I sighed. “If it comforts you any, he will tire of her soon enough and take another. And after that, another.”
“No,” she snapped. “It does not comfort me. I will still be made worthless and die in dishonor as the world’s most hideous woman.”
I cocked my head, studied the slice of her face visible to me. The thin curve of her eyelids and the smoky lashes framing golden eyes. Indeed, one might never know from looking at her that parents frightened their children with tales of disfigured amira Azru.
“Surely it’s not that bad.”
Her golden eyes examined me. “Do you know what it is to be ugly? I doubt it, you with your fine suit and your chiseled face. Tell me, did you have plastic surgery to look like a cheap paperback romance cover, or does it come naturally?”
I blinked. If her sharpness of tongue was a preview to her face she could draw blood with a stare.
“All natural,” I snapped in return.
“So then you’re here to seduce me, hmm? That would be a trick of Khosrow’s. Entice me into adultery so he can legally kill me. He’d like that, wouldn’t he?”
I laughed. “No, he hired me to seduce Farrah.”
She cursed. “What, to ruin her? Make her worthless so none will take her, and she will have to crawl to him for marriage?”
“My lady, you have me mistaken for someone else,” I explained.
“I’m not stupid. I am not mistaken at all. That’s the benefit to being ugly. You can’t coast through life by virtue of your good looks. You have to be smart, Mr. Suit. You have to be intelligent. You have to crash parties and load the dice. Ugliness does not tolerate the lazy.”
I gestured to her face, the thin gauze of material separating us.
“Come,” I said, “show me.”
She snorted in derision. The dare was loaded with social implications. Woman only took off the chador in the company of relatives or other women in the privacy of their home. It is intimate. For a strange man to make such a scandalous request would earn me imprisonment; for her to indulge me would earn her lashes untold if not execution itself. I might have asked her to take off her clothes and stand naked.
She tapped her foot. I sucked in a breath.
She reached up and snatched the fabric away.
This is usually the part of the story where one discovers the heroine has been brainwashed into believing she is ugly, when in fact her beauty is astounding and awe-inspiring and will no doubt capture my heart with her modesty and virtue.
This was not so.
She was ugly after all.
We were lonely possessions of a jealous prince. Left to ourselves we sought amusement to pass the time. After that, we met in the library regularly.
We spoke of Khosrow and Farrah. Some hours we passed in communal silence reading books until she or I fell asleep in the perfumed wind. A safety pervaded our company long forgotten, or never known while I was busy fucking on command for every royal from here to the Caspian Sea, to drive rivals into madness, to destroy threats to the empires, to whore as a gift for services rendered. Azru asked for nothing, and I asked nothing of her. It was hard to describe her ugliness and she admitted that when she was young a dog attacked her and tore off the lower half of her face. If not for this, her beauty would have been legendary. All that remained was a suggestion of it, the ghost of another face hiding inside of her own.
Meanwhile, my nights were spent in any number of sex acts until I’d exhausted every page of the Kama Sutra and struggled to keep attentive to Farrah’s hungry needs. I did not begrudge her desire, but there is only so much interest a thousand-year-old demon can maintain. I was tiring of being used this way, but Khosrow swore Farrah was coming around. She was entertaining his proposal and had confessed to him only the other day she had the most tantalizing dreams of him, but she would not say of what nature they were.
“Boring and unimaginative sex, in case you were wondering,” I groaned when he asked me for details. “Are you sure you wish to be shackled for eternity to a woman with no poetry in her heart but to repeat, ‘Yes, fuck me, there, harder’?”
“I don’t need her for poetry,” Khosrow scoffed. “I just need her.”
I reflected on Azru. I suspected she could come up with better poetry, but it was not for me to say.
On the fourteenth day of haunting Farrah, I could not bring myself to do it.
The poor girl was skipping meals and growing thin. Given long enough, she would stop bathing and grooming and fall into ruin if there were not a conclusion soon. I considered she would do well to have a break and so instead of invading Farrah’s dream land, I came to Azru—uninvited.
We met in the thin dream space between consciousness, this precarious plane of existence which only the few may wander unmolested. I took a spot on the floor of her bedroom in the palace and she awoke, in this dream within a dream.
“Lilu,” she observed.
“I was thinking,” I said slowly, “that I might sleep here for a night.”
“Are you hurt?”
I did not answer. The many nights of lovemaking had taken a toll and I craved a quiet, safe space. Here in the swaths of purple and indigo tapestries and the plush pillows where she rose with her black hair coiled in ropes of silk, I felt peace. Books dog-eared and loved, stacked and fallen in a jumble, every which way.
“I am an incubus,” I said. “And when you wake up, you will remember none of this.”
“I am dreaming?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not an incubus. My husband hired you to ruin Farrah. Yet another empty-headed snake in my husband’s den of vipers.”
“This viper is old, my lady. It will not be long before Farrah will become second wife. Perhaps you might find a modicum of peace knowing you can annoy her for the rest of your married life.”
She shook her head. “I fear that is not to be. He will get rid of me. Send me away or fabricate a crime I must be punished for. I hear him making plans for the wedding night. I will not be here, mark me.”
I frowned to hear it. Would Khosrow be so low as to cast his first wife out of the house? Azru had nothing of value, not even beauty to defend her.
“And what will you do, when he marries and your task is done? What do incubi do when they are doing nothing at all, exactly?”
I gestured vaguely to the air.
“I am a part of this palace. I will haunt until I am called to service again.”
“How did you come to be here?”
“I was human once,” I sighed.
“How did you become this incubus?”
“Rare components must coalesce. One must first be in love; and die ever-wanting and unrequited. The lust follows us into afterlife, and thus we are crippled by our own, unsatisfied want, hungry and unable to be filled. But this alone would populate the world with lustful haunts and is not enough to provide the final catalyst for transformation.”
Her gold eyes widened and then narrowed as though she crossed a spectrum of feeling I lacked the skill to translate—nuances lost with my bones and become dust and sand in the passage of centuries and with it all my human sensibility.
“Is this how it was for you, then?”
I swallowed. “For the change to be complete … one must drink the other’s tears.”
A silence descended. Her eyes charted me from my crown to my feet and then settled on my eyes as though estimating me by new measurements, and what she saw satisfied her. A puff of breath escaped and tented the fabric over her mouth before deflating. She looked away to the glass vial on the end table—the much fabled tear catcher that Azru could not fill.
“You were in love, then?”
“A long time ago.”
“What was it like?”
“I don’t remember.”
She nodded, pragmatic. “I don’t, either.”
And strangely, it made me laugh.
The next day, Khosrow gave me the news.
“Farrah’s accepted!” He clap
ped me over the shoulder. I straightened the suit before turning to shake his hand and congratulate him.
“And Azru?” I asked. “What is to become of her?”
He made a derisive noise. “Who cares! She’d fall in the gutter and no one would know the difference, she’s so ugly. Here, cigar? Come, celebrate with me.”
I smoked and thought of Azru. She would be the joke of careless men and women who hadn’t the wit to appreciate her sharp tongue, her detached and cutting intellect.
A shame, I thought. And not truly any of my business. I would fade back into the ether, into the stardust and cosmos, and be none the wiser until I was made flesh again by another unwitting prince.
Khosrow upset the pleasant haze of smoke ringing us and took me by surprise.
“Would you sleep with her, then?”
I blinked.
“Farrah? I thought that was what I had been doing all this time.”
“No,” he said and leaned in close, conspiratorial. I discovered I did not like being so bodily near him and I itched to flee my host simply to buy inches of space to stuff between us. “I meant Azru.”
“Whatever for?” I asked, drawing on the cigar. It tasted bitter and ashen. Like burnt offerings.
“You said yourself. Too much of your visitations can destroy a person. Sleep with her until she crumbles. I promised Farrah first wife status, and so she shall have it.”
The prospect of seducing Azru filled me with an apprehension and terror I could not define.
Khosrow must have discerned it on my face and the ash grew long on the end of my cigar.
“Too ugly even for you, eh?”
I fumbled for a witty reply and discovered I was speechless.
“Do it anyway,” he commanded, knowing it was not in my power to refuse.
I waited until the ember burned down to my teeth.
I found her in her familiar bedroom. I locked the door behind me and through the netting of her sleeping area I stalked like a tiger resplendent in my stripes. A peacock pulling each feather slowly open.
She heard the click of the door and looked up from her open book with a paper folded in her hands. She did not see me at first through the dim evening light and squinted.
“Khosrow?”
“It is not Khosrow,” I whispered.
“Lilu!” Her face suffused with light to know I was there and she shut her book and set it aside in eager anticipation.
I unknotted my tie. I felt strangely naked before her while she was fully clothed in her chador.
I seated myself across from her and did not look at her.
“Lilu, you are troubled.”
“I have been commanded to do you ill,” I whispered.
“Oh? Well, look at that. And here I thought my husband surrounded himself with liars. You realize you won’t be able to accomplish whatever it is he wants you to do if you tell me about it beforehand?”
“I am an incubus,” I told her. “I was to wait until you were dreaming and come for you. Seduce you over and over relentlessly until there was nothing left of you. Inchoate and insensate. Flesh upon flesh and feeling without thought.”
She leaned way from me and sat up straight.
“I feel as though this is familiar,” she began, “like—”
“Like you’ve heard it before? I know. I’ve come to you before this. While you dreamt. No one remembers their dreams in passing. They only remember when I call night after night, when I mark them with mouth and hand. One must make an impression to be remembered in the morning.”
“But—” and now came the doubts and recriminations and the uncertainties creeping in with her questions and all tinged with the remnant of memory, of half-recollected dreams, and she fell into silence on her own.
“So you are like the demon I have heard tales of in my childhood? And read, in my youth?”
“Yes.”
“So why are you not seducing me now? Why are you here in the flesh when you might have waited for the sun to dip low, and the moon carve out your path to me? Under the cover of darkness?”
I clasped my hands in my lap and said nothing.
She clucked her tongue.
“Do you suppose,” she said gently, “that for someone whose existence is defined by touch—whose purpose is a never-ending sexual penetration, a never-ending seething lust—the highest expression of love would be a refusal to touch anyone at all?”
If I remain still, perhaps I might disappear. If I remain still, I think, perhaps my heart itself will stop and free me of the this body and its heavy flesh.
“Lilu,” she said, and reached a hand for mine where it lingered on the bedspread. I contracted my fingers away from her.
“I can’t,” I hissed. “I can’t.”
And then I was gone and when I left the door hung by the hinges in the fury of my passage and everywhere the moans of unsatisfied desires erupting from every stranger who crossed my path; everything bled over from me like a throbbing ache and infected all living creatures around me. I did not care to look back and see how it might reel Azru; might send her backward upon the silk and with her mouth canted open, her eyes half-lidded and dreaming of me—whether I was there in spirit or not.
I did not tell Khosrow. And if he wondered that she was no worse for wear in the elapsing days with the wedding approaching, I did not enlighten him.
Khosrow bid me stay until the wedding night. I did not care for the nuptials but I accepted. I thought I might say goodbye to Azru before Khosrow decided to end my service and free me from the body. I bought her a book of poems and when I arrived at her room, no one was there.
“Where has she gone?” I asked the guard.
He shrugged. “She is no longer a resident at the palace.”
“She’s the first wife. Where else would she be?”
“You did not hear? She has been accused of adultery. As punishment she has been sent to be executed.”
“Did they say who this wretch who shared in her fate was?”
“None were detained, sir.”
“So soon,” I murmured.
Khosrow’s patience had been stretched; and unable to wait he took matters into his own hands. I unleashed a laugh on a bitter gust of wind. I had provided an excellent excuse. He would sleep soundly in the belief she had committed adultery—with a demon, no less.
“Sir?”
I clenched the book so hard the spine broke. It fell to the floor in a flutter of pages. The guard did not struggle, at first. The first kiss made him woozy and drunken and he could not resist. When I had him pressed to the wall and groaning I drew my hands across his throat and cut him wide with the edges of my fingernails. Blood poured down the front of his service uniform and stained the pages of poetry meant for Azru.
I cast him aside and walked forth into her room. Every item as she left it and even the indent in the sheets ready and waiting to receive her body. I turned and the pungent odor of attar of rose and perfume drifted from the end table and when I turned, I saw it there: glass bottles and in the middle, the tear catcher she could not fill for Khosrow.
I plucked it from the table and held it up to the light.
A millimeter of liquid refracted a brief rainbow over my face.
She could not shed a tear for Khosrow. Of this, there could be no doubt, but in my palm the proof of a tear shed for a lowly demon.
I unstoppered it and before I could stop myself, I drank. I tasted her, the hidden scents of her molecules and her atoms and her blood; the low vibrations of her, flush with the undernotes of her hidden sexuality and her intellect. All these delicious things captured in her tears like prisms of light.
It was then I swelled the fortress of my flesh. For while it held me like an anchor, my consciousness laid siege to the lands. In pure spirit I was enraged and spilling over onto the living world so wives attending their mundane tasks stopped where they stood on their way to prayer or in the midst of dining to be aroused by the fierce wind following in the wake
of my passage. Lust on the wing. Husbands’ pupils dilated and compelled them to turn with open mouths as though to drink wine from a font; women sighing in ecstasy behind the closed doors of private rooms; the populace as a whole overcome with the fading influence of my transient presence. To be touched only briefly left them trembling and choking down the ancient language of want, of need, of desire, before coming back to themselves to recall their present and damp down the embers of their primacy, their fearsome want, leaving behind me a landscape of hushed men and women in afterglow.
All my focus narrowed to a pin-head as my demon self battered down the doors in search of Azru who could not hide from me or be stolen or diminished, searching with her scars and the flavor of her to guide me—until I found her like a bright point in a midnight sky, a northward star: my Azru, languishing in a dark prison room.
I retreated. As demon, I could come and go like the wind but in the end I had no choice but to return to the body Khosrow had bound me to; this would not help Azru. This was beyond my limits, now.
They would kill her, of course.
The vial fell from my fingers and broke against the stone as I began to laugh and laugh and I was still laughing when they arrested me and dragged me away.
“What happens next?”
The man looks from the ember of the cigarette to the guard. The guard leans against the table until the uneven chair leg sinks to the left and he sways with the motion as though he has done this countless times before.
The prisoner drops the glowing cigarette into the sandy floor. The butt extinguishes in the sand and a curl of smoke rises between them in a question mark. The guard taps the pruning shears against the table.
“You have to come back tomorrow for the rest.”
The guard snorts. “That’s an old trick. So old it’s almost a joke.”
The captive shrugs. “Is another day too much to pay for a decent ending?”
“Just this once,” the guard concedes, and leaves the prisoner to himself, intact and whole in the darkness.
The next day, a new guard enters. The setting is the same. The rickety table. The ominous layout of sinister tools.
“What happened to the guard from yesterday?” the captive asks.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 22