Me and the Devil: A Novel (46 page)
Now
that,
set forth as an exemplum of holiness and piety, was sick indeed. It was beauty and its magic that I wanted, not the vile putrefying corpse of it to turn me away from it.
And what of my craving for booze? Would I ever truly understand it? The Bible itself, I told myself, had no shortage of bad things to say about this—more than enough to sanction it, in reverse, on principle alone.
But, no, the taste of booze and the taste of blood were right now both repellent. And yet I couldn’t free my mind from the words in that letter:
“Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw blood.”
Nor, as I sat on that bench outside the bar, could I banish from my mind the distant sounds of all the laughter and oblivion of all the bars of my life.
But these things—blood, booze; even if my desire for them was not born of sickness—would they not in the end again lead me only to sickness, of mind and of body? Having found freedom, was I now not capable of halting myself in repose, before I lost control?
And didn’t writing bring a sickness of mind and body as well? When writing, I forgot to eat, I forgot to take my pills and my insulin, or rather postponed eating, postponed my medications as I sat there for stretches of from ten to twenty hours, hunched over, smoking, trying with the index finger of my right hand to wrest something from nothing, to hammer through rock and dig through dirt to find a word that seemed not to exist until it was
found, all to bring a sigh of power or poetry to a single phrase. And all in solitary confinement, with only yourself to tell whether or not you are lying in the gutter looking at the stars, or merely lying in the gutter, or are actually ready for a padded cell. And there is no fucking muse, that bullshit metaphorical bitch of those who speak of “creativity.” There is no fucking muse.
And talk about a sickness of mind and body. After the last novel I wrote, I ended up in a medical gown at some joint called Regency Medical Imaging, on East Seventieth Street.
They put me in this big coffin-like thing. It was cold and dark in there, in that coffin-like thing.
In the enclosure encasing my head, there came a loud whirring clatter, and what sounded like a few small-caliber pistol shots. Then this hellacious noise like a jackhammer and a cement mixer going at once, all aimed at my skull.
Then there was stillness. And there was this nurse, or something, out there somewhere. Her voice was cool and calm.
Why did I remember it that way?
No, her voice wasn’t cool and it wasn’t calm. It was chilling, and without feeling. The gruesome voice of a monstrous maternity, a voice nectared with extreme unction.
“The next scan will be six minutes.”
And it came again, longer, worse: that whir and clatter, those sharp firings, the jackhammer and the cement mixer. Then again the descent to immense sightless silence.
“Are you all right in there?”
Who’s she talking to? She’s talking to me obviously. But she couldn’t hear me if I responded. She must know that. Who is she? Maybe she’s—
“We’re going to inject you now…”
That was just a few days after finishing the book. I was convinced I was suffering from a brain tumor. My doctor had assured
me that I was not, but I was certain that I was, so, to ease my mind, he sent me to the cement mixer place.
But, God, I loved that book, even if it did take me awhile to recuperate from it. I still love it. If I hadn’t written it, it never would have existed for me to love. Two people I didn’t know later told me that it prevented them from committing suicide. I told them both the same thing: “There’s always the money, but it’s hearing something like that that makes all this typing worthwhile.” And I meant it, too.
When I was young, I thought it would get easier. But as it turned out, each novel got harder. Maybe this was because, with each one, I was flaying a further layer from inside me, exposing yet another, deeper layer. Maybe this was what made it harder. When I was young and thought it would get easier—the days when I was thrilled to see my name or my picture on a book—I hid. I did not even dare to write in the first person. Then all that changed, and when it did, it reminded me of that sixteenth-century anatomical engraving by Amusco something-or-other, or something-or-other Amusco, the one of a guy stripped to his inner anatomy holding a knife in one hand and the drooping entirety of his body’s own freshly removed skin in the other.
The special knife, I thought as I recalled this: the special knife. Maybe I needed to write. Maybe, even with all the illness it brought, it was the least destructive, least dangerous alternative that I had. And I should be thankful that I had it.
Every gift a curse, every curse a gift.
Did I really need or want anything anymore? Or did I just need to want, or want to need?
But what would I write about? While feeling strong and good and free, as long as I was set on doing nothing but living, I also felt spent, world-weary, and drained by the very strange events of the past year and their repercussions.
If I wrote another book, I could buy a bottle of
really, really
good champagne. A fucking magnum. Or I could just lie in my hammock and sip iced tea.
Electra and some boy-ass sittin’ in a tree. Up popped the Devil, and the Devil was me…
Tea, tree, me. Free.
Perhaps I could write a very simple book, a book that involved neither self-torment nor the hammering and digging for words that were evocative of what was almost impossible to express. But even as I told myself this, I suspected that I could no more do this than could I write a best-seller. That was one gift that I had not been given as an alternative, though I did so want to write a very, very simple book. I was not there yet. I was happy on this day. I was free. But I was not all-powerful, as I sometimes told myself in my vanity, just as I sometimes vainly told myself that I had left all vanity behind.
How often had I thought and at times spoken of the elusive spell of words, of seeking and trying to capture the sounds and colors of that spell. And all the while, neuroscience has told us that neither colors nor sounds exist outside our brains. Words, the hues and the music of them, were magic.
And if the neuroscientists were right about Bach cello suites, about the suites of dawn and dusk, what then of light and dark, good and evil?
It was all a crapshoot, the toss of a penny found in the street. The spin of a wheel, the turn of a card. A Zoroastrian football game.
Yes, I said to myself yet again, free to drink, free to kill, free to write.
But did I want to do any of these things? Deep down, did I really want to? Did I have it in me, in the fullness of my new freedom,
to merely and superlatively and sublimely just
live
and enjoy whatever came to me, from within, from the sky, from unforeseen chance and the change it brought?
As much as I craved that, it seemed somehow vaguely daunting. Maybe I was not there yet, either. Maybe I never would be.
Out of the blue, I remembered that I still had the address and telephone number of the girl who had written me that letter. Could she still be there after all these years? I very much doubted it. Besides, if I recalled correctly, she was about twenty years younger than I, which would put her in her forties by now.
I had better scratch her off the list of possible candidates to hold my hand as I lay dying, even though I had never thought of a hand in patent leather. That returned the list to a grand total of nobody.
As I finished my coffee and threw the paper cup into the gutter, those words went through my mind again like a broken record: free to drink, free to kill, free to write.
There must be countless other options. Why did I seem so enthralled by these three?
Why could I see into the sky and, at the same time, in a way, not see beyond my own right hand?
Then again, the sky didn’t seem to have too many options, either.
With some disappointment, I realized that the shrill ringing had returned to my ear. It was inevitable, I told myself. I just sighed and let it settle back in. The return of the beloved.
A pretty girl passed. She smiled to me as if she knew me from somewhere. Maybe she did know me from somewhere. I smiled back. My eyes followed her as she continued down the street. I thought of what she might look like in the boots and gloves that what’s-her-name described in her letter.
I had to admit that I never cared much for patent leather. I thought of a girl at the Lakeside one night, a girl in over-the-elbow gloves of black satin. I asked her where she had got them. Some store in midtown, she said, somewhere in the West Thirties. They were really a lot cheaper than they looked, she said; maybe eighteen bucks. Why, she asked; did I want to buy them from her? Just the right one, I told her. She could keep the left, I would give her twelve bucks just for the right. What was a single glove good for? she asked with a bemused grin. You’d be surprised, I told her, you’d be surprised.
Yeah, fuck patent leather, at least when it came to gloves. Satin was the ticket.
My eyes drifted to the sky.
If only it were a recording rather than a letter. I think I still had some pictures of her stashed somewhere. Good pictures.
Big billowing white clouds moved fast across the sky from over the river.
The cold wind that moved the clouds stirred and rustled through the winter branches and the few dried remaining leaves that clung to them.
Free to—
“Enough already, I get it,” I said aloud.
I walked freely through the door, freely laid a twenty on the bar, and freely ordered a drink.
“What’s new?” the bartender asked.
Such talk, I figured, came from wandering back and forth all day beneath three television sets that foddered the sparse, wretched herd with the ongoing sham of the most trusted name in news.
I glanced at one of the screens, was mildly pleased to see that the stock market was taking another dive and that the children of Shem were still blowing one another to hell.
“Nothing at all,” said I.
There was a smile on my face. I could feel it.
This smile, it seemed, was for me, and for the billowing sky, for chance and for change, for all that lay behind and all that lay ahead, and for this moment in which I found myself still breathing in this very strange and unforeseeable accident of blood and stars called life. “Nothing at all.”
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Nick Tosches lives in New York City and is uniquely acquainted with the half-lit world in which his tale is set.
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