Free Demon: A Memoir by Tosca Lee Page A

could never have done this.”
    “Wasn’t Lucifer still giving off light?” Perhaps I had found a hole in his story. The inconsistency would never explain the other things—the dreams, the hallucinations, if that’s what they were. Hope surged, and maybe a companion bit of despair, that I might have caught him in an incongruity. “If he was fallen and damned, why was he still giving off light?”
    We had come to the footbridge with its pale blue lampposts and railings. The demon leaned a thin shoulder against one of the pillars and crossed his arms. Behind him, the water of the lagoon reflected the brown of maples and elms and the sharp arch of long-limbed willows bowed low to the water’s edge.
    “You need to understand something. Outwardly, Lucifer hadn’t changed. Despite the venom he hurled at El, he still illuminated the lower heavens. He was still brilliant. Consider Moses after he came down from Mount Sinai. He glowed from having stood in the presence of El, and that after only forty days in El’s presence and he, a flawed human made of mud—a rather unreflective surface overall.”
    He smiled blandly. “So you must imagine our Beautiful One, perfect master-work that he was, shining with an infinity of reflected Shekinah glory. Even we, who do not breathe, are breathless at him still.”
    “So this was a different kind of light.”
    “Yes. And when Lucifer left, retreating to the periphery of the lower heavens to look down on the muck of Eden, he took with him the light from the world, which was his own. So when El made this new and spectacular light that chased away darkness so that even the murky waters reflected it like facets of onyx, Lucifer was taken aback. He took it as a personal blow, in fact.”
    “Because he felt replaced.”
    “Yes. But El wasn’t finished. Now he did something he had never done: He partitioned time. It sounds so fantastic, so mythical, doesn’t it?” He paused to study my wrinkled brow. “You do understand that time, in the measured sense, had now begun.”
    “I really don’t,” I said at last. “If you’re trying to sell me on seven days of creation, you’ll have to pull a few more tricks out of your demonic bag. That’s folklore.”
    Of course, the fall of Lucifer had been folklore, too.
    He scratched at his temple, and I realized he was just now discovering the hardening scab on his scalp. “I know all manner of theologians and even scientists hold debates about this. How long was a day? Isn’t a thousand years like a day to God? Isn’t a twenty-four-hour day too literal? Surely God created evolution. They ship speakers into churches and seminaries and universities to debate it.”
    He gestured in the general direction of Cambridge. “But what they fail to realize is that creation defies rationality, mathematics, and reason no matter how you try to quantify it. You might as well try to quantify El himself—something you’ll never find me wasting my time on.”
    I thought of MIT, practically across the street from my office. Of divinity school scholars at Harvard. And I realized then that I could more easily publish the memoirs of a self-professed demon than I could share with another scientific or religious-minded human the truth of my interaction with him. The thought left me feeling alienated, like some frail and sickly member of my species separated from the human herd.
    “Listen now,” he said, fixing me with a bright gaze. And I saw that same darkness behind it, as though a cloud had passed behind the sun. “He called it a day, and the significance is this: There had been no days until this point. For all I know, our revolt might have erupted an eon or an hour before that. Only misery had made it seem like an eternity. But here was this new and revolutionary thing: the day. An invention for all time—literally. Can you understand what it was to us, having languished in our inertia? Can you imagine our relief and fear at once?”
    “I think