Demonology (10 page)

My mom never had an aunt from Lithuania or any relatives anywhere besides old Hibernia, and they were mostly dead, and truth
is if I lied to her about the inheritance she was going to receive it’s probably because I worried about my mother. When she
got home each night from the long-term convalescent home where she was an accountant, she was about as lively as a vinyl footstool.
And she had to officiate in the fisticuffs between myself and my brother.
I
wanted her to have something to look forward to.
She played the lottery, when the lottery became state supported, and I used to see her at the variety store. She’d be counting
out the grimy singles that she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. She scrawled out numbers based on sentimental remembrances.
Occasionally she took home small purses. The point here is that my prophecy is kind of inexact, and you have to use a sort
of
metaphoric-analytic schema
(it’s in the retail-sales training manual here on my desk) in order to understand exactly how it works its wonders.

A few contemporary forecasts. Cher will contract a grave immune disorder of unknown origins, until she reveals the nature
of the voodoo that has so preserved her semblance. I was just making this point to Mrs. Rona Peregrina of Bensonhurst, in
fact, while issuing a strong sell recommendation in the e-merchandizing sector. The color
yellow
will become the one color that everyone
has to be seen in.
In the Big Apple, Gotham City, below Fourteenth Street, everyone
will start to wear it: canary, lemon, mustard, maize, curry, goldenrod, marigold, sunflower, ochre. Entire discotheques, places
I’d never go, yellow, inside and out, the yellow of the power tie, the caution signal, the yellow of foul-weather gear, the
yellow of hepatitis. What else? Books, apparently useless objects of my childhood, paperweights, shelf decorators, books will
get rare. You know that volume of women’s sexual fantasies that you’re embarrassed about, or that science-fiction opus about
computer telepathy among Venusians?
You’ll throw these out, or give them to the library, and you will never replace these books. Your kids will read screens;
their contact lenses will fuse onto their eyes. And the wild language that you used to find in books
or upon stones,
language of prophecy, like when a guy from Schroon Lake, New York, or Cowan, Tennessee, calls out from his wilderness about
how to interpret obscure texts rescued from caves of Egypt, texts that refer to
our last end,
this language will instead be used to write irate letters to owners of television stations who sell zirconium rings to minimum-wage
earners across the land. These letters will never be read on air, if indeed, they are ever read at all. More? Every relationship
you ever have, in your entire life, will end in disease. Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Today you eat grilled cheese on seven-grain
bread, tomorrow you clutch your gut, locate the tumor. A dog will be crossed with a sheep, because it will make wool less
expensive. Most people will accept this rationale. Melvin Cushman, chief executive of that very hot venture capital firm,
Vortex Solutions, will, utilizing techniques perfected by American-educated doctors in Lagos, Nigeria, have himself
cloned
as a gift for his wife, Wilhelmina, thirty years his junior.
I
just love the little
lady here, and I’m not about to let her go just because my pancreas is giving out.

My brother’s kid, the one with leukemia, will get sicker still.

Here’s another story. I met my wife on the subway. I was on my way to a basketball game when Bobby Erlich, the paraplegic,
came wheeling into the subway car, displaying his amputated limbs.
OK, not really. I would often hear the door at the end of the car open, however, and I would think,
Here comes Erlich.
Any desperate life form that entered the space,
Evening, ladies and gentlemen, sorry to interrupt and I don’t mean no one no harm but I am homeless and trying to get money
for my three kids. I’m currently living here on the trains with my family.
Any unfortunate was the harbinger of a celestial accounting for yours truly,
Let there now be penitence.
Know what I mean? That night even worse things came to pass. I had changed for the Seventh Avenue line at Times Square, and
by habit I waited near the rear of the train,
the empty car;
if you’re ever going to know that this visible earth is only a splinter of the mystical action spinning out around you, figure
on the last car. I was sitting down on the empty bench at the front end of the last car, with a book, probably something required
for a class at Queens College, let’s say Plato’s Apologia,
And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are
gifted with prophetic power.
Besides, nobody on earth messes with you if you’ve reading the classics. Just as I had arranged myself on this bench, and
opened my book, I heard this guy coming down the stairs, making a real commotion,
Hold the train! Hold the train!
Ladies swept aside by his assault. You
know those stairs at the end of the platform there? How many femurs have become bone meal on that staircase? How many hips
replaced?

Hold the train.
I could make out his latecomer’s face, as the doors tintinnabulated and converged. He was smiling. This was the train he
needed to catch. This was his quarry. Never mind hindrances that developed, the door being closed, the conductor shuttering
his window, the train beginning to move,
Hold the train.
I wish he’d said something more compelling, such as
Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, turneth it upside down, scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.

I looked up from the Apologia, saw him smiling. I knew right away. I didn’t want to know. But, like I’ve been trying to tell
you, my heart was crenelated
with scars of foreknowledge.
He was making for that spot where the plates of the two cars abutted. A bisection of chains to keep away the foolhardy. The
train lurched forward, I saw
the smiler
disappear out of the region of my peripheral vision, like a bird of air lifting off. He wore a smile, he grabbed for the
chain, got one leg up, his shopping bag went under, there was a silence, there was exertion, he fumbled for the bag slipping
down between the cars, there was a span of blackness, there was the third rail, and then he was tumbling after his possessions,
down there.
Between platform and train. Holy God. The Apologia fell out of my hands.
When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them.
Just as I saw him lifting off, as in falconry, out of the margin of my weak eyes, I was up off the bench, the train jumped,
and there was that awful hydraulic exhalation that means
this conveyance is not going to move for a while,
this train
has met
impediment upon the tracks.
The entire system of trains, all the hundreds of miles of it, all Gotham knew at once what it had done; its daily imaginings
again included gristle, sinew, marrow, plasma. There had been an
incident.

Since I was a strapping young man of well over two hundred pounds, closer to two-fifty, to be honest, I was a kind of missile
being propelled forward, when the train stopped, ready to squash just about anything or anyone. I fell across the two-seater
there,
into the lap of a woman.
She was irritated at first, she didn’t know where we were, in the circle of creation reserved for dismemberment and sorrow,
the realm of severed limbs, of triage, and she pushed back against my commodious bulk,
Move, goddamit.
I said,
Hey, excuse me, I’m really sorry, hell.
Then the woman in whose lap I had parked my large, soft posterior called weakly across the car to an MTA employee who powerlessly
inhabited our car, standing nearby,
Is someone on the tracks?
The older woman stared across the car at the gathering of official presences outside, at the crowd beginning to gather around
our train.
I
knew he was gonna do it.
A small Hispanic boy said, clutching at his mother’s hand,
What happened? What happened? What happened?
His mother shook her head.

A long two or three minutes we were locked inside, in our stationary subway car. There were faces pressed up against the outside,
a wall of faces, and these faces would look down into that space under the train, never satisfied until they had apprehended
why,
and then their faces would knot uncomfortably at what information they now possessed. I resolved that I wouldn’t be one of
these people, one
of those who
had to see.
When the door at the end of the car was at last opened from the platform by a man with a high-visibility vestment, people
filed off, and the announcement began to cycle on the P.A.,
lasshnnrnd genmhhnhnssbrs…
What a processional, all of us filing out,
Before him went the pestilence, burning coals went forth at his feet,
by arrangement of Excellent Destiny, the woman I had nearly crushed touched me on the arm, beside me now, in the queue,
Do you think he’s all right?

I thought, since I experienced trauma as a convulsion of the imagination,
Who’s the guy’s mother and what did he have for lunch and did he ever drive a hydrofoil and did he ever feed a dolphin and
how old was he when he lost his virginity and did he know the difference between a coniferous tree and a deciduous one and
who was his favorite Yankee and did he know the table of the elements and how many women did he love and who were they all
and are they all happy and did they do the things they wanted to do and did he have a kid brother and did he ever play a musical
instrument and what is the woman he was meeting thinking right now and what is his mother thinking and is his head separated
from his neck or his leg separated from hip, his inner organs like stew upon the undercarriage of the express?
Of course, I
knew
the answers to these questions and knew the answers to others, too, through my sophisticated foreknowledge, even if my step
was unsteady, even if I felt like I might pass out. I made reply to the woman; I said poetical words that had only recently
occurred to me,
I
have a couple of tickets to the Knicks, they’re about to lose to Philadelphia, but I won’t tell you the score. I was going
to sell one of the tickets anyhow.
Let’s make something good out of something bad.
I had never ever asked a woman out before.

The emergency guy at the door remarked,
Let’s get a move on, pal, we got a situation.

My wife, because that’s who she was, my solace, my destiny, my respite, because that’s the substance of what I am telling
you,
detrained,
but she froze on the platform, shoulders trembling suddenly as she held a pulped tissue to her nose, and crowds surrounded
us, a gathering of disgruntled New Yorkers, getting home late from the office, or trying to get home late, while down the
stairs came the paramedics, with their stretchers. In every part of this story, the stretcher-bearers eventually come. To
my wife, I said,
No big deal, if its too sudden. I’d understand. I just don’t feel right tonight. I don’t feel like being alone.

What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What
kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy
interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering
way, the kind who doesn’t even notice how she keeps having to buy
larger jeans,
the kind who likes big cars because she doesn’t like
to be uncomfortable.
I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how
lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that
Everything will be roses.

She gave me her number. On the fortieth day of our acquaintance, I proposed.

Soon I was living near the water in the Bronx. Not far from City Island. What I loved about that part of the world was how
the swamps persisted long after the city planners had tried to do away with them. Co-Op City rising out of the swamps, the
cattails and the trash, the Bruckner Expressway kids actually attempting to fish in the rivers —unwor-ried about hepatitis,
unworried about PCB’s. Old unsteady docks, skiffs that leaked, a clustering of powerboats, all in the shadow of low-cost housing.
My wife and I were newly-weds in our little place with the screened-in porch in back and the quarter acre, and I had just
got this job on the retail desk, where I attempt to persuade regular folks to gamble away their meager savings. Every day
since I was trained I had known I was going to lose my job, and sometimes for weeks at a time I wouldn’t allow my wife to
touch me because I was so disgusted with who I was, with the bands of useless pork on me, with my fulsome breasts, with my
joyless prognostications.

You might be wondering why my brother hasn’t turned up in these prophecies until now. Any idea what it is like to grow up
the homely older brother of the most gifted, the most talented, the most revered kid on your block? Any idea what it is like
to look at the basketball hoop in the driveway and to see your brother sailing past it, in slow motion, grinning an unspeakable
grin, dunking the ball with his offhand, finishing a soda, lighting a firecracker, all at the same time, while the Cosa Nostra
kids from up the block curse under their breaths for having again lost the two-on-one? Any idea what it’s like having your
own brother
beat you in a drug deal
in which he sells you a mixture of oregano and
fresh basil and then, to give credence to his salesmanship, smokes some of it with you and comments on its potency?