Me and the Devil: A Novel (9 page)

I wrapped her in a big soft towel and dried her. I swabbed the cut with peroxide and rubbed some thick vitamin E on it with my fingertip. She smiled and raised her lips to mine. When I took her lower lip between my teeth, she stepped back and her smile did not return until she sat in my robe beside me on the couch, sipping Roquette 1797 from a pony glass. I had finally found some good
parmigiano reggiano
and had bought a hunk with a good deep tawny layer beneath the rind. I broke off pieces of it with a narrow chisel, put them on a plate, drizzled some unfiltered olive oil over them, ground some black pepper over them, peeled a blood orange, added the segments to the plate, and laid it down beside her glass of absinthe.

I wanted to talk to her about stone houses and rolling hills and sunlight and shadows in the pines. I wanted to talk to her about the difference between hunting and infidelity. But I said nothing. She was stroking my shin with her bare foot, and it felt good. I thought of the odd faint taste of caviar that I had experienced. I thought of the watery slightness of the blood, barely
enough to moisten my lips and mouth and evoke that faint odd taste. There was not much blood, hardly any, to be drawn from the capillary vessels where I had broken her skin. There were not many nerve endings in that part of the body, either. You could stick a pen, an index finger, a comb, anything to that part of someone’s back and tell them it was a gun or a knife, and they would never be able to feel that it was not. It was a trick that every mugger knew, the principal anatomy lesson of the school of crime. I wondered what she had felt when I bit her there. I wondered if she felt anything there now. It had been somewhat like taking a mere few drops of light, bracing aperitif or—that impossible taste—a mere smidgen of caviar from a dainty little mother-of-pearl spoon. Something that was so very deliciously satisfying while intensifying the appetite that rendered it satisfying. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. This effect was quite perversely pleasant, like catching sight of a wondrously beautiful bird in the instant that it vanished in flight from the visible sky.

In Vientiane one late afternoon, in the ghostly quiet before owl-light descended, I wandered through the winding dirt streets on my way back to the old hotel where I was staying. I had spent the day on my hip and on my back in an opium den, smoking and dreaming, smoking and dreaming, on the rotten wood-plank floors of paradise. A chicken crossed before me in the dust as I made my way. The moment I saw the chicken I knew why it was crossing that road. Utterly and truly and precisely, as if—no, not as if, but simply as—its mind and purpose were conveyed to me in a beam of irrefutable revelation, I
knew.
A life of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” A life of “To get to the other side.” It was over. I
knew.
And what I knew, the inestimable truth of this sudden supernatural knowledge, was so overwhelming and life-altering that I felt that it would imbue my days and guide me ever
thence. The knowledge filled me. I could never, would never breathe another breath that was without this knowledge that had claimed my mind and my existence.

By the time I made it to the next bend in the dirt road, maybe a distance of three or four yards, I had completely forgotten why the chicken crossed the road. The evaporation of this knowledge has tormented me ever since. I know that I will never recapture it. My only consolation is that I
knew,
if only for a fleeting, fated instant, why the chicken crossed the road. This great and mystical knowledge was mine. For that instant I had and I knew what no other human being ever had or ever knew.

For some reason, or from some idle misfiring of synapse and neuron, I thought of this now. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. The chicken that crossed the road, the sea spray and the moon and the tides, droplets from capillaries and gushings from arteries, living happily ever after, and the hunt without which there could be neither happiness nor ever after, even the dead monkeys and the exorcism and laying to rest of them. The more Melissa’s bare foot softly stroked my shin, the more I felt myself falling into a shallow trance in which images and thoughts flowed in otherworldly harmony.

How I wished I could have opium again. The real stuff, the good stuff, the best stuff in the world. I could go out and find within a mile of where I lived a gun, heroin, crack, whatever I wanted. But not opium, not the most beatific of drugs. Not here, not in Europe, nowhere but in parts of Asia, and even there it was growing more rare as well, so much more profitable was it when processed into heroin. Everyone who had ever claimed they could get me opium in the city had turned out to be a liar out to impress with empty words or a fool who believed the hard black little pieces of foul matter he had purchased was real opium, and that, even if it were, it could be smoked in a hash pipe.

Yes, I wished I could have opium again, the sweet smoke of the one true heaven again. To cling to the young flesh in the heat of the vital flame, to draw from that young flesh the warm blood,
calidum innatum,
of new life, the rekindling of dying embers from the power and pleasure of that vital flame. To have this paradise and to enhance it with the paradise of opium too—it was a dream, this nocturne of blood and opium. Some dreams were not without a sublime magic of their own.

I imagined a long ivory pipe with a golden saddle, a lustrous yellow jade bowl, rich gold-edged cloisonné end bands, and shadow-wood tips; a blue and white Ming porcelain jar full of rich putty-soft chestnut-colored opium, its unique scent perfuming the air; a chased silver and cut-glass oil lamp, a layout of ivory-handled fine steel needles, scrapers, wick trimmers, spoons, tweezers, cleaning rod, and sable brush on a black lacquer tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

I imagined a small pool of fresh warm blood in a gold and enamel drinking bowl that bore the image of the protective spirit-creature, sword in mouth, beneath the octagonal symbol of the Chinese Eight Trigrams that was painted, its colors long fading, on a piece of wood nailed above the rickety door atop the rickety stairs at the entrance to the opium den.

I took a picture of that image with a cheap disposable camera and later sent it to ethnologists, anthropologists, scholars of Eastern religions, mythology, and symbolism, heads of Oriental studies at universities, curators of Oriental collections at museums, experts on the primitive magic, primitive art, primitive culture, and history of the region. None of them could identify the source and exact meaning of it beyond associating it with an animism of an ambiguous nature. They could not tell if it was good or evil. Only one of them, a professor at Columbia, quoted the fourteenth-
century
Yü-li Tzu
of Liu Chu: “Can it be that what man regards as evil, the gods regard as good?”

I did not care if he was a god or a demon, that mad figure with the blade clenched in his mouth. And god or demon, I did not care of what. As for whether it was a numen of good or evil, the wisdom of Liu Chu had taken care of the idea that that there might be meaning in the answer to a question such as that. I gave a name to that image.
La beauté de diable.
It was a beauty, blessed and damned, that was everywhere, in every thing. Everything. And everything, the all of it, could no longer break the barriers of my mind. For my mind had no more barriers. It could flutter like a butterfly on a silent hilltop and devour the cosmos at once.

Everything. It was what I wanted. It was what I felt. It was what I would have. Everything.

The knife between my teeth, or what was left of them, felt good. The soothing, entrancing caress of Melissa’s bare foot entered into my imaginings. Their still-life images took on life. Lost in the dreamlike flow of what passed behind half-closed eyes, I watched myself remove the knife from between my teeth and lay it down between the inlaid lacquer tray and the softly gleaming drinking bowl.

Sky. Earth. Thunder. Wind. Water. Fire. Mountain. Marsh. The Eight Trigrams. The everything. And the god-eyed, devil-eyed guy whose face looked out commandingly, angrily, all-seeingly beneath the suit of eight of everything. And the chicken, the giver and the taker of knowing; the chicken who crossed that dusty road.

There seemed to be music from very far away: the single piano notes, woven through deep silence, of Pärt’s
Alina,
each note an evocation of myriads of subtle emotions, the subdued summoning of an ancient astrology, the slow bearing away of a
soul by the evening tide, a meditation on the dusk and decline of magic, a melancholy star in the black of the endless night before time.

But there was no music. It was in my head. Or somewhere in me. The very-far-away in me.

Blood and opium, opium and blood. And sky and earth, and thunder and wind, and water and fire, and mountain and marsh. Blood on the shadow-wood pipe tip as I sucked deep and long. The vapors and the blood entering my body. Animism. The body ascending to where the spirit beckoned.
Anima mundi.
Christ, I was dying for Chinese food. Not real Chinese food. It was good old New York Jew Cantonese food I craved. Shun Lee would not deliver downtown. Liberty View, which was downtown, would not deliver at this time, period. There wasn’t a good old-fashioned Chink restaurant left in Chinatown since the old Mandarin Inn shut down a lot of years ago. There was always China Red on Chambers Street. No, forget about that joint. I thought of taking a taxi up to Shun Lee and getting a shopping bag of takeout. No, fuck that. I’d eat a couple of salami sandwiches and then I wouldn’t give a damn about the Chinese food. My eyes were closed now. Near to the open porcelain opium canister, the pipe, the layout, the bowl of blood, the knife, there were open wire-handled Shun Lee takeout containers of roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, and dry shredded crispy beef.

I made the salami sandwiches, throwing them together on some dry, staling pumpernickel with slices of genetically modified tomato and the all but tasteless mozzarella that I had bought in a pinch at Glucoplastics. Never buy shrink-wrapped, Saran-wrapped, or any other PVC-wrapped food.

When I returned to the couch with the sandwiches on a paper plate, I saw that Melissa was bent over her big baggy black leather
purse, which was on the easy chair across the room. She took from it a beat-up, dog-eared paperback, brought it to the couch, and sat down by my side.

I was pleasantly impressed, upon seeing the condition of the book, that she had taken such care with the book that she borrowed from me. It could have been worse. I knew someone who, if she liked a book, chewed on it like a slavering dog as she read it. Maybe Melissa had picked up the paperback used and on the cheap, and it was already pretty beaten-up when she got it. I didn’t say anything. It was her book. She could do whatever she wanted with it or to it. I saw that the book was
Steppenwolf.

Hermann Hesse. Every girl read Hesse. Him and Rumi. Between their first period and their first decent paycheck, even if they would never read another book in their lives, there were Hesse and Rumi.

“Do you like Hesse?” she said.

At least she didn’t say his name as if it rhymed with
less,
or
yes.
A lot of people did. But then again I wouldn’t have expected that of her. She pronounced it, like almost everybody who didn’t rhyme it with
less
or
yes,
with a schwa at the end, so that it sort of rhymed with the way Simon, the black buggy driver in Faulkner’s
Sartoris,
said “Yessuh,” or the way Rochester, the black chauffeur in
The Jack Benny Program,
later said the same thing. This is how I said it for most of my life, feeling self-satisfied with this lint speck of presumed erudition. Then, about forty-five years after I advanced from the
yes
to the
yessuh
pronunciation, it was revealed to me that the final vowel of his name was really a Germanic long
e,
not a short one. Properly spoken, the name Hesse rhymed with
essay. Hes-say.
So I felt that I was in no standing to take it upon myself to correct anyone who was of the
yessuh
or even the
yes
persuasion.

“Yeah,” I said, “as a matter of fact I do. I read
Siddhartha
and
Demian,
and I liked them a lot. I wanted to read
Magister Ludi
but it seemed too long. But, yeah, I really liked the ones I read.”

“How about this one? I found it in the garbage near school the other day, and I’m really getting into it.”

“You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I read that one. If I took a look at it, I might remember. But I don’t think I did.”

“I bet you would remember this one if you had read it,” she said with an inscrutable archness.

She skimmed the dog-eared pages until she found the dog-eared page she was looking for. It looked to be about a third of the way into the book.

“The main character is some guy about ten years younger than you. Some guy named Harry, and he’s really losing it.”

I didn’t like where this was going. Younger than me. Really losing it. I chewed at my sandwich. Fuck those Chinks who wouldn’t deliver downtown. Fuck Hermann Hesse. And that rhymed with
yessuh.
And fuck this Harry guy, this sputum from a sputtering pen and nothing more. And fuck Whole Foods too. “And he writes this poem.” She looked down at the dog-eared page. “I sort of wasn’t paying too much attention when I read it. My mind was sort of wandering. Then this jumped out at me.” She cleared her throat and, without removing her eyes from the page, read four lines aloud, as if rapt: