Diablo grinned. He had a photo in his head that no one else would ever see. It was hilarious, the asininity of deceit, and at first he did nothing but point and laugh as they fell all over each other and swore and generally made their asses even barer than they already were. At some point, Doreen demanded to know what he was doing home, but by then Diablo had already walked past them and fetched the butcher knife and the cordless phone from the kitchen. Laughing no longer, he ambled back in, where Doreen’s other lover—the vulture picking at the carrion of his rotten relationship, and a bedswerving intruder, as far as Diablo was concerned—was trying to hop into his pants while Doreen huddled behind him on a blanket on the slouch, blubbering hysterically. Taking up a position square in front of him, Diablo twitched his right hand ever so slight and sent the eight-inch blade on a wicked double cartwheel, a skill he’d developed with some buddies while in the service. He locked eyes with the bedswerving intruder as he caught the knife by its handle, never watching, never hesitating, supremely cool, and smiling. The intruder, half-naked and still trying to fasten his pants, started babbling something remarkably cliché, pleading for his life and all that, a typical reaction to an atypical situation, as it were. Diablo interrupted him, told both him and Doreen to shut up, and then ordered the intruder to take his pants back off. He also called him an asshole somewhere along the line to emphasize his position of absolute authority. The intruder hesitated anyway and Diablo roared “NOW!” at which point the intruder did as instructed.
Calling 911, Diablo leveled his knife at the intruder as he reported that there was a prowler exposing himself at their condominium complex, pressing his genitals up against people’s windows and such. After disconnecting, Diablo proceeded to lecture the intruder on the responsibilities of brotherhood for some time before ordering him to take his naked ass outside. Despite the intruder’s complete lack of attire, Diablo’s menacing calm compelled him to comply immediately. Once the door was locked and Doreen started both apologizing and demanding to know what the christ he thought he was doing all in the same breath, Diablo laid down the knife and handed Doreen the phone. She looked at him astounded as he calmly informed her that she had two and only two choices.
Number one, she could do nothing, allowing the intruder to be arrested as a sexual predator. In this scenario, her low infidelity would be forgiven. Or number two, she could call the police and tell them this whole story, thereby preventing the intruder from being arrested. In this scenario, Diablo patiently explained, he would leave immediately, close the door, and never open it again. “Time is short,” Diablo reminded her, crossing his arms. “There will be no questions and no clarifications. Choose quickly.”
Two minutes later, Diablo peeled Billy Pronto’s truck out of the parking lot, feeling enthused.
67 DIABLO HAD AVOIDED Billy Pronto for over a year simply by not driving anywhere. Lately, however, Diablo was feeling a little out of sync, and as much as Billy Pronto could irritate him, he nonetheless provided a certain privilege of perspective. Also, Diablo loved the casino game, cleaning up at the roulette table, although after the first few adventures he’d quickly been blackballed. As far as he could guess, some casino trade group has a division that monitors lucky individuals, photographing them and feeding their digitized faces into a data bank. If anybody’s luck is consistent, facial recognition technology will alert security whenever one of these individuals enters a casino that subscribes to this costly service. Diablo hadn’t found a casino that could tolerate his presence for more than a few minutes in years. There may well not be one, he reckoned, for in an industry built on the temporal limitations of human perception—a tendency not just toward chance but toward active bad luck—one lucky individual can bring down the whole house of cards. As long as luck is censored, this is the only insurance a casino really needs to remain hugely profitable.
“Synchronicity is your tether to the rest of the universe,” Billy Pronto had explained. “Tune in to it, and the path of your life opens before you like the Red Sea. Luck is inevitable.”
Diablo had disputed this philosophy vehemently and at length, but in the end, there was simply no denying what Billy Pronto was able to show him. At one point in the course of their dialogues, Diablo had grown preoccupied with the plastic gas can and all the money inside, demanding to understand where it came from. Billy Pronto’s only response, predictably, was, “Such an explanation requires the past tense, and I am incapable of such nonsense.”
“Can you show me how you obtained it then?”
“I am incapable of placing any bets,” Billy Pronto reminded him. “I have no physical existence.”
“Well then how the hell did I get it in the first place? I mean, I remembered everything that went down with Doreen after I dropped you off, and I can even remember it now. But I have no memory of this money or where it came from. You said I’d remember everything once I dropped you off and was no longer dichotomized.”
Billy Pronto grinned and shook his head. “You bind yourself with your own words.”
Diablo tapped on his steering wheel, puzzling. “What if I took you to a casino? What if we played roulette?”
Billy Pronto shrugged. “That certainly is an interesting idea.”
And so it went. He had been heading north already, and Atlantic City was not more than an hour away. Soon, Diablo found himself standing at a roulette wheel in a small casino, losing consistently. Unwilling to publicly confer with his imaginary friend, who was merrily watching all that was happening, Diablo grew more and more frustrated.
“Quit trying, for the love of God,” Billy Pronto advised at last. “The universe does not occur as a result of effort. Effort implies a past and a future divorced from the present that already is. The universe occurs in a single moment. It is an impulse, and nothing more. You are a molecule of water, but you are drenched in the ocean. Realize this, and you become the ocean.”
Forgetting himself, Diablo waved him off and retorted, “Now is not the time, oh enlightened one.” To everyone else present around him, he snarled this mockery into thin air.
“Sir?” inquired the croupier, as Billy Pronto, heedless of the sudden awkwardness, continued unabated.
“You are of course correct to ridicule these notions, for the universe is as ridiculous as anything is possible to be.” Billy Pronto talked over the croupier’s further inquiry as to whether or not Diablo was placing another bet. “But the fact that you can laugh at something does not make it false. And incidentally,” he continued, “now is the only time.” Placing his palm on Diablo’s shoulder, Billy gently announced, “whoa now.” As he spoke these words, any doubts and aggravations that had been plaguing Diablo vanished with a gasp. This was due neither to the erudition nor charisma of Billy Pronto’s words, but rather to an unexpected cessation of commotion. The entire casino, or Diablo’s perception of it, had instantaneously and without explanation come to an absolute standstill.
Diablo was aghast, eyes sweeping wildly about the room, scanning for motion amongst the grotesquely frozen expressions of avarice and defeat. Billy Pronto continued undisturbed. “In the same way up and down have no meaning once you understand the infinity of space, before and after have no meaning once you understand the eternity of time.”
“What happened?” Diablo demanded, nearing panic.
“No,” Billy Pronto insisted. “What happens. Present tense.”
“Where am I?”
“The moment of Truth. Right here. Right now,” Billy Pronto answered patiently. “That is all you need ever understand.”
“I’m afraid,” Diablo confessed, feeling the worse for having admitted it.
“This is how you always react,” Billy Pronto sighed. “And you’re not afraid, you’re alive. Be careful how you define yourself. You can feel fear. You don’t have to be fear. Look more deeply.”
Having nothing else to do, Diablo allowed his gaze to come to rest on the ball bearing frozen in its place on the roulette wheel. At first th
is was the only remarkable thing about it, but after gazing at it long enough to have been able to discover that all the numbers on a roulette wheel sum to 666 if he had cared to add them up, he began to notice a luster that seemed no less overwhelming than the sun’s own sparkle. Entranced but alarmed, he looked quickly away, his gaze falling upon the croupier’s mannequin face, a fantastically exuberant child peering from beneath the besmogged mask of his adulthood. And it was the same everywhere he looked. There was nothing to see but the omnipresence of infinity, and the longer and the closer he looked at any one thing, the more light fantastic it became, and the more undeniable that each and every thing was a keyhole through which the entire universe spied upon itself.
“There are no clocks in casinos,” Billy Pronto interrupted Diablo’s wonderment. “This is to encourage gamblers to lose track of time, so they keep pushing their bad luck far beyond the point of reason. But you are no gambler. You are now, and among the wide-minded, there are no clocks because you understand that there is only one moment. You understand that the measurement of time walls you off from eternity, and the past and the future are the locks and the latches that prevent you from seeing the netherworld of nowever. Here and now, your soul is no longer lost. You feel your undivided unity, and you thereby possess a tremendous advantage.”
Diablo looked again at the roulette ball, studying the perfectly intricate reflections on its surface until he found himself gazing back at himself from the far side of a funhouse mirror. He looked deeper still into his reflection until he could see the roulette ball reflected in the reflection of his own eyes, ad infinitum, and before he knew it the ball was again whirling in its groove, and the roulette spindle was again turning, bells were jangling and people were shouting, and the croupier called final wagers. Diablo raised his remaining three chips—$150—and listening to the echo of the bearing as its metallic purr pulsed a path about its perpetual groove, he caught the peek-a-boo of an impulse, which whispered within, around, and from nowhere at all, number nine.
68 THE ODDS OF hitting a single digit on a double-zero American roulette wheel are thirty-seven to one. Despite this, the house only pays thirty-five to one, hence Diablo was escorted away from his first roulette table with only $5,250 in winnings. This he took to a larger casino, placing all of it, again, on number nine. Minutes later, he was escorted out of the casino with $183,750 in winnings, which he simply added to the remaining stash of cash in the gas can.
“I am enlightened,” Diablo announced to Billy Pronto, after they’d been driving away from Atlantic City for quite some time in silence.
“That’s either contradictory or self-evident,” came Billy Pronto’s unhesitant reply.
Diablo tried to think of how an enlightened person might react. “What do you mean?” he intoned at last, a basso pro-fundo enormity of enunciation vibrating his words.
“I am enlightened,” Billy Pronto quoted him. “Your statement is grammatically possible but flamboyantly stupid. If by I you mean the sobriety of your ego, then you are simply incorrect, for you the ego are finite, and the enlightened mind is infinite. If, on the other hand, if by I you mean the divine impulse that animates your transitory incarnation, then big deal. That’s obvious. The sun announces that it’s bright? No shit, sunshine.” Diablo was silent, and Billy Pronto chuckled. “I’m hot, says the fire.” He laughed some more. “I’m wet, says the water.” He laughed loud and long before concluding. “There is no value in such assertion.”
“Jeezus christ,” Diablo grumbled at the mockery, abandoning all his pretensions at enlightened serenity. “What the hell am I then?”
“You are lucky.”
“Lucky? You’re joking.”
“Luck is the heckler of all reason, so yes, you can consider it a joke.”
Diablo tried to ignore him. “This is perfect nonsense.”
“Perfect nonsense.” Billy Pronto nodded. “Yes, that is exactly right. Well-spoken.”
Here I am, Diablo thought, driving away from two casinos that froze before my eyes. I think I’m alone, but I’m nevertheless bickering with a nattering apparition who is somehow facilitating all of this. Glancing over, he found Billy Pronto staring back at him. Smiling all the while, he swiped the side of his nose, pointed back at Diablo, and said simply, “Walk away.”
Diablo had an impulse to slug him, and he followed it, swerving the car in the process. Of course, he entirely missed connecting with anything, succeeding only in throwing his own shoulder painfully out of socket.
“That is unintelligent,” Billy Pronto advised. “You argue that I am your hallucination, yet you try to punch me. Even if I am not a hallucination, you cannot punch the impulse, my friend. The punch is the impulse.”
“Fuck off,” Diablo fumed.
“It is okay to follow an impulse,” Billy Pronto continued. “That is what this is all about, after all.”
“What does that mean?” Diablo demanded.
“Evolution, of course.”
“Evolution,” Diablo repeated. “Please stop talking in riddles and tell me what you are talking about.”
“Geometry,” Billy Pronto replied. “Your life is a vortex, like your tornado. In a vortex, involution spirals inward, and evolution spirals outward.” He demonstrated this with his hands, involving a spiral with his right index finger and evolving a spiral with his left. Then he pointed at Diablo with his left hand, still evolving a spiral. “It is time to evolve.”
Diablo nodded. “As usual, you’ve succeeded in telling me next to nothing.”
“Involution,” Billy Pronto twirled his right index finger inward, “is when you identify with the world of illusion, separation, ego, the bottom of the funnel, so to speak. This is life, the fall into the finite, matter and distinction, where your perceptions are limited by your material existence. On the other hand,” he began twirling his left index finger outward, “evolution is when you see through the illusion, when you ascend out of the funnel and awaken to the world of undivided unity of which you are after all indistinct. Heed the call of the infinite, and your perceptions become unlimited.”
“That’s how I’m winning all this money?”
Billy Pronto shrugged. “Luck is a force in the universe.”
“And this has happened before?”
“Actually, it’s all that ever happens.”
“So why don’t I remember it happening before?”
Billy Pronto shrugged. “You tell me. You evolve out of the toilet bowl only to involve back to the sewers after a few breaths of fresh air.” He paused. “You can’t handle the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That you are not in control. That no matter what you pretend, you are only one accident away from utter extinction. That instead of the universe at large, you choose to settle securely into the ordinary, to immerse yourself in petty angers and social fictions of the most dreary and petulant variety. That you make a speck of yourself and permit your own symbols to hound you into unhappiness. That you abandon ecstasy, sacrifice the superlative, and trade the tremendous for the trivial. That you are actually far more intelligent than you believe.”
“Maybe evolution is too ruthless,” Diablo protested. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe the trouble with life is that its scale is much too vast. It cares nothing for the sufferings of individuals.”
“What can I say?” Billy Pronto shrugged. “Pain pushes life, and no body survives it. You can be ordinary and pretend to be in control, but you cannot be extraordinary without opening to the totality of life. So long as you retain a sense of self as separate from the universe, you cannot know the beauty of the universe. It simply implodes upon you with neither hesitation nor regret, and whether you participate in it or not, evolution goes where it needs to go.”
“Great,” Diablo replied. “Evolve or die.”
“No,” Billy Pronto corrected. “Evolve and die. You continue to deny the skeleton in your closet. Death happens absolutely and regardless. It’s just a bet
ter ride when you release any illusion of control.”
“Bubblegum spirituality,” Diablo mumbled.
“Take a look at yourself. You identify with a single, dying organism, but you cannot regard that reality. In the trembles of your terror tantrum, you close your consciousness, contract your heart, and imprison your impulse. Then, you think you are in control, that you rule the world, but in fact the only domain you master is that of your own illusions. I say expand your mind. Identify with the eternal universe instead of your rotting corpse.” He was silent a few moments. “Unless of course you prefer to be a zombie. Then by all means, tuck yourself safe and secure into the satin coffin of your consumer culture while your so-called leaders chant lullabies to nightmare. But that is not I. I am the impulse.”
“That’s great for you, but where does that leave me? I mean, these illusions you keep offhandedly referring to are pretty stubborn from where I’m sitting. Unremittingly, unremorsefully real, even. You don’t seem to understand that.”
Billy Pronto shrugged. “The most obstinate illusion is your own sense of individual identity, the order you impose on the impulses of your spirit. All other illusions cascade from that singular confusion.”
Diablo sighed impatiently. “You’re still not addressing what to do about the situation. Maybe I am trapped in some Gnostic illusion. What then, Master Yoda? Are you just going to harangue me with earnest platitudes until the end of time?”
“Yes, actually.”
“And when’s that going to happen?”
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