“But if I did that you’d—”
“I know. If you did that, I would age out and die. For every day in Heaven, a year passes on Earth, right? So wait three months in Heaven. A fiscal quarter. After I pass away as a human being, maybe I’ll come back as a stick.”
“That should have been your plan all along,” I continued. “You should never have come to Earth in the first place. The two of us are demon magnets, and being together makes it worse. Get out of here and let me run out my life span.”
I knew exactly how much hurt would be in Quentin’s eyes when I said it. So all the worse on me for letting him walk away without a word.
34
I watched my dad from outside the gym’s glass windows, whistling to himself as he sanitized the incline benches. He didn’t know I was there. A few weeks ago I would have said he was the fish in the fishbowl, but now I knew that wasn’t true.
He’d earned the right to a peaceful existence like this one. He’d taken the kind of risk that the extreme sportsmen he wiped up after would never understand. My father had given the finger to the system and sure, maybe that finger had been bitten off, but hey. The breaks. He understood thems.
And meanwhile his daughter, who’d gone to school on his meager dimes, and worn the clothes he’d put on her back, had thought she’d float into the sky and ascend gracefully into Heaven, buoyed by a cloud of rules followed and boxes checked.
I always faulted him for overconfidence. Thought I was better than him. But he’d at least put his blind faith in his own two fists instead of letting the fight go to the judges. I’d never been so brave.
For a moment, Dad looked up as if he’d sensed I was late. But a client entering the gym, a young banker type in Lycra knitwear, came over to say hi to him. The two of them, as different a pair of human beings as could possibly be, became engrossed in a conversation that involved pantomiming shoulder injuries.
I turned around and left.
I had a lot of time to kill after flaking on both Anna and Dad. I went to the park.
The weather was good, and it was packed sidewalk to sidewalk with sunbathing, wine-drinking yuppies. They formed a carpet of trim, attractive bodies over the grass that would occasionally bunch up as people rolled on their elbows to check each other out.
I sat against a tree in the back. The shade was cold and the knobs on the roots were hurting my thighs. I didn’t deserve comfort.
I felt old. Older than everyone around me, even though that wasn’t true. They came in different flavors of twenty-something. Unless they’d been trucked in from far away, they were uniformly well-to-do. Only people with large salaries could afford the rent nearby. Most of the accents I heard wafting on the breeze weren’t local.
This, if I had to be honest, was exactly what I’d been fighting for. I was after a good school and a good job, wasn’t I? Well, these people went to good schools and had good jobs. Chilling here on a sunny Saturday was what people who went to good schools and had good jobs did in these parts. Somewhere on one of these blankets was my spot. My eternal reward.
“None of you have ever fought what I’ve fought,” I said out loud. “You can’t see what I see.”
I could have said the word demons. No one was listening, and even if they were, it didn’t matter a lick.
My eye caught on a tall, starkly handsome man picking his way toward me through the crowd. He was wearing an athletic top and sandals like half the people lying on the grass, but he was in much better shape than all of them. When he got close enough he lowered his shades.
“I thought it was you,” Erlang Shen said.
The last person I was expecting. “What are you doing here?”
He produced a can wrapped in a brown bag and wiggled it. “I’m getting drunk.”
The last thing I was expecting him to say. He must have seen the confusion on my face because he laughed as he sat down next to me.
“There’s a Peach Banquet going on in Heaven,” he said. “Lots of wine flowing freely. But I can’t stand celebrations, and I don’t like indulging in front of the other gods. So in times like these I find various watering holes on Earth and drink human drinks. I was at a bar down the street but I felt your presence nearby.”
“Do you need three hundred and sixty-five human cocktails to match one Heaven serving?”
“Actually the exchange rate for alcohol is a binary logarithm, so it’s one thousand twenty-eight,” he said. “Right now I’m on six hundred thirteen.”
I snorted. He was as big of a dork as I was.
“By the way,” he said, waving the can. “I have completely failed on every promise I gave you before.”
“There was just the one promise. Your uncle won’t let you help round up the rem
aining demons?”