Me and the Devil: A Novel (32 page)

I could not have gone unknowing through the summer. I could not have forgotten it. I mean, it was still the summer, there were a few more days of it left, and I was aware of this day, this moment. So what had happened? I was aware of this morning, of the hatred that had taken me. But, again, had that really been
this
morning? The lights still worked. That meant that I had paid my bills, that I had been conscious and functional. Then I realized that it didn’t: I approximated and paid all my monthly bills for each coming year in advance every January. I felt my face. There wasn’t much of a beard. I had shaved at some point recently. I saw in the mirror behind the bar that my hair was somewhat shaggy. I felt weak. I looked bad. But I must have eaten in recent days. Then again, I had once, years ago, gone three months just drinking and
not eating. The doctor in the hospital where I ended up told me this was impossible. But I knew it was very possible because it was the truth. Now, however, I had been taking my baclofen and not really drinking much at all. Or had I been?

It was just a matter of relaxing and remembering, I told myself. But I could not relax and I could not remember.

After a few more drinks, I was not relaxed, but I was drunk and did not give a fuck about anything. And I remembered. Nothing that had to do with this season or that. But I remembered: images and things and feelings, barely discernible but recognizable, flowing out of time through my memory, or what I believed to be my memory, in the slow river of dark night that was my mind, or what was left of it.

That thing with the monkeys. Those monkeys, those dead monkeys.

The taste of Sandrine’s blood, the taste of all their blood. Endeared and estranged, asphodels that bloomed in the night.

The taste of that croissant, the caress of that breeze, the heavenly corn silk and persimmon flesh of her pussy.

“Oh. Melissa. I don’t really know her. She seems like a nice kid.”

“Thenceforth evil became my good.”

The woman who spoke another tongue, the leopard who awaited glance in bowering shade.

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

“It was the look in my father’s eyes.”

A doorway on Thompson Street.

“I know this guy. He’s all right.”

All that matters is that the words are brought forth and set down: the words that are from or about she who is of the legends.

I loved her. I wanted to have her for whatever remained to me of forever.

The oak leaf on the sill.

Maybe it was over, I told myself.

It was then, suddenly, that I realized that I hated her.

I had thought it was the drawing of the blood. Then I knew it was the blood itself that was the essence of the transformation. Then I knew there was no transformation.

“I’ve seen things
come out of them.
”

Blood and spicy V8 juice.

The long dark passage without breath, the dark passage longer than life.

And I will never forget this. Or will I? All the brain-mold and deathless water bugs of memory that we cannot rid ourselves of, all the seemingly meaningless detritus that has bored into our minds and remains there, no matter how much we would extract it. Remembrance is a derelict, wretched, and infested broom closet in which almost all that is worth remembering, almost all that we wish we could recall, is lost and irretrievable amid the haunted litter of what we wish we could forget. The brain is not, as they would have us believe, a miraculously complex machine. It is a junkyard, a dangerous dumping ground of rusted ills; and what we regard as reason and intelligence are nothing but the diseased rats that dart and scramble through it: the crumbled plaster of things past turned to asphyxiating dust, stirred by the dead air of our inward stirrings. The mind is a lugubrious, malfunctioning instrument of self-torment, fear, and ghosts. Brilliance and beauty are but the flames of the mind that demolishes itself, the fire of arson in the junkyard. And memory is a killing thing, chewed upon and consumed by the rats, but rarely scorched by the fire that drives out the rats.

My eyes were shut. There was a sudden phosphorescence.

“If you can comprehend it, it is not God.” Augustine, no?
And the human mind, which summoned that God into a lie of being, can never and will never understand itself. And whence this arrogance from brain to mind? The brain was just another organ, prone to if not defined outright by illness and disease. The heart, the liver, the prostate, the brain: one or more of them would get you in the end.

Well, I was still here. At least I believed I was, and that was good enough.

All of the lust and blood, Melissa and Lorna and the rest.

The cravings had ebbed, and this, I remembered, felt good. The dwindling of it all, my sexuality, my desire for physical intimacy of any kind.

Was a lingering of that lust still there?

There were cunts and there were pussies. Anatomically, I mean. Most women had cunts. Ugly jagged-purfled necrotic folds of livid flesh and tissue to which one all but had to close one’s eyes. They had come to repulse me to the point where I would not enter into them, could not enter into them. But some young ladies had pussies. Alluring bivalves of pink, puffy vibrant flesh that were a pleasure to behold and to smoothly, lubriciously, sweetly enter. Behind my closed eyes I saw Melissa anointing with the chrism of her pussy the stiletto heel of her shoe, then slowly sliding it into herself. But now—for how long had it been so?—even pussy repelled me. What waited hidden within seemed to be not beautiful sacrament but something disgusting, unclean, and dangerous. And now I felt the same about a kiss, a caress, a touch. It was all repellent to me.

Even the bloodlust, the desire for new life, seemed to have left me. To recall the taste of blood was to be taken with repulsion. I no longer wanted to merge with those who possessed the youth that I had lost, the youth that, however fleetingly, I believed I had regained.

Awaiting glance. I had been like that for years. The dread of eye contact. The dread of physical contact, of any physical intimacy. Somehow, as the years had passed, these had become anathema to me. But now it was over. What was over? Something. Yes, something was over. Or was something just beginning?

Was I here? Was I really here? I did not even feel the hate of this morning—or whenever.

Why had I so intensely wanted a knife with a leopard-bone handle?

The theory of solipsism had now found a place in quantum physics. As the theory has it, only one mind exists, and all that seems to be reality is only a dream transpiring in that one solitary mind. The identity of the dreamer, of course, could never be known.

Was I the dreamer or the dreamt?

But that shit made no sense. Maybe I was going mad. Or maybe I was mad.

The shadows of early dusk were here. I staggered home. I felt the shadows to be those of another life than mine. The few blocks of my staggering seemed endless.

I saw that my kitchen was a cluttered mess of stinking empty bottles. Beer bottles and wine bottles. Vodka bottles. Whiskey bottles. A grain alcohol bottle. Even my glass jug of snake sake, with the dead snake coiled at the bottom, was opened, half empty, part of the snake protruding desiccated above the liquor that was left in the bottle. There was a pizza box, with a few slices of pizza still in it, lying on the floor.

Who had done this? Had Melissa done this in revenge? I could not remember if she had a set of keys or not. But no, who would conceive of doing something like this? I rushed about, banging here and there, looking for further signs of intrusion. I lunged to the drawer in the bedroom dresser where Melissa had
kept her hosiery and fancy high heels. They were all still there. I gathered up some shoes and pantyhose and held them close to me. They were better than her—they were her—and they were still here.

I made it to the couch and collapsed. I tried to light a cigarette, but I could not. I wanted water desperately, but I could not get up. I coughed from deep within and thought I saw something like a rat, but vaporous, shoot from my mouth and scurry wildly away.

Lorna screamed from her cross.

I slept—it was a thousand years—then woke in darkness to see if morning had broken. But all was black, and I could not raise myself to go down again to self-annihilation. I felt that I had reached the depths of direst hell.

Then I felt someone sitting beside me.

W
HO THE FUCK WAS THIS?
H
AD
I
BROUGHT SOME BUM
home from the bar? It was a guy, not a broad. And I did not know him. I was pretty sure I did not know him.

He wasn’t a queer: he was at the far end of the couch. He wasn’t a thief: I had been unconscious, and he was still here. I had done this on rare occasions in the past, brought drunken souls home with me when I could barely get home myself. What had been the plan? We would listen to music and drink more? We would not be alone? Who knows? All I thought was, oh, God, not again.

I saw that somehow I had got my shoes off, and I looked down at my feet.

“Nice socks,” he said. “Lisle?”

“Sea Island.”

He seemed mildly impressed. He bent to see if there was skin showing between the upper cuff ribbing of the sock and the frayed blue jean hem of the raised leg, resting on the knee of my other leg, that was aimed toward him.

“Over-the-calf?” he asked.

“Mid-calf,” I said.

He leaned back, then spoke as if pondering aloud. “Lisle,” he said, “Sea Island, and cashmere. The only things a man should let touch his skin.” I saw then that he was smoking an English Oval,
and I watched him tap ashes from its end into the ashtray that was on the couch between us. I still had a lot of difficulty lighting a cigarette. He graciously withdrew a lustrous gold lighter from a pocket and lit it for me.

“Tell me,” he said, “are you a Zimmerli man as well?”

I nodded, and he in turn nodded approval and reiterated, more softly, more reflectively, what he had said about the only things that a man should allow to touch his skin.

I was seized again by a hideous cough and saw, or thought I saw, another hideous, vaporous rat-haint rush from my mouth to the floor and flee, black on black, into the darkness.

“Pesky little things, those, hey?” he said lightly, a faint smile on his face. Then he resumed speaking of fine cottons. “Not many men go the tad extra for the Sea Island. After all, unless one has a good maid to wash and dry them with the proper care, what can one do but throw them away after a wearing or two? The essence of their delicate luxuriousness is lost to the washing machine, or even to slapdash hand-washing.

“But, then again, it’s just like life, isn’t it? Live it once and throw it away.” He blew a smoke ring. “And those who don’t even live it but merely throw it away almost invariably wear bad, cheap socks, to which they cling.”

“What kind of socks do
you
wear?” I asked, for want of anything else to say.

“Handwoven Carstarphen. The only truly pure Sea Island cotton. It’s the stuff Queen Elizabeth had her snot-rags made of. It was said those hankies were so light that they could float upon the air of the gentlest of breezes.”

“Custom-made socks?”

“The toe seams, or rather the absence of them. A few other minor details.” He extinguished his cigarette. “There’s an old weaver in Kentucky. Exquisite.”

“And you wear them once and throw them away?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no. I give them to storefront charities. I’m a great believer in charity.

“Should you like to feel them?”

“No.”

He withdrew another English Oval from a lustrous gold cigarette case, lit it with his lustrous gold lighter.

“Those people who throw away their lives and cling to their cheap socks have no understanding of charity,” he went on. “They are overall a curious lot.

“They all fear death, but they want to hurry and cast away the time remaining between now and the grave. ‘I can’t wait till this day’s over,’ they say. ‘I wish this week would end,’ they say. ‘I can’t wait until next month,’ they say. All of life they will ever know lies in the moment; all of infinity they will ever know lies in the present breath that they are granted. But they, who would think us crazy for throwing away socks, throw away everything in their rush to obliterate their lives and be devoured all the sooner by their greatest fear. The end and its grave-mold. Their beginning is their end: a brief, nervous twitch of panic and dread, and nothing more.”

As he spoke, I shut one eye to banish my diplopia, and I studied him, as best I could, in the dim night light that entered through the windows into the darkness of the room. He was clean-shaven, his sparse black hair streaked with gray or silver. His height, as he sat there, was indeterminate, as was his age, though he was definitely on the older side, perhaps a few years older than I. The cast of his face, which was a bit jowly, seemed to shift from grave nobility to innocent pleasance to a faraway, disincarnate gaze to complete nonchalance. His nose was rather thin, with nostrils that flared somewhat. He was dressed moderately, a bit conservatively, a bit shabbily and carelessly. From what he had said, if he was to be believed, his underwear and socks were probably more
extravagantly costly than his outer wardrobe, though for all I knew, his shirt, white with blue pinstripes, may have been of handwoven Carstarphen as well. His eyes had a soft clear gleam. And he was sober, while even I could hear the thick slur in my attempts at speech. Most of the time, I could when very drunk speak with a precision and lucidity of articulation that belied my state and affected relative sobriety. It was a gift that served me well. But I was beyond that now. Why was he here?