The Demonologist Read Online Free PDF Page A

now. And no matter how far away she’ll driftfrom you, you can’t give up. She’s your child, David. She is you . So you have to prove your love for her every goddamn minute of every goddamn day. Anything less and you fail the Human Being Test. Anything less and you really are just alone.”
    Even here, in the A/C-challenged Oyster Bar, O’Brien shivers.
    “Where is this coming from?” I ask her. “You’ve never said anything like that about Tess before. That she’s . . . like me. By which you mean she has what I have.”
    “More than eye color and height passes through the bloodline.”
    “Hold on a second here. Are you speaking as Dr. O’Brien the shrink? Or my pal O’Brien, the friendly kicker of ass?”
    This question, intended to return us to lighter ground, only seems to confound her. And in the moment she struggles to find an answer, her illness passes over her features. Her skin pulls close over her face, her color fades. In a transformation that would be invisible to anyone but me, she now looks as though she could be the Thin Woman’s sister. A likeness that ought to have been apparent from the time I saw the woman sitting outside my office, but revealed, in a private second of horror, only now.
    “It’s just something I know,” she answers finally.
    We carry on for a while. Order another round, share a lobster as we normally do. The whole time O’Brien expertly keeps us from returning to her diagnosis, or her oddly portentous insight into my lifelong affliction. She has said all that she meant to say about it. And there is the unspoken assurance between us that even she isn’t sure of its full implications.
    When we’re done, I walk her back up to the main terminal floor. It’s quieter here now, the commuters outnumbered by the gawkers, the picture takers. I’m ready to wait with O’Brien at the entrance to her platform until her train up to Greenwich is ready to go, but she stops me at the gold clock.
    “I’ll be okay,” she says with a weak smile.
    “Of course you will. But there’s no point waiting alone.”
    “I’m not alone.” She links her hand around my wrist in a show of gratitude. “And there’s someone waiting for you.”
    “I doubt that. These days, Tess just locks herself in her room after dinner, gets on the computer. DO NOT DISTURB in neon on her door.”
    “Sometimes people close a door because they’re trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.”
    O’Brien releases my wrist and slips away into a pack of German tourists. I would follow, or try, but she doesn’t want me to. So I turn and head off in the opposite direction, down the tunnel to the subway entrance, the air getting hotter the farther from the surface I go.

3
    I EMERGE FROM THE 86 TH S TREET STOP ON THE U PPER W EST Side. This is where we live, my little family among the other little families of our neighborhood, our street often crowded with latte-holding parents pushing state-of-the-art, single-child strollers. It’s magazine perfect for people like us: educated professionals with a prejudice against the suburbs and a faith that living here, in relative safety yet also a short walk to Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, and high-rated public schools, will give our only children what they need to become us one day.
    I like it here, in a permanent tourist sort of way. I grew up in Toronto, a city of a more modest scale and modest temperament, relatively unmythologized. Living in New York has, for me, been a process of getting better at pretending. Pretending this is really my home and not a fabrication from novels, from movies. Pretending we will ever pay off the mortgage on our roomy three-bedroom apartment in a “prestige building” on 84th Street. I’m often troubledby the fact that we can’t really afford the place, though Diane likes to point out that “nobody affords things, David. It’s not 1954 anymore.”
    Things are bad between us, perhaps irreparably bad. But as I