Me and the Devil: A Novel (34 page)

I shook my head as rapidly as I could, as if to clear it. It made me dizzy and nauseous. I drank. I leaned forward and labored to work my feet back into shoes.

“And where to now?” he said. “To bottomless perdition, there to dwell?” He took a sip. “Or there perchance to die?”

I had got my shoes on, and it was taking all my concentration to try to tie them. I was panting with the effort. His words broke my concentration, flustered me, angered me with frustration.

“Look,” I said, “you only want to give me what I want? Gimme ten kilos of gold. Twenty-four karat, triple nine-point-nine.

“Credit Suisse or Johnson Matthey?”

“I don’t care.”

I returned to my shoelace, but was distracted by the grotesque bulging of his neck. The first of ten heavy kilograms of gold hit the floor with a loud slam.

“If I were a prick,” he said, “I would have shit them out.” He rubbed his neck and coughed modestly, then took a sip. I stared at the gold. My shoelaces were tied.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Think nothing of it,” he said. “ ’Tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.”

“All the same, thank you. Not a bad pastime, sitting around spitting up gold.”

“Oh,” he said lackadaisically, “never cared much for it myself.” He began to softly sing “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

“Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, that other fellow—what was his name?—Ray Henderson. Nineteen twenty-seven. Everybody and his mother recorded that one. What a bundle they must have made with it.

“That DeSylva was something, all right. He also made a
bundle with ‘Wishing Will Make It So.’ And they call the blues the Devil’s music.” He sang again, softly.

I stood unsteadily. Looking down at the gold bars on the floor made me feel better. I coughed out one of those rat-things, a small one. I wiped my mouth.

“It’s good to see you smile,” he said.

“I feel good,” I said.

“I’d hate to see you feel bad.”

He cast his own eyes to the gold on the floor. “So,” he said, “off to the melter for the gelt through your swarthy-complected intermediary, is that it? And so it is that Jew and Christian and Muslim become one, brought together by greed and stealth. Selah, selah.

“Shall we have one for the road?”

He brought more drinks.

“What’s the difference between Satan and the Devil?” I asked.

“Words, words. Nothing but words. The former, as you should know, is a word rooted commonly in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The latter, in Greek and Latin alone.”

He took a sip, lit a cigarette, went on.

“You really are a fool for words. Immersed as you are in the wisdom of Ch’an, you seem to hew your way through it, embracing what you wish, discarding what you wish. You bear close the wisdom regarding the foolishness of thought, but not the wisdom that follows close after: ‘How can one obtain truth through words?’ I am not really criticizing you, for, to the best of my knowledge, no one has had the wisdom to counter this wisdom by asking what it is if not just another bunch of words.” He raised his glass. “Thoughts. Words. Hang them and fuck them. Let’s just drink.”

“Save me,” I heard myself say.

“Save you?”

“Yeah. Save me. Enough of this. I want to go back to where I was. I don’t want to go through the hell of life again just so that I can return to the wonder of those butterflies, those fireflies, that one lone blue jay, the magic in the clouds, the sense of illimitableness that only a child could know. Just take me back to where I was not so very long ago, when serenity and rebirth were in my grasp. No, don’t take me back there. Bring that back to me, in this here and now.”

“Serenity and rebirth were in your grasp? Nothing was in your grasp but a whip handle and the haunches and loins and thighs of females as lost to themselves as you were to yourself.” He ruminated, snorted. “Drinking their blood to gain their youth. From what comic book did you get that ridiculous African ritual notion from?”

“It was real. For a while I was well, better than—”

Then, again, cutting me off this time, that lilting voice of his, which now was maddening to me:

I cut him off in turn. “You know I’m telling you the truth,” I declared. “You know it was real. How can you say it’s not happiness that I wanted, that it’s not happiness that I want still?”

“Because you can’t lie to me. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to
all
of yourself.”

“Save me.”

“Save you from what? Long ago ere this you would have slain yourself had not the sweet pleasures I gave you conquered deep despair.”

He kicked at one of the bars of gold on the floor.

“You unappreciative prick,” he said. “Though your brain can barely function, you gather the poetic bullshit to slur of butterflies and blue jays and magic clouds and happiness. You beg for salvation, and the while all you crave is gold and self-annihilation—a most odd combination as I see it. As the universal proverb has it, there are no pockets in a shroud. And you hardly need money to hasten your self-annihilation. There’s no more smack about the place, but you’ve still got all that good old crushable oxycodone and a bag of insulin syringes right there on the shelf. And there’s all that liquor still there waiting to be drunk. And all those other pills and shit you’ve got tucked away.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“What you want to do can be done here. Besides, there are others out there.” He cleared his throat. The pitch of his voice changed slightly as he delivered the quotation: “ ‘I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.’ That quite fits your own feelings, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I know that one. Henry James. Or was it Somerset Maugham?”

“No evidence that either of them ever said it. I’m the one who said it, whispered it long ago to a barkeep in Trafalgar Square. If either of them said it, they got it from that barkeep. A moment of weary discontent, of wanting to turn my back on and turn away from it all. A moment such as this.” He sighed. “But such is not one of the conjuring tricks allowed me. One might say that Nature casts her lots.” He sighed again. “And you want four and twenty more years of this. Why not four and twenty thousand more years? Fool. If I had my druthers, if I had the powers of a storm god of olden myth, I’d blow it all asunder this very moment.” Then a nuance of cheer entered his voice. “Or after the next drink, in any case.”

I belched and sneezed in sickly counterpoint. Some sort of
bitter bile-like substance rose like a burning in my gut, and ran from my nostrils and gurgled from my mouth onto the front of my shirt. I held my stomach, for there seemed to be a pool of churning acid within it. With my free hand, I wiped at the slobber from my nose, lips, and chin. My body was rejecting and expelling the whiskey. Or maybe, worse, it was the water. I needed to switch to beer, to see if that would stay down. The rising acid in my gut would not subside. I felt my stomach constrict and convulse. Tremors ran through me.

“Well, pal o’ mine,” said he, “if we’re to venture forth into society, no matter how low, I suggest you don a bib and diaper and try a change of trousers. Besotted, piss-sodden, befouled, and adrool. Thou biddest thyself adieu.” He tsk-tsked as he beheld me.

I tried to speak, to force words through the rising bilious tide of acid that would have swallowed them in its undertow. Only guttural sounds and a spittle of vocules came out.

With two shaking hands I raised the near-empty glass to my mouth and tried to swallow. Sour saburral vomit spewed from my mouth and nostrils.

“Ah, in sooth, the puking sphinx!” he commented with a celebratory note in his voice.

“Gimme a beer,” I demanded, wheezing. Words after all had come.

He rose, returned with a cold bottle of Asahi Super Dry, put it in my outstretched quivering hand. It felt good against the skin of my sweating palm and fingers.

“Enjoy it,” he said. “It’s the last one.”

I pursed my lips and sipped tentatively. I belched deeply. It stayed down. The last one. I didn’t ask myself how one who could emit gold kilos couldn’t cough up a cold bottle of beer or two. I just opened my mouth wider and drank more freely. I belched, and my whole body shook when I did so—but the beer stayed
down. I inhaled slightly—I could not take a deep breath—and lit a cigarette.

“Gimme Lorna.”

“Oh,” he said dismissively, “why her? Lorna. That boring crucified bitch in her peek-a-boo slicker. She ought to put a poor box at her door.”

“Lorna,” I said. “She would help me.”

He waved his hand, with a more decisive, albeit silent, dismissiveness.

“Though I must say,” he reflected calmly, “I did rather enjoy that night with the stun gun.”

Yes, that night. It was her idea. I never asked her where she’d got the damned thing. A slim sort of two-pronged thing. At barely five inches it was mostly all handle, and weighed less than a pound. I had never held one in my hand before. It was black plastic with
Z-FORCE SM
and a lightning bolt and 100,000
V
printed on it, and it felt like a remote control, a small one, with most of its slight weight coming from the single nine-volt battery within it. She herself had no experience with one, either. She said she had been told that this was one of the lowest-powered stun guns available; that even the three-hundred-thousand-volt model was considered a lightweight. A hundred thousand volts didn’t seem so weak to me, I said. But she just smiled, said “come on,” and told me what she wanted; and it sounded good to me.

After our usual routine, as she began to climax spread-eagled on her cross, I stroked her sopping cunt with the plaited leather stock of the whip, hooped the whip over her head, placed a thick length of it in her open, eager mouth, which jerked forward for it. I stepped back, watching her head move to the sounds of her breathing deeply as she chewed and tongued the whip; seeing her sweet bared buttocks clench and unclench beneath the raised and bunched raincoat; watching and hearing it intensify.

I switched off the safety on the stun gun and when I heard the garbled feral scream “Now!” from round the whip in her mouth, I swooped my hand fast and stuck the two contact probes of the damned thing upward directly to her pussy for barely a second. She was praying for a clit-hit, and maybe she got one. The whip fell from her mouth and she screamed again as the jolt hit her, sending her body into a seizure of sorts before she passed out.

It was, she said later, cradled in my arms, the most unbelievable orgasm she ever felt. She offered to shoot me in the cock as I came in her face, but I demurred and ultimately declined. With the safety switched back on, she fell softly asleep sucking it like a beloved childhood thing.

“Yes, quite an evening, that,” he said with a smile.

“Lorna,” I said.

“Oh, enough of that. And why is it that you can only reach out for another person when you can barely reach out for another drink? What do you fear?”

“Death,” I said, wandering back to his earlier words.

“Oh, that old farthing fuck-all of endless drivel. No. What are you really afraid of? Answer that in truth and we shall celebrate it, and you will be saved.”

I drank the last of the beer. My mind was blank. There was nothing in me. Nothing but weakness, sickness, dread, and desperation. And together they were a black emptiness. Nothing. I could not answer him. All I could say was “No more beer?”

He sighed deeply, gravely, a bit whimsically.

“No,” he said. “No more beer.”

I stood on faltering legs. I did not wash and I did not change into clean clothes. I had not the strength, nor the care. In the taxi, we said almost nothing. I could see his reflection in the window through which I stared with blurred vision. Sitting next to me, he seemed to evanesce and materialize, evanesce and materialize, in
a vague pattern of arrhythmic pulsations, now weak, now fast and hard, weak again, again fast and hard. I could hear them inside my ears, coming from within. By the time I realized these arrhythmic pulsations to be those of my own heartbeat, I could no longer see him beside me.

Propping myself on the corner barstool and staring into nothingness, I felt like a skull, a corpse, but anxious not to be taken, not to be recognized as such.

“Oh, no, not you again.”

It was good, reassuring to hear Lee’s laughter.

“Gin and tonic?” the bartender asked with an inscrutable grin. I wanted to say no, just a Guinness, but the words were too hard, too slow coming out.

“You’re getting as bad as our friend, what’s-his-name, there,” Lee smiled. He drew nearer, took a whiff of me. “Worse.” He laughed. “Maybe I should open up a funeral parlor upstairs. Catch ’em comin’ and goin’.” He laughed again.

I raised the glass. The place grew suddenly dark. This sent an enfilade through the arrhythmia of my heart. Everything became even darker and began to fade. The glass fell from my hand and spilled and shattered on the floor. A deafening skirl seemed to burst outward through my eardrums. Then, with my heart seeming about to burst as well, I tried to stand, and I fell crashing to the floor, feeling blackness overtake me as I fell.