Me and the Devil: A Novel (44 page)

As I walked, I tried to con myself into believing that all of this was the whispers and cries of a book gestating within me, calling out to me to be written. But I wasn’t buying any of it. This had nothing to do with words destined for paper. It was something else, completely different; something I had never before known.

Why was I walking, in a roundabout way, to the bar? It was, I told myself, because I needed to hear familiar voices talking the same old familiar bullshit. Real voices.

Then again, were they not all real? The ones from which I had fled, and the ones to which I was fleeing?

I shot the shit awhile with a buddy of mine. We both fell silent after a few minutes, then I thought he was resuming our wayward conversation.

“What did you say?” I asked him, raising the brim of my wool cap from my ear and leaning a bit toward him.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said.

S
WEET, FAIR
V
ENUS CAME FORTH FROM THE WAVES OF
clouds that were like froth in the cold night sky.

Myrtle of the sun god. Lover. Purifier. Seducer of slayers, born of severed cock.

T
HE VOICES WENT AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS, THEN LATE ONE
night as I lay in bed, I heard Sandrine whispering for me to rise. A soft, lone whispering that brought no alarm or unease. I found it in fact to be rather soothing, and rather welcome: an emollient of sorts, an opiate tincture for my troubled mind. The return of a familiar.

She whispered that I tarried, that I must be on with it. She whispered that I knew this. She whispered that the turmoil of voices that had beset me were all merely trying to tell me this, and that among the assailing voices had been my own, descending upon me with the others, telling myself what the others, and she herself, had been trying to tell me.

The manner in which she spoke was different from what it once had been, in life. Her voice, too, had about it a more dulcet tone. I felt it to be somehow beatific. The voice of Sandrine, yes, but the voice of Fra Angelico’s
Angel of the Annunciation,
too.

I asked her about this business of tarrying, this business of getting on with it. She whispered to me words that were my own:

“To betray one’s nature is to be betrayed in turn.”

And then she whispered more:

“The entranceway. You must pass through it. You await yourself on the other side.

“There, as one, you will find change. There, as one, you will find repose. True change. True repose.”

I saw things in my mind: abominable, unutterable, and worse.

She was in me, seeking revenge, seducing me to wreak it for her upon myself.

Fra Angelico’s angel was tempera and gold leaf on a piece of poplar wood. And it was sometimes better not to look too closely at such things. Had not art restorers recently uncovered the image of Satan lurking in the hallowed clouds of a fresco by Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi?

No, this was no Annunciation of any kind at all. It was a trap, a damnation, a snare.

“Trust me, my love. Trust me.”

I could feel myself glaring. I stood and paced forward on the floor, my forefinger extending and waving in anger at her who was not there.

“Trust you!” I growled aloud. “Trust you!” I cocked my head to one side, menacingly. “You fucking bitch. You dirty rotten little fucking bitch. I killed you once, I’ll kill you again.”

“Yes, my love, yes.”

If only she were really there. If only I could kill her again. Oh, how I wanted to kill her again. And again. Kill her over and over, again and again, forever and forever.

“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”

There were knives everywhere, all sorts of knives. The Walther in the closet. The capped black iron pipe. Oh, Christ, how I wanted to kill her again, fuck her corpse, jerk off on her dead fucking face, then kill her again; murder and desecrate her again and again as she said those words through a bruised and swollen mouthful of blood, broken teeth, and ebbing breath:

“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”

I took a step back, took a few breaths, each calmer than the last.

“I put you here,” I said, tapping my head and lowering my
voice, to her, who did not stand before me and was not to be seen. “I put you here, and I can take you out of here.”

I felt suddenly strong, not with anger but simply stronger, as if with the weightless armor of tranquility.

“For no one has power over me.”

There was something then like the trace of a whisper—no more, probably, than the cold wind entering through the slight opening of the kitchen window—and then there was nothing but the familiar and faint shrill ringing in my left ear.

That was the end of the whisperings, the end of the voices. But the things that I had seen in my mind, abominable, unutterable, and worse, they stayed with me.

T
HEY WERE SCENES OF RAPE AND TORTURE AND BUTCHERING,
and of things far more horrid, things on which I will not dwell lest they become further embedded in my mind. I walked down the street, and with the merest of glances at them, set people afire, caused them to clutch their hearts and drop dead with a scream, made little schoolgirls to tear away their skirts and blouses and masturbate in a frenzy, shattered windows here, brought about terrible crashes there. It was all so horrifyingly delicious, especially those visions of which I cannot tell. And I was immune to all consequence. It was my own world, the world of these visions, a world of crime without punishment.

At times I yearned for it to be real. At times I wished to banish it all from my mind. At times I merely wondered at the darkness of an imagination given more to seeking beauty in the sky.

I brewed some coffee, stuck another pin in the voodoo doll, and reflected that this day belonged to me, and that it would bring whatever I willed it to bring, if only within myself.

From the window I saw, like cockroaches down in the street, hurrying little figures of hurrying little people, flinching and cowering in the cold and the wind. This made the hot coffee taste and feel even better. I looked at my thick leather and shearling coat draped over the chair.

At the bar I sat with another coffee, in a paper cup, from the corner store across the street. Candlemas was only a few weeks
off. On the television set above the bar, I noticed a commercial for what seemed to be a Christian dating service called Christian Mingle. The ichthus, the Jesus fish, was part of its logo. I thought of Lorna on her cross, scaring away whatever kind of suitors she might find through Christian Mingle. I wondered if anybody ever got raped and strangled through Christian Mingle. I thought of the origin of the Jesus fish thing. It was a stupid fucking acrostic in which the five letters of the ancient Greek word for “fish,” pronounced
ichthus,
were taken in order to stand for the first letters of the five words in the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” A stupid fucking acrostic. The goddamn Church made the Word Jumble look high-class, if not downright divinely inspired, by comparison. Fucking mah-jongg mackerel.

No, it would probably be impossible to get away with it, raping and strangling one of these Christian Mingle cunts. Ah, but what a sweet thought.

T
HERE HAD TO BE A WAY OUT.
O
R A WAY IN.
O
R A WAY.
I
WAS
free, but I was lost. There was something beautiful in this. But something scary, too, when it began to get dark.

I
CALLED
B
ENNET, MY ACCOUNTANT, AND ASKED HIM WHAT HE
thought my annual living expenses would be if I had little or no income. I also asked him what I would get in social security payments if I began to take them now.

I called Greg, my lawyer, and asked him what the statute of limitations was on bank robbery.

My accountant responded by saying it all depended on which Nick I was taking about: the Nick who had once lavished away eighty grand in a week, or the Nick who had calculated that he was now spending eight grand a year on coffee and cigarettes, and reacted with the shocked resolution that measures must be taken to reduce this sum. The fact that both Nicks always stopped to stoop and pick up pennies in the street—not only, as I saw it, a habit of perspicacious economic prudence, but also damned good physical exercise as well—signified nothing to him.

My lawyer said: five years, if no killing was involved. He also advised me not to get any ideas.

Of course, I had already considered several possibilities. I could live lavishly for a year or so, then sell my apartment for a million bucks or so and be the wealthiest homeless guy around. I could take what I had, less a few hundred grand for a private plane to London, and try to double it at the blackjack tables at the Ritz Club. But every time I pondered this particular idea, I saw myself sitting weeping on the edge of a bed in a three-grand-a-night
hotel suite. And there was always the prospect of selling my apartment, getting that imagined little place with a hammock in the sticks for a quarter of what I would get for my place, and pocketing the rest for living out the rest of my allotted days at a far lower cost, but in comfort. But this would mean cutting the umbilical cord without any period of acclimation to new surroundings, which I might end up hating, and which in any case would seem to irrevocably seal the fate of solitude and loneliness. I couldn’t see, in such a place, the occasional nine stone of sweet young gal-meat on nights of need, let alone love that might be mine to have and to hold, in my small town in the sticks.

For some years, a certain middlebrow magazine paid what amounted to my monthly bills for the privilege of using my name on its masthead. Then, when hard times hit, this stipend was annulled. I guess the alter rebbe of whose Philistine empire the magazine was a part felt the economic squeeze. It must be a terrible thing to be in one’s eighties and have only ten or twenty billion dollars left to live on for the remainder of one’s life. Perhaps the next time I ran into him, I should ask him if he needed a few bucks.

I had my name removed from the masthead. Without the few grand each month for doing nothing, I surely did not want to be incriminated, no matter how fancifully, as a contributing editor of a rag that now encouraged, or at least condoned, language such as “adorkable” and “tweepulsive” on its website. It had never been a literary magazine, but it had been minimally literate. Now it was merely another celebrity-gossip rag for housewives on the racks at supermarket checkout lines.

I have here, in fine ink, a handwritten letter from a dozen years ago and more, from the rebbe’s lapdog, saying of one of the pieces I wrote: “It is, quite simply, a masterpiece. The best thing I will ever have published, in fact. I cannot thank you enough.”

And these hollow men were indistinguishable from so many other dishonorable hollow men who had come to define this fallen, shoddy racket.

There were mornings when I wondered whose death would bring a sweeter smile of fleeting pleasure: the monkey-faced one or the pig-faced other; this lying dolt or that one. Oh, the ways of idle musing. Oh, the ways of this world.

In the same box of correspondence where this letter lay, I also came across many letters from a young lady whom I had known and cherished:

“Because of you, joints loosen,” began one of these, then went on:

“I want leather shoes with high high heels. I want patent leather gloves that go past my elbows. I’m kneeling over you, lying on your back. Your neck is exposed. Your head is tilted back off the edge of the bed. The hairs of my cunt graze your neck. My left fist is in your mouth. My right hand is in your hair, pulling. Give me your neck. You feel my cunt on your chin. I feel your hand on the back of my thigh, through my stockings. Ultra ultra sheers.

“I take my fist from your mouth, leaving one finger in to pull your mouth to my tit. I leave it in while you suck and bite. My finger and your tongue roll around each other. My knuckle pushes hard against your teeth.”
—I had real ones then.—
“The ones in the back. Hard. My right hand stops pulling your hair to hold your neck so you can fuck my tit (I think this is possible) with your mouth without distraction. Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw milk.

“I let your head down gently. I take my finger from your mouth. I turn around and now you feel my tits and patent leather around your dick. My nipples brush your balls. Your fingers are in my cunt, moving in and out in the same rhythm my hands move up and down, tighter and tighter around your dick. I place the tip of my heel between your lips. Your left hand grabs my hair. It’s in a ponytail, high and tight. Grab it. Pull. Wrap it around your wrist. I arch my back. My nipples are so hard. I pull against you. I want your
cock down my throat. As I lower my mouth, as you slide down my tongue, my heel slides down yours. Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw blood.

“Don’t let go of my hair. Keep pulling. Harder. Harder. Push my head down. Harder. Harder. Don’t stop fucking me with those fingers. Don’t stop. Fuck. Fuck. Don’t stop coming, baby, don’t stop…”