Me and the Devil: A Novel (31 page)

“Turn off the waterworks, baby, they don’t move me no more.”

I knew her sobbing was an overture to anger, and I would
have none of it. I went to the basket of umbrellas in the nook beside my stacked washing machine and dryer, near my front door. There it was, among the umbrellas, seventeen inches of pure heavy iron: a twelve-inch length of black iron pipe connected firmly by an inch-and-a-half Ward-threaded black iron coupling to another three and a half inches of black iron pipe affixed to a blunt black iron cap. An inch in diameter, the four base inches of the pipe were wrapped tight in McMaster-Carr grip tape for a perfect grasp. It was good to have friends who were plumbers and boiler men.

I raised it out, wrapped my hand fast around the grip, went back to where she stood, swung it sideways, and rapped her in the ass with just enough force for the iron cap to send a deep, long-lasting, and painful bruise through the fat of her buttock.

As I did this, she shrieked, flinched, and struck out all at once. Thus one of her flailing forearms was also none the better for the blow.

“You’re crazy,” she exclaimed in a high, panicky voice as she cowered away from me. “You sick fucking monster! You
really are
crazy.” She placed her hand where she had been struck. Her face was contorted with wincing and crying and who knew what else. She ran to the bedroom. Shit, I thought suddenly, what if she knows where the gun is? But I did not hear the closet being opened. I glimpsed her pulling off my robe and throwing it to the bed, then gathering up her clothes.

I sat there, the pipe in one hand, a cigarette in the other. It hit me. This bitch is going to make a report at the First Precinct. I took a drag. So what if she did? I had asked her to leave. She had refused. That made her a trespasser. And besides, she’d never get a hospital report of any use out of this. A bruise on her ass, maybe her forearm; no big deal. Shit, a bruise on her ass. The fucking cops would spit out their coffee trying not to laugh. And if she
pulled down her britches for the doctor, how would she ever explain away the telltale signs of our blood-play? Nah, fuck it, she wasn’t going anywhere, except away from here. Still, I figured, it would be best to disassemble the pipe in my hand and put the two lengths and the connector in different places. I would ditch the cap that had left its mark on her ass. I could always pick up another at the hardware store for a couple of bucks, maybe less.

Then something else came to mind, but I was quickly reassured to see that her bag, as usual, was on the easy chair across from the couch where I was sitting. I peeked in, and there it was: that gizmo of hers, that smartphone, or handheld device, or whatever the fuck they called it. Good. That meant she wasn’t in the bathroom or crouched in a far corner of the bedroom melodramatically whisper-calling or e-mailing or texting or tweeting or twittering or Facebooking or pressing little red all-points bulletin buttons or whatever the hell else these people did.

She stood before me, and she no longer showed any fear. She turned, shouldered her bag, then turned to once again stare into my eyes.

“I’ll always love you,” she said. She said it as one might say words over the dead.

Sarah fucking Bernhardt.

She forgot to fake a limp until she was almost halfway to the door. Then she was gone.

I poured a glass of cold milk and took a Valium. I breathed deeply. My pulse was calm. My mind was as placid with no-thought as ever I had known it to be.

Melissa had meant the world to me. I had come to hate the world. In casting her away, I had cast away the world that I despised. I felt free. I felt great.

Yes, fuck the living. Fuck the dead. Fuck the world and all that lies beyond.

I
RAISED MY GLASS IN SALUTE TO MYSELF, TO THE VINDICATION
of my hatred and my freedom. But there should be a different glass in my hand, with something different in that glass.

There was no shaving, no showering, no brushing of my hair or of my remaining teeth. I pulled on some clothes, stuck my cheap plastic choppers into my mouth. I had been advised by Olivier to take my doses of baclofen even if I were to drink. But I took no baclofen, and I left my morning diabetes medications, my glyburide and my metformin tablets, in their vials in my medicine cabinet. I had no time for these things. I wanted to get drunk. Now. Right now. I patted my pockets for money, cigarettes, keys. I slammed the door shut behind me.

The first thing I did when stepping forth into the world, which until this morning had bound me, was to spit with loud, thick vehemence on the pavement.

It was not yet half past nine, and the bar on Reade Street was still rather empty, the way I liked it.

When I was a little kid on my way to school at half past eight in the morning, I used to walk by joints like this, look in, and think: who are those guys? Now I was one of them.

I slapped a few twenties down and ordered a pint of Guinness and a double shot of Jameson. I drank the whiskey in two swallows, the Guinness in three, then I ordered more. I drank them and ordered more again. I stalked outdoors to spit again, loud and
thick, and to smoke a cigarette. I watched the island-nigger nannies waddle by pushing white yuppie brats in three-grand prams and strollers. I’d rather have them as neighbors than the mothers of the brats they pushed. I flicked my cigarette butt in the direction of a passing twin stroller, then reentered the bar and drank more. I pushed the emptied rocks glass into the bar gutter and drank only Guinness.

A few city workers, a few union slobs wandered in. They watched, or stared at, the news on one of the three television sets behind the bar as they drank. They were like a bunch of old ladies lost in their soap operas. Whenever the satellite reception went on the blink, they grew nervous, unbearably alone with nothing but themselves, their dull empty lives, their dull empty talk, their dull empty laughter so like the sounds of cows at slaughter.

I glanced at the television screen nearest me. In these joints these days, it could not be avoided. In these joints these days, television had the attributes of the Judeo-Christian God: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. That glance upon the face of Yahweh-Yeshua brought me something most unexpected, something I had never before seen. It was a commercial for Barnes & Noble, the bookseller whose corporation had come to represent something like a monopoly of bookstores. I liked Len Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble. He was a good guy. But I had watched through the years as Barnes & Noble grew from a single store in New York to an immense chain that operated throughout the country. And as it grew, independent bookstores vanished and its own stores gave over more and more space to cafés, magazines, newspapers, comic books, children’s books, CDs, DVDs, calendars, games, gifts, and greeting cards instead of books. And what books they did sell became increasingly of a timely and crass commercial nature.
Buddhism for Dummies, How to Get a Job You’ll Love,
and ghostwritten
celebrity autobiographies came to be more easily found than books by William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, or living writers of worth.

So here I was looking at a Barnes & Noble commercial. I had never thought I would see the day when a bookseller advertised on television. But how disheartening it was. It was not a commercial for books. It was a commercial for the latest model of the Barnes & Noble electronic-book reader, the Nook. Worse, there seemed to be little to do with reading or books, even e-books, in this commercial for the new Nook e-reader. Rather, its flashy gimmicks were to be set forth as its selling points. Its VividView color touchscreen, its Internet-browsing, e-mail, instant-messaging, flash-chat, flash-video, and game-playing functions; its access to high-definition movies, television shows, and music. As for reading matter, it could be downloaded via iPod, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android smartphone, as well as a PC or Mac.

This was literacy as she now stood, or, more like it, as she now lay in the gutter. The last thing I wanted to do was think. But I am no fucking Ch’an master, and this stupid fucking commercial on this stupid fucking television pushed me to it.

I went back a long way with my friend and editor Michael Pietsch, the executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown. We began working together in 1983, when he was with Scribner. I can still see and remember the feeling of those old Scribner offices, with their somber, age-rich wainscot paneling and creaking floors and books and books and books. Charles Scribner III could still be seen on occasion ambling about, pausing a moment here or there as if remembering it as the spot where, as a boy, he had seen his father conversing casually with Hemingway and now whimsically expected to hear the voices of the conversation resume. Those offices were in the grand old Scribner Building, on Fifth Avenue, on whose ground floor was the grand
old Scribner Bookstore, which would close a few years later, losing out to the Barnes & Noble store across the street.

Through all the years that followed, as Michael ascended and I did whatever the hell anybody wants to say that I did, I have been proud to say that he is my editor. I loved our lunches together, talking about literature and the colors and music of words. But lately even Michael’s talk wandered to the dystopia of electronic books.

The new, top-of-the-line Nook tablet cost $249, with, if one desired, a Saffiano leather cover available for $89. The top-of-the-line Kindle DX cost $379, with an optional Cole Haan hand-stained pebble-grain leather sleeve available for $119.99. The Kindle Prime membership fee was $79 a year. It was easy to see where Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other e-book merchants were making their money, but what about the publishers? And fuck the publishers, what about the writers?

I thought of some of the books in my library. The five vellum-bound volumes of the eighteenth-century Zatta edition of Dante with its magnificent copperplate engravings. The first printed edition, from 1576, of Dante’s
Vita Nuova.
The 1948 first printing of
The Cantos,
inscribed by Ezra Pound to himself while in the bughouse at Saint Elizabeths. The first edition of Lampedusa’s
Il Gattopardo.
The signed and numbered limited edition of Faulkner’s
The Wild Palms.
The twenty volumes of the hand-bound-in-leather second edition of
The Oxford English Dictionary,
their blue goatskin covers gilt-stamped, their pages gilt-edged. And so many more: so beautiful to have, to behold, to feel, to read.

These were books, the writer’s words dignified and framed in ink and paper, leather and boards, not pieces of cheap plastic shit. I had been lucky to make it all these years to the end of publishing, the end of books, the end of literacy. I look forward to the day when I can put the piece of cheap plastic shit, the computer
on which I now write these words with my right index finger, into a big black garbage bag, haul it down to the street, and smash it to the gutter with all my might.

I drank more. But wasn’t I writing another book? That thing with the fucking leopard in the tree? The miller and the whatever? Yet another exorcism performed by the possessed upon himself, yet another telling to myself that after this the demons would be gone from me, yet another discovery that once they had been brought forth from me, I would find only deeper, darker demons that had lain beneath them? Yes, I seemed to sense, there were pages awaiting me at home. Pages with things on them that no black iron pipe could kill. But the demons and I would sit together now and drink.

Another double Jameson now to go with the Guinness. I gazed through the window. There was a lot of good-looking leg passing by out there. What a drag it was that rape involved so much exertion. Just to get some broad to be still while you jerked off on her calf or had her suck your cock without being properly introduced.

“So where you been hiding?” the bartender said. He must have figured that I had drunk enough to no longer want to be left alone. He was wrong.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I was here just the other day.”

“You haven’t been here in months.”

The old guy was losing it. This was too much. First that commercial, now him. I looked at him and he looked at me. I pushed my empty glasses toward him. He poured more whiskey into the rocks glass, fetched a fresh pint glass, and drew another Guinness.

“I swear, Nick, I haven’t seen you since the spring.”

“You better lay off that Johnnie Walker before he tips his hat to you and walks off the label. This
is
the spring.”

“Well, then, if you’re right, the calendar’s wrong.”

I shook my head, looked away from him, nonplussed. I drank down some of the whiskey, drank down some of the stout.

The bartender leaned against the cash register, as if trying to determine if I was pulling his leg. Then he let out one of those high sheela-na-gig tee-hee-hee’s of his.

“Hey, Charlie,” he called out to one of the union flotskies. “What month is it?”

“What
month
is it?” Charlie called back. “Last time I looked, it was September.”

The bartender looked to me, nodded in self-satisfied verification, then let out another little tee-hee-hee.

One of the drunken civil servants had a folded newspaper at his elbow. I put on my eyeglasses, went to it, squinted down at the date.

By now I had drunk too much to be rattled, but I was rattled. I could not remember the summer, not a single bead of sweat of it. Nothing.

When had I hit Melissa in the ass with that pipe? Hours ago, this morning? Or could it have been months ago?