The Devourers (18 page)

“Are we disturbing you?” asks one of them in Hindi. The ground sparks as a cigarette butt lands right by my feet.

The stranger says nothing. I feel a growing sense of betrayal at this, as the seconds grow long. “No,” I say, looking straight ahead at the river and its bobbing boats. I sound very meek to my ears. I remember men occasionally catcalling when I sat here with Shayani. I would do nothing but hold her, and it would be enough. It was never this late, never this abandoned. We'd just leave, and everything would be fine.

I hear flies unzipping in unison on either side of us.

I'm sweating now, despite the cool breeze blowing off the water. I've been afraid of the stranger, but I'm shocked in this moment at how abstract a fear it's become.

What I feel now is like that fear turned bitter. There is no magic here, in being threatened by three bored, ignorant young men with ugly thoughts. Now I
want
the stranger to be fearsome. And he's just a man sitting next to me, and that makes me want to throw up in front of these three other men, also strangers, with their smell of testosterone and alcohol.

“Don't mind us. Go on with your romantic evening,” another voice says. The other man, standing nearer the stranger. A cackle behind us. I hear piss hitting the ground and spattering down the steps into mud and water. Then another stream, from another man's penis. Two men, pissing on either side of us, while their friend watches behind us. I keep my eyes straight ahead. We're surrounded.

It goes on forever and ever, until I imagine these rivers of piss flooding the Hooghly in front of us, sloshing and frothing and rising up to drown us. Any moment, I expect to feel it warm and wet against my body instead of the ground. Tears brim in my eyes as they go on pissing right next to us, and the stranger does nothing but smoke his joint.

Then, as suddenly as this moment in time began, it ends. The two men shake off, zip up their flies, and walk away laughing and patting each other on the back, leaving nothing but the wet-soil smell of their urine in the earth. As they vanish into the shadows of the path, their catcalls ring out over the Hooghly, fading with distance. The stranger gets up, throws away his roach. I want to ask him what he was doing sitting there silently, but then, why shouldn't he have been? What else would I ask him? Why he didn't turn into a monster and chase them away or, better, slaughter them right in front of me? The men didn't attack us. They didn't touch us. They didn't threaten to hurt us openly. Perhaps the wisest thing was to remain silent. So I remain silent, now.

I wipe my eyes, shaking with anger and shame.

The stranger laughs a little as he looks over the water, brushing off his butt.

“What the fuck,” I say, voice shaking like the rest of me. “What the fuck are you laughing at? We could have gotten hurt.”

His tall, slender silhouette is unmoving against the dark-red river and the sparks of city light borne on its waves. The horizon glows again, a thump against the clouds, as if from a distant war on the edge of the city. “Hurt. By those uncouth changras? No, Alok. We couldn't have gotten hurt,” he says, and walks a couple of steps to where one of them pissed. He sits on his haunches and runs his fingers through the wet ground, sniffs them. “Them, on the other hand,” he says. “They don't even know.”

It's my turn to laugh. I get up quickly, viciously hitting myself to shake off the dirt.

“Are you kidding me?” I ask the stranger. “You…I
still
don't even know your name, and I'm sitting here with you in the fucking dark in the middle of the night, and we're nearly fucking beaten up by three drunk assholes and you run your hand through some dirty piss on the ground and I'm supposed to be impressed? I'm supposed to be hypnotized into your magical world and think, what, that you're going to remember their scent and hunt them down and kill them very impressively and very conveniently when I'm not around? No. Sorry. That's just fucking disgusting, that's not magical, that's not inspiring. That you just did that in front of me is disgusting.”

The stranger looks at me, his face dark like the men now gone, their piss on his fingers.

“Oh, I understand,” the stranger says, very calm. “You wanted something different. You wanted…fear. Is that it? Did you want me to scare those bad men like they scared you? Did you want
me,
perhaps, my dear Professor, to scare
you
like those bad men scared you?”

The stranger takes his fingers and puts them to his mouth, sucking them clean loudly.

“You want magic, Alok? Stories on the page aren't enough for you? Certainly, then. I'll show you a little magic trick. Real magic.” He licks his fingers again, sniffs. “I can tell they drank cheap whiskey tonight. Royal Stag. Your brand, Alok.” A little whisper of a laugh.

“One of them has diabetes, and probably won't know it till he dies from it. Are you impressed yet?” He spits.

The shame doesn't go away, but I feel something else uncoil in me, riding the adrenaline in my blood. I don't know why, but I find that I can't bring myself to walk away down that path alone, and whether that's because I don't actually want to leave or because of my fear of the catcalling men I don't know.

The wet ground crunches under his feet as he walks toward me. My mouth floods with salt and saliva, my bladder bulging with piss, like the piss on the ground and on the stranger's fingertips and lips.

“What do you want me to do, Alok? Chase them down? They're not that far. I can still hear them, smell them. Tell me,” he says, his voice silken, unfamiliar. “Your wish is my fucking command.”

Uncomfortably, horribly, I feel my disturbed blood rushing to my cock, stretching at the crotch of my jeans. I step back, breathing hard. I imagine him hunting those bigots down, his glorious, hulking second self a shadow along the Hooghly, tearing each of those awful young men open from throat to balls, painting the white pillars of Prinsep's monument with blood, hurling their heads onto the street for taxis to send tumbling across the tarmac in bony thumps. All for me.

“I want to go home. Forget tonight. Forget all of what just happened,” I say. I take deep breaths, taming the gorge rising up from my gut.

He is silent for a beat, letting the breeze lift the bottom of his kurta so it clings to his long legs.

“Then you'll go home, Alok. You don't need me for that,” he says. I consider the thought of riding with him in a taxi tonight, and it makes the sweat on me turn cold.

“Yes,” I say, still not turning to walk away.

“Are we going to see each other again? Are you abandoning your job?” he asks. The manuscript, the transcription. I've still got pages left. I've been going slow deliberately. His voice is sharper, harder. It is, again, unfamiliar to me—there's a note of panic that I've never heard before. It only strengthens the unraveling in me. In just one moment, we're both afraid. We're both afraid now.

“No,” I say.

He nods. In the weak light I see his fists unclench. I hadn't noticed that he'd clenched them. “Remember, you made a promise,” he says, his voice gone even lower.

“I know,” I say, barely able to muster the breath. My throat dry. “I'll finish the job. I just want to go home right now, if that's all right.”

“Good,” he says. His teeth squeak as they grind against one another, and I wince at the sound. “Home, yes. That's completely all right. I advise it. I'm sure you'll find a taxi on the road. If not, just walk till you do, and don't stop.”

“You're…”

“Staying here, yes. Leave. It's clearly not safe for you. I don't know why I brought you here.”

“It's all right. I feel, strange, for having said those things. I shouldn't be angry at you, you're not the one who—”

“I did something disgusting in front of you, remember?”

“Yes.” I nod, adjusting my jeans and wiping my face. “You've done a lot of things that I wouldn't expect. You've shown me things I wouldn't expect. Amazing things.”

“I wasn't apologizing,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, lowering my chin in a slight nod.

There's a musk coming strong off him, like onions rotting in honey. Even in the midnight gloaming, his face indistinct, I can feel his smile from six feet away.

“Go home, Alok. Quickly,” he says. “Please.”

I waste no more time. Catcallers or not, I walk away, walk on down the dark path and past the harsh blue light of the small Prinsep station and its empty tracks and platforms. Walk on by the lit-up monument and on to the blessedly bright road beyond. I don't look behind me. “Don't hurt them. Don't hurt them,” I whisper to myself, like the coward I am. I don't encounter the three men. After several failed attempts I finally find a cab willing to take me, and I go home. It feels like I'm following a command, the stranger's words resounding in my head.

When I'm finally in bed at three in the morning, the adrenaline still hasn't burned away. I'm left watching the streetlights cast shadows on my thin curtains, the pattern of leaves on the tree that crowds my bedroom view. I turn on the geyser, take a shower. I masturbate under the lukewarm water, feverish with arousal. I watch the come wash away under the water as if it never existed, never came out of my warm, blood-beating body. Still unable to sleep, I return to the manuscript in the manila envelope, return to the stranger's calming handwriting. Once again I let myself become the conduit for this story he's given me, a conduit for this woman who's nothing but a ghost in language, if she ever even lived. She, ghost that I quietly carry, is the only one in my life who knows of the people the stranger comes from. The people. Even here in the privacy of my home, I write,
the people.
Shape-shifters. I'm a man of my time, and this is not their time. I cling, I cling to Cyrah, because honestly I don't understand anything that's going on, and I never have. The world makes no more or no less sense with shape-shifters in it.

The stranger exists. This manuscript he gave me exists. The woman in the manuscript exists, if only in words. All this I know. And despite whatever just happened, I can't imagine not seeing the stranger again, can't imagine turning my back on this entirely unexpected phase of my life and just going back to what was there before. Who's to say the stranger would even allow me to walk away? The thought that he might not is actually comforting. This is why I have trouble sleeping.

I keep typing till my eyelids grow heavy, the sky going from dark red to light blue outside.

My dreams, ever faithful, are filled with terrible monsters and skewed, magic-haunted worlds from the past. In them, I often find that I'm a woman.