Saving Elijah

earnestly. "There are physiological causes for behavior, you know." I told him about my intro psych course. The professor had lectured on nature and nurture that very day.
    "Did you discuss the issue of evil?" he asked.
    Now I giggled. "Evil isn't in the syllabus, as far as I know." I was making a joke, but he didn't laugh, so I kept talking. "If you're talking about the Holocaust, say, or Adolph Hitler, maybe psychology alone can't explain it."
    "Which proves my point. In that case you've got history, and politics, and economics, and, most of all, religion. At the heart of Christianity—at the heart of European culture—you've got two thousand years of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. But even with all that, it doesn't explain what happened in Europe in the 1930s and forties. Only a concept like evil would come close."
    Anne Frank's diary had piqued my interest in the subject when I was about thirteen, and I'd read other books after that, books that described the horrors of the concentration camps, some in excruciating detail. Ghost stories had been supplanted by real, true evil.
    "Well," I said, "it seems to me that blaming evil acts on some sort of evil force—on the Devil, which seems to be where you're going—is a way of not taking responsibility for your actions."
    "Personally," he said, "I see two possible explanations for the presence of evil in the world. One, the existence of evil negates even the possibility of a benevolent God. And two, there's a force of evil separate from God, maybe greater than God. Simple as that."
    "Greater? No way. I vote for number one. Because no truly good God could allow horrible things to occur, like the Holocaust, or the Inquisition."
    "Atheist, are you? The existence of the Devil doesn't nullify your psychological argument, it just explains the supremacy of evil, and fills in holes that psychology, genetics, and history can't."
    The Devil again. A subject with which Seth Lucien seemed obsessed. That night, and nights to come, he lectured me on the subject—its origins, the difference between Jewish and Christian concepts of Satan, and so on—as if I were his student. Given his fascination with evil, what amounted to a theological belief in evil, I doubt he accepted the dry historical facts he spouted. I was certain even then that his attraction to Satan was helped along by his having read that the Devil's foot is marked. He'd interpreted his injury as distinguishing him in some way. And it was pillow talk like none I'd ever heard of. Not that I had a concept of pillow talk at the time.
    But that night he lifted his glass in the flickering light of black candles. "How about we drink to the blossoming of Dinah?"
    I resolved in my mind to be more uninhibited with him, clinked with him again, too hard, and the two goblets shattered, spilling onto the bed and our laps. His mother's goblets, for God's sake. "I'm so sorry, I—"
    "Wait, don't move. You're bleeding." He took my finger and put his mouth to the cut and kissed it, then gave it a few strokes with his tongue.
    "Let me get you a bandage." He brought the bandage back to the bed and wrapped my finger in it, kissed my finger again. "You know what this means? I've tasted your blood." He smiled. "That means you're mine forever."
    It seemed over the top, even at the time, but I loved it.

    *    *    *

    During the next few weeks, I hardly ever went back to my dorm room. I did my homework in Seth's attic while he worked on his play or practiced with his band, Death Trip. I watched his rehearsals, hung out with his actor friends, though I was completely left out of their conversations, ate my meals with him, slept in his bed, discussed philosophy and religion, his brand of it, as best I could. He was constantly quoting this or that— long soliloquies of Shakespeare, multiple lines from Hermann Hesse, stanzas of Tennyson or Goethe. I was fascinated with his recall, which truly was remarkable, but I mistakenly interpreted a pathological need to show off for something else entirely, a love of literature itself. I even changed my way of dressing for him. He favored black, of course, black jeans, tight tops, boots. He introduced me to marijuana and hashish, and we listened constantly to The Doors. Jim Morrison was already dead, and his records were all Seth ever listened to, other than his own band's music. One time I brought over a few of my own albums, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and he called them "old lady