Me and the Devil: A Novel (33 page)

I felt that I must summon the power to raise myself. I braced my effort with the arm of the couch. I stood. I fell. My balance was shot. This was a bad sign. It could mean that I had no electrolytes left. This was how I had ended up in the hospital the last time. I had never heard of electrolytes before then. I tried to get up from the floor but I did not have the strength. The stranger assisted me, helped me lurch unsteadily to the kitchen. I put a handful of vitamin capsules into my mouth—electrolytes—and washed them down with a long draught of water, what seemed like an endless draught of water. Dehydration. I needed to stave it off. I needed to live. I forgot completely about my diabetes medication, forgot completely the last time I had taken any.

When I took the container of Centrum Silver from the refrigerator, I saw and smelled the foul remains of partially eaten, partially unrecognizable things. It was amazing what a greasy lamb gyro looked like after enough time: part rock, part unspeakable laboratory experiment.

Gasping after almost a liter of water, I stood on my own legs, leaning on the countertop. The stranger aided my return to the couch, where I lit my own cigarette and took a deep drag.

“What say we raise a glass to ourselves?” he said. “I saw that bottle of Tignanello in there was still half full and recorked. Or perhaps a nice bourbon and branch? That bottle of Booker’s still had a lot in it as well.”

“Bourbon and branch,” I said. Then I heard him opening the kitchen cupboards looking for the glassware. He poured, first the Booker’s, then a bit of water. He set one drink on the little table near me, the other on the little table near him.

I saw then that what I had taken to be shabby corduroy pants were in fact corduroy of pure silk, soft and comfortable as soft and comfortable could be. I had seen and felt a pair once at a store in Milan, once at a store in London. His well-worn shoes, however, were plain and brown, with a vaguely pedorthic look, not unlike the SAS shoes I bought from the Eneslow Foot Comfort Center store. Though I had no doubt that his were more comfortable and custom-made of some rare and supple leather.

What the fuck was with this guy? He saw, he knew, that I was on the verge of going under, and he was not even loaded; yet here he was pressing more drink on me.

I took an unsteady sip. It livened me a little. I took another. There was in me not the least concern for what I said, or tried to say, so I turned to him and said:

“Who are you?”

He took a good swallow, lit a cigarette, laid back his head, and laughed.

“I mean, you gotta excuse me,” I said, “I’m sorta fucked-up and all, but—”

“Here we are. We’ve known each other all these years. And you ask me who I am?”

“Where do we know each other from? I mean, like I said, I’m pretty fucked-up. I think I been blackin’ out, gettin’ everything all fucked-up lately. From the bar? Is that where we know each other from? The bar?”

“Yes, from the bar.” He laughed again, and now there was something ominous in his laugh. “We know each other from the bar. We know each other from here, from there. We know
each other from everywhere. Years and years and years. Everywhere.”

I pressed the palm of my hand to my forehead. I drank. I pressed the cool glass to my forehead. I drank.

“Do you like
The Music Man
?” he asked.

I looked at him strangely. “I like that song ‘Trouble.’ I like that song.”

“Ah, yes, perhaps one of the great Robert Preston’s finest performances.” He sipped, smiled. “I do a damned good Professor Hill myself.” He leapt suddenly to his feet and stood before me. He began to sing in the stentorian speech-like cadences of “Ya Got Trouble,” gesticulating with arch fervency as had Robert Preston in the picture. He was performing, not for me, but merely performing.

He seemed not at all taxed, not the least out of breath, after this exuberant routine. He merely resumed his seat and took a sip.

“Music by the great Meredith Wilson,” he said, “lyrics by
moi.
Not bad, hey?” He lit a cigarette, smiled. “Or perhaps it’s just the Irish in me.” He took a deep drag, took another sip, followed by a sound of savorsome appreciation. “Have you a ditty of your own you should like to entertain us with? Come now. Conviviality is not a solitary affair but a feast of folly to be shared.” Then his voice turned cold, cruel, and deprecating: “But you’d probably just fall down.”

I drank, emptying the glass.

“May I replenish that for you?” His voice was again calm, measured, amiable.

I gave him the glass. He took it into the kitchen with his own, came back with two fresh and full drinks. He raised his to mine and said,
“Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.”
Then he smiled with a whisper of a laugh and drank. I nodded the best I could: Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die salute you. I drank. There was silence. He seemed to be almost inaudibly humming to himself something like ancient Ambrosian plainsong.

I coughed forth another of those rat-like shadow-things. I drank more.

“Who are you?” I tried again.

He stopped humming, if indeed he had been humming.

“Who am I?” He laid back his head again, laughed low and sardonically. “Who am I?” He fell quiet. “Who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re the fucking Devil,” I spat out.

He fell quiet again. “And your better half, too,” he said decisively.

“And you’re here to claim my soul, or buy it, or some such shit.” I laughed, somewhere inside me, I laughed. It was a laughter most strange and unhealthy and indefinable.

“Buy your soul?” His voice rose. “I’m no fucking two-bit schlockmeister,” he said with some indignation. “And how, in any case, does one purchase or lay claim to what was born forth and rendered to him?” He blew a smoke ring, opened his mouth wider, and one of those shadow-vermin leapt from it, through the vanishing ring of smoke, and made off like the others. “Souls?” Again he laid back his head and this time snorted a more forlorn sort of laugh.

I lugubriously composed words, lugubriously enunciated them. It was like moving heavy stones.

“So, my friend from here and there and everywhere, my friend of many and many years, Devil mine, grant me four and twenty years more, to live in voluptuous happiness. Surely that is yours to spare and give me.”

“I would,” he said pensively. “But it is not what you want. It is not life or happiness that you wish. It is death that you crave. Look at yourself, look into yourself. It is death that you pursue. You are not one of those, the great common multitude who rush to obliterate their lives, whose beginning is their end: a brief, nervous twitch of
panic and dread between cunt and grave, and nothing more. But so much of you has been self-killed. You have been your own attrition. This is why I say I am your better half. I am what of you has endured. I am what of you stays you from the grave. But if truth be told, you seek death, not the years of life and happiness for which you petition me. It is death that you love. I feel that to keep you from it would be to deny you the true desire in you that goes unuttered.”

“Is that why you force drink upon me now? To kill me?” I could feel the anger in the moved stones of my own voice.

“I force no drinks on you. I merely serve you. I give you only what you want.”

“Then give me the four and twenty years more. If not of happiness, then of misery; of this.”

“I feel that what remains of you, the you that is apart from me, can take care of that.” He sipped. “But you can forget about those four and twenty years.” He sipped again, then lit a smoke. “You will write three more books, and then you will die. Then to your true love you will go.”

“And what if I do not write three books more? I’ve had it with that, anyway. I don’t want to write three books more.”

“Then you will die anyway.”

“When? Not tonight?”

“Is that disappointment or relief, eagerness or fear? No, not tonight.”

My glass was empty again. His was still almost half full. He asked politely, “Should you like another?”

I wanted to say no, but I was not strong enough to say no. I took the drink he brought, and I drank from it.

“Yes,” he said. “Nice socks. Very nice socks indeed.”

“So tell me. Is there a soul?”

He began to say something, then hesitated with an “oh,” then laughed a slight laugh. “Excuse me. I had mentioned socks, and I
thought for a moment that you were asking if a sock had a sole, which of course it does, so I was thrown off for a second. You were talking about the other kind, that breath-of-life thing, mortal to some ways of thinking, immortal to others.” He shrugged. “I know only the wisdom that you have forgotten, or that you still retain. Plus a few things I’ve picked up on my own. Ways of thinking. Thought. The root of all evil.”

“Picked up on your own? If you’re my better half, how do you pick up things on your own, without my picking them up?”

“Because I’m not only your better half. I’m the better half of everything, all that was and all that is, and all that ever shall be.”

“You talk more like God than the Devil.”

“You can call me that, too. I don’t mind it at all.”

“I thought the Devil would be good for more than some imitation of Robert Preston in
The Music Man.
”

“Ah, another sucker for conjuring tricks.”

He began to sing to the melody of a vaguely familiar Irish air:

An unlit cigarette hung from my mouth, and from the side of his own mouth there shot a laser-like blaze of fire that halted at the tip of that cigarette. I drew smoke. After this unsettling ignivomous feat, he drew a cigarette from his golden case, placed it between his lips, and lit it casually with his golden lighter.

“How about a clandestine jaunt, in the blink of an eye, to the pope’s privy chamber? We shall be quite unseen, I assure you. And I can also assure you of some vintages in the papal wine vault that few have ever tasted.”

I felt all strength ebbing from me. No. Worse. I felt all life ebbing from me.

“Oh, well,” he sighed. “World-weary indeed is he who declines that one.”

My head was lowered, and I peered to him. I tried to say something, not even knowing what I was trying to say.

“The puking sphinx,” he said. “Remember that one?”

More than forty years ago, the poet Ed Sanders had shown me an old engraving of one of the most bizarre and arresting images I ever saw: a frontal view of an open-mouthed vomiting sphinx. It made quite an impression on me, as it had on him, and seemed to bespeak all manner of lost, unspeakable mystical powers and arcane, unknowable meaning. Just a few years ago, never having forgotten that image or the impression it made on me, I asked Ed where he had got it, where it had come from. He remembered it well, too, but could recall only that it must have come from an old volume that he no longer possessed and whose title and any other details were lost to him as well. Yes, that old engraving seemed to reveal all while revealing nothing. The puking sphinx.

“I could take you there,” he said, “there and back, in a blink as well, to confront that wondrous thing, and not as an engraved image, but to see and touch and feel in the reality of this very moment.”

How could he even know of this?

“But that would, I must admit, be rather a cheap shot, for what you took to be the engraved image of a puking sphinx was indeed merely an engraved image of one of the four water-spouting sphinxes sculpted in 1858 at the lower basin of the Fontaine du Palmier in Paris. It was an old engraving of one of those sphinxes you saw. The etched spewing water was to your eyes a spewing of a different sort. And from there grew the great mystical icon that has captivated you for all your adult life. Folly, fancy, and falsehood. But, nonetheless, I could take you there. If we’re
lucky—six hours later, daylight there now—the fountain will be working and the water will be spouting.”