Me and the Devil: A Novel (10 page)

I no longer cared where this was going. When verse and a salame sandwich vied, verse lost, no matter how much the salame
sandwich left to be desired. How could they call this shit mozzarella? How could they charge three bucks for a half-pound shrink-wrapped blob of it? How could I have bought it? I never entered that fucking Whole Foods without stealing something. I had a drawerful of Quince Body Moisturizer and other extravagantly priced Dr. Hauschka skin-care products. There were days when I had three pounds of Kosher Valley chicken under my belt and a pound of Health Valley butter in my pocket. This organic shit sucked, but you couldn’t beat the price. I looked forward to the spring morel season, even more to the white matsutaki season in the late fall. The formality of waiting in a checkout line or pausing at a cash register was very rare. I even well worked the honor system in the coffee department, where you scooped your own beans from false-bottomed barrels and wrote the variety and price look-up code on the bag you put them in, whole or ground. I liked some kind of French roast, which I ground for a paper-cone drip into a bag whereon I indicated it to be some cheap shit, Morning Buzz or Café Blend or whatever it was, that cost a fraction of what was in the bag. It
was
an honor system, for few things were as dishonorable as allowing yourself to be played for a sucker. Yes, they may have been out to rip me off, but I was beating them at their own racket. My most memorable coup was perhaps the four-pound châteaubriand filet that protruded from my lower flank and hip like an elephantine colostomy bag about to burst all over the Ancient Harvest quinoa. Then there was that two-foot organic sprouted-grain baguette that, with one end tucked into my sock and the rest of it running hidden up my trouser leg, lent me a quite distinguished limp. Natural. Organic. Dog shit was natural and organic. A puddle of piss left in the gutter by a drunken bum was natural and organic. Potassium cyanide was natural and organic (with a
periodic-element pedigree, no less). And unlike the salmon at Whole Foods, dog shit wasn’t artificially colored. I remembered walking into Buccellati on Madison one day a few years back. There was only one customer, an elderly matron who seemed to be in the process of both croaking and buying about a million bucks’ worth of jewelry. The armed guard must have gone out for coffee, and the lone saleslady was so wrapped up in catering to and reaping the fortune of the windstorm buying spree of the decomposing matron, that a bracelet of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies lay right there in the open, half on and half off its plush black-velvet display cushion, on a showcase counter. The fat kike with the loupe I took it to in Newark offered me twelve grand cash, so I figured it was worth twenty-five. I was wrong. Another fat kike with another loupe gave me thirty a few months later. Yahweh only knows what he got for it. From one end of Kosher Valley to the other. In the wrong direction.
Yea, though I walk through the aisle of the shadow of sugary death…
So why had I paid for rather than boosted this misbegotten little ball of gypsum-like mozzarella? I chewed and swallowed, none too pleased with myself or my sandwiches. Goddamn fucking Chinks.

“What was it that made those lines jump out at you?” I asked.

A smile came over her face, and that arch look returned. “You’re kidding,” she said.

“So that made you think of me. Is that what you think of me?” I said. “That I’m some kind of monster?”

I was being defensive. She wasn’t even Chinese. She wasn’t even a team member of the Whole Foods cheese department. I took a deep breath, remembered what she meant to me.

“No,” she said. “Not at all.”

She was more than forty years younger than I, and her tone had the mature, measured, calm, and somewhat amused forbearance of a mother dealing with a recalcitrant child.

“No,” she repeated. “It made me think of you, yes, but not as you say. It made me think of us. I read those lines over and over, and the more I read them, the more excited I became. I was on the subway, and I kept wishing more and more that I was with you, just the two of us, alone, together. I missed my stop. I got out and walked. I realized I had memorized the lines without knowing it, just by reading them over and over. I kept repeating them to myself as I walked. Every step I took, I became more conscious of the friction of my panties and my pants on my pussy. I felt my thighs rubbing together as I walked. It felt good. It felt too good. I just kept getting more and more excited, until I felt that if I were thrown down to the cold concrete and raped, it wouldn’t really have been rape. It would have been part of the poem. The real rapist would’ve been me. And it was you that I saw throwing me down. You. I can’t explain it. You raping me, and me raping you. But how could two people rape each other at the same time? Not as some silly game, but for real. How could that be? It wasn’t what rape was. It was beyond that. It was everything rape was, but it was different. It was more.”

She was no longer talking to me. The mature, calm, and forbearing mother had left the room, had left the night, had never been. And she was not talking to hear herself talk, or to ward off with words phantoms of torment that thrived on silence. No. What she was doing was trying, impossibly, desperately, to parse the inflections of feelings that lay outside the known grammar of feeling.

Communication is a shoddily cobbled shoe encrusted with the muddling sludge of time, trampling, and ill wear. We speak of
Isis, unaware that, in the vowel-less phonetics of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the symbols of the throne and the loaf that signified her name give us not Isis but
Jst.
And we speak of Jesus, he of a later mythology; but how many of those who yet kneel unto him know that this is a name that he never would have recognized or answered to, for his name was Yeshua? And we say of any of the elemental turnings of nature that we can “smell it in the air”; yet the word book we might use to more precisely express our perceptions remains unopened by most of us, who with a single word,
petrichor,
could describe the pleasing scent brought by rain after long days of warm, dry weather. The word was welded from two Greek words, the second of them being
ichor,
the ethereal blood that ran in the veins of the gods and the goddesses. From the first babblings of earliest childhood to the dimwitted pretensions of eloquence uttered in age, we pass most of our lives unable to communicate effectively what we feel, think, or want to say. Like trying to work wood or metal without tools, we can’t even articulate our worst stupidities, let alone the few worthy perceptions that attach themselves to us by accident. Unless helped out posthumously by historians, how many of us can even string together a cogent cheap platitude of parting on our deathbed? The tired saying was all too often true: if you remain silent, people will take you for a fool; if you speak, they will know you to be one.

But Melissa was no fool. I cannot say that I understood all of what she was trying to say, any more than she herself did. Her words, however, lighted on places in me where I felt that understanding slept and was about to wake. The more she spoke, the more I admired her. She already knew what most people never learn. It was what Homer knew: that words were for war, and not for surrender. Even if she was unaware that she knew this, she did. Like a rare and beautiful creature of an exotic vanishing species
who knows no others like itself but only the drabber beings that flourish in multitude around it, she may have felt herself merely to be different, and to be isolated by that difference. It was up to me to show her that what she might be mistaking as lowly difference from the flock was in fact the rare beauty that constituted transcendence, a difference of a very special kind.

“And what did you do when you got home?” I asked her.

She looked straight ahead for a moment or so, as if now trying to choose her words carefully. Then, seeming to discard any such attempt, she simply spoke the words that had been there waiting to be said:

“I raped myself.

“I masturbated like crazy. I bit my arms as I was doing it. I slapped myself. I snarled dirty things at myself. It was like there were two me’s. It really did feel like I was raping myself. And I thought of you, and we were raping each other. And I felt myself beginning to come, and I told myself I was going to hold myself back and rush over here and rip open my coat and finish it here, in your face. All sorts of things. And then I just exploded. I came and I came again. And I fell asleep.” Here she paused again. “And before I fell asleep, I looked around in the dark with my eyes open, and I knew you weren’t there, and I said ‘I love you.’ And I was saying it to both of us.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Saying ‘I love you’?”

“No. The self-rape. You raping me and me raping you at the same time?”

“It was all in my head.”

“But what did it feel like? What did what was in your head feel like?”

“It was almost too much. It was like being in a storm that was so bad I had to close my eyes. It was like I could feel the force of
the winds and all these windblown things hitting me and flying past me, but I couldn’t see what they were.”

“When you say you closed your eyes to it, do you think that could mean you closed your mind to it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted to feel it a lot more than I wanted to see it. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to feel it.”

“And it felt good? You weren’t afraid of what you couldn’t see?”

“It felt more than good. It felt fucking great.”

She seemed lost in that remembered feeling that was hers alone. She slowly stood, returned the beat-up paperback to her bag. She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it with my lighter, and sat back down. I had not seen her smoke before.

“What was really weird was that the whole thing, whatever it was, didn’t even have a name. I never heard of any kind of sex, any kind of anything, that didn’t have a name. That sort of shook me up a little. Like I had gone beyond what was known. Like I had gone beyond what was even imagined. I mean, they had words for guys who fucked dead bodies. Words for guys who got off disemboweling live children. I read a whole paper once on how Proust liked to jerk off while he stuck hatpins through rats. But there was nothing for this. Not a name, not a word. Bernini made a statue of Saint Teresa swooning while Jesus fucked her brain. They called it ecstasy. They called it—what’s that other word they called it?”

I shrugged and grimaced indifferently with ignorance.

“Oh, come on, you know. You of all people. That word they only use when they’re talking about her.”

“I really don’t know.”

“Transverberation. Yeah, ecstasy, transverberation. And they put it in the Vatican. Nobody was going to make a statue of me raping myself, a statue of me raping you while you raped me. But it was ecstasy. And it was transverberation, whatever the hell that means. But it was way more.

“They say that if a fly flies too high it gets sucked off into space. I felt like one of those flies. Fancy words, dirty words, the whole taxonomy of sex and sin: it’s all down there somewhere, and here I am, up here in dark space without any gravity to get my little fly-ass back to where it came from.”

“Does that scare you?”

“A little. But this is all just—I don’t know. If it does scare me a little, it’s all just part of that other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“That thing without a name. That thing, whatever it is, that feels so fucking great.”

She then fell still. Though she was not looking at me, or at anything, I could see on her face the most serenely beguiling smile that I had ever seen, certainly on her, maybe on anyone. It made Mona Lisa look like she was taking a pleasant shit and nothing more.

“Do you want to rape me?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I can.” Only then did the smile on her face ease and become imperceptible. “I don’t think it would work that way. I think I can only rape you by being raped
by
you.”

Without thought, without hesitation, with nothing but a sudden white heat in my mind and body, I grabbed her by the neck, jammed my hand down her panties, and rammed my fist up her cunt. She screamed and clawed at me, and I tore down her T-shirt and sank my teeth into her breast without any foreplay of lip or tongue. She struck me as the blood, full and strong, entered my mouth. I smacked her in angry response. She pulled violently at my arm to remove my fist from her, and I drove it in deeper, deeper again, as I sucked the blood relentlessly from her. She punched my back. I wrenched my fist from her cunt, and with both hands pried open her clenched jaw and let loose a good amount of her own blood from my mouth into hers. I blocked her
breath with my hand until she swallowed and gagged. As she made to strike me again I grasped her wrist and forced her to smear herself with the blood that still flowed from her breast. I shoved her aside. I was panting like a beast, and so was she. Our bodies loosened, our breath subsided. We looked as if we had overcome a wild boar and feasted on it raw with our bare hands. Glancing at each other, our bellies moved with mild, soundless laughter.

“I love you,” she said.

How I had yearned to hear those words from her, and how happy it now made me to hear them. I felt blessed. I felt as if I could close my eyes and sleep in bliss in her embrace.