Part 12 (1/2)
Ti away from us?
I coent recollection of every word in the act of writing it When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper fro bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces ofthat had been near to hand
I opened my laptop and started to type
Around 1:00 aether-ht there was sonificant about the fa about them first drew her interest and then piqued her But that wasn't it, the thing that precipitated therevelation in her own story The thing she knew she must say
”And then he forgave them”
I had thought nothing about that stateiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion
Even for demons?
I scrolled back through the electronic account to an earlier appoint at me as I came to them:
”Had I been a God, I would have set it all back I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been””Why couldn't you? For that matter, ouldn't God?””I'll tell you why: because ere damned!” damned!”
I scrolled forward
”He forgave them”
I sat back inat the screen
LATE THAT NIGHT I received a response fronized Confused, I paged through the brief teaser of Drea: A Memoir, by L LeGeros by L LeGeros
It was the personal account of a paranoid schizophrenic
16
The demon chose two more plates and pushed them across the table toward me with a short, stocky arm
”Please stop,” I told him as the woman with the dim sum cart stamped her red symbol on our tab and pushed on I meant it not only because I was full but because the rapt interest hich he had watched me eat for the last half hour disturbed me He had inundated etable packets with tiny green peas perched on the twisted peak of their wrappers They squatted now in orphaned ones and twos inside their bamboo steamers; I could not possibly accommodate them all
”Very well” He folded those ar his jacket over the back of his chair but, seeing the way his dress shi+rt strained at the shoulders, I thought he ought to have left it on
”About your proposal to Katrina” I wasn't sure how to go about what I ned an e- even more carefully that I needed the short one, the additional one she had given ht the day she came to ain through the scant pages of Drea: A Memoir by L LeGeros by L LeGeros
”What proposal?” He seeh his eyelid never moved
So that was it Another of his mind tricks No one had seen the proposal for Demon: A Memoir Demon: A Me into a living thing onand coht, to feed it the nutriment of my preoccupation An excitement tapped in my chest, a metronome in time with my heart butinto a living thing onand coht, to feed it the nutriment of my preoccupation An excitement tapped in my chest, a metronome in time with my heart
”I see,” I said carefully More, More, I thought, I thought, though it will risk his anger though it will risk his anger ”Then in that case, I need to knohat happened after El forgave them The humans, I mean” ”Then in that case, I need to knohat happened after El forgave them The humans, I mean”
He sat up, fussing with the little teapot, over pouring a small trickle of chrysanthemum tea into his untouched cup It see and cold into this topic, so I waited, considering his bushy eyebrows, the unreestion of jowls on either side of his thin-lipped ht hih of late he seeuises
”El's acts of forgiveness beca routine is tedious Like a sound that grates on your patience so that where you had only disliked it before, you coestion of it Like a smell that has the ability to incite nausea I didn't knoho I was ave the ust and ao with theain in pain a life, once so wonderful, reat ball of earth and water But he would not relinquish the had happened within me”
”What do you h
”Like nerves after they've been severed, I could no longer sense El as I had before, even after falling away But in that saing For as little as I could perceive of him by then, I understood well his senti”
”And Lucifer?”
”Oh, he had deter ball of land-had, in fact, never given up his claiht from him the moment he abdicated it, he threide the doors to this world as though to abanquets of diversions designed just for theences for all appetites He had by then set his he had ever wanted to be: a power, a rulera God Gods He answered to a variety of nareat acts of rand”
”So he had what he wanted at last”
”After a manner, I suppose You s, the blood, or the lives It was that people did it that delighted him That with every little betrayal, the people ot hi faster and faster until she falls; like your drea in your ears And I watched it all with a sense of inevitability”
Sometimes when he was like this, when it seemed he was transported back, I wondered if his own memories were as vivid to him as they had been to me the time in the tea shop or that day in the Commons
As vivid as my memories of Sarah Marshall's death
I had al about it
”But even the forbearance of El in his grief had lier Of course, I expected him to slam down the heavy fist, but the day ca a child to the count of three, El gave the clay people 120 years to change their ways”
He sat back and crossed short ares ”I was put off! Had he ever been willing to play the suffering parent toward any one of us? Toward Lucifer, first and best-created of El, prince and anointed cherub? But El had not offered hilimmer of the patience he showed humans Never so much for any of us”
As he said this, the distant and disowned look seemed to creep first into one eye and then into the other, like a lizard slithering through his skull
”Had I been human, I would have considered h that it didn't ence they had been given They went about their ways as pleased them best And the years went by”
”All 120 of them”
”All 120 of thereed ”In the end Lucifer crowed his triuht about the destruction of El's world and the spoiling of his clay creatures like so round Noould be forced to acknowledge him; there would be no more of the clay people to talk with, commune with-and ould want to by now, anyway? Unworthy, fickle, unfaithfulThe humans were a failure It was time to destroy them”
I shuddered at the slight jeer hich he said this
”Only you Westerners fancy what happened next as the stuff of ht it as history: water covering the land, sing up creation as it had Lucifer's rock garden an age before”