by Tosca Lee
Her eyes flickered toward the window behind me. I turned to see what had caught her attention. “I’m bored with this. With you.”
My head snapped back around. “What?”
“Go away. Go live out your gnat’s existence.”
“But we’re not done!”
Her eyes lolled back to me. “Yes, we are.”
“But—I don’t know how it ends!” And now I remembered something else. “Or what it has to do with me—you said this story was ultimately about me. What does this have to do with me?”
“What does this have to do with me?” she mimicked. “Can’t you do anything but think of yourself? Go home.”
“But how can I—”
“Go.”
“I don’t know—”
“GO!” She screamed it, lunging across the table at me.
I bolted up, stumbled back, knocking over my chair.
She screamed again. “Go!”
I never saw the couple’s reaction, what must have been the gaping mouth of the student behind the counter. I pushed out the door and ran to the corner of Norfolk, down the street toward my apartment, the dizziness closing over me like a hood. As I scrambled up the stairs, through the door I had forgotten to close, let alone lock, darkness overtook me like a pursuer in a black alley. I fell without feeling toward the floor, realizing as I did that something had been very wrong in this last meeting.
She hadn’t been wearing a watch.
29
White Shoulders. It was the same perfume my grandmother had worn. I knew this only because I had once chased the cat across her backyard with that glass bottle as a boy, spraying it in the animal’s eyes—a feat that had landed me a sound spanking.
Something brushed my face, soft and furry. For a moment I thought it was the cat, back from boyhood, its tail teasing my nose.
“I think I’d better call an ambulance, dear.”
Mrs. Russo knelt next to me in her wool coat and gloves, her scarf brushing my cheek as she felt my head.
“You didn’t bump it too badly, at least, as far as I can tell.”
“I’m fine,” I said, only now understanding that I was laid out on my floor, the front door hanging wide.
She reached back for a chair, slid onto the seat with a creak of her knees. “I still think we’d best call 9-1-1.”
“Please, no.” I made myself sit up, slowly, mortified. “I’m fine. My blood sugar dropped—I came running up the stairs.”
And then I remembered why.
I had never seen Lucian like that. And I had run home, like a child back to his mother’s skirts, to the protection of a building inhabited by religious Mrs. Russo.
No, it wasn’t the religion that made her so fearsome to them. I knew that now. I thought of the day in the church.
It was the prayer.
I sat up, wiped blood from my chin onto the back of my hand. At least my growing beard would hide the scab.
“I’m going to get you something to eat. I want you to leave the door open while I fix it.”
I nodded and moved onto the sofa.
WHEN SHE RETURNED, I made my way through a bowl of homemade noodle soup—“It’s from the freezer, but it’s homemade,” Mrs. Russo said—a sandwich, and three cookies. She watched me eat, telling me about her grandson’s part in the school play, the Debussy he had recently learned to play on the piano. “Oh no, dear”—she didn’t miss a beat—“finish that sandwich.”
I finished, and I had to admit I felt better. Better, and tired.
As she studied me with kind but troubled hazel eyes, I thought the wrinkles around them seemed more prominent, somehow more human than ever. She looked like she wanted to say something, but I assured her that I was fine, that I was just extremely worn down.
I promised to come knocking if I needed anything. I started to pick up the dishes, but she swatted my hand and carried them to her apartment.
She returned for a moment to tell me to come get her if I needed anything, and then left, closing the door behind her. As I got up to lock it, I wished I could close out the memory of the demon’s scream, the pernicious smile. For the first time in months I wished I could delete the memory of Lucian altogether, erasing him from the story of my life.
I SLEPT AND DREAMED of sandwich wraps, of blonde, wavy hair, of that smile, that terrible smile, of the jogger and her faceless husband.
I woke with a start. It was well past 3:00 a.m. I walked on steady legs into my living room to fumble with the lamp, wanting to banish the dark.
At my desk I woke the laptop, bypassed my calendar, and began my search for Jake Salter. It took me a while to find him, finally, on my high school alumni page under Passings. Deaths were listed by year.
“Jake Salter ’86. Youth pastor, Our Savior’s Church, Independence, MO.”
I STAYED UP UNTIL dawn exorcising the conversation in the sandwich store onto the page. When it was done, I determined I would not add it to my account. It was out of my system and that was all that mattered. I could sleep now—for days, if I wished. I could find a new job. But I was determined that I would not go back to the story. That I would leave it like a poisonous thing, a horror story come to life, a demon game that kills its human players like a bad B movie.
But by six that morning I was writing, adding my reactions to the belated revelations about Jake Salter and the jogger in the Garden, the shape of Lucian’s mouth as she screamed at me . . . waking up under the scarf and care of Mrs. Russo, White Shoulders and angora fuzz in my nostrils.
Some time after ten o’clock, I pushed back from my desk. I went to the kitchen for a snack and one of the bottles of juice Mrs. Russo had left in my refrigerator along with sliced turkey, provolone cheese, and a quart of milk. Cans of vegetable soup, a loaf of bread, and an assortment of fresh fruit sat on my counter. She had done it in spite of my protests, saying it was a privilege to serve me, that she had been “burdened” for me, as she put it, for months now.
I was just returning to my desk with a partially eaten apple when I stopped and stared at the screen.
It was the Is that jumped out at me. The first-person narrative. The story encasing the story.
I sat down slowly, my fingers sticky, the chunk of apple like Styrofoam in my mouth.
And I saw, as I had that day in Belmont, the deconstruction of everything on that page—not as a pile of wood and metal rubble, of furniture legs and earth—but of two stories: Lucian’s . . .
And mine.
My story is very closely connected to yours, he had said. My story is ultimately about you.
And then, just yesterday: My story has given way to yours.
As I stared at the narrative I on the screen, at my every fear, incredulous amazement, and myriad questions, I realized that indeed, it had.
I had written a tale, the main character of which was not Lucian, the demon, but I.
I SPENT ALL DAY rereading it, the entire thing, with new eyes. Each word from Lucian’s mouth imbued with new and sinister meaning. I saw myself no longer floating along the eddies of Lucian’s story as I had thought, but caught now, dead center in the current.
Between two firing armies.
I reconsidered the phone call in the middle of the night. The pair of women at the Bristol Lounge. The man on the train. I had thought myself the observer in all of this but found now that I had been the one being observed and that this conflict had come to include me.
A war, Lucian called it. A satanic grudge match against an omniscient God who loved his human creation. A God I did not know.
I wanted to rail as he had railed, to accuse him, but I knew without checking that my calendar remained untouched.
The demon had left me.
He had accomplished his purpose. He had put up his story like so much window dressing, spinning his tale as deftly as a spider, and it had been a distraction to me, as solid and real as the stately houses in Belmont. And just as the mansions were that day before my eyes—crumbled to the g
round, ruined—I now stood stripped of all things I once was: husband, editor, would-be writer. An honest man. A “good man.”
Worst of all, I was alone. Who could I talk to? Who could I tell who would not consider me a madman? I had lost Aubrey and alienated Sheila. I had not seen any of my supposed friends for months. I could call my sister, but where would I start, and if I did, how would she ever believe me?
I thought of Mrs. Russo, the kind, praying warrior who kept even the brash Lucian at bay. How could I tell even her?
I cancelled my doctor’s appointment. I vacillated between desperation and fear. I could not spend my life like this, but if I had inadvertently wandered into a battlefield of opposing spiritual forces, neither did I want to become yet another piece of collateral damage.
I returned to the online Bible, compared it again with my account—and I saw now that it was truly my account—of our every interaction. But while Lucian had finished his tale of jealousy, revenge, and his probable end, I knew—with the sense of one who has spent his entire life reading stories—that mine was not finished.
TWO DAYS LATER, I knocked on Mrs. Russo’s door. I had no idea what I would say, what to even ask for. But I knew she could help me find it.
When she pulled it open, she did not greet me with her characteristic smile and “Hello, dear!” but told me to come in even as she hurried into the kitchen.
She was breathing quickly, her hands hesitating in the air before her as though they had forgotten what they were about.
I had expected to come in, to search for words, to be afraid to look into those aging hazel eyes. That she seemed flustered was even more unsettling.
“Open that refrigerator, Clay, and take out the perishables. You need to take them.”
“Mrs. Russo, you’ve given me enough food to last for days. Is everything all right?”
She went into the bedroom and came back, a sweater over one arm, a book in another. A homemade sandwich was wrapped on her kitchen counter next to an apple, a bottle of water. She packed them into a carry-on bag on her kitchen table.
“Clay, would you set those flowering pots in the sink and run some water into them? Run it good, dear, until it comes out the bottom.”
“Are you leaving town?” I asked with growing alarm.
“My son had an accident this morning on his way to work. I need to go help take care of my grandchildren.”
“I’m so sorry. Is he all right?”
“He’s in the hospital, and I need to get to their house so Beth, my daughter-in-law, can be with him. On second thought, can you just take those plants with you? And will it be much trouble for you to collect the paper and mail for me while I’m gone? I don’t know how long it will be, but I’ll let you know if I’ll be more than a few weeks. I might have to trouble you to send me my bills.”
I assured her that it was no problem, that I was glad to help. And while I tried to be as helpful as possible, I felt desperately alone at the thought of her impending departure.
“Why don’t you just call me when you know more? And if you think of anything else, I have my key.”
“Thank you, dear. I meant to knock on your door earlier, but then I realized if I hurried, I could catch a train tonight, and I got distracted.” She looked around, lost, but then fixed her eyes on something—a worn Bible on her coffee table, which she added to her bag.
I loitered, like a child watching a parent pack for a business trip. “I meant to ask if you’d been to that little church down the street, the Gospel Room.”
“No, I haven’t, which is a shame since it’s so close.” She looked around as though searching for anything she might have forgotten.
“Maybe,” I said awkwardly, “we could go there together after you get back.”
She paused to give me a wondering smile. “Why, I’d like that very much, Clay. I would like very much to visit that little church.”
Somehow, in that moment, I knew that what I’d thought was true, that within her lay wisdom to counter Lucian’s knowledge and answers I had been afraid to ask for.
“I’ll enjoy our Sunday outing when I’m back. Especially if those grandkids of mine don’t do me in before then.” She chuckled.
THAT NIGHT I ATE a sandwich with some of the lettuce and tomato from Mrs. Russo’s stash of “perishables.”
I found myself thinking of Aubrey more and more, practically by the hour, as I once had. And I felt inexplicably guilty for the days I had forgotten her, for my mental absence, as if I had been taken in by someone new, like an interesting new friend in school who makes our old loyal standbys fade in comparison. Or a new fling, next to whom old relationships seem stale, familiarity having bred its inevitable contempt—only to discover that the luster of the new face had grown thin or, worse, that I had become the one passed over in favor of a new infatuation.
Never mind that she had been the one to leave. When I was truthful about it, when I was honest with myself, I could admit that I had left her first—in spirit if not in deed.
Now, abandoned by Lucian, I found my thoughts returning to her in lieu of any other crutch on which to lean. My selfishness filled me with self-contempt, even as I wondered if she was happy or if she might be tiring even now of Richard, of his habit of playing the radio too loud, of chasing his food around on his plate with his fork as if it were a hockey puck, of predictably retreating from certain topics or conversations, of repeating the catchphrases that had once seemed funny but had grown as tedious as a pull toy. For the first time since the day in the museum, I considered calling her.
But I returned to my manuscript instead, adding to it my conversation with Mrs. Russo, my thoughts of Aubrey, my dread of the monster at the end of the book.
30
With Mrs. Russo gone, I felt exposed, vulnerable, fearful. And hopeful.
Would Lucian come back to me now that she was gone and the “spiritual static” was no longer present? And if he did, would I welcome him? I could not shake the memory of our last encounter—hearing that screaming, even in my mind, sent chilly spikes through my gut.
I told myself I should get back to my life. There was still a life waiting for me as far as I knew, and I needed, if nothing else, to find a job.
One night I lay in bed trying to picture my future. It was filled with insomnia and demons. I stared at the ceiling and thought of Mrs. Russo.
“El?” I spoke, softly, feeling foolish. And then, “Elohim?” The night answered with silence.
I missed Mrs. Russo. I hoped for selfish reasons that her son would recover quickly. Lucian was right: I was not such a good man.
I WAS GATHERING MAIL—mine and Mrs. Russo’s—the next day when I saw it, peeking out from between a bill and her Cooking Light magazine. I knew the letterhead by the large B showing on the corner. I pulled it out of the stack and, by the feel of the single page inside it, knew I didn’t even need to read it.
But I did anyway.
Dear Clay:
In light of our recent separation, we feel it best to pass on Demon: A Memoir at this time. Please feel free to pursue publication with another house.
Best of luck,
Helen Gennaro
Editorial Director
Brooks and Hanover
My manuscript, my story—and now I knew that it was indeed my story—was my truth broadcast to the world. It was my voice.
But now that, too, was gone.
THE NEXT MORNING CAME upon me in a panic. I dressed in the same clothes I had worn the day before, hurried to my computer, and slammed my fist down on the keyboard when my calendar yielded, as I knew it would, nothing.
Outside on the street I turned away from Massachusetts Avenue and walked toward Saint Mary’s. But I wasn’t going to Saint Mary’s. I stopped half a block shy of the cathedral, in front of the diminutive Gospel Room, a converted house that could not hold more than fifty people, if that. I stood there for a long moment before opening the tiny chain-link front gate and trying the door.
Why were houses of God always locked?
As I turned away, I caught sight of someone standing on the corner of Inman, watching me. It frightened me at first, and then I became indignant.
“What? Who are you with?”
The figure, a man in a short jacket, just stood there.
“Is that you?” I asked it with a spark of I knew not what—hope, anger, desperation, recklessness. I started across the street, but the figure turned and sauntered away. Something about that posture—the man leaning against the post of the house! Could it be him? Willing the glowing spots from my vision, I started after him again, but when I gained the corner, he was gone.
I SCROLLED THROUGH THE directory on my phone and dialed a number I had not called in months—had only saved, in fact, in order to identify the caller and avoid answering if I didn’t feel up to talking to her.
After five rings of waiting, for once, to actually get her on the phone, I resigned myself to leaving a message. But then someone picked up, and I thought I must have had the wrong number; the voice sounded nothing like the woman I knew.
“Is Katrina there?” Perhaps she had changed her number.
“This is she.”
“Katrina,” I said, caught off guard. And I knew why I had not recognized her at first: She sounded tired.
“Clay?”
“Yes, sorry. This is Clay.” I said, fumbling.
“I heard you left Brooks and Hanover.”
“I guess you could say that. Did I wake you up?”