Demons Read Free Page A

they bothered with a designer for these things after the first one.”
    “They don’t need one, it’s true—and that’s the point. The lava lamp is protosociety’s purely unconscious expression ofthe primeval ooze on one level, shaping itself into our most remote sea-slime ancestors; on another level, the lava lamp is the pleroma, the fundamental stuff that gives birth to the existential condition. Hank, down at the antique shop, tells me he likes to smoke pot and look into his lava lamps, and then he sees girls there, apparently, in all those sinuous lava-bubbling curves—like Moscoso drawings—but it’s all quite unconscious . . . tabula rasa for the subconscious. . . . Freud not utterly discredited after all, if we consider Hank and his lamps . . .”
    Paymenz noticed my attention wandering; my gaze must have drifted to Melissa’s bedroom door. “Oh good lord. Typical young person today. Post-MTV generation. Internet-surfing brain damage. Attention span of a gnat. Melissa! Come in here, this young man is already weary of pretending he’s here to see me! He’s aquiver with desire for you!” He clutched his reeking alchemist’s robe about himself—Melissa had made it for him, as a mother will make a Superman cape for her little boy—and stumped off to the kitchen to finish his breakfast. “He’s sniffing the air for your pheromones!” he called to her as he went.
    I grimaced, but I was used to the professor’s indifference to social insulation of any kind whatsoever.
    Melissa came in then, wearing a long black skirt, no shoes, a loose, low-cut Gypsy-type purple blouse. Her crooked smile was even more to one side of her triangular face than usual in wry deprecation of her father’s vulgarity.
    “Shephard is gone?” she asked.
    “He is,” I said, “unless he’s somehow watching us through his business card.”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me. He makes my skin contract on my body,” she said, locking the front door. “He asked me if he could hear me sing for him sometime! Like to hear my songs, he said.”
    I was thinking that Shephard had always had an unhealthy interest in her but decided not to remark on it. My own interest in her, I told myself, was . . . earthy.
    She was a few inches taller than me, a big girl with tiny feet; I don’t know how she kept from teetering. Her forehead was high, this only mildly mitigated by the shiny black bangs; long raven wings of hair fell straight to her pale, stooped shoulders and coursed round them. Her large green eyes looked at me frankly; they seemed to coruscate. Her chin was just a little slight. Somehow the imperfections in her prettiness were sexy to me. I suspected, after long, covert inspections from various angles through various fabrics, that her right breast turned fractionally to one side while the other pointed straight ahead. Each small white toe of her small white feet had a ring on it, and her ankles jangled with Tibetan bells. She was thirty, worked in a health food store, and did endless research for her father’s never-finished magnum opus, The Hidden Reality .
    “Come into the kitchen with me,” she said, “and help me make tea and toast. You can make it on the gas broiler. We’ve got the gas and water back on.”
    “I couldn’t possibly let you take on a big job like making tea and toast alone.”
    She stacked up the wheat bread, and I found the old copper teapot and filled it with tap water. As it filled, I said, “I wonder what impurities and pollutants this particular tap water has in it. No doubt some future forensic archaeologist will analyze my body and find the stuff. Like, ‘This skeleton shows residues of lead, pesticides, heavy metal contaminants—’ ”
    “Which perhaps weighted down his consciousness so he became doleful all the time. Great Goddess! Ira, you can’t even pour a cup of tea without seeing doom in the offing?”
    I listened to her bells jangle as she got the margarine off the cooler shelf in the kitchen