Me and the Devil: A Novel (21 page)

It was like looking into my own eyes.

These knives arrive from Japan with their blade edges at seventy to eighty percent of their maximum sharpness. After buying the knife with the black-magic blue maple handle, I had the shop’s knife-sharpening master, Chiharu Sugai, hone its blade to a razor edge. At the sunken basin of water at which he squatted, he worked at the blade with expert movements on a series of wetted sharpening stones of increasing fineness.

As he did so, I went to a farther glass showcase in the little shop. Set off by themselves, near a variety of folding knives designed by Koji Hara—handsome blades in handsome handles of stag, abalone, exotic hardwoods, silver inlaid with mother-of-pearl—were a couple of stranger and much older-looking knives.

The blades of these knives were about three inches long and remarkably slender, narrowing to sharp points from a maximum width of barely a quarter of an inch near where, with a small flourish of twenty-four-karat-gold symbols laid into the steel, they were set into thin ebony handles not much longer than the blades. Each had a fitted sheath of wood, with a removable metal ring to which were attached braided colored cords intended to be fixed to sash-belts. These knives, I was told, were called
tosu.
They were among the last made by the last of the master
tosu
craftsmen, Uegama Nobuyiki, who retired some years ago, bringing to an end the long history of
tosu
artisanship that began more than two thousand years ago.

“What are these used for?” I asked.

Young Keisuke smiled his friendly smile. There was in that smile now an element of implied but unspoken knowledge that he seemed to suspect I already shared.

“You could use them, I guess, to open letters,” he said, smiling still. “Maybe to eat fruit.”

They were assassins’ knives. So deadly, so beautiful. The one
of the two on which my eyes were fixed had a sheath of snakewood with a hand-wrought silver finial and an elaborately embroidered woven-gold Nishijin storage pouch.

So deadly, so beautiful. And so much more costly than the best of the cutlery that New York’s most celebrated chefs came here to buy.

We got past the letter-opening and fruit-peeling. For the last few hundred years, I was told—there seemed to be only the merest hint of warning, the merest hint of advice—
tosu
were used only as part of ceremonial or decorative dress, or bought only as collectors’ items.

Sugai-san had finished with my big magic-handled knife. It was being placed in a sheath of light magnolia wood and arranged in a hard black felt-lined, silver-clasped carrying case.

The assassin’s knife, I knew, was also to be mine. I asked Sugai-san if he could restore the
tosu
to its razor-like cutting edge. He was a knife-sharpening master. A blade was a blade. I was told that the relatively fragile nature of the
tosu
blade was such that I should make careful use of tsubaki oil, derived from the camellia plant, to tend it well.

I was still sipping coffee, though it was cold, when I put my shades back on and left the shop, a few grand lighter, but pleased with my black magic knives. Words came to me from nowhere, and I said them as I dumped the empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup into the trash on the corner of West Broadway:

“One for the kitchen, one for the killing.”

S
O THERE
I
SAT IN THE CROAKER’S OFFICE ON THE
U
PPER
East Side. He was a good guy, a general practitioner who specialized in gastroenterology, whom I had inherited as my internist from my previous doctor, Allen Yanoff, who was the greatest man of medicine and one of the greatest human beings I have ever known. The two doctors had adjacent offices and shared examination rooms on East Sixty-third Street. Yanoff had always spoken highly of his colleague, and so when Yanoff, who did not smoke, died of lung cancer, I began seeing his friend and fellow doctor.

I had once gone for more than thirty years without seeing a doctor, except for an Italian-Swiss guy in the Village, also now passed on to the Hippocratic beyond, who simply asked me what I thought I should be prescribed and then gave me the prescription for the drug that my self-diagnosis had been calculated to call for.

What had brought me to Dr. Yanoff was the inexplicable loss of more than thirty pounds within barely three months. I figured it was the end. But how to find an actual good doctor? I knew that good, honest physicians were as rare as good, honest grease monkeys or good, honest lawyers. It was my old friend Richard who, when I told him of my quandary, provided me with the sage advice that led me to Allen Yanoff.

“Ask a healthy person,” he said.

The healthiest-looking and best-preserved person I knew at the time was my dentist. I asked her who her doctor was, and she told me it was Yanoff. I went to see him. I later came to suspect that I did so only to hear the worst, which would have given me full license to drink myself to death forthwith. He took a good long look at me, told me it was not what I thought, drew some blood, and—I was impressed that a physician would be so caring as to do this—called the next afternoon, which was a Saturday, to report that the results of the blood tests, on which he had placed a rush, revealed that I had diabetes. The woman with whom I was living at the time told him that I was not there, that I was drinking at a nearby bar. “Tell him not to drink beer,” he said. She came to the bar with this message. I turned to my drinking buddy Hoboken Jerry, who lately had been given to spewing blood but refused to see a doctor and lived not too much longer.

“You believe this?” I said. “The doctor just told me to drink Scotch instead of beer.”

“I want the name of your doctor,” he said.

Having just met me, Yanoff had no way of knowing how much of a binge drunkard I was. I went back to see him again, and then again. Sometimes I wondered why. Maybe there remained in me, even at my darkest, a grain of hope that if I did what I could to lengthen my wretched existence, there might be a day when light would come. Then there were times when I thought it was only the Valium prescriptions that kept me coming back. Only after he was gone did I appreciate the fact that it was he who kept me coming back.

“How do you feel?” he asked me one day.

“The words ‘I don’t give a fuck if I live or die’ keep rising to my throat. I don’t really mean them. I don’t want to die. So I don’t say them. But they keep rising in me, like a part of me really doesn’t care about a single fucking thing in this world.”

I saw that he was smiling benignly, as if I had made him happy for me and thereby for himself. I didn’t get it.

“That’s great,” he said. “You’re free. It means you’re free.”

What I had felt to be something fatally bad within me I now felt to be something very good. It was an illumination. In a few minutes he had performed, off-the-cuff, greater good than psychiatry could or would perform over a lifetime.

He was like that rock in the sea off the coast of that Sicilian island. He cured. Body, mind, and soul. He cured. Like the jagged black rock called Faraglione, he could not be replaced. Only after he was gone did I fully realize this, and my sense of loss was great.

But the new guy, the new croaker, his buddy, was not bad either. On his desk as I sat with him in his office this day was the copy of Olivier Ameisen’s book and the letter I had sent him.

We talked about the baclofen I sorely wanted after reading Olivier’s book, corresponding with him, and speaking with him.

“One man’s opinion,” he said of the efficacy that Olivier claimed for baclofen.

As is your own, I thought.

He told me that the American Medical Association placed what is called a “black box” around baclofen. This, he explained, was a sort of warning regarding certain medications with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms or otherwise adverse drug reactions, which the AMA referred to as ADRs.

While he had me there, he wasn’t going to let me go without a complete physical. In the examination room, he asked the usual questions. How frequently did I wake up at night to urinate? How were things in the erectile department? Was I coughing up much phlegm lately?

“Yeah. I figure it’s good to get it out.”

“What color.”

“Oh, it depends on the day.”

And so on. He examined the inside of my mouth pretty thoroughly. Then out it came, that penlight. I watched his eyes narrow and his brows rise.

“Any change in vision?”

“If anything, it’s getting better.”

He muttered something. It was as if he were asking himself a question that he expected another part of himself to answer. Did he say it just to hear himself say it?

“Have you seen Dr. Chang lately?”

Dr. Chang was the eye specialist whom I saw every year or so for retinopathy examinations.

“No.”

He put his little penlight back in his pocket and said no more weird words, seemingly satisfied with having passed the buck to Chang and thus got himself off the hook.

My pulse was a bit fast, he said, but my blood pressure and blood oxygen level were perfect. He put his stethoscope to my front and my back. I lay down on the table. He pressed, poked, palpated my lower abdomen, my upper abdomen.

“What’s that?” he said. “Does that hurt?”

“What? I don’t feel anything.”

He took my hand in his and placed it to my lower left belly, where sure enough one of my guts was protruding hard under my skin like a fat dead snake in rigor mortis.

“Has it been like that all the time?” he asked. “You haven’t felt it before?”

To tell the truth, I had felt some occasional cramping and stiffening there, but it had always passed. The same occurred, with more intensity and more frequency, in my lower legs. But I was not in the mood to tell the truth. Whatever it was, it would go away, and I didn’t want any further tests. I rolled sideways, my upper knee raised, and he finger-fucked his way to my prostate.
The nurse came in. She gave me an electrocardiogram, drew blood, and wheeled out the spirometer. I was untrusting of this new spirometer, which factored various data into its breath-capacity readings: age, height, weight, and how much you smoked. Why should my lung power be measured differently from that of a twenty-year-old? Shouldn’t the spirometer’s results be independent and indicative of how much I smoked, rather than being influenced, one way or the other, by this information beforehand? My antagonism to the device made me blow the required three times to the absolute fullest of my wind power, as I was supposed to. She took me into another room for a chest X-ray.

When I was called back into the doctor’s office, he told me that the electrocardiogram and lung capacity readings were fine. The X-ray hung over the light box on the wall to his left.

“You broke a few ribs, I see,” he said. He had been saying the same thing every time he looked at my chest X-rays for the past two years, ever since I had cracked three ribs falling down drunk one night. It was always as if he were noticing the healed cracks for the first time. This is one of the things that made me leery of these guys. They seemed never to remember anything about you that wasn’t in your medical file, and even then only if the record lay open before them like a cheat sheet. There was no human or personal element. You were not a lost mortal creature with a life with which you had entrusted them, but only a mess of test results from an impersonal, unknown industrial-suburban laboratory with which they had a sweetheart deal. If you told them your wife passed away, they would probably ask you how she was when they next saw you, if they could remember that you had ever had a wife.

And so I was thankful for those cracked ribs, which served as a constant reminder that most of these guys neither knew, cared, nor remembered anything about you no matter how many years they saw you.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at the familiar marks from the cracked ribs that showed on the X-ray. “That was awhile back.”

He asked me if I needed prescriptions for Valium and dandruff shampoo.

“I think I’m doing all right with the dandruff shampoo,” I told him. Then I added aggressively: “What about the baclofen? Are you giving me the baclofen?”

“Reluctantly,” he said.

Yeah, I thought, the same way I’m paying that eight-and-a-half-yard bill on the way out.

“Call me next week for the test results.”

He had sent the baclofen prescription electronically to my pharmacy, he told me. Modern times. The prescription had already been filled by the time I walked to the E train and got back downtown. In the bag with the baclofen there was also a container of anti-dandruff shampoo.

A few days later I saw my endocrinologist. I had also sent him a copy of Olivier’s book and a letter. I wanted two sources, my internist and him, for all my prescriptions. I liked to remain stocked up.

Much to my surprise, the endocrinologist declined to give me a prescription. He spoke of unknown possible side effects. He said he did not trust a drug for which it was claimed that there were no known side effects. “Even aspirin has side effects,” he said. He was doing this, he said, because he cared for me.

The aspirin reference. The caring about my fate. My own words were being used to deny me what I wanted. The business about concern over possible side effects was what really got me. What about the fucking ADRs of booze, including death not only from the shit itself but also often from the withdrawal from it? Where the hell was the AMA’s little fucking black box there? You would think that medical doctors, who collectively have a higher
rate of addiction and suicide than any other profession, would better understand these things. But it did not pay to think. As the old Hippocratic writings tell us: what drugs do not cure, the knife will. Yeah. The knife of suicide.