Me and the Devil: A Novel (30 page)

There was a feeling of being in limbo. I drifted not only to and from sleep, but through my days and nights as well. I was aware of undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts, but I knew not from what to what this change was taking me.

Slowly I began to feel that I was being brought from a new dimension of being to yet a newer, higher dimension. I was wary of it at first, but ultimately I knew I could do nothing but surrender to it.

For a few days I did not write. This was usual for me. Whenever I succeeded in driving down the first stake of a new book, I took a break. In the past, I drank. But now I did not. It was with a degree of disappointment that I did not attribute this to the baclofen, for I did not experience any of the attendant changes that baclofen was supposed to have effected in me. There was no quelling of the nerves, no banishing of anxiety, no newfound calm. Not from the baclofen anyway. Maybe my own answer had lain elsewhere, and I had already found it there: in the same broached source of other wonders.

Or maybe I was not drinking simply because this felt like no other book on which I had ever set course. I thought of the book that lay ahead as a ghost-book, as something beyond a book,
though I could not explain this to myself or to anyone else. And there was no need to. Aura and resonance transcend meaning and saying. Some things can not be captured and conveyed.

In a few days’ time, when I resumed writing, first in the mornings, then in the mornings and again in the evenings, increasingly into the late hours of the night or early hours of the next day, it was with a feeling, again and again, of going to meet the ghost. And soon the ghost became to me the Holy Ghost. Not the Holy Ghost of Saint Paul, not the Holy Ghost of any other; but my own Holy Ghost. And I felt as if I were entering a church. Not a sanctified place, but a sacred place. Sacred to gods or demons or both, I did not know. Sometimes it felt that this church was within me. Sometimes it felt far from me, in the dark woods of my soul’s traveling. Always it felt that I belonged there.

There were no cravings. I took this to be good. A sign of freedom. On May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, I lit a candle, a nice beeswax taper glommed from the emporium of high-born junk food and ecologically friendly toilet paper. On the first morning of May, I opened a bottle of good Margaux and drank two glasses with a big plate of soft-scrambled eggs and blood sausage.

I wanted to be alone. But I began to wonder why I hadn’t heard from Melissa or Lorna. Had they forgotten about me? I wanted to be alone, not forgotten. I began to feel a jealous anger well up in me. I imagined the worst things, and I flung the worst curses against them. These outbursts of senseless wrath incited by imagined wrongs were not like me. Of course, I had in my younger years experienced the insecurities and angers of jealousy, just as I had occasionally heard the hissings of ethnic intolerance; but I had known these follies only in the way that they are endemic to the species, and had for the most part seen through them and outgrown them. Even in my younger and more foolish years, I had never felt the likes of the sudden fast-rising wrath I lately had
been subject to. It was as if, in my new life, the last remnants of old failings had been sloughed off only to be replaced by new failings. It was as if some seething vengeance or fury were trying to force its escape from me through any means, any fissure possible. In fact, these were not fits of temper that I felt. They were more like the spontaneous turmoilings of an unfamiliar presence seeking vent. I wondered if what I had done in the doorway was but a lashing forth by this presence as well. It must have been, for it was not I. It could not have been I.

W
HEN
M
ELISSA CALLED, IT WAS NOT TO TELL ME THAT
she loved me and she missed me. She said those things. But I could tell that she was calling about something else.

“Do you know what ‘prions’ are?” she asked.

“How do you spell that?” I asked.

She spelled it. And within an hour she was sitting beside me.

“ ‘Prion’ is a rearrangement of the initial letters of ‘
pro
teinaceous
in
fectious particle.’ Actually”—she paused—“why would they do it
that
way? Anyway, prions can be transmitted by drinking blood,” she said matter-of-factly.

Her father. Of course. Her father was a medical researcher, and she had been home to visit him.

Prions. As she spoke I could not help recalling the night she expounded on Cologne and haunches and
Keulen.
I had learned later that
Keulen
was the Dutch name for Cologne, not an old German name as she had said.

“What, did you show him where I bit you, too?” I said.

“Oh, hush. He thought my curiosity was purely scientific. These guys can’t even unscramble words.” She looked down at her notes. “
Prion.
It should be
pro-in.
”

Like father, like daughter, I thought.

“I was amazed at what you
can’t
get from drinking blood. You can’t get blood diseases. You can’t get leukemia. You can’t get AIDS,
because HIV can’t be transmitted that way, unless maybe if you have lesions in the mucous membranes of your mouth, your esophagus, or your stomach. Your immune system would take care of the leukemia. Your stomach acids would kill the HIV and just about anything else.” She looked impressed. “Ingested blood will be digested blood. Simple as that. It’s not the same as a transfusion. The blood type doesn’t matter. Look at a steak.” She read directly from her notes: “A steak is merely cooked muscle with various amounts of blood. We do it all the time.” She paused. “But there are certain parasites that the acids can’t kill—and prions. They pass right through the acids and penetrate through the stomach into the system.”

“But what are prions?”

“They don’t seem to be so sure about that yet.”

“What is it with these guys? They misname something,
then
figure out what it is?”

“They’re these little virus-like particles. They’re still sort of hypothetical. They seem to agree on scrapie. They think that’s caused by prions, but only sheep and goats get that. Mad cow disease, that’s another one. Anyway, prions cause fatal neurological diseases. And maybe other things. They just haven’t figured it all out yet.”

She put aside her notes.

“Anyway,” she said, “here’s the thing. Whatever these prions and parasites are, I don’t want any. The same goes for HIV and whatever else, which I have more of a chance of getting from them going directly into my bloodstream from your mouth than you do from them entering your stomach.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t know who else you’re fooling around with like this. I like to think you’re not. But—”

“Well, you’re right. I’m not.”

I don’t know why I said that. I should have just kept my mouth shut.

“OK, you’re not. But let’s say you are, or you might. If you’re not going to worry about yourself, think about me. And you should worry about yourself. Parasites. Prions. God only knows what they are.”

What she told me served only to reinforce what I believed: that science as yet knew nothing. The croaker had said that my diabetes was improving, that my blood type seemed to be changing. These were impossibilities. Yet they seemed to be true.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “According to science, I have a better chance of getting sick from you drinking my blood than you have from drinking it.”

She wanted me to be faithful to her. And so, after all that, in her own way, she was really telling me that she loved me and missed me. That old black magic. The prion of love.

The cravings had ebbed, and this, I felt, was good. But as I sat beside Melissa, I realized that my sexuality, my desire for physical intimacy of any kind, had dwindled as well.

Maybe it was over, I told myself. And in a way this was a comforting thought. I did not want to relinquish my new life and all that it had brought me. But what it had brought me in recent days scared me more than a little, and there were times when I would have reembraced and reclaimed the solitary misery of my old life if I could. If I was becoming a god, then that god in turn was becoming something I did not know. There was a darkness and a stillness in the air. It was like the darkness and the stillness when I encountered the dead monkeys. Yes, maybe it was over, all of it: from the dead monkeys to my resurrection to the doorway in the black of night to the presentiment of the darkness and stillness in the air now before me.

Melissa touched my hand, and I withdrew it. She touched my neck and I turned away.

“Have you thought any more about those leopards?” she asked.

I looked at her. She was smiling.

“No,” I lied. “Have you?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m insane. Or maybe we both are. Simple as that.”

Her words were heard by me, but I was not listening. The whole business of that all-but-forgotten morning, the business of crossed lives and leopard souls was a minor key in the background now.

If I were going to tell anyone that I killed the two girls, it would be Melissa. And a part of me did feel a need to confess, and to expiate my guilt. But I would not. I knew in that instant, I would not. No, I told myself. It was done, and it was not really me. To say it was me would not quite be the truth.

Did I any longer know the truth? I was not sure. I was not sure of anything anymore: of what was real and what was not. All I knew for sure was the terrible feeling that I had passed through a state of bliss and was coming out the other side.

We fell to sleep that night slowly, silently, her arm lightly around me. I had a troubling dream. There was nothing odd in this. Most of my dreams, if not all of them, were troubling. I had come to learn that this was common to almost everyone. The good-night lovers’ wish of “sweet dreams” was sardonic. But of this particular dream I could remember nothing.

I gently removed her arm from me and quietly went to make a cup of coffee. The morning light was still a mere insinuation. I returned softly to the bedroom and looked down at her. Her sleeping face to me, her raised right arm beneath her head, her left arm lying on her body, unseen beneath the bedclothes, the delicate protuberance of her hand resting on her crotch. She lay like
the
Sleeping Venus,
but more lovely, and immersed in shadows that seemed to have grown and darkened and deepened in the more than five hundred years since Giorgione, as death neared, had labored with his brush to perfect the encroaching shadows of his painting.

I stood awhile. Her beauty mesmerized me. It was then, suddenly, that I realized that I hated her.

P
ALE LIGHT CAME SLOWLY AS
I
SAT ALONE WITH MY COFFEE.
I did not delve into my feelings or my mind. I had no inclination to do so, and I knew that there was no real understanding to be had by such delvings.

The Ch’an Buddhists had known the truth. Thought was the great curse. Only when the mind was free of it could the power of no-thought bring the burning flame of being. Those who seek truth should realize that there is nothing to seek.

Faustus dismissed all Christian theology with the words: “What doctrine call you this? /
Che sera sera,
/ ‘What will be shall be?’ Divinity, adieu!”

Yes, I reflected, before there was Doris Day, there was Faustus. And before there was Faustus, there were the Ch’an masters who knew that what Faust sought did not exist.

The coffee grew cold in my cup, and I drank the last of it and just sat there.

I had killed. I had killed without even really knowing it. I felt no remorse. Maybe a cheap metaphysical Hallmark sympathy card cast to the wind with scant emotional postage; nothing more. There was no sin in killing. Like the rest of the Ten Commandments, it was merely a reflection of man’s fearful desire to protect himself by transferring to the supreme authority of an imagined God decrees against those things that man feared—being murdered; being robbed; having his wife fuck around; and so on—that
consigned them to the realm of “sin” and the punishment of eternal damnation, the
“Che sera sera”
that Marlowe put in the mouth of his Faustus.

There was no morality. There was no sin. There was only fear.

Given the chance of returning to the moments before I had killed, would I do it again? But there was no going back. Never.

All I knew at this moment was that my abhorrence for the woman in my bed was so intense that I could easily kill her—were she not in my bed, in my home; were it not that there were others who had seen us together, who suspected or knew that we were lovers.

Thou shalt not get caught. The unwritten commandment, the palimpsest on the unseen side of the tablet. Again, there was only fear.

Then she was standing before me, in my robe, smiling with eyes still adrift with sleep. She was no longer the beautiful girl who had sated my cravings, the goddess whom I had loved. She was a detested creature, alien to me.

“Get that off,” I told her, gesturing to my robe. “Put your own shit on. Then get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

She looked at me, stunned, the sleep gone from her eyes, her jaw lowered, slowly, remotely, as if it were a motion apart from her brain signals, beyond her consciousness.

“What?” she demanded. She had heard and comprehended my words and their stern seriousness. Her question was not a question. It was a delayed articulation of shock. She stared into my eyes. I do not know what she saw. Her stare did not waver, as if she were intent on discerning another to emerge through my eyes. Then she turned away and began to sob.