Unsoul'd (8 page)

People see my life -- my bossless, set-your-own-agenda life; a life in which I make shit up and get paid for it -- and they assume I've succeeded. They assume I've achieved what I want to achieve.

Of course, I haven't. My books barely break even. I have fewer than four thousand followers on Twitter. I live advance-to-advance, although I occasionally miss, dipping into my credit cards to keep myself buoyed until the next check.

It's not a successful lifestyle, but compared to the workaday world of most people, it
appears
successful. And the thing is, when people treat you like a success, it's often difficult not to fall into the pernicious self-delusion that you
are
a success.

Fortunately, the world has a way of reminding you. Heaping failure upon failure. Throwing the success of others into your face at every turn.

And, yes, apparently, conjuring the devil in a coffee shop to barter for your soul in exchange for the much-craved, elusive, glorious success.

Manda rolled away from me in her sleep. I wondered why I couldn't tell her that I loved her. Why had I resisted? Maybe the conjoined facts that I could resist and did resist meant that I didn't truly love her.

I wished I knew. I wished I knew so much. I wanted to know if I loved and what love was. I wanted to know why my dreams were dead and washed into the gutters like filthy street snow. I wanted to know: Why not me? In my darkest hours, my coldest, most private hours, it was a plaintive and whining infant's cry from my heart to my throat: Why not me? Why not? Why was I not good enough? Why did the world not care enough? Why not me? Why. Not. Me?

In that moment in the dark, in the middle of the night, alone in my bed though companioned, I would have sold my soul to the devil for the answers.

If I hadn't done so already.

Wherein I Try to Write

Staring at the laptop screen at Construct, The Ramones blaring in the background, I tried to make words. The words scoffed and refused to come.

"Writer's block, huh?" the devil said, plopping down in the seat across from me. "That must suck. Myself, I am an endless fount of creativity and boundless energy." He yawned and stretched with bombast.

"I'm not blocked," I said, not entirely sure I was lying. "Writer's block is for wannabes. I'm a professional, man. I get shit done."

He raised an eyebrow. "Clearly."

The problem was not writer's block. Not exactly. Not as I understood it. Writer's block was when you didn't know what to write. I knew exactly what to write. I knew my characters, my scenes, my plot, my overall story arc. I knew the beginning, the middle, and the end.

I just couldn't bring myself to type the words. Maybe Tayvon was right. Maybe this was too much. Maybe I was an idiot to think that I could attack something so large and break it down into words.

"You think it's so easy?" I sulked, turning the laptop to him. "You do it, then."

The devil recoiled as though my laptop had been dipped in holy water. "No thanks. It has to be you, man. You have to be the one to write it."

Something occurred to me then. I snapped shut the laptop and leaned over the table at him. "It has to be me? Is
this
the book, then? This one that I'm working on? Is it going to be the book that makes me rich and famous?"

The devil squirmed a bit, uncomfortable for the first time since I'd met him. "Look, I can't see the future. I just have...I have a near-perfect vision of the
now
, is all."

"What is
that
supposed to mean?"

"I don't see the future. But if you give me a set of circumstances, a set of guides and potentials... I pretty much know the outcome. Not the details, not always -- but the broad strokes."

"So, like, if I showed you a movie trailer, you could tell me if it was going to be a hit or not?"

He pushed away from the table and stood. "I'm not a fucking second-story walk-up psychic, Randy. Cut the bullshit and get to work. You need to write this book on your own."

"Why?"

"Just...write the fucking book already, OK?"

He left me there alone, thinking.

So... The book -- the "hit book" -- for which I'd sold my soul was not written yet. I had thought that maybe one of my books already in print -- maybe even the book about to come out,
Down/Town
-- would experience a sudden boost in popularity and sales. But no. It would be the
next
book, the one I was (allegedly) working on right now.

The one I couldn't write, no matter how hard I tried.

Did the devil know that? Had he known when we signed the contract that I was having trouble, that my doubts and fears made it likely that he would never have to live up to his end of the bargain?

Well, of course he'd known -- he was the devil, after all! The whole thing had been a put-on, a sting, a way for him to swipe my soul without having to pony up anything on his side. I'd been cheated, and I couldn't even get mad about it; how could I expect anything less from the devil?

And yet...

And yet, I felt no different. And hadn't the devil told me that he hadn't taken my soul?

What if he couldn't take my soul until I finished the book? What if some set of invisible scales had to be balanced, and in order for the devil to get what he wanted, he
had
to give me what I demanded?

The implications were many and varied. Too many to sort through and comprehend. I left Construct, handing a five to Lovely Rita on my way to the gym.

Wherein I tell Gym Girl a Secret

On the treadmill, I had a choice between watching a gargantuan ass on the machine in front of me or watching one of three TV screens: music videos, ESPN, or Fox News. I chose the least and more interesting of three evils: Fox. (Yes, the politics were execrable, but I couldn't stand music videos and sports bored the hell out of me.)

Gym Girl was three treadmills down to my left, out of casual eyeshot, hence my focus on the TV, where Lacey Simonson's mother was being interviewed for what had to be the eight hundredth time since her daughter's disappearance. By this point, the woman must have been a media professional.

"Lacey was just the sweetest girl," she said, and I believed her, but I also wondered how convenient and coincidental it was that no one abducted was ever a prick or a bitch. "She loved her new puppy, Baxter, and she was so excited about her first year of college. Whoever took her--" and here she looked directly into the camera "--please be good to her. Be good to my Lacey. She's a good person and she deserves to be treated well."

I couldn't take it any more; I took out my headphones and ran full-tilt for a couple of minutes until I had trouble breathing and my ribs started to complain.

"How long will you be?"

I almost slid off the treadmill at the sound of Gym Girl's voice at my left shoulder. She'd come up to my treadmill while I was running.

I glanced at my timer and quickly covered it with my towel. It read thirty minutes. "Five minutes," I told her.

"Great. Got time for a drink today?"

"Sure. I'll meet you over there."

"Why don't we meet at Eileen's instead?"

I absorbed that -- Eileen's was a nearby bar. No juice or smoothies in sight.

"See you there," I said casually, as though we met there all the time, as though the thought of Gym Girl drunk did nothing to me.

I quick-walked for five more minutes just to make it look good, then hit the showers. By the time I got to Eileen's, Gym Girl was already waiting for me at a table in the back, running her index finger through the condensation along the sweating neck of a Corona. It was somehow the most sensuous thing I'd ever seen.

I ordered a Scotch and soda and joined her, aware suddenly of the dark, cramped intimacy of Eileen's, as compared to the open-airiness of 2 Your Health. It felt less like two gym buddies hanging out and more like a date. I suddenly wondered if I should/were expected to pick up the tab.

"That poor girl," she said suddenly, and I turned in my seat to see -- of course -- an image of Lacey Simonson on the TV over the bar. This time it was CNN. "What do you think happened to her?"

I had my thoughts. Most everyone did. The odds of a young, pretty girl like Lacey Simonson still being in any recognizable condition more than a month after her abduction were as long and as slim as Gym Girl's perfect legs. The things that most likely had been done to her were not really fit for mixed company.

I settled on the logical outcome, skipping the sordid details. "She's most likely dead," I said as soberly as I could. And horrifically raped, sodomized, tortured, and mutilated, I did not add.

Gym Girl nodded with grim agreement. "Yeah, I think so, too. And her poor mother is on the news every five minutes, talking to the camera like she's still alive, like the person who took her would even care what the mother has to say in the first place. James -- that's my boyfriend -- he thinks the mother's an idiot."

She always clarified James's status whenever we spoke. As though she thought I needed reminding. Or maybe as though she thought
she
needed reminding.

"She's not an idiot. I understand her impulse. In a situation like that, you never want to give up. Even when you should."

"I guess what I don't understand is why the news keeps putting her on."

"Because it's an excuse to keep showing pictures of Lacey. And she's a pretty white girl, so it helps ratings." It came out more cynical than I'd intended, but Gym Girl flashed a quick, sad smile.

"Yeah. Isn't that terrible? If she was black or ugly, no one would care."

And there we sat, two attractive white people bonding over our mutual concern for the ugly and the minorities. We stayed mute for long, uncomfortable moments.

"Are you working on a book right now?" she asked at last, leaning in close. I flashed back to her in a similar position the other day, her clothing made invisible by the machinations of the devil.

"I'm always working on a book," I said expansively. It was both a lie and the truth. I may not have been actually writing anything more than a sentence or two a day, but my mind was always chewing over some project or another.

"What's it about?" she asked.

I opened my mouth to answer and realized that I couldn't. It's not that I didn't know what the book was about -- of course I did -- but rather that I found that I couldn't articulate it in any coherent and minimal fashion. Authors are often told to be prepared to explain their books in no more than a sentence or two -- the so-called "elevator pitch" -- but in this instance, I couldn't. I couldn't even explain it to myself with such brevity.

"It's tough to explain," I told her. "I'm sort of having a lot of trouble with it." It was the first time I'd said so out loud. (More accurately, it was the first time I'd said so out loud for someone else to hear, having groaned and moaned and whimpered it aloud to myself many, many times before.) "I mean, I'm usually pretty fast. At writing, I mean. But this one... Even my best friend in the world thinks I'm wasting my time with it."

"So you can explain it to him, but not to me?"

She had me there. When I'd first told Tayvon about the new book, I thought he'd be excited by it. So it had been easy to let it gush out of me. But when he'd told me not to bother, it choked something inside me. I just couldn't talk about it. Couldn't express it vocally.

Or with a keyboard, apparently.

"It's nothing personal," I told her. "I just--"

"No, no, it's OK. But why are you having so much trouble with this book?"

"I don't know." But I did know, and even though I hadn't said as much to Manda or Sam or even to Fi, I found myself spilling my guts to Gym Girl:

"I feel like it's too...big for me. I feel like I'm attempting something beyond the reaches of my talent, you know? Like I'm a midget who wants to play basketball, I guess. Is that un-PC? Is it OK to say 'midget?'"

"I think it's 'little person,'" she offered with a saucy smile. I'm not sure why the smile was saucy at that particular moment, but it was.

"You know, 'little person' sounds more offensive to me than midget or dwarf. Am I crazy?"

"No. I see what you mean."

"I mean... dwarf and midget... Those are
words
, with definite meanings. Singular words. 'Little person' sounds like... You're just modifying 'person.' As though a midget or a dwarf isn't a
real
person. They're a
little
person."

"It's like if you called women 'vaginal people,'" she said, and giggled.

I made a mental note that in the totality of our relationship (such as it was) to date, neither of us had mentioned reproductive body parts. She was the first. I don't know why I noticed or remembered such things, but I did, and I assigned importance to them simply because I
did
notice and remember them.

"You're right," I told her, holding up my glass for a toast. "To vaginal people!" We clinked glasses. I knew it to be impossible, but in that moment I felt as though a brief, sharp spark of current leapt between the glasses at their impact.

Later, I picked up the tab. It felt like the right thing to do, though I couldn't say why.