Me and the Devil: A Novel (43 page)

I should have taken a few steps after the two women, and, excusing myself for the intrusion, asked the one I had overheard
if she had spoken his name. I did not do this, but I should have. She had nice legs, too.

He himself may have heard her as well, for it was not long after this that he suggested we remove ourselves to a different bench. I had become so habituated to this bench that for a moment I hesitated. A block north, we entered little Duane Park. Walking slowly and looking round at the barren winter trees, we chose a bench, a good one, beneath one tree and facing another. It also faced a sign that, in three languages, forbade smoking. I took to aiming my cigarette butts at the sign when I flicked them.

A different bench. The notions of change and repose were in the drifting of the fallen leaves in our path.

Then one morning he was not there. And I somehow knew that he was not to return. He had moved on.

O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR’S
E
VE
, I
MADE
ARAGOSTA AL SALMORIGLIO,
broccoli with anchovy and garlic sauce, and thick-cut French fries. And, fool that I was, I blew almost another grand on another bottle of that Clos du Mesnil 1995. Money down the drain, almost literally. But fuck it. The year past had been the most diabolically fucked-up year in my life. I would toast its end with the champagne I chose.

The broiled lobster came out beautifully. I had watched it closely and pulled out the pan the very moment that the olive oil in the
salmoriglio
sauce set it aflame, placed the hunks of sizzling hot lobster, still moist and tender on the inside, into a bowl, and poured over them more
salmoriglio,
which I had reserved and only very, very slightly chilled.

It was
un pasto ambrosiaco,
a meal fit for the gods—of which I was one, was I not?

I should have got myself a cake or a pie or something, too, I thought with some regret. I had been good, all too good, these last few months as far as my diabetes was concerned. But one could not live in deprivation. That was not living. Fuck my diabetes. It had fucked me.

A banana cake from Billy’s. An apple pie, or a pecan pie, from that little joint on Chambers Street. A half-dozen cannoli from—oh, fuck, I didn’t even know who made good cannoli anymore. And ice cream. And fresh whipped cream. But what had I got?
Fruit. A fucking pear. Some blue goat cheese, a stick of finocchiona. Not even a few sweet figs or dates. Oh, well, maybe it was better in the end to ring out the old year and ring in the new salubriously.

New year? Who the fuck knew what year it was, anyway? According to the old Roman calendar, we were now in the year two thousand and fifty-something. The sixth-century abbot who, through his interpretation of a fairy tale, decided to split everything into
B.C.
and
A.D.
, reckoned the year preceding what he, and we after him, call
A.D.
1 to have been the first year of his snappy new Christian calendar, rendering the year called
A.D.
1 to have been not the first but the second year, thus throwing us all off by a year ever since. To further confound matters, the hypothetical Jesus could not have been born in the year the abbot set forth. Historical research into New Testament “evidence” reveals that he would have to have been born a few years earlier. So
A.D.
1, or the abbot’s zero year, would really have been more in the range of 4 to 7
B.C.
We were off on all counts.

And then you had the Chinks, who were in the year four thousand seven hundred–something, and the Jews, who were a little further on in years than the Chinese. According to some of our Muslim brothers, we were now only in the year fourteen thirty–something; and one of a confusing variety of Indian calendars has us well past our four millionth year.

As for the custom of the first of January marking the start of the new year, this was not widely accepted even throughout Europe until the seventeenth century, with Italy and England holding out until the middle of the eighteenth century.

So what the fuck was it, and why was I celebrating it? Without banana cake and ice cream, no less? This whole fucking world was crazy. Its brains were running out of its nose.

Lingering with my second champagne, I drew from a desk
drawer the slim bundle of papers on which I had written during the four seasons past. I sat with the last of that second champagne, my cuttings of pear, cheese, and finocchiona, and I began to peruse those writings.

There were not many sheets and scraps, and of what was written on them, not much made sense.

Several of the scraps presented words that found their place in my memory as well: notes about the taste of blood, with adjectives and similes and such crossed out, one after another, deemed insufficient, inadequate; a shopping list with “dated after 4/10” underlined in parentheses after the item “goat milk”; a poem of sorts that remained untitled:

One piece of paper contained no writing at all, just the impression of a cute lipsticked kiss. After a moment, seeing the color to be not red but a reddish dark brown, I realized that it was not lipstick but dried blood.

Hadn’t I started work on a new book this past year? Or had I just thought that I was beginning work on a new book? Was there any way in hell that I possibly could have considered what was on any of these papers to be even the germ, the seed, let alone the worded opening breath of a book, however inchoate?

Yes, not one of the most diabolically fucked-up years in my life, but the most diabolically fucked-up year in my life.

Something that struck me was the disregard for grammar and
syntax in much of what was here. Even in my most hurried notes, I usually gave more care to these things than to the legibility of what was being scrawled for my own eventual decipherment. And there were pages here where my illegibility was so daunting that, after some effort, I merely turned them aside with a shake of the head.

Then there was a page on which I had very neatly printed with an unwavering hand these words alone:

I
N THE MORNING LIGHT, THOSE WORDS NO LONGER GAVE ME
pause. They meant nothing to me, for I knew them to be the words of a madman. That I was that madman meant nothing either. I was at repose with myself, as the old ghost might say.

And besides, it was true. I was very soon to die. As are we all.

What did give me pause was that, looking back on all those crossed-out adjectives, similes, and such with which I had tried to capture in words the taste of my fair maidens’ blood, I now, in the calm, quiet morning, found myself trying to recall and summon that taste with all the power of my physical senses.

And more than just the taste, but the feeling it brought with it, too.

But try as I might, I could not. I entertained the notion of renewing and refreshing my memory.

No. Nature may love to hide beneath vague indications and dark hints. But I must not further hide the hidden. I must allow my own nature no longer to cast or to hide or abide in vague indications or dark hints. I must not betray myself.

T
HE WOLF MOON SIGHED FULL IN THE DARK EASTERN SKY.
In the night’s breath just before dawn, under the sea-goat of Babylon, she could be seen with her consorts, godly Saturn and the blue giant Spica.

I saw them in the cold black before morning light, on my way to the gym. The one thing the gym lacked was a heavy bag. On some mornings, I went instead with my old sparring gloves to the old boxing gym, a few blocks farther south, on Park Place. I loved striking out at the heavy bag. Ducking, circling, left, right; hitting, hitting, hitting, and hitting, hitting, hitting again; harder, harder, harder, and harder, harder, harder again.

The winds grew ever more bitter, the whistlings of their siren songs ever more strange, more rapturous in their deceit. Soon the Year of the Dragon would begin.

I did not call it that. I called it the year of the nine gods, because these gods whose names I did not know were now no longer to be loved and now no longer to be feared. They were to be slain. For I myself had looked within me, and I myself had found and let loose the light, had found and given light to the dead parts of me.

The change in the winds was as nothing compared to the change in me, and the songs of their sirens were as nothing compared to the songs with which I lulled myself to sleep, and the Year of the Dragon was as nothing compared to the seasons I claim for and unto myself. May the slaughter of the gods begin.

T
HIS WAS IT.
I
WAS WARM IN MY FINE NEW COTTON LONG
johns, flannel-lined britches, thermal socks, my cashmere sweater and watch cap, shearling coat, and lightweight Sorel Avalanche Trail boots. Warm with barely cooked soft-scrambled eggs and good hot coffee going down my gullet. Warm in the repose of the infinite change whirling round and through me as I sat on my new bench watching the world shiver past, fleeing from nowhere to nowhere.

I was warm and I was ready. I was ready to cut through the nylon again. Ready to cut the past to shreds and leave it for the hungry wild dogs that roam that netherworld of nonexistence, that wasteland of the past. Ready to look on and howl with those dogs as they devoured those shreds, then cut those wild dogs to ribbons as well. Ready to cut away all the residue of bullshit and lies, mine and the world’s, that so stubbornly clung to me and in me. Ready to cut myself free, once and for all, of the whole fucking world of bullshit and lies, which is the only fucking world we have beyond ourselves. I was ready to cut into a good big greasy slab of swine. I was ready to cut the throat of anything called God and all the fools that knelt before it. I was ready.

The new bench the spook Heraclitus had led me to was a big part of it. Not only a great change in itself, but a change that brought with it more change. The few buddies I had who congregated at the bench in front of the bar rarely ventured to these
benches, just a block away, in little Duane Park. That brought more solitude, more repose. And there was a change in pussy as well. There were new legs galore, legs that would rather walk the path through the trees than pass by the bar on their way from nowhere to nowhere. Even the sky seemed to change as seen through the branches of trees so nearby, so much closer.

As I closed my eyes, smiled, and raised my face to the sun of the new sky, I could almost see the rushing blood of the slaughter of the gods. There were whisperings in the wind. They were hard to make out at first. But in time they grew clear.

The first of the whisperings that I was able to grasp came to me in a voice that I recognized. It was the voice of a young woman I remembered from somewhere. Slowly I became aware of whose voice it was. Yes. Her. But her name eluded me. I had forgotten it, yet it seemed to lie so tantalizingly, so frustratingly, in the periphery of vague memory. Yes. It was her. Sandrine. The redhead who liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. Yes, of course, Sandrine, the first of those whose blood I had tasted. Sandrine, who, with her young friend Marie, had met her end in a doorway on Thompson Street on a cool spring night.

She whispered nothing of her death, nothing of her young friend Marie, nothing of Thompson Street, nothing of blood or of flesh. But she did speak of some sort of doorway, some sort of entranceway, which may have been of this world, or the world within, or some kind of otherworld.

“You were there,” she whispered to me, “but you did not enter. You did not go beyond where you had been led. You did not go to what awaited you, to what you did not and do not know. You did not enter.”

None of the other voices was recognizable, except for my own, which at times seemed to be whispering to me from outside myself. But most of the voices, like Sandrine’s, spoke in a cryptic
way, like seers, soothsayers, or the deranged. It was all rather peaceful, like playing with the pieces of a puzzle: pieces of a mystery that the voices brought to me.

Then one day, that peacefulness was gone. There was, as always before, but a single whispering. But all of a sudden it was joined by a multitude of others, speaking all at once, and all these whisperings became a babel of screams that rose to a maddening pitch.

I jolted up from the bench, and as my heart pounded and my legs quaked, I tried to concentrate on the sounds of the cars, trucks, and people nearby.

The babel of voices in my head subsided, but I feared they might return. I walked slowly away, and it was awhile before my heart beat quietly again and my legs regained equilibrium.

I could not remember anything of what these whispering, shrieking voices said. I did not want to.