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on me. “I thought your mad and genius artists were supposed to succumb to higher visions beyond the corporeal world. But there you are, still painting your devils red with horns, making Lucifer, our shining star, into a grotesque goat-man. And these are the images that remain to this day: ugly, marred, toppling from heaven, herded toward hell by the swords of shining blond men with stoic faces and bleached togas—Michael and Gabriel, I presume.” He turned away.
    “Just think,” I said, in a moment of facetiousness, “you can dress up as a devil on Halloween and no one will recognize you.” I regretted my recklessness the moment I said it.
    “Just think,” he said, too lightly, “you might pass me in the street and never know it. If I wished, you might even feel lust for me.”
    He glanced sidelong at me, and I shrank back at the memory of copper hair, of a silver ankh swinging against smooth skin, pointing at the breasts beneath.
    “Why do you show up like this, in these different guises?” I hated the feeling of being caught always unawares.
    “I like the feel of trying them out,” he said, as though they were nothing more than new shoes or a bicycle.
    I thought of the calluses on his hands, the telltale record of a history not his own. I wondered if they belonged to someone, or once had.
    I shook the thought away. I might be a seeker, but there were some things I did not want to know.

    ONE BLOCK FARTHER, LUCIAN stopped in front of a tea shop. “They have a good oolong here. Didn’t you take a fancy to oolong in China?” He pushed through the glass-paned door of the shop.
    I knew I had never mentioned the trip I had taken nearly twenty years ago. I had fallen in love with the country, and, at one point in our marriage, even suggested adopting a baby from China.
    Of course, that was all moot now.
    In a show of defiance, I did not order oolong but decaffeinated Earl Grey. The demon, for his part, preferred jasmine.
    The wall at the back of the shop was plastered with academic, activist, and personal notices, ads seeking dog-sitters and lesbian roommates and advertisements for Pilates instruction and colonic irrigation. Lucian was silent as he plucked the tea ball from his cup and set it aside on the saucer. It occurred to me then, with a sense of strange intuition and even stranger incredulity, that he was procrastinating.
    “You were promised more?”
    He’d been right that first night in the café: I hadn’t forgotten a phrase, a detail. While I’d never had an eidetic memory, his words came back to me with such repetitive insistence that the only way I could exorcise them from my consciousness was to write them down. Even now his last words on the street echoed in my mind and, I suspected, would continue to do so until I was at my desk.
    He ignored me, and I thought about prompting him again, but just then he did something so subtle as to wring at reason: He pursed his lips, the chapped skin creasing reluctantly, dry as a newly fallen leaf. And I marveled at the mundane aspects of his humanity, against which I must remember the truth of what he was: Demon. All around me life hummed along like a machine, oblivious to any sound but its own, as unaware of the interloper among its cogs and wheels as the diners in the café had been that first night, deafened by the drone of the everyday.
    “With the clock on the wall over there ticking so loudly,” he said, “I’ve just realized I can’t tell you how long it went on like that—my life before. Isn’t that funny? I just can’t say. You can point to the calendar and say you were born on such-and-such a date and married for five years. But as for me, I could not begin to guess. Eons must have passed. Millennia. Ages. Or maybe it was really only a moment. I don’t know. When one pre-exists time, an epoch can pass like a day, and who would know it? It’s so cliché, a trite line from novels about lovers: ‘Time had no meaning.’ But that’s how we