Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  For some reason, or from some idle misfiring of synapse and neuron, I thought of this now. Something so wonderfully satisfying and so maddeningly unsatisfying at the same time. The chicken that crossed the road, the sea spray and the moon and the tides, droplets from capillaries and gushings from arteries, living happily ever after, and the hunt without which there could be neither happiness nor ever after, even the dead monkeys and the exorcism and laying to rest of them. The more Melissa’s bare foot softly stroked my shin, the more I felt myself falling into a shallow trance in which images and thoughts flowed in otherworldly harmony.

  How I wished I could have opium again. The real stuff, the good stuff, the best stuff in the world. I could go out and find within a mile of where I lived a gun, heroin, crack, whatever I wanted. But not opium, not the most beatific of drugs. Not here, not in Europe, nowhere but in parts of Asia, and even there it was growing more rare as well, so much more profitable was it when processed into heroin. Everyone who had ever claimed they could get me opium in the city had turned out to be a liar out to impress with empty words or a fool who believed the hard black little pieces of foul matter he had purchased was real opium, and that, even if it were, it could be smoked in a hash pipe.

  Yes, I wished I could have opium again, the sweet smoke of the one true heaven again. To cling to the young flesh in the heat of the vital flame, to draw from that young flesh the warm blood, calidum innatum, of new life, the rekindling of dying embers from the power and pleasure of that vital flame. To have this paradise and to enhance it with the paradise of opium too—it was a dream, this nocturne of blood and opium. Some dreams were not without a sublime magic of their own.

  I imagined a long ivory pipe with a golden saddle, a lustrous yellow jade bowl, rich gold-edged cloisonné end bands, and shadow-wood tips; a blue and white Ming porcelain jar full of rich putty-soft chestnut-colored opium, its unique scent perfuming the air; a chased silver and cut-glass oil lamp, a layout of ivory-handled fine steel needles, scrapers, wick trimmers, spoons, tweezers, cleaning rod, and sable brush on a black lacquer tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  I imagined a small pool of fresh warm blood in a gold and enamel drinking bowl that bore the image of the protective spirit-creature, sword in mouth, beneath the octagonal symbol of the Chinese Eight Trigrams that was painted, its colors long fading, on a piece of wood nailed above the rickety door atop the rickety stairs at the entrance to the opium den.

  I took a picture of that image with a cheap disposable camera and later sent it to ethnologists, anthropologists, scholars of Eastern religions, mythology, and symbolism, heads of Oriental studies at universities, curators of Oriental collections at museums, experts on the primitive magic, primitive art, primitive culture, and history of the region. None of them could identify the source and exact meaning of it beyond associating it with an animism of an ambiguous nature. They could not tell if it was good or evil. Only one of them, a professor at Columbia, quoted the fourteenth-century Yü-li Tzu of Liu Chu: “Can it be that what man regards as evil, the gods regard as good?”

  I did not care if he was a god or a demon, that mad figure with the blade clenched in his mouth. And god or demon, I did not care of what. As for whether it was a numen of good or evil, the wisdom of Liu Chu had taken care of the idea that that there might be meaning in the answer to a question such as that. I gave a name to that image. La beauté de diable. It was a beauty, blessed and damned, that was everywhere, in every thing. Everything. And everything, the all of it, could no longer break the barriers of my mind. For my mind had no more barriers. It could flutter like a butterfly on a silent hilltop and devour the cosmos at once.

  Everything. It was what I wanted. It was what I felt. It was what I would have. Everything.

  The knife between my teeth, or what was left of them, felt good. The soothing, entrancing caress of Melissa’s bare foot entered into my imaginings. Their still-life images took on life. Lost in the dreamlike flow of what passed behind half-closed eyes, I watched myself remove the knife from between my teeth and lay it down between the inlaid lacquer tray and the softly gleaming drinking bowl.

  Sky. Earth. Thunder. Wind. Water. Fire. Mountain. Marsh. The Eight Trigrams. The everything. And the god-eyed, devil-eyed guy whose face looked out commandingly, angrily, all-seeingly beneath the suit of eight of everything. And the chicken, the giver and the taker of knowing; the chicken who crossed that dusty road.

  There seemed to be music from very far away: the single piano notes, woven through deep silence, of Pärt’s Alina, each note an evocation of myriads of subtle emotions, the subdued summoning of an ancient astrology, the slow bearing away of a soul by the evening tide, a meditation on the dusk and decline of magic, a melancholy star in the black of the endless night before time.

  But there was no music. It was in my head. Or somewhere in me. The very-far-away in me.

  Blood and opium, opium and blood. And sky and earth, and thunder and wind, and water and fire, and mountain and marsh. Blood on the shadow-wood pipe tip as I sucked deep and long. The vapors and the blood entering my body. Animism. The body ascending to where the spirit beckoned. Anima mundi. Christ, I was dying for Chinese food. Not real Chinese food. It was good old New York Jew Cantonese food I craved. Shun Lee would not deliver downtown. Liberty View, which was downtown, would not deliver at this time, period. There wasn’t a good old-fashioned Chink restaurant left in Chinatown since the old Mandarin Inn shut down a lot of years ago. There was always China Red on Chambers Street. No, forget about that joint. I thought of taking a taxi up to Shun Lee and getting a shopping bag of takeout. No, fuck that. I’d eat a couple of salami sandwiches and then I wouldn’t give a damn about the Chinese food. My eyes were closed now. Near to the open porcelain opium canister, the pipe, the layout, the bowl of blood, the knife, there were open wire-handled Shun Lee takeout containers of roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, and dry shredded crispy beef.

  I made the salami sandwiches, throwing them together on some dry, staling pumpernickel with slices of genetically modified tomato and the all but tasteless mozzarella that I had bought in a pinch at Glucoplastics. Never buy shrink-wrapped, Saran-wrapped, or any other PVC-wrapped food.

  When I returned to the couch with the sandwiches on a paper plate, I saw that Melissa was bent over her big baggy black leather purse, which was on the easy chair across the room. She took from it a beat-up, dog-eared paperback, brought it to the couch, and sat down by my side.

  I was pleasantly impressed, upon seeing the condition of the book, that she had taken such care with the book that she borrowed from me. It could have been worse. I knew someone who, if she liked a book, chewed on it like a slavering dog as she read it. Maybe Melissa had picked up the paperback used and on the cheap, and it was already pretty beaten-up when she got it. I didn’t say anything. It was her book. She could do whatever she wanted with it or to it. I saw that the book was Steppenwolf.

  Hermann Hesse. Every girl read Hesse. Him and Rumi. Between their first period and their first decent paycheck, even if they would never read another book in their lives, there were Hesse and Rumi.

  “Do you like Hesse?” she said.

  At least she didn’t say his name as if it rhymed with less, or yes. A lot of people did. But then again I wouldn’t have expected that of her. She pronounced it, like almost everybody who didn’t rhyme it with less or yes, with a schwa at the end, so that it sort of rhymed with the way Simon, the black buggy driver in Faulkner’s Sartoris, said “Yessuh,” or the way Rochester, the black chauffeur in The Jack Benny Program, later said the same thing. This is how I said it for most of my life, feeling self-satisfied with this lint speck of presumed erudition. Then, about forty-five years after I advanced from the yes to the yessuh pronunciation, it was revealed to me that the final vowel of his name was really a Germanic long e, not a short one. Properly spoken, the name Hesse rhymed with essay. Hes-say. So I felt that I was in no s
tanding to take it upon myself to correct anyone who was of the yessuh or even the yes persuasion.

  “Yeah,” I said, “as a matter of fact I do. I read Siddhartha and Demian, and I liked them a lot. I wanted to read Magister Ludi but it seemed too long. But, yeah, I really liked the ones I read.”

  “How about this one? I found it in the garbage near school the other day, and I’m really getting into it.”

  “You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I read that one. If I took a look at it, I might remember. But I don’t think I did.”

  “I bet you would remember this one if you had read it,” she said with an inscrutable archness.

  She skimmed the dog-eared pages until she found the dog-eared page she was looking for. It looked to be about a third of the way into the book.

  “The main character is some guy about ten years younger than you. Some guy named Harry, and he’s really losing it.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. Younger than me. Really losing it. I chewed at my sandwich. Fuck those Chinks who wouldn’t deliver downtown. Fuck Hermann Hesse. And that rhymed with yessuh. And fuck this Harry guy, this sputum from a sputtering pen and nothing more. And fuck Whole Foods too. “And he writes this poem.” She looked down at the dog-eared page. “I sort of wasn’t paying too much attention when I read it. My mind was sort of wandering. Then this jumped out at me.” She cleared her throat and, without removing her eyes from the page, read four lines aloud, as if rapt:

  The lovely creature I would so treasure,

  And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,

  I would drink of her red blood full measure,

  Then howl till the night went by.

  I no longer cared where this was going. When verse and a salame sandwich vied, verse lost, no matter how much the salame sandwich left to be desired. How could they call this shit mozzarella? How could they charge three bucks for a half-pound shrink-wrapped blob of it? How could I have bought it? I never entered that fucking Whole Foods without stealing something. I had a drawerful of Quince Body Moisturizer and other extravagantly priced Dr. Hauschka skin-care products. There were days when I had three pounds of Kosher Valley chicken under my belt and a pound of Health Valley butter in my pocket. This organic shit sucked, but you couldn’t beat the price. I looked forward to the spring morel season, even more to the white matsutaki season in the late fall. The formality of waiting in a checkout line or pausing at a cash register was very rare. I even well worked the honor system in the coffee department, where you scooped your own beans from false-bottomed barrels and wrote the variety and price look-up code on the bag you put them in, whole or ground. I liked some kind of French roast, which I ground for a paper-cone drip into a bag whereon I indicated it to be some cheap shit, Morning Buzz or Café Blend or whatever it was, that cost a fraction of what was in the bag. It was an honor system, for few things were as dishonorable as allowing yourself to be played for a sucker. Yes, they may have been out to rip me off, but I was beating them at their own racket. My most memorable coup was perhaps the four-pound châteaubriand filet that protruded from my lower flank and hip like an elephantine colostomy bag about to burst all over the Ancient Harvest quinoa. Then there was that two-foot organic sprouted-grain baguette that, with one end tucked into my sock and the rest of it running hidden up my trouser leg, lent me a quite distinguished limp. Natural. Organic. Dog shit was natural and organic. A puddle of piss left in the gutter by a drunken bum was natural and organic. Potassium cyanide was natural and organic (with a periodic-element pedigree, no less). And unlike the salmon at Whole Foods, dog shit wasn’t artificially colored. I remembered walking into Buccellati on Madison one day a few years back. There was only one customer, an elderly matron who seemed to be in the process of both croaking and buying about a million bucks’ worth of jewelry. The armed guard must have gone out for coffee, and the lone saleslady was so wrapped up in catering to and reaping the fortune of the windstorm buying spree of the decomposing matron, that a bracelet of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies lay right there in the open, half on and half off its plush black-velvet display cushion, on a showcase counter. The fat kike with the loupe I took it to in Newark offered me twelve grand cash, so I figured it was worth twenty-five. I was wrong. Another fat kike with another loupe gave me thirty a few months later. Yahweh only knows what he got for it. From one end of Kosher Valley to the other. In the wrong direction. Yea, though I walk through the aisle of the shadow of sugary death… So why had I paid for rather than boosted this misbegotten little ball of gypsum-like mozzarella? I chewed and swallowed, none too pleased with myself or my sandwiches. Goddamn fucking Chinks.

  “What was it that made those lines jump out at you?” I asked.

  A smile came over her face, and that arch look returned. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “So that made you think of me. Is that what you think of me?” I said. “That I’m some kind of monster?”

  I was being defensive. She wasn’t even Chinese. She wasn’t even a team member of the Whole Foods cheese department. I took a deep breath, remembered what she meant to me.

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  She was more than forty years younger than I, and her tone had the mature, measured, calm, and somewhat amused forbearance of a mother dealing with a recalcitrant child.

  “No,” she repeated. “It made me think of you, yes, but not as you say. It made me think of us. I read those lines over and over, and the more I read them, the more excited I became. I was on the subway, and I kept wishing more and more that I was with you, just the two of us, alone, together. I missed my stop. I got out and walked. I realized I had memorized the lines without knowing it, just by reading them over and over. I kept repeating them to myself as I walked. Every step I took, I became more conscious of the friction of my panties and my pants on my pussy. I felt my thighs rubbing together as I walked. It felt good. It felt too good. I just kept getting more and more excited, until I felt that if I were thrown down to the cold concrete and raped, it wouldn’t really have been rape. It would have been part of the poem. The real rapist would’ve been me. And it was you that I saw throwing me down. You. I can’t explain it. You raping me, and me raping you. But how could two people rape each other at the same time? Not as some silly game, but for real. How could that be? It wasn’t what rape was. It was beyond that. It was everything rape was, but it was different. It was more.”

  She was no longer talking to me. The mature, calm, and forbearing mother had left the room, had left the night, had never been. And she was not talking to hear herself talk, or to ward off with words phantoms of torment that thrived on silence. No. What she was doing was trying, impossibly, desperately, to parse the inflections of feelings that lay outside the known grammar of feeling.

  Communication is a shoddily cobbled shoe encrusted with the muddling sludge of time, trampling, and ill wear. We speak of Isis, unaware that, in the vowel-less phonetics of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the symbols of the throne and the loaf that signified her name give us not Isis but Jst. And we speak of Jesus, he of a later mythology; but how many of those who yet kneel unto him know that this is a name that he never would have recognized or answered to, for his name was Yeshua? And we say of any of the elemental turnings of nature that we can “smell it in the air”; yet the word book we might use to more precisely express our perceptions remains unopened by most of us, who with a single word, petrichor, could describe the pleasing scent brought by rain after long days of warm, dry weather. The word was welded from two Greek words, the second of them being ichor, the ethereal blood that ran in the veins of the gods and the goddesses. From the first babblings of earliest childhood to the dimwitted pretensions of eloquence uttered in age, we pass most of our lives unable to communicate effectively what we feel, think, or want to say. Like trying to work wood or metal without tools, we can’t even articulate our worst stupidities, let alone the few worthy perceptions that attach themselves to us by accident. Unless helped
out posthumously by historians, how many of us can even string together a cogent cheap platitude of parting on our deathbed? The tired saying was all too often true: if you remain silent, people will take you for a fool; if you speak, they will know you to be one.

  But Melissa was no fool. I cannot say that I understood all of what she was trying to say, any more than she herself did. Her words, however, lighted on places in me where I felt that understanding slept and was about to wake. The more she spoke, the more I admired her. She already knew what most people never learn. It was what Homer knew: that words were for war, and not for surrender. Even if she was unaware that she knew this, she did. Like a rare and beautiful creature of an exotic vanishing species who knows no others like itself but only the drabber beings that flourish in multitude around it, she may have felt herself merely to be different, and to be isolated by that difference. It was up to me to show her that what she might be mistaking as lowly difference from the flock was in fact the rare beauty that constituted transcendence, a difference of a very special kind.

  “And what did you do when you got home?” I asked her.

  She looked straight ahead for a moment or so, as if now trying to choose her words carefully. Then, seeming to discard any such attempt, she simply spoke the words that had been there waiting to be said:

  “I raped myself.

  “I masturbated like crazy. I bit my arms as I was doing it. I slapped myself. I snarled dirty things at myself. It was like there were two me’s. It really did feel like I was raping myself. And I thought of you, and we were raping each other. And I felt myself beginning to come, and I told myself I was going to hold myself back and rush over here and rip open my coat and finish it here, in your face. All sorts of things. And then I just exploded. I came and I came again. And I fell asleep.” Here she paused again. “And before I fell asleep, I looked around in the dark with my eyes open, and I knew you weren’t there, and I said ‘I love you.’ And I was saying it to both of us.”