Demon: A Memoir - By Tosca Lee Page 0,5

press of rush hour, but today there was something comforting about the electric lights, the subterranean warmth, the flow of bodies to and from the T.

On the train I did something I rarely do: I studied the faces around me. I took note of clothing, skin color, and watches but saw no one resembling the Mediterranean stranger. Packed in the Red Line car, I considered the distant dullness of the commuters’ eyes, even of those playing games on their phones or jacked into iPods, of the book readers who had all but escaped their bodies for the ride.

How long had I been one of them?

I filed out and up onto Park Street, one in a milling flotsam of bodies. I often felt lost in this current, everyone around me having places to be and going there with a purposeful intent I envied.

But not tonight.

Tonight I meant to end these three days of anxiety—days during which I had somehow forgotten that I was a rational and intelligent person. I meant to remember that, despite how I had felt in the past, I was not at the complete whim of circumstance—or of any other phenomena either.

I walked down School Street in the brisk cold of pre-twilight and entered the bookstore.

There was a time when this sheer volume of books—shiny in their crisp dust jackets, stacked along the new arrivals section or, better yet, orphaned on the bargain table—was as intoxicating to me as any wine. That was before I entered the business. Now I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here—only that it had been with Aubrey.

I took the stairs up a half level toward the back of the store. I wasn’t sure where I was going; I just wanted to get out of the entry. Passing between shelves like labyrinth corridors, I veered off between Women’s Studies and Sexuality and found myself, ironically, in Spirituality. There I sequestered myself at the end of a row housing books on guides, angels, and psychics.

Demons, too.

5:40. I felt a spike of anxiety but reminded myself that tucked away here, I was the colloquial needle in the haystack. Six o’clock would come and go, and here I’d be, my nose in a book on psychic healers. By seven o’clock I’d be taking dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, perhaps contemplating writing an essay about the lengths desperate writers will go to get published, or at least requesting that our technical team put up a better firewall.

I had a second reason for coming here—one that had more to do with the exorcism of Aubrey than disproving the authenticity of demons. Sometime last summer I realized that in moving to Cambridge, I had penned myself in to a little safe-cage and that the city I first loved for its culture, for its civic and intellectual history, had become a connect-the-dots of locations infused with painful memories. So I had started the slow, deliberate process of reclaiming those places I had frequented with Aubrey and of putting new pins in my map that were solely my own.

It was difficult. Even today, walking in through the oversized double doors and passing the coffee bar, I remembered the soy lattes that Aubrey used to drink, the way she drifted up that stair to wander the travel section, there to pick up books on Africa, Italy, and Mongolia, to point out the exotic locations where one could hike to the summit of Kilimanjaro, walk through ruined Pompeii, or overnight in felt yurts—all trips I agreed should go on our list of future places to see. All places I knew I could not afford to take her.

Walking up that half flight of steps tonight, I recalled the collection of Eyewitness Guides she had kept on our bookshelf—a constant reminder of unfulfilled hopes and my own shortfalls as a provider. A detail I had forgotten until now. But it came upon me, reflexively and fully formed, the way the smell of a hospital room could conjure my dying father.

It was always like that. I might open a box—there were several in my apartment I had not unpacked yet—and find one of her long, dark hairs still clinging to a spare set of towels or even one of my sweaters. They used to stick to our pillows and sheets, adhering in tangled twists to the lint collector in the dryer. I still expected to see them there sometimes, still smoothed their phantom presence off the pillow before I lay down, just as