Me and the Devil: A Novel (40 page)

What had been Alexander’s dream? These were things that fascinated and beguiled me. This was why I had wanted to make a tale of history and dreams, of fucking one’s mother and all of the world, of demons and of drink. But who would want it? In this age, Alexander and Aristotle meant nothing. They were nobodies, except perhaps in name, who had never even texted or tweeted. Alexander the Great? Aristotle? No market value. Hoi
polloi twaddle, the milk toast slurry and fodder of which best-sellers were made—now we were talking. Would Alexander have even cared to conquer this world?

He had conquered the world, but not himself. That’s what I wanted to do: subdue and possess the world that was in myself.

Part of this, I knew, was inseparable from ridding my life of the bourne stones of its freedom. True, I was freer than most; but I was not as free as I could be.

Soon I would get a driver’s license. I had never had one. This would give me the freedom to travel alone to an idyllic little town I had come across in the middle of deep-wooded nowhere in eastern Pennsylvania. The grandiose, delusional expectations of youth were behind me now, and all I really yearned for was a few years of peace and quiet and solitude at the end of the road, a little place with a hammock strung between two great old trees in the breezes of being. A driver’s license would allow me the means to get there when I wanted. It would demolish one of the bourne stones of my freedom. Whether I could yet cut the umbilical cord that held me to the corpse of this city was something that remained to be seen, and it had to do with an even greater bourne stone. But in the desire for freedom there was strength. I entertained traveling back and forth between here and there for a while. Whether I could afford both my Manhattan place and my little place with a hammock also remained to be seen, but this was a matter of hard reality, not desire and strength. We would see.

And I knew that I had to turn my back and walk away from this business of writing. It was not what it once had been. No matter what publishers claimed, the racket was now only a vestigial withering on the much bigger dying racket of conglomerated business itself. And freedom of speech was dying, and literacy was dying, and reading was dying.

Just as important, I no longer felt a need to assert my own
existence by communicating to others. And on the occasions when I did, I felt there was no one out there at the other end.

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts.

Writing was not an act of the imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word “creative” in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe “artists,” living the “creative” life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was absolutely nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest fucking ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

No. The seduction of writing in one’s impressionable years could prove fatal in one’s later years.

In the folly and self-torture of trying to say what cannot be said lies nothing but ruin. This is why the greatest of writers have in the end always forsaken words for silence. As George Steiner said: “The true masters are those who relinquish their vocation.” In this regard, he mentions Tolstoy. I would summon Dante, Rimbaud, Pound, Beckett. It was Rimbaud who saw the light earliest, quitting the racket six days before his twenty-first birthday, to run guns and coffee in Africa. But it was Pound who put it best, after fifty-seven years’ work on his
Cantos:

“I have tried to write Paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise.”

Yes, the greatest of writers have always forsaken words to
embrace and cede to the more expressive powers of silence. I was not great, but in an age bereft of any greatness whatsoever, I could pass for it.

So why go on writing? It was no longer a means to freedom. It was barely anymore even a means to make a buck. It just stole your real life and immured you in a sort of counter-life, neither here nor there. There were no holy words, no words that bore wisdom. Holiness and wisdom belonged to silence alone. To believe otherwise was vain arrogance; and worse, to know this and to persevere in the exaltation of words was to become the cheap carny barker of lies peddled as truth—a degradation and a wrongfulness, and nothing more.

I
T WAS AN OVERCAST MORNING OF DRIZZLING RAIN.
C
OOL, BUT
not cold. To me it was a lovely morning, except for the humid-ity, which I could always feel throughout my system, from my nasal passages to my guts, like a malaise.

The diminutive Ecuadorian drudge who tended to the upkeep of the joint had not yet arrived. The retractable dark green awning above the bench had not been lowered, and the bench was wet and getting wetter in the drizzling rain. I went into the bar, got the long, unwieldy awning crank from the barroom corner where it leaned, extending from the floor almost to the ceiling, brought it outside, raised its hooked end, finally engaged the small hoop of the rig, and cranked down the awning to keep the rain from the bench.

I returned the crank to its corner in the bar and looked about for a newspaper to place on the bench under my ass. I found a copy of the
Post,
and as I was about to lay it on the wet bench I saw its headline:
BADGE BETRAYED
. I never read newspapers. They were bad for you. But occasionally I was drawn to one of their tawdry front pages. Both the
News
and the
Post
had grown almost unbearable in their use of worse and worse puns. It was the old-fashioned Dick Tracy sort of headlines, the feigned public-spirited cries of outrage and shock, that I liked. So I stood there in the light rain to check out the story.

“A veteran NYPD officer assembled an ‘army’ of his fellow
not-so-Finest,” the two-page spread began. The cop had “boasted to an FBI informant” that he could pull together the perfect “crew” for any crime. The army had been branching out from smuggling guns and cigarettes and slot machines to offering violence for a price. “We got cops with vests and guns,” the veteran officer had told the fed. “I’m setting up a good army here. A good f—kin’ army.” There was a bunch of pictures. The guy who shot his mouth off to the informant, several of his “army” members. My eyes passed over the pictures, returned very suddenly to one of them. And I heard his voice:

“I know this guy. He’s all right.”

Those two cops that morning last spring. Numb-nuts and glue factory. It was glue factory. Good old glue factory.

I had wondered a lot about that strange visit from those cops. I had wondered even more about the events of the night before. Had I really slashed those girls’ throats? All I remembered was a dim, indistinct flickering in the blackness of what could have been a dream. But I had seen the blood. On the blade of that knife. On me. Or had I only imagined seeing it?

I had wondered about the old cop in my kitchen with his moronic young acolyte. He seemed so intent, old glue factory did, on simply writing me off as innocent and getting the hell out of there. It left me wondering, and I had been wondering ever since.

He, not I, was the killer, I told myself at times. He was, I told myself at other times, a secret brother, a fellow blood drinker, who somehow recognized me as one, and who understood.

When I wondered, my mind went everywhere. Now, as I put the paper on the bench and sat on it, I told myself that he was likely far more concerned with unloading his latest shipment of assault rifles than with any kind of pain-in-the-ass cop work.

Sitting on that paper, the awning overhead, sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette, looking into the foggy drizzle that
seemed to quiet the street, I wondered again if I had really killed those girls that night in that doorway. I recalled my last words with the Japanese guy at the store, just a few blocks from here, where I had bought that knife. My last words to him were about the long knife with the leopard-bone handle that I wanted to have made. He told me that the knife master had spoken with several of the great craftsmen in Japan. Using leopard bone was totally against the law, he reported; it could not even be obtained in Japan. One of the craftsmen could make for me a
higonokami
—a folding knife—with a handle of ivory, maple, and ebony. I could also have a
tanto,
a dagger, with a handle of ivory, persimmon, and white sharkskin. I could, if I wanted, have a
higonokami
made entirely of silver. I asked the guy to thank the knife master for me, but also tell him that he should trouble himself no further. “The special knife,” I told him, “can only be made of leopard bone.”

I still didn’t know why I wanted this thing, this “special knife” with a leopard-bone handle. Why did anyone want anything he didn’t need?

As I sat there, I tried to remember what those two girls looked like. I stared into the diffuse mist of silent rain, trying to bring forth their faces.

In that diffuse mist under a sky that showed nothing but a gathering of heavy gray clouds, there were here and there the odd faint twinklings of the slight refractions of stray half-light passing through the raindrops.

If I had in fact killed them, I should at least have the memory of having done so. This at least should be mine. The feel of their warm flesh in the springtime night, the drawing of the blade across that flesh, the terror in their eyes, their blood in my mouth. These things, the memory of them; they should at least be mine. If one was to be a killer, then the memory of killing
should be his. What was it to be a killer who had not even the pleasure of—

It was there and then that I caught myself and turned away from wondering. I gave myself to, became lost in, the semitransparent windblown veil of the muted light-falling rain. I did not feel so good. It was the weather. The humidity.

I
T WAS NOT WITHOUT FEAR, OR FEARLESSNESS, THAT
I
DECIDED
to call Melissa and Lorna. I wanted to know. Whatever it was, if anything, that I was to know, I wanted to know it.

This would have been a lot easier, a hell of a lot easier, if I had a few drinks under my belt. The booze would bring forth my words with ease and without anxiety. But those days were over, the days of the slaking silver tongue. The booze was behind me. I took some baclofen, some Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, turned on the telephone, and dialed Lorna’s number. Truth be told, I had a premonition. A bad one. I had the eerie feeling that Lorna was dead. This Venus born from a sea of gloom, this night flower whose wails of ecstasy sounded so much like cries of suicide, or of one being murdered. She was dead and was no more. I was almost sure of this as I listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times. I should be doing this in the light of morning, I told myself, not now, when all was dark. I was about to end the call when I heard her voice.

“Hey, stranger,” I said. “It’s me.”

There was a pause, as if she did not recognize my voice. Then she spoke. There seemed in her a mixture of curiosity, surprise, and concern. The emotion that lay under these things was unreadable.

“What happened to you? It was like you vanished. One day you were there, and then you weren’t.”

It made me breathe easier to know that she was all right, or at least that she was still there, still alive.

“I was sick, baby. I got sick, really sick. I ended up in the hospital for a while. I’m just now starting to feel better.”

There was another pause. I could hear her breathe. I felt that there was anger in her, but that she could not speak it after what I had said. It was good to know that I could still cast my cape of deceit over the cheap prop of the truth on its worn little pedestal.

“God.” She sighed. “I don’t know how many messages I left, how many times I called you.”

“I haven’t listened to any messages. They told me just to rest, to take it easy. But I had to call you.” I took a swig of milk. “I had to call you.”

“Can I bring you anything?”

“I’m OK.” I tried to sound as weak and sickly as I could, and I hated myself as I did so. “I’d love to see you, though.” Why did I say that? Why?

“You sure you don’t need anything?”

Why had it taken her so long to answer the phone? Was she in the middle of prodding that stun-gun gizmo into her own crotch?

“I just needed to hear your voice and know you were all right.”

And to know that you were not dead. To know that you had not killed yourself, and that I had not killed you, and that you do not want to kill me.

“Do you remember the last time we saw each other?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. For a moment I grew tense, as if she would say no more. “I knew something was wrong then. I knew you’d been drinking. A lot. I was going to ask you to leave, but I was worried about your diabetes. With the drinking and all. I asked you about it and you waved it away. I should’ve done something, but I didn’t.”