He’d been right that first night in the café: I hadn’t forgotten a phrase, a detail. While I’d never had an eidetic memory, his words came back to me with such repetitive insistence that the only way I could exorcise them from my consciousness was to write them down. Even now his last words on the street echoed in my mind and, I suspected, would continue to do so until I was at my desk.
He ignored me, and I thought about prompting him again, but just then he did something so subtle as to wring at reason: He pursed his lips, the chapped skin creasing reluctantly, dry as a newly fallen leaf. And I marveled at the mundane aspects of his humanity, against which I must remember the truth of what he was:
“With the clock on the wall over there ticking so loudly,” he said, “I’ve just realized I can’t tell you how long it went on like that—my life before. Isn’t that funny? I just can’t say. You can point to the calendar and say you were born on such-and-such a date and married for five years. But as for me, I could not begin to guess. Eons must have passed. Millennia. Ages. Or maybe it was really only a moment. I don’t know. When one pre-exists time, an epoch can pass like a day, and who would know it? It’s so cliché, a trite line from novels about lovers: ‘Time had no meaning.’ But that’s how we were: enrapt, enthralled with our very situation, with every aspect of our circumstances, our whole purpose for being. It was the golden age of ages—of which every age since has been only the palest shadow.”
He took the tea ball from the saucer, squeezed the hinges together just enough to crack the sphere open but not enough to let the mass of sodden leaves fall out. “It all ended with a glance.”
“What do you mean, ‘a glance’?”
“How does anything new begin? How does an extramarital affair begin?”
“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
