Later, well past 1:00 a.m., I returned to my account. I had combed it a dozen times in the last week but left each time feeling that something was missing. Even as he took me speeding through the heavens and introduced me to Eden, he was coy, refusing to put me at the edge of his understanding as I demanded my authors do in their narratives, holding back some vital piece of information.
I checked my calendar.
The blank grid stared back.
13
The parade was on TV. Apparently it was Thanksgiving. But all I knew or cared about was that it had been five days. Five days, and nothing. I sifted through the stack of pages comprising my record as an archaeologist brushes dirt through a sieve, searching for details, meaning, reason.
My pulse throbbed in my temple. I was more conscious of it of late, imagining that I felt its thumping shiver through the mattress beneath me as I lay in bed at night. This experience had drained me, this thing that I had fallen victim or privy to.
I checked my schedule by the hour—sometimes more often—lingering at the keyboard like a lover waiting by a silent phone.
In these idling moments of distracted nonproductivity, I looked up articles on Horus, searched for pictures of the falcon-headed god to see if I saw anything of the demonic scowl in the ancient idol’s eyes. In dark, postmidnight hours, I browsed the Internet, following the links through a pantheon of Egyptian gods until, dozing in my chair before dawn, I dreamed convoluted dreams of bird-headed deities with clay bodies, of sarcophagi with wide-eyed funeral masks, of a woman the color of bone singing by the pale light of Lucian’s moon.
I woke up in the afternoon, raked my hands through my hair, scrubbed at the stubble on my cheeks, and realized the holiday had passed. It was the weekend.
That day, as I returned to the account of my meetings with Lucian, I was disturbed by the fragility of the paper it was written on, the fraying edges of the notebook pages, the bloated ink where I had set a glass of water on one of them. I recalled the shambles of the house in Belmont, the splintered table leg.
I immediately decided that I should type the entire thing, commit it to a more lasting medium.
When I finished, it was well past dark. I sat back, considered the last line of my account, which ended in the museum with Aubrey and me parting ways again. With Lucifer searching for the weakness in man.
On impulse, I pulled up an online Bible and then faltered. There were at least two dozen translations to pick from. We had read the King James in confirmation, the “thees” and “thous” as mysterious to me as God himself. I randomly chose a more modern version.
It was so bare-boned. The image of God hovering over the water that had made Lucian shudder was recounted here with all the emotion of a recipe. I read through the days of creation, and though I found no inconsistencies between this account and the demon’s, I found no mention of the angelic host or Lucifer, of the fall that precipitated the earth’s emptiness. I read through the creation of animals and man. I found it retold in the next chapter, this time with more detail, even down to the exact rivers flowing into the garden. The specificity surprised me, as though one might actually locate the place on a map. I read the first two chapters again, this time with a writer’s appreciation for the omniscient point of view, the declarative sentences, the repetition.
Still it seemed much the same as it had been thirty years ago in Sunday school: dry and rote, down to the repetition of the days coming and going in numbered sequence. I was disappointed, tired, and very hungry. My mouse hovered over the X that would close the online Bible, but then something happened: I heard the echo of past conversations with Lucian coming back to me now in fragments like the lyrics of a half-forgotten song.
