Saving Elijah

been swimming with the fish, but now our skin has dried in the hot sun, and we hear the music, a progression of chords in a minor key, a chorus of arpeggios, a tenor voice.
    "Do you hear that singing, Mommy?"
    "Yes, I hear it. That's the demon's song."
    I look over the side of the boat at the rippling water. Just beneath the surface I see brain corals, stag corals, honeycomb corals, tall and fat, tiny and towering, structure upon structure, in blues, reds, whites, greens. And crevasses between the coral for fish, resting places, free from predators. We all need resting places, do we not?
    Elijah scoots over beside me and winds his arms around my neck. "No, Mommy," he says, "that's never been the demon's song."

    *    *    *

    "Everything seems fine," Dr. Selson said the next day, after he'd finished examining Elijah. Elijah and the doctor had developed a friendly rapport in the months since we started bringing Elijah to see him. Now Elijah was sitting contentedly on the doctor's lap, playing with Dr. Selson's purple dinosaur pencil puppet.
    "I want to still keep him on the same medication," the doctor told us, "but next month, I think we'll do another EEC At the next appointment, no hurry."
    We booked the appointment with the receptionist, then Sam and I left his office, each of us holding one of Elijah's hands.
    We waited for the elevator, not saying anything, trying not to catch each other's eye. When we came out onto the street, I pointed to the lot across the street. "We're over there."
    Sam nodded. "Do you want me to walk you?"
    "We can manage, but thanks." I wanted him home so much I could taste it.
    "When are you coming home, Daddy?" Elijah asked.
    I bent down to look him in the eyes. "Daddy can't come home right now, honey."
    "Wait a minute, Dinah." Sam bent down, so that Elijah was between us. We parted the crowds walking on the street. Sam whispered something to Elijah, who looked at me with a big, big smile.
    "Do you want Daddy to come home?"
    I looked at my husband. "Of course I want him to come home."
    Elijah looked up at us, back and forth, from my face to Sam's. "He doesn't."
    "Who doesn't, Elijah?" Sam asked.
    "The ghost."
    My husband made a noise in his throat, but suddenly he and Elijah were gone, and with them that busy New York street. Another scene materialized in front of my eyes, inch by dreadful inch, a panorama of grass, sky, fields covered with snow, a farmhouse in the distance. Each visual fragment stacking one on top of another until the collection of fragments became a whole picture. A place.

    *    *    *

    I am standing in an icy rain, on a snow-covered cornfield, under a black roiling sky. It is cold, very cold, and a raw wind whips around me. I hear a low rumble from the catastrophic sky, and there is heavy black smoke everywhere, hanging in the air, the smell of burning fuel. I am able to move through the smoke easily, but I hear coughing all around me, human beings suffering, burning, dying.
    "Please," I say. "I left Elijah on the street."
    The black smoke lifts with a gust of wind, enough for me to make out a death sculpture: jagged metal strewn across a cornfield like so much garbage, part of a wing, a propeller, a piece of tail, a section of fuselage, gunmetal gray, resting in the snow.
    "Survivors!" I race across the field in that icy wind, stepping over bodies and pieces of bodies, a bloody arm, a torso, a white thighbone stripped of skin, protruding from the ground like a headstone. Finally I am standing next to the fuselage. I know the metal is fiery hot, but I feel nothing of life in this vision, no heat. I peer into one of the airplane's small windows. A woman's body is strewn like a naked rag across the floor of the cabin, clothes and skin in tatters. I hear a high-pitched scream—not the woman's, the woman is dead.
    The screams come from a dark-haired boy, about ten years old, trapped under the woman's body. By instinct I reach in through the window and try to pull him, but I cannot touch him, and he is wedged in, screaming earsplitting shrieks more animal than human.
    I hear another sound now, a slurp, and then a sizzle. The demon materializes next to me, bright and blinding against the leaden sky. In this gray light, I can clearly see for the first time what it is made of. Tiny wasplike creatures moving so quickly they create a kind of formed light, a whirlpool of stinging, buzzing, itching, swirling, agonizing torture. Thai is what I felt inside me, the