Me and the Devil: A Novel (22 page)

Fuck these doctors. Fuck them all. With Yanoff gone, Olivier on my side, and Paeon in the air I breathed, the rest of these arrogant venal frauds could go to hell. Prescriptions could be had more honestly and cheaply from Chinatown croakers, or from the Hindoo who had a storefront practice just a few blocks from me.

I walked out onto Fifth Avenue and spit on the sidewalk. I didn’t look to see what color my phlegm was. It’s the thought that counts.

I turned east, walked down Madison to Lobel’s, the best butcher in New York, to get a nice slab of kurobuta pork and a great big dry-aged steak. Besides the Valium, the proximity to Lobel’s was the only other reason to throw money at this schmuck. A good butcher was harder to find than a good doctor, and far greater and more valuable as a healer and a man.

A bit farther south on Madison, at the Christian Louboutin boutique, I blew seven hundred bucks on a pair of black leather pumps with red-lacquered soles. The stiletto heels were even higher than those of the Jimmy Choo black snakeskins.

As I walked to the Lexington Avenue subway line with my bag of swine and beef in one hand and the bag of high heels in the other, I felt myself in possession of goods of true medicinal value.

P
ALM
S
UNDAY, WHEN THE GRASS MOON WOULD RISE FULL,
was nearing. Two days later, Mars, the bringer of war, would enter into conjunction with Mercury, the messenger, in retrograde, with folly of all communication, all sense, moving backwards. We were under the force of the warrior.

I believed in none of the astrological bullshit presented by any of this. But I was enamored of the mythic poetry inherent in the idea of the sky of these nights belonging to the bringer of war. I slept well under that sky. I was beginning to notice, however, that the grand rebirths of my mornings were more fleeting, and less grand, the longer I went without communion with the flesh and blood of those life-giving goddesses whose dew rose not only with the coming grass moon but with every moon.

Lorna was all right, she told me when I called her, and she sounded all right. We met for breakfast on a morning when the chill at last seemed gone from the air. It was good to see her. Looking at her, I could not help but think of her long slender limbs stretched bare and on that Saint Andrew’s cross, the lashes striking her through the transparency of the vinyl raincoat as the panties in her mouth gagged the screams of her pleasure and pain. Her juices dripping to the floor.

I asked her if she had gone to the meeting on Sullivan Street that morning. I purposefully took off my shades and laid them on the table.

“Christ, I haven’t been to a meeting since that night I was with you.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

The waitress came and we ordered. In declining coffee, I managed to get in my line about never drinking coffee when denied the freedom to enjoy a smoke with it. Useless words, but if I had a credo by which I lived, this was it, and I was going to affirm it whenever the opportunity arose.

“I don’t know if it’s good or bad. How about you? Have you been hitting the rooms lately?”

I shook my head in the negative. I said that I just hadn’t felt like it lately. I wasn’t going to say what part of me believed: that I had got all I was ever going to get out of A.A. when I got her. I told her that I had no desire to drink, however. I told her about the baclofen that I had been taking now for several days.

“A pill that cures addiction?” She followed her words with a little laugh of disbelief.

I told her about Dr. Ameisen’s discovery, about the ways it had been suppressed.

“Rimbaud said morality is a disease of the brain,” I said. “I think he was right on the money. Of course, a lot of people disagree. But I don’t think anybody disagrees that alcoholism is a disease of the brain. I think that’s a given. Baclofen alters the brain chemistry so that the underlying causes of addiction are eradicated. I forget the science, all the scientific words. But it’s all there in black and white, for anyone who can understand it. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that it works. The science just explains how and why. Some guy who won the Nobel Prize for medicine came right out and said it. He said, ‘Dr. Ameisen has discovered the cure for addiction.’ The thing is, there’s no money in it for the pharmaceutical companies because its patent has expired. But companies like Novartis are trying to
play with the molecules so they can come up with something like it that they can patent.”

“So you’re cured?”

Again she followed her words with a little laugh—no, not really a laugh this time, but a wry, mischievous smile—of disbelief.

“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “I just started taking the shit.” I put a forkful of eggs in my mouth, chewed, swallowed, took a drink of water. “We’ll see.”

She took out one of those handheld-device gizmos, asked me the name of Ameisen’s book and how to spell his name, then put the gizmo back in her bag.

“How about you?” I asked. “Have you felt like drinking lately.”

“No,” she said. Now there was a different sort of smile on her face, an almost plain and happy smile.

“And how do you feel otherwise?”

I hesitated following my question with another, the question that seemed naturally to follow it. And she hesitated in her acknowledgment of understanding what I meant, even without that unsaid second question being asked. So I went ahead and asked it:

“How about the spooks?”

She looked into my eyes. Who knows what they looked like. Who knows what she saw. But she looked into them quite easily.

“They’re still there,” she said. “But”—she knocked on wood—“they seem to be receding into the shadows.”

She fell silent for a few moments, and I took care not to break that silence.

“That night.”

Then she fell silent again, and again I let the silence be. It was a silence so heavy that what little noise there was in the restaurant on this quiet morning seemed to fall into silence as well.

“I don’t know how to say this,” she said. “I don’t know how to say this without it sounding melodramatic. Without it sounding stupid.”

I took a sip of water. I looked at her lowered eyes with my own, waiting for those eyes to rise, to meet whatever it was to see, or whatever it was that she might see, in mine.

“You took something out of me,” she said. Then, as her eyes rose, more words followed quickly: “I mean that in a good way.” Then the words slowed again, to a normal if slightly halting pace. “You took something out of me that needed to be taken out. It was like some bad thing inside me, some kind of growth, some kind of disease that needed to be removed. I don’t know if you got all of it. I don’t think you did. But you got some of it. You got a lot of it. I could feel it. I can still feel it. Something was taken away and something was given back. Something bad was cut out, or let out, and something good was let in. I really don’t know how to describe it. I really don’t.”

She began to eat again. A good sign, I figured. I finished what was on the plate. She drank some coffee.

“Don’t dwell on it,” I said. “Don’t try too hard to figure it out. The way you describe it, it makes sense to me. I don’t know exactly what you feel. That’s something nobody can ever do, get inside somebody else and feel exactly what they feel. But you sound like you feel a lot better than you did. You seem like you feel a lot better than you did. It’s probably better not to even question it.”

She nodded slowly in agreement. I couldn’t tell if it was truly a nod of agreement or merely the simulacrum of one. I smiled at her. She smiled back, and there was no doubt that at least this was real.

“So,” she said, “when you went to the doctor to get those little magic pills, that Booze-o-Fix or whatever it is, did he say anything about your eyes?”

“He mumbled something and moved on to my prostate.” I did not want her to fear my eyes. That is why I had removed my shades. But I did not want to lead her back to the eyes of her father, either. For her to see my eyes as beautiful without even a thought of her father—and this was what I really wanted—was to want far too much.

“Do you want to get together tonight?” she asked.

How could she think I would not? How could she think I would not have asked her before we rose from this breakfast table? How could she not know that she was irresistible to me? Why would she even ask?

I got a cappuccino to go, lit up in the street, walked her to work, kissed her good-bye, squeezed her hand, and told her I’d see her later. Before entering the building, she turned and smiled to me. It made me feel good.

I passed a new store, on Hudson Street, a sort of day care resort for yuppie mutts called Biscuits & Bath. It offered grooming, transportation, natural foods, puppy kindergarten, classes in basic manners, exercise programs, and socialization services. This neighborhood really was fucking going to hell. It was getting embarrassing just to live around here.

I stopped by the joint on Reade Street, finishing my coffee and tossing the cup into the trash on my way. It was good, the coffee. It was really good. But there was no denying that the Eucharistic euphoria wasn’t there. It was good to know that it would be there again tomorrow. My night with Lorna would see to that.

I still couldn’t get used to the television sets in these joints. News, baseball, commercials for dick-stiffeners and hair-sprouters. Half a dozen customers and three satellite television sets going. Some of the guys in these joints would rather stare at a soap opera than drink alone and face themselves and their drinks and the screaming emptiness and desperation inside them. It was as if
they had forgotten how to talk, even if it was to talk only the nonsense of their shambled brains. Only when there was enough booze in them did they give voice to the empty, desperate screaming inside them. And still the television sets droned on.

From the bar I went to the knife store. I did not know why, but I wanted to pursue the possibility of having made for me a dagger with a leopard-bone handle. If it had been suggested to me an hour ago that I might be entertaining such a pursuit, I would have responded with a blank, nonplussed stare.

It was a short dagger that I wanted, I explained. A
hishu,
a
tosa,
a
hishu-gatana.
But I would also take a longer dagger, a
tanto,
or an old-style traditional hunting knife, a
yamagatana.

Whatever the type, I wanted a knife that was at least about eight inches and not much more than about a foot in length. I suggested that the dagger should have a modest
tsuba,
or hand guard, of hard metal, maybe good silver or good, strong-alloy twenty-karat or twenty-two-karat gold.

To craft a knife with a leopard-bone handle, a true master craftsman, or two master craftsmen, one for the blade, the other for the handle, would have to be found.

A leopard-bone dagger, carved from treated fresh leopard bone or from petrified leopard bone, must be made by a true craftsman working with his own hands, not by a mere big-business designer who oversaw a modern assembly-line company.

The question was: could there be found a true traditional master? A true, old-fashioned knife-making artist?

Sugai-san knew real Japanese blade-forgers well. One of them was Keijoro Doi, an eighty-four-year-old master of masters. Sugai would be going to Japan at the end of the month. The more precise an idea I could convey of the knife I envisioned, and the
amount of money I was willing to pay, the more likely it was that the very special knife I wanted could be made for me.

I knew that leopard bone was difficult to obtain here in the United States, but that it also was not too costly. Not long ago, a friend in Texas, where the remains of protected and endangered species can be sold legally to Texas residents by licensed dealers, bought me a leopard skull. As federal and local laws prohibited its interstate transportation, it was more difficult to get it to me in New York, where dealing in poodle skulls is probably a capital crime, than it was to purchase. And the price had been under four hundred bucks for a fine skull with all its teeth. It sat now atop my cherry television cabinet. I also knew that endangered-species bones, as I had seen firsthand, were far more easily and openly available in Asia, where I’d had many chances to buy leopard pelts but no way of getting them back home. So the cost of the bone would be the least of the expenses.

The problem was that I had no idea how durable or workable leopard bone was, or how it aged, treated or untreated. Could it, for instance, be gold-riveted in two identical simple, striking pieces to both sides of the tang? Could it be ornately carved, even carved out,
katabori
-like, for a hollow center, to be affixed to and expose glimpses of hard, dark-brown ebony or black onyx beneath it? And I had no idea what petrified leopard bone looked like, or if it was an available or desirable material. Without this information, it was hard to arrive at the more precise details of the leopard-bone handle I envisioned.

Would it be possible to obtain this information, so that I could then know the limits of my envisioning, the extent of possibility, and thus the extent of craftsmanship available to me, so that I might then be able to explain in more precise detail what I wanted, and how much I would be willing to pay for it? There
would also be the
saya,
or wooden sheath. Leopards spend much of their time in the boughs of trees. I wondered if they had a favorite type of tree. If so, it was wood from that type of tree that I wanted. If not, any one of many dark and beautifully grained woods lay open to me. Or perhaps, going against tradition, a sheath of fine-tooled strong dark leather.