Diablerie

by Walter Mosley

  Star was carrying a folded square of paper that she placed on the podium. Then she went about moving the microphone down so that it would accommodate her shorter stature. She unfolded the paper, looked at it, looked up, squinting at the spotlight, and then down at the audience.

  She took in a quick breath, as if she was about to speak, but no words immediately followed.

  "My name is Barbara," she said at last, "but for more than twenty years I was known as Star. One dictionary I looked up that word in said, I quote, 'a pinpoint of bright light in the darkness.'" She looked around. The audience was completely silent. "That was me. I lived on communes with virgins and murderers. I sold sex in the cities for men I called my boyfriends. I carried drug-Med condoms in my stomach across fifteen borders, and I was tethered by a chain to the back of a truck while Leon Cargill raped, murdered, and dismembered men, women, and children right there next to me."

  She stopped for a moment then. Maybe others thought that she was experiencing pain from those appalling memories, but I didn't think so. I had met the real Barbara, Star. The woman who chided me for forgetting some long-ago tryst was not going to show real weakness. You could see that in her small, bicolored eyes.

  "And then just when I thought the nightmare was over, the police charged me for the crimes. For a while there, when they thought Leon was too crazy to stand trial, they wanted to make me the mastermind. They speculated about my death sentence in the daily papers in Memphis. They found blood on my clothes and in my shoes. They said all kinds of terrible things about me. That's when I turned to Buddhism, when I started meditating."

  Barbara/Star reached under the wood podium and came out with a small bottle of water. She guzzled from this. No sipping or tasting for her—no, she turned the bottle upside down with her lips wrapped around the mouth and emptied three quarters of the contents.

  "And do you know what Buddha told me through his teachings? That I had created my own hell. I was selling my body and turning a deaf ear to criminal activities. I was guilty. Me. I hadn't done what they said. But karma does not distinguish like a court of law. I deserved what I got. Maybe I deserved worse. That's why I've written this book . . ."

  "What's wrong, Benny?'' Mona asked me on our walk back home.

  I was guilty. The words echoed in my mind like the lyrics to a song that you halfway remember for the first time in many years.

  "Nothing, Moan."

  "That's not my name."

  "Benny's not my name. At least I don't introduce you to people as 'Moan Valeria.' "

  "Is that what's wrong with you?"

  "Have you fucked Harvard Yard yet?" I asked her.

  "What?" She was laughing.

  She stopped but I kept moving, so she grabbed my sleeve to make me pause.

  "What?" she asked again. "Am I hearing right? Ben Arna Dibbuk is jealous?"

  "What of it? You drag me out there and make me sit through all that egotistical nonsense while every chance you get you're putting your hands on him, looking at him, fawning over him with all those questions about when he was a cop, when he got shot . . ."

  I could see in Mona's eyes a tinge of fear. This was odd because the laughter was there too.

  I realized that I must have been getting loud or intense or something.

  "I'm sorry, honey," she said softly, attempting to placate me.

  I wanted to say more but my breath was confused. I couldn't inhale deeply or exhale enough. It's like the air was stuck in there and I didn't know how to move it around.

  My breathing was proof of the rage she feared. Maybe I was angry, but I didn't know why. I hadn't thought about Mona flirting with Harvard Rollins. I just said that because I was tired of her calling me Benny. I certainly hadn't felt jealous. I was guilty kept reverberating in my mind.

  "Are you okay, Ben?"

  "We're gonna do it tonight," I said with absolute certainty.

  "Do what?" she asked, but she knew exactly what I meant.

  "Fuck you in your ass."

  * * *

  The shadow contained a mountain, that much I was sure of. But knowledge without visual corroboration is like a star on a cloudy night: You know it's there but you don't know where—not exactly. In the dream the deep shade was a flat plane against my senses. I would take a tentative step forward and then stop, afraid of falling over some precipice (hadn't I used that word the day before?).

  Echoes came to me in staccato, irregular intervals. Sharp rocky crags cut my face and arms, thighs and buttocks (I was naked). The fear of falling made me anticipate the crunching of my skull bones on some rocky floor.

  But still I pushed along, listening to the garbled, disjointed echoes for some guidance.

  "Ben," she said from behind the flat plane of darkness.

  "Star?"

  "Do you remember that pipe? The mud on your chest? Do you see me?"

  And then I was at my desk at work. I took a deep breath. I must have sighed in my sleep. Work again. My tiny office stacked high with oversize computer printouts in red plastic folders with the program names written on the sides of the reams the way I used to write my name at Louis Pasteur Junior High School in L.A. in the early seventies. HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, ALGEBRA, I wrote on the neatly bound and cut pages of my textbooks. Sometimes I never opened those books, but I labeled them, I knew what they were.

  It was then that I noticed the tiny ant wandering purposefully over the coffee-stained printout of DB101SUBROUMSTR, the main program for Our Bank's nightly check-balancing routine.

  The ant inspected the coffee stain, sprawled like a series of veins across the printed page, but it moved on to a crumb of Starbucks coffee cake. The crumb was much larger than the ant but still the ant lifted it and staggered away toward the edge of the desk.

  I was amazed at the ant's might and purpose and relieved that I was no longer under the shadow of that beckoning, unseen mountain. So I watched the tiny creature instead of finding the bug in 101 . . . MSTR.

  As the ant went over the edge, I noticed that there were lines of the small creatures moving all over my office, thousands upon thousands of them. They roved the printouts and metal &g cabinets. They were on the window swarming over a slice of Mona's birthday cake that I had put there and forgotten to eat.

  Mona cried out then as she did before, when I penetrated her rectum.

  "What's my name?" I whispered into her ear.

  "Benny," she cried. "BennyBennyBennyBenny . . ."

  The rage between us was sex right then. The birthdays forgotten again. The party and Harvard Yard and Star . . . Star.

  Ants covered the whole floor when I looked back. My vision became clearer the longer I watched. After a while it was as if1 was watching them under a magnifying glass. Their faces were quite human and every one of them wore a top hat cut at a rakish tilt. They each had a piece of birthday cake in their mouth and were moving in communal rhythm as if they were singing. I concentrated on trying to hear them. Then suddenly one of the little revelers burst into flame.

  I looked around the office &om one ant to another and every insect I gazed upon caught fire and danced a wild ballet of pain.

  "Stop! Stop!" a minuscule voice shouted.

  I noted then a small ant (the one I first saw on my desk, I was sure) had climbed up onto the magnifying glass that I now realized I was holding. Somehow the lens also amplified its petite voice.

  "Your eyes!" the ant shouted. "They're burning my friends. Stop looking at them."

  I wanted to do what the ant told me; I intended to stop, but a fascination with fire kept me looking from one ant to another, killing them with my eyes. Then I noticed that the program printouts and their red plastic files had begun to burn. I ran from my office, but it was too late. Fire was everywhere.

  "There's no escape,'' the First Ant said. "You can run and burn or cook where you stand. All those years working and gathering gone up in flames, gone up in flames."

  I awoke with a start. Mona was rolled up into a ball as far on
her side of the bed as she could manage. The open bottle of Vaseline sat on her night table—mute witness to our grinding carnal abandon.

  I took a shower and then went to the kitchen. It was 3:27 when I got there. I wasn't tired, and even if I had been, I doubt that I would have gone back into the inferno of my dreams.

  "What do you think it means?" Dr. Shriver might have asked in our weekly session.

  I would have made up something and he'd shake his head ever so slightly. And then it would be over: the dream, its possible meanings, our session, another day—a tidy little system of lies like a cheap dime novel from the old days.

  I read a lot when I was a teenager. My mother is a reader. My father, before he died, prided himself on reading a book every week. But I had given up that habit somewhere along the way; I lost interest in the narrative line. Everything in a novel leads somewhere. There's a plot and a story and characters that make discoveries. None of that is pleasing to me. That's not the way life works. Life, I thought then, was infinitely tedious or depraved. I wrote down hexadecimal computer code, day in and day out. Mona flitted from one silly magazine to another. There was no plot, no resolution, revelation, character development—or even any change other than the fact that we got older.

  I think my parents might have been upset that I no longer read, but I hadn't seen either one of them for many years, even before my father passed on. I would have gone to his funeral but the old banking system, the one I maintained, crashed two nights before the funeral and I had to work seventy-two hours straight in order to set it right.

  At least he had come east to see Seela. At least that.

  I often thought that I should go out west again but I got tired even thinking about it. My mother's house is too small to stay in; I could have stayed in a hotel, but the traffic in L.A. is awful and room rates are way too high.

  Anyway, my mom would be appalled at me not reading.

  It didn't seem as if I was missing anything by giving up books, except at times like that morning, when turning on the TV would have awakened Mona. I could have read in the late night hours after nightmares and before the dawn, but I was out of practice. "Ben?"

  It was a little after five. The sun was a glowing promise out beyond Long Island somewhere.

  "Yeah, babe."

  Mona was wearing only her panties but she held her hands in front of her breasts when she stood before my east-facing throne. I had made her shy with my aggressive sexual appetite. I had made her hurt and bleed but she had also had powerful orgasms and put deep scratches into my left forearm.

  I reached for her. It was a quick motion, and before she could move away, I pulled her down into my lap. She fell against me as if she had no bones at all and cried for a very long time—forlorn bleating like a nocturnal beast that had lost its mother to the night.

  I don't think that we had ever been closer, that there was ever so much love between us. We hadn't spoken hardly at all since coming back from the party. I came at her and she froze, wanting me and not wanting me.

  "Are you okay?" I asked when the sun had become a red ball on the horizon.

  "I was &aid of you," she replied. "I wanted to say no but I was afraid of what you might do."

  "Have I ever raised my hand to you or Seela?"

  "You didn't see that look in your eye. It was like you, like you hated me."

  "I don't hate anybody," I said, thinking, nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone.

  "You hated me last night. You pulled my hair and hurt me." "I thought you always said you wanted me to be like that, to take you like that."

  "I know I said it," she said, "but I didn't really mean it . . . at least not like that. I wanted you to love me, not come at me making those sounds and, and hurting me."

  "I'm sorry," I said, now stroking her hair. "I guess I got carried away. Here, let me put you back in the bed."

  I stood up holding her in my arms and carried her into the bedroom. While putting her down, I got the intense desire to ravage her again. The passion invaded my breathing so I turned away quickly.

  "Aren't you going to join me, Ben?"

  "No. I have to go to the bathroom," I said, the werewolf turning away from his lover as the full moon begins to rise.

  I locked the door to the bathroom and sat there trying to calm down.

  Mona was right. I should have gone back to Dr. Shriver but I was worried what we might find. Maybe I had some chemical imbalance that got worse with age. Maybe the next time I'd lose control.

  That made me laugh, and laughing was good. The idea of me, Ben Dibbuk, losing control, for even a moment, was ridiculous. I quit smoking on the first try. I stopped drinking and never even missed it.

  There was no unrestrained side to me. It was just sex. Good sex. Nasty, low-down, hard-fucking sex. That's not losing control. It's just human.

  Mona was deep asleep by the time I was ready to go to work. I came in to kiss her good-bye but her face was buried away in the blankets.

  I didn't know it at the time but that was to be my last normal day of work.

  I used my electronic key card at the turnstile-type entrance to Our Bank. Then I came to the bank of elevators, where Molly Ammons greeted me.

  "Good morning, Mr. Dibbuk," the chubby white woman said. "Smile."

  She pressed a red button on the little stand in front of her and the camera eye above her head snapped a photo of me.

  I took the express car to the forty-seventh floor, where I used my key card again to open the glass doors that led to my section. My office was just down the hall to the right, but first I had to sign in at the desk there, where Tina Logan sat every morning brushing her hair or chattering on her cell phone. She never said good morning or anything else to me.

  One morning a few years ago, I walked in while Tina was leaning over with her head on the desk whispering into her cell phone—sharing secrets with her best girlfriend or some new lover. I was having a problem that day. One of the quarterly runs was putting out a totals sheet that didn't balance with the ATM system. I knew that I was supposed to sign in but I didn't. After all, what difference did it make? They already had my key-card code and picture.

  So I went to my office and pulled down the red fle for the quarterly master and started reading through the code.

  Two hours later there came a knock on my doorless door frame. "Ben?"

  It was Cassius Copeland, maybe the only man in America who had been born after Cassius Clay's first stunning victory over Sonny Liston and named for that champion before he changed his name to Muhammad and then KO'd Liston a second time with the famed "phantom punch."

  "Hey, Cass," I said. "What's happening?"

  "You, my brother," the dark-skinned security expert intoned.

  Cassius's uniform was black trousers and a tight-fitting black turtleneck sweater-shirt that showed off his well-developed physique. He took a stack of red folders off my visitor's chair, threw them into a comer, and sat down.

  There was no disrespect in these actions. Cass knew that I had a finely honed sense of my messy office, that I would be able to find any program folder whenever I needed to.

  "Me?"

  "Uh-huh." He held up a blue slip of paper.

  "For me?" I asked, really surprised.

  "Tina Logan says that you refused to sign in. She says she asked you but you just shined her on and walked by."

  "She had her head on the desk," I said. "And she was talking to her girlfriend or somebody on the phone."

  "You want me to write up a slip on her?" Cass offered.

  "I don't know why she even works here," I said. "Why do we need a key card, a camera photo every day, and a sign-in sheet? You told me yourself that none of it makes any difference if somebody really wants to mount an attack."

  Cassius Copeland smiled enigmatically. His dark features were more compelling than handsome. His eyes seemed like they held a trove of forbidden knowledge.

  "Security," he said. "They asked me to set up a secu
rity system and that's just what I've done."

  "But we're not any safer now than we were before nine-eleven and all these procedures."

  "Not safer," Cass said, holding up a powerful, instructive finger, "but more secure."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Security, Ben, is a feeling. You got your security blanket, your good-luck charm, your friend on the phone saying you're all right when everything around you is goin' to hell. That's what they hired me for."

  "They hired you so that no mad bomber comes in here and blows them all to hell."

  "And I promise you, Ben, nobody is gonna blow up the main offices of Our Bank." Cass smiled and I laughed with him.

  He tore up the blue slip and dropped it on my overflowing trash can.

  From that day on, I signed in every morning at Tina's desk and never felt the slightest bit put out by the absurd security precautions implemented by Cassius Copeland for Our Bank.

  That morning I was a little sluggish, but coming to work soothed my inflamed emotions from the night and day before. Seela would move into her roach-ridden apartment, Mona would heal from the sex she always asked for but never wanted, Barbara Knowland would move on to another banquet, shocking people with her tales of atrocity and recognizing people from her promiscuous past; people who didn't remember her. And I would sit in that tiny, doorless office copying numbers and making notes that were too boring for anyone else to consider.

  When I first came to work at Our Bank, then named New Yorker Savings and Trust, there were sixteen people in my department. I was a lowly entry-level programmer working in COBOL and learning assembly language from an old Irish duffer named Junior. That was way back before PCs and the Internet. We still used information punched into cards and monitors that only had one color—green.

  The systems I maintained were developed in the early sixties. There were hundreds of poorly thought-out, poorly executed, almost completely untested programs that broke down every other week. I learned from fixing logic flaws, bugs, in those programs. I wrote obscure subroutines to make up for the faulty logic rife throughout the data processing systems.