understand the revelation of this great wash of green.”
“It was a novelty to you,” I said, almost to myself.
“Of course! This was no rock garden but a rich and lush new world, teeming with life! Who could have fathomed such delicate complexity? It awed us. And for another reason, too: All those strange green things had within them the power to create, to reproduce, each of them manufacturing miniature versions of themselves. Imagine! ”
It had never occurred to me what a bizarre concept reproduction might seem to a race of finite number.
“I was enthralled by the veins on the back of leaves, by the seeds growing inside fruit and pod,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel as though to hold—as he must have held—each leaf between his fingers, each pod, broken apart to reveal the seeds within. “The sticky pollen on the stamens. It was bizarre. It was awesome. This was beyond your science fiction to us. I had never even dreamed such things. And by the look on Lucifer’s face, neither had he.
“There were new and foreign bodies in the heavens now, too, their courses precharted for millennia to come. And the water, once dark and stagnant, moved by the pull of the new moon. I was instantly in love and left the others to walk by the muted light. I stood by the shore and watched the tides leave their skeletal treasures on the sand, lulled by the rhythm of a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. I longed for it, for all that was within it, and to be a part of it.”
We had turned off Memorial onto Mount Auburn, and I was gazing at the scratched Plexiglas divider between us, seeing in its surface the mottled white of the moon, when a Lexus abruptly cut in front of us. Lucian hit the breaks and flashed a distinct bird over the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that!” I said, alarmed. “For all you know he has a gun!”
“He doesn’t have a gun,” he said, and flashed it again. Some time after the car had sped on ahead, the demon continued. “These new celestial bodies took on great meaning to us. It was like watching the creation of an hourglass and all the sands within it. Sands within an hourglass are measured a closed set, a finite amount. And they were now set in motion. I would never look at the heavens the same; where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.”
“Who says time has to be finite?” I studied him in the rearview mirror. He had a faint scar against one temple, again suggesting a history that was not his. I wondered if it was the demon equivalent to designer jeans, faded and pre-ripped right off the hanger.
“Things with beginnings also have ends. The beginning of time is also the beginning of an end. And so that great hourglass to me was like your fabled Doomsday clock, ticking, ticking, every grain one in a too-limited series, the granule of an instant, passing and lost forever. I understood that things now and hereafter set in motion would be things of consequence, of inevitability. The passing of every moment since has disconcerted me. See the clock on the dash?” He tapped it. “You’re deaf to it, to the death of each second. But I am not.”
I had thought his fixation with time and timepieces a fetish until now. Now I thought I understood the preoccupation, the compulsive checking. Every timepiece I had ever seen him wear had been expensive. Was it that time was precious?
And to think that in the last year I had done nothing but pass time since my separation and divorce, tossing first days and then weeks and months at the iterant routine of work, of the T. Waiting out the pain, waiting for clarity and direction, waiting for the day that something shoved me from inertia.
And something had.
The demon was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other fingering his watch with more thoughtful delicacy than I would have thought those fingers capable of. “I didn’t
“It was a novelty to you,” I said, almost to myself.
“Of course! This was no rock garden but a rich and lush new world, teeming with life! Who could have fathomed such delicate complexity? It awed us. And for another reason, too: All those strange green things had within them the power to create, to reproduce, each of them manufacturing miniature versions of themselves. Imagine! ”
It had never occurred to me what a bizarre concept reproduction might seem to a race of finite number.
“I was enthralled by the veins on the back of leaves, by the seeds growing inside fruit and pod,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel as though to hold—as he must have held—each leaf between his fingers, each pod, broken apart to reveal the seeds within. “The sticky pollen on the stamens. It was bizarre. It was awesome. This was beyond your science fiction to us. I had never even dreamed such things. And by the look on Lucifer’s face, neither had he.
“There were new and foreign bodies in the heavens now, too, their courses precharted for millennia to come. And the water, once dark and stagnant, moved by the pull of the new moon. I was instantly in love and left the others to walk by the muted light. I stood by the shore and watched the tides leave their skeletal treasures on the sand, lulled by the rhythm of a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. I longed for it, for all that was within it, and to be a part of it.”
We had turned off Memorial onto Mount Auburn, and I was gazing at the scratched Plexiglas divider between us, seeing in its surface the mottled white of the moon, when a Lexus abruptly cut in front of us. Lucian hit the breaks and flashed a distinct bird over the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that!” I said, alarmed. “For all you know he has a gun!”
“He doesn’t have a gun,” he said, and flashed it again. Some time after the car had sped on ahead, the demon continued. “These new celestial bodies took on great meaning to us. It was like watching the creation of an hourglass and all the sands within it. Sands within an hourglass are measured a closed set, a finite amount. And they were now set in motion. I would never look at the heavens the same; where I once saw the artful strew of El’s stars, I now saw the cogs and pendulum of a great clock, ticking the finite measure of time.”
“Who says time has to be finite?” I studied him in the rearview mirror. He had a faint scar against one temple, again suggesting a history that was not his. I wondered if it was the demon equivalent to designer jeans, faded and pre-ripped right off the hanger.
“Things with beginnings also have ends. The beginning of time is also the beginning of an end. And so that great hourglass to me was like your fabled Doomsday clock, ticking, ticking, every grain one in a too-limited series, the granule of an instant, passing and lost forever. I understood that things now and hereafter set in motion would be things of consequence, of inevitability. The passing of every moment since has disconcerted me. See the clock on the dash?” He tapped it. “You’re deaf to it, to the death of each second. But I am not.”
I had thought his fixation with time and timepieces a fetish until now. Now I thought I understood the preoccupation, the compulsive checking. Every timepiece I had ever seen him wear had been expensive. Was it that time was precious?
And to think that in the last year I had done nothing but pass time since my separation and divorce, tossing first days and then weeks and months at the iterant routine of work, of the T. Waiting out the pain, waiting for clarity and direction, waiting for the day that something shoved me from inertia.
And something had.
The demon was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other fingering his watch with more thoughtful delicacy than I would have thought those fingers capable of. “I didn’t
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