Unsoul'd (19 page)

"You're awfully quiet," she said. "Are you upset? I would get that."

"I guess I wondered if it was just a one-time thing--"

"As I recall, it was more like a bunch of times," she said.

"Yeah. I know. I guess maybe... I guess maybe when I didn't hear from you, I figured it was over and then you showed up tonight..."

"I didn't hear from you, either," she pointed out. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," I said.

"Remember when you told me you sold your soul? Way back?"

The last thing I expected her to ask about. "Yeah."

"What the heck was that all about?"

I shrugged. "Just me being a writer."

"So, like, you meant it metaphorically?"

"Yeah."

"I thought maybe you meant... I thought you meant, like, selling out, you know? Like
Down/Town
would have a happy ending or something, unlike your other books."

"You've read my books?"

She grinned. "Of course I have."

"And you liked them?"

"I did. But you know, if you
do
'sell out' or whatever... There's nothing wrong with a happy ending, Randy."

I'd never written a happy ending in my career. I wasn't sure I knew how. And now, without a soul, was it even possible?

"Do I seem different to you?" I asked her. "Compared to when we met at the gym, those first few weeks when we first started hanging out."

"Not really. Maybe a little more assertive."

"Assertive?"

"Assertive."

I bit my lip and told myself not to go on, but I couldn't help myself. "Not, like,
bad
or anything?"

She smiled at me. "Randall... We're
all
bad."

"Is that true?" I asked the woman cuckolding her boyfriend with another woman's boyfriend in her roommate's bed.

"It's the truth."

"The truth," I told her -- and it was a truth that I didn't know until I heard myself say it aloud -- "is that I sort of want to turn you over and rip off that nightie and fuck you again."

"You can't rip the nightie," she said in a tone of voice that told me that I could tear it to shreds.

I did.

Wherein I Attempt to Return
 

I was cock-sore and smelled like I'd been dipped in a combination of orange spice (Gym Girl's newest body lotion) and water, pyridine, squalene, urea, acetic acid, lactic acid, and more (Gym Girl's vaginal secretions). I half-expected the devil to be waiting for me in his cab when I emerged from her apartment building coincident with the sun emerging along the Atlantic skyline, but instead there was only a homeless man pushing a grocery cart laden with plastic bags stretched sausage-casing-tight with bottles and cans, ambling up the sidewalk and whistling a tuneless rendition of something I eventually recognized as "Hit Me Baby, One More Time."

I made my way to the nearest subway stop, realized I'd left my wallet on my dresser -- four feet from a sleeping Manda -- and thumped my forehead against a grimy Brooklyn subway wall.

"Randy?" a voice asked. "Randy, that you?"

Lovely Rita had come up behind me, shuffling in shoes gone thin as socks.

"Sorry, Rita." I thrust my hands into my pockets as if to show how empty they were, how roomy. "Nothing on me. At all."

She frowned, an expression that served only to make her less lovely. "I ain't lookin' for a handout, Randy. Just surprised to see you here. So early." She squinted, uglifying herself further. "You lost?"

I actually found myself opening my mouth, ready to explain to Lovely Rita that I was not lost, but, rather stranded mere blocks from the site of my latest faithless liaison. And then immediately shut my mouth because...since when is
any
of that
her
business?

"Left my wallet at home," I managed at last, falling back on the humiliating (and stupid) truth.

Rita patted her breasts with an mien of such focused concentration that I thought perhaps she was working her way through the opening stages of a massive stroke. But a moment later, she groped inside her ratty shirt and produced a slightly bent MetroCard.

"Should be enough on here to swipe you in." She unbent the card and slid it through the turnstile. "Yep! Go on ahead."

I passed through the turnstile, numb with gratitude. I turned to thank her, but she just waggled her fingers in the air, grinned a partly-toothed grin, and said, "I be seein' you again!" before waddling off.

If I'd had money to give her, I would have. Not that it would have mattered. Charity to the contrary, I was going to hell when I died.

Was she a guardian angel? Sent by the devil to get me home? No idea. I raced for the subway.

Wherein I Lie My Ass Off

Home, I silently thanked God or the devil or whomever was responsible that I had not neglected to take my keys with me. I slipped the key into the lock as quietly as I could, then minced the door open a centimeter at a time, only to find that Manda was already awake, standing just inside the apartment, wearing my bathrobe.

"Randall!" she shrieked, and threw herself at me, making me aware not only of the curve of her under the robe, but also the smell of Gym Girl that must have still clung to me. Would it be similar enough to her own scent to go unrecognized? Or was that just a pipe-dream?

"Whoa!" I told her. "Whoa!" I separated us, as though overwhelmed by her emotion, when in reality I needed the distance solely for olfactory purposes. "Let me get in the door!"

The fact that she'd thrown herself at me rather than screamed at me led me to believe that she'd only been awake a short time, and so didn't know exactly how long I'd been gone. I ransacked my brain for an excuse and readily found one. Thank God (or, again, the devil) for a novelist's innate ability to make shit up.

"I went out to surprise you with some bagels for breakfast," I told her, "but like an idiot I forgot my wallet."

"And your phone!" she wailed, gesturing with both hands, each of which, I realized now, held a cellphone. "I tried calling you, but it just rang from the sofa and then--"

"Hey," I told her, aware that a comforting embrace was well-due at this point, but not being willing to risk it, "it's OK. I'm sorry. I just went out for a sec to surprise you and I was trying so hard to be quiet that I totally forgot my wallet and phone." I shook my head and put on my best expression of male self-reproachment. "I'm just an idiot, is all."

She deflated a bit and slumped against the kitchen counter...then grinned and laughed self-deprecatingly. "God. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to freak out. That was stupid. You can do whatever. Obviously. It just-- It was just the first time I'd woken up here alone and it was
weird
, you know, and I didn't know what to--"

"It's fine," I said as smoothly as I knew how. "Look, why don't we go out for breakfast? You need to grab a shower first?" Slipping the thought in there.

"A shower?" She looked puzzled. "No."

"Well, go get dressed," I said airily, "and I'm just gonna grab a quick shower before we go, OK?"

Without waiting for her to acquiesce or demur, I headed into the bathroom and turned on the faucet.

The devil sat on the toilet, pants around his ankles, a copy of
Rolling Stone
open on his lap to cover his underworldly junk. "Man," he said, grinning, "you missed getting your dick cut off by about
this
much." He held his thumb and forefinger a centimeter or two apart. "Which probably wouldn't be a bad thing. Go out on a high note, you know?"

"Were you there?" I asked him, covering my speech with the sound of the running shower. "Were you
watching
me with her all night?"

"Told you before: That's not my thing. Besides, I didn't have to. I told you before -- I can smell guilt. Sin. I don't need to witness it, dude -- I relive it every time you think of it. Emotional sensory transfer." He shrugged. "Comes in handy."

"Do you have to take a shit in my bathroom?"

"Well, I have to do it
some
where!"

"You have your own place. I've been there."

"Your seat is more comfortable," the devil said, and shimmied side-to-side as though to prove it.

"Well, could you wrap it up and leave so that I can take a shower?"

"That was a pretty slick move," the devil confessed. "No pun intended. I mean, vis-a-vis your slick moves earlier."

"Yeah, I got it. And hey, thanks for stranding me in Brooklyn Heights."

The devil shrugged. "I wouldn't be the devil if I wasn't at least
inconvenient
every now and then, right? Besides, I picked up a fare to Queens."

"Please leave," I groaned. "I just want to get a shower."

The devil waved at me as if I were a bad smell. "Dude, I've seen it all before."

I remembered him describing my inaugural masturbation session, age ten. He
had
seen it all before. I stripped off my clothes and hopped in the shower without comment.

"Don't drop the soap!" the devil chortled, and then flushed the toilet. I bit back a scream.

Wherein I Tour

Sitting on the floor of SFO, en route to PDX, waiting for Sherrie to come back from the bathroom, I videochatted with Tayvon on the other side of the world. I wasn't sure what time it was in the specific part of Afghanistan from which he responded. Then again, I wasn't entirely sure what time it was in my part of the United States, either. My iPad said one thing; my wristwatch said another; my internal body clock said a third. I didn't really trust any of them.

"...so you think you'll see Gym Girl again when you get back to New York?" he asked. I had, of course, confessed all to Tayvon. I could be my best, most honest self with him. Which made sense, soul or not -- after all, I wasn't trying to fuck him.

"I don't know. I can't figure her out. She's playing it all very casual."

"What about you? How are you playing it?"

I didn't know the answer to that, either. But in the meantime, I still had Manda. Sweet in the right ways. Cool in the right ways. Maybe not a sex-bomb, but better than ending up like my father -- alone and lonesome (the two aren't always intertwined) and jerking off his last days.

"I'm cool either way, I guess."

"At least she's not crazy like Fiona was. Same for Manda, too."

"True dat," I said in my best "bitches be
crazy
" voice.

Tayvon gave an indulgent chuckle. "How's everything else going?"

You mean
other
than losing my soul to Satan?
I wanted to ask. But there was no point. It was done and over with. Now was the time to reap what I'd sown, and I was determined the reap the hell out it.

"Four cities in three days so far," I told him. "Not that I'm complaining."

I waited for him to tell me to quit whining, that just yesterday he'd been under heavy Taliban gunfire. Or that his position had been rocket-attacked and two of his buddies were dead, another one Medevaced out and expected to live...less the usual number of limbs.

Instead, he said, "It's been quiet over here. Boring as hell. Keep waiting for something to happen and then keep beating myself up for wanting something to happen."

"Would it really be so horrible if you spent your tour being bored out of your skull?" I asked.

"That's not why I'm here, man. You know that."

I knew it. But I didn't understand it. Not really. The military and its culture, its strangely rigid codes, were a mystery to me. If it was as simple as "I like killing people," then I could understand -- military service could be a free ticket to shooting people and receiving not a prison sentence, but rather a medal in return. But from Tayvon and his friends I'd spoken to, it wasn't about that at all. They used words I understood -- honor, defense, protection, truth, patriotism, love, commitment -- but invested them with shades of meaning that were beyond me.

"I'm just glad you're safe for now, is all."

"Shit, so am I. No one
wants
to be in danger."

There again: A complete paradox, an oxymoron. If you don't want to be in danger, I yearned to say, then why the hell are you there at all? But saying that would earn me something worse than a head-shake and a comment that I "just don't understand." It would earn me one more attempt on Tayvon's part to explain it. One more opportunity for me to feel like an idiot for Not Getting It.

"No one wants to be on my tour, either," I joked weakly. Tayvon's eyes narrowed. As always, he took me way too seriously.

"You all right, bro? Are they pushing you too hard?"

"No, man. No." Just like him -- he's in a warzone and I'm being shepherded around the country on my publisher's dime and he's more worried about me than about himself. "I'm fine. They're taking good care of me. I've even been stealing a little time to write." Total lie. I hadn't done any writing since getting on the first plane at JFK.

Normally, I wouldn't lie to Tayvon about something like that. Or about anything, for that matter. But considering his situation compared to mine, I just couldn't bring myself to lay more of my burdens on his shoulders. Tayvon being Tayvon, he would try to help from half a world away. Try to solve my problems, try to carry my load. And the last thing he needed was a distraction, when death could come at him from any direction and in any number of ways.