The Demonologist

There’s my desk. The map on the wall. The stuffed animals I don’t play with anymore but don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings by sticking in the closet. I might be in bed. I might be just standing there, looking for a missing sock. Then I’m gone.

It doesn’t just show me something this time. It takes me from here to THERE.

Standing on the bank of a river of fire. A thousand wasps in my head. Fighting and dying inside my skull, their bodies piling up against the backs of my eyes. Stinging and stinging.

Dad’s voice. Somewhere across the river. Calling my name.

I’ve never heard him sound like that before. He’s so frightened he can’t hide it, even though he tries (he ALWAYS tries).

The dead boy floats by.

Facedown. So I wait for his head to pop up, show the holes where his eyes used to be, say something with his blue lips. One of the terrible things it might make him do. But he just passes like a chunk of wood.

I’ve never been here before, but I know it’s real.

The river is the line between this place and the Other Place. And I’m on the wrong side.

There’s a dark forest behind me but that’s not what it is.

I try to get to where Dad is. My toes touch the river and it sings with pain.

Then there’s arms pulling me back. Dragging me into the trees. They feel like a man’s arms but it’s not a man that sticks its fingers into my mouth. Nails that scratch the back of my throat. Skin that tastes like dirt.

But just before that, before I’m back in my room with my missing sock in my hand, I realize I’ve been calling out to Dad just like he’s been calling out to me. Telling him the same thing the whole time. Not words from my mouth through the air, but from my heart through the earth, so only the two of us could hear it.

FIND ME

I
U
NCREATED
N
IGHT
1

T
HE ROWS OF FACES
. Y
OUNGER AND YOUNGER EACH TERM.
O
F
course, this is only me getting older among the freshmen who come and go, an illusion, like looking out the rear window of a car and seeing the landscape run away from you instead of you running from it.

I’ve been delivering this lecture long enough to play around with thoughts like these while speaking aloud to two hundred students at the same time. It’s time to sum things up. One last attempt to sell at least a few of the laptop ticklers before me on the magnificence of a poem I have more or less devoted my working life to.

“And here we come to the end,” I tell them, and pause. Wait for the fingers to lift from the keyboards. Take a full breath of the lecture hall’s undercirculated air and feel, as I always do, the devastating sadness that comes at reciting the poem’s closing lines.

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

With these words I feel my daughter next to me. Since she was born—and even before that, as the mere idea of the child I wished to one day have—it is Tess whom I invariably imagine walking out of the garden with, hand in hand.

“Loneliness,” I go on. “That is what this entire work really comes down to. Not good versus evil, not a campaign to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’ It is the most convincing case we have—more convincing than any in the Bible itself—that hell is real. Not as a fiery pit, not a place above or below but
in
us, a place in the mind. To know ourselves and, in turn, to endure the perpetual reminder of our solitude. To be cast out. To wander alone. What is the real fruit of original sin? Selfhood!
That
is where our poor newlyweds are left, together but in the solitude of self-consciousness. Where can they wander now? ‘Anywhere!’ the serpent says. ‘The whole world is theirs!’ And yet they are condemned to choose their own ‘solitary way.’ It is a fearful, even terrifying, journey. But it is one all of us must face, as much now as then.”

Here I take another, even longer, pause. Long enough that there is a risk I will be taken as being finished, and someone might stand, or slap her laptop shut, or bark out a cough. But they never do.

“Ask yourselves,” I say, tightening my hold on Tess’s imagined hand. “Where will you go now that Eden has been left behind?”

An arm almost instantly shoots up. A kid near the back I’ve never called on, never even noticed, before now.

“Yes?”

“Is that question going to be on the exam?”

M
Y NAME IS
D
AVID
U
LLMAN
. I
TEACH IN THE
E
NGLISH
D
EPARTMENT
at Columbia University in Manhattan, a specialist in mythology and Judeo-Christian religious narrative, though my meal ticket, the text upon which my critical study has justified my tenure in the
Ivy League and invitations to various academic boondoggles around the world, has been Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Fallen angels, the temptations by the serpent, Adam and Eve and original sin. A seventeenth-century epic poem that retells biblical events but with a crafty slant, a perspective that arguably lends sympathy to Satan, the leader of the rebel angels who became fed up with a grumpy, authoritarian God and broke out on his own in a career of making trouble in the lives of humans.

It’s been a funny (the devout might even say hypocritical) way to make a living: I have spent my life teaching about things I don’t believe in. An atheist biblical scholar. A demon expert who believes evil to be a manmade invention. I have written essays about miracles—healed lepers, water into wine, exorcisms—but have never seen a magician’s trick I couldn’t figure out. My justification for these apparent contradictions is that there are some things that bear meaning, culturally speaking, without actually existing. The Devil, angels. Heaven. Hell. They are part of our lives even if we never have and never will see them, touch them, prove them to be real. Things that go bump in the brain.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

That is John Milton, speaking through Satan, his most brilliant fiction. And I happen to believe the old fellow—
both
old fellows—have got it right.

T
HE AIR OF
C
OLUMBIA
’
S
M
ORNINGSIDE CAMPUS IS DAMP WITH EXAM
stress and the only-partial cleansing of a New York rain. I’ve just finished delivering my final lecture of the spring term, an occasion that always brings a bittersweet relief, the knowledge that another year is done (the class prep and office hours and evaluations almost finished) but also that another year has passed (and with it, another distressing click on the personal odometer). Nevertheless, unlike many
of the coddled grumblers who surround me at faculty functions and fuss over pointless points-of-order at departmental committee meetings, I still like teaching, still like the students who are encountering grown-up literature for the first time. Yes, most of them are only here as pre–Something That Will Make Serious Money—pre-med, pre-law, pre–marrying rich—but most of them are not yet wholly beyond reach. If not my reach, then poetry’s.

It’s just past three. Time to walk across the tiled quad to my office in Philosophy Hall, drop off the clutch of late term papers guiltily piled on my desk at the front of the lecture hall, then head downtown to Grand Central to meet Elaine O’Brien for our annual end-of-term drink at the Oyster Bar.

Though Elaine teaches in the Psychology Department, I’m closer to her than anyone in English. Indeed, I’m closer to her than anyone I know in New York. She is the same age as me—a trim, squash court and half-marathoned forty-three—though a widow, her husband claimed by an out-of-nowhere stroke four years ago, the same year I arrived at Columbia. I liked her at once. Possessed of what I have come to think of as a serious sense of humor: She tells few jokes, but observes the world’s absurdities with a wit that is somehow hopeful and withering at the same time. A quietly beautiful woman too, I would say, though I am a married man—as of today, at any rate—and acknowledging this kind of admiration for a female colleague and occasional drinking buddy may be, as the University Code of Conduct likes to designate virtually all human interaction, “inappropriate.”

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