Free Demon: A Memoir by Tosca Lee

understand humans,” he said and then grabbed me by the upper arm.
    My experience the night before had been birthed into the warm vessel of sleep. But this was an electrifying jolt, like the first chug of a roller coaster on a track. Just as I felt I had reached the apex of that first hill, the universe unfurled before me, as though I were standing in the narrow part of a funnel looking out toward the opening of everything. I was aware of the vastness of it, the infinite amplifications of space before me, the stars. And I knew, somehow, that each of them had a name known to El.
    There was Eden. When I dreamed it—no, when I saw it—the darkness had been a moving thing, a living tar creeping across the rocks and flashing stones. It was as black now as a shroud, vacant as an eye in a corpse’s head. I heard a sound like a sob and recognized my own voice. Eden, infused with sorrow, stood ruined, a monument of grief covered by a dark and terrible presence trembling on the water.
    The spirit of El himself.
    I pulled away, unable to endure another moment of it, and doubled over on the lawn, sucking breath.
    “Did you hear it? The keening?” the demon asked from above me.
    “I didn’t hear anything.”
    “Human ears,” he said, the way a debutante might dismiss a bottle blonde.
    “What did I miss?”
    “Didn’t you see the shifting over the water?”
    I shook my head.
    “Did you see anything?”
    “Dark Eden. And space.”
    He rolled his eyes. “What you missed, my dear”—the words were thoroughly odd coming from him in this getup— “was the sense of his hands. El’s. Covering the vast wreck of the world the way a sculptor’s fingers roam a block of marble, carving with the inner eye before touching the chisel. You missed that sense of him moving over the surface of the deep, as though there was no memory of Lucifer’s cherished garden, ruined beneath the chaos of violence like an insect trapped in amber. You missed that this was no longer a ruined Eden but an Eden roiling with the potential for a new thing. And you missed when he spoke.”
    I regretted having pulled away so quickly from the vision, though I knew he would not have allowed me to see this far.
    “Spoke?”
    “He called for light.”
    “As in, ‘Let there be light’?”
    “As in.”
    “‘Let there be light.’ You’re telling me it actually started that way,” I said, my hands on my knees.
    “Actually, we weren’t sure what was happening. All I knew then was that upon hearing that voice—that beloved and awesome timbre—I wanted to weep. Only then did I realize how much I had longed for it, how strong and reassuring it was to the fibers of my heart. And, because of what we had done, how foreboding.”
    “I thought you said there had already been light. That Lucifer gave off light.”
    “This was new light—different from that of my master,” he said, gazing past the footbridge toward the statue of Washington. High-rises jutted up like teeth into the sky beyond the statue. “And light, as you know, is many things. Energy, for one.”
    “Are you talking about the sun?” I straightened, my patience thin. He was specific when I didn’t want him to be and maddeningly vague when I wanted specifics. And the kicker was that he probably knew it, too.
    “Among other things. But you’re missing the point, and it’s this, since I have to spell it out: We had never heard words like that before—wonderful, terrible words. These were more than words of power—they were infused with creation and the giving of life. Think about it. What one of us had ever witnessed an act like this? We don’t recall our own beginnings, after all, so this was the first creation we had ever witnessed. And you call an earthquake an act of God.”
    “So this light—”
    “It was brilliant, the first of its kind, generated by El himself, exploding out into the heavens. Even Lucifer, who was by now more disdainful than ever, was in awe. Speechless. He