woman. I’m something else.
A static whine.
Then it starts.
The words are all there, love and death and rage and the riot of fighting through fear to something more, something wholly human. But Benjamin sings like one of us. All ice and holy fire.
The crowd goes wild.
I wait for him in the alley after the show. When he sees me, he stops dead, his long coat falling around his shoulders.
I try to think of something profound to say.
“You were great,” I tell him, looking at my feet. The heels are hurting me. I danced all night.
“I know you from somewhere,” he says. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
He’s high on adrenaline, and drunk.
But not too drunk, not yet.
I smile, and hold out my hands.
I wake up on a dirty mattress somewhere on Caledonian Road. A train is rattling overhead. Pigeons vomiting in the walls. The smell of cheap coffee, bittersweet and black.
Benjamin is already up, already half-dressed. In the dawn light, his naked torso is smooth and translucent-pale, dusted with freckles. Eleven blond hairs sprout from his chest. I counted them all last night.
I’m going to count every freckle. Every scar. I’m going to number his days and open his heart and drink his passion and his pain. I’m going to tell him all the names of the stars so he can write them down in a song.
Benjamin places a mug of coffee in front of me and stares.
“I remember you now,” he says.
I sip my coffee and shake my head. “You must be thinking of someone else.”
“I do,” he says. “I remember. I called you. It was a mistake.”
My mouth is dry. “People call all the time,” I say. “It’s what people do.”
“No,” he says. “I mean, this was a mistake. I had a nice time. A really nice time. But I can’t give you what you want.”
He’s staring out the window at the fist of traffic groaning down the road toward Camden.
“You don’t want me to stay?”
He looks at me, right through my skin.
“I want you to stay,” he says, “but I need you to leave.”
Benjamin gives me twenty pounds for a taxi. I get out at Angel Station and stop at a pay phone which hasn’t been operational in years. I pick up the receiver and call the only number I know.
“Your prayer will be answered by the next available operative. Please note that we cannot take requests for miracles over the phone. Your orisons may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.”
“Hello, my name is Legion, how can I help you this morning?”
“Grem,” I say, “it’s me.”
“Where the fuck have you been?” Grem hisses down the line. Demons can really hiss. “You’re three hours late. Supervisor’s freaking out. Are you even coming in?”
“I—” I swallow hard. “I don’t think so. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow either. I don’t think I can do the job anymore.”
“Mate,” he says, “what happened? Are you okay?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, and my voice is thick and strange. “I don’t think I’ve been okay for a very long time.”