Body Surfing

too. Had believed him when he said all he had to do was have sex and it would come to an end. In his seventeen years on earth, he’d never given too much thought to how the afterlife was going to start, but he was pretty sure he’d never imagined it beginning with a borrowed dick waving in the morning breeze like a flagpole. A flagpole planted in foreign soil and shorn of its colors. Leo had said it was easy, but, as Jarhead’s dick was pointing out with irrefutable eloquence, this was hard. Really, really hard.

2
Book of the Dead
    “Let no man think he may escape by pleading ignorance.”
    —The Malleus Maleficarum

1
    T he flat in London was nicer than most. The top two floors of a terrace house just off Islington High Street. Four big rooms with white walls, high ceilings, soft yellow light falling aslant pale floorboards every morning. A little Spartan, but luxurious compared to some of the rattraps Ileana had put up in over the last decade. A big bay window in the bedroom overlooked the back garden, where the children who lived in the downstairs flat played every afternoon. A boy and a girl, six or seven years old, possibly twins. They were indefatigable, running and screaming, now laughing, now fighting as they slipped imperceptibly from London Bridge to Ring Around the Rosie to Cowboys and Indians and other games of their own invention.
    Sitting in the high-backed rocking chair in the bay window, Ileana felt like a cross between Whistler’s mother and Mrs. Bates. She stared through the glass, watching the children innocently playing at death. It occurred to Ileana that demons weren’t the only beings to treat mortality as a game. Children do it too. London Bridge: a parable of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn. Ring Around the Rosie: a dance to the victims of the Black Plague. Cowboys and Indians: a reenactment of one of history’s most notorious genocides. God, what a phrase. “One of history’s most notorious genocides.” As though there were a selection to choose from, like apple varieties or prostitutes.
    She identified with the ease with which the children slipped into and out of various identities. She’d introduced herself to their parents as Lana, told them she was in London to set up a branch of a management consulting firm out of Poland. She softened her consonants, played Chopin and Górecki on the stereo; that part was always easy. Becoming someone else for a few weeks or months until the next assignment. But none of it erased the memory of what had happened in Sudan. First killing an innocent man, then taking out Dumas as well. A kind man. A humanitarian. She tried to tell herself that she, too, was making the world safer, more humane, but she still shuddered awake in the middle of the night with the scientist’s last gurgling breaths in her ears, the smell of his burning flesh in her nostrils.
    To escape those memories she went to an antiquarian bookshop near the British Museum, where she purchased a copy of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis —the so-called Lesser Key of Solomon . The Lemegeton ’s primary feature was a list of seventy-two demons said to have been enslaved by the biblical King Solomon, who was also purported to be the text’s author (although all evidence indicated the grimoire had in fact been cobbled together in the seventeenth century from works produced during the Christian Middle Ages). The text listed not only the demons’ names and dominions, but instructions for summoning them, as well as the metallic sigils the summoner had to wear to protect him-or herself. Among these demons—number thirty-one on the list—was Foras, the name Malachi had mentioned when he let drop his remarks about the Alpha Wave and the Covenant. Solomon was said to have enslaved Foras and the other demons to help him build the First Temple in order to house the original Ark of the Covenant, although whether a relationship existed between the Hebrew covenant and the one Malachi had mentioned remained a mystery.
    In 1918, a demon by the name of Beleth (number thirteen on the list) had been killed by the Legion’s founder, Jordan David, at which point the Lemegeton became for all intents and purposes the Legion’s handbook. Despite ninety years of perfervid examination on the partof the gatherers, however, the book had yielded nothing besides the name of the cut the hunters submitted to in order to protect themselves from possession. But in the wake of Malachi’s name-dropping, she