by Nick Tosches
And then you had the Chinks, who were in the year four thousand seven hundred–something, and the Jews, who were a little further on in years than the Chinese. According to some of our Muslim brothers, we were now only in the year fourteen thirty–something; and one of a confusing variety of Indian calendars has us well past our four millionth year.
As for the custom of the first of January marking the start of the new year, this was not widely accepted even throughout Europe until the seventeenth century, with Italy and England holding out until the middle of the eighteenth century.
So what the fuck was it, and why was I celebrating it? Without banana cake and ice cream, no less? This whole fucking world was crazy. Its brains were running out of its nose.
Lingering with my second champagne, I drew from a desk drawer the slim bundle of papers on which I had written during the four seasons past. I sat with the last of that second champagne, my cuttings of pear, cheese, and finocchiona, and I began to peruse those writings.
There were not many sheets and scraps, and of what was written on them, not much made sense.
Several of the scraps presented words that found their place in my memory as well: notes about the taste of blood, with adjectives and similes and such crossed out, one after another, deemed insufficient, inadequate; a shopping list with “dated after 4/10” underlined in parentheses after the item “goat milk”; a poem of sorts that remained untitled:
It is the gods, the nine of them,
whose names we have forgotten
that we must love and fear,
for they are within us, seeking light
in the darkness where we do not look,
where the dead parts of us lie.
One piece of paper contained no writing at all, just the impression of a cute lipsticked kiss. After a moment, seeing the color to be not red but a reddish dark brown, I realized that it was not lipstick but dried blood.
Hadn’t I started work on a new book this past year? Or had I just thought that I was beginning work on a new book? Was there any way in hell that I possibly could have considered what was on any of these papers to be even the germ, the seed, let alone the worded opening breath of a book, however inchoate?
Yes, not one of the most diabolically fucked-up years in my life, but the most diabolically fucked-up year in my life.
Something that struck me was the disregard for grammar and syntax in much of what was here. Even in my most hurried notes, I usually gave more care to these things than to the legibility of what was being scrawled for my own eventual decipherment. And there were pages here where my illegibility was so daunting that, after some effort, I merely turned them aside with a shake of the head.
Then there was a page on which I had very neatly printed with an unwavering hand these words alone:
YOU WILL DIE VERY SOON
IN THE MORNING LIGHT, THOSE WORDS NO LONGER GAVE ME pause. They meant nothing to me, for I knew them to be the words of a madman. That I was that madman meant nothing either. I was at repose with myself, as the old ghost might say.
And besides, it was true. I was very soon to die. As are we all.
What did give me pause was that, looking back on all those crossed-out adjectives, similes, and such with which I had tried to capture in words the taste of my fair maidens’ blood, I now, in the calm, quiet morning, found myself trying to recall and summon that taste with all the power of my physical senses.
And more than just the taste, but the feeling it brought with it, too.
But try as I might, I could not. I entertained the notion of renewing and refreshing my memory.
No. Nature may love to hide beneath vague indications and dark hints. But I must not further hide the hidden. I must allow my own nature no longer to cast or to hide or abide in vague indications or dark hints. I must not betray myself.
THE WOLF MOON SIGHED FULL IN THE DARK EASTERN SKY. In the night’s breath just before dawn, under the sea-goat of Babylon, she could be seen with her consorts, godly Saturn and the blue giant Spica.
I saw them in the cold black before morning light, on my way to the gym. The one thing the gym lacked was a heavy bag. On some mornings, I went instead with my old sparring gloves to the old boxing gym, a few blocks farther south, on Park Place. I loved striking out at the heavy bag. Ducking, circling, left, right; hitting, hitting, hitting, and hitting, hitting, hitting again; harder, harder, harder, and harder, harder, harder again.
The winds grew ever more bitter, the whistlings of their siren songs ever more strange, more rapturous in their deceit. Soon the Year of the Dragon would begin.
I did not call it that. I called it the year of the nine gods, because these gods whose names I did not know were now no longer to be loved and now no longer to be feared. They were to be slain. For I myself had looked within me, and I myself had found and let loose the light, had found and given light to the dead parts of me.
The change in the winds was as nothing compared to the change in me, and the songs of their sirens were as nothing compared to the songs with which I lulled myself to sleep, and the Year of the Dragon was as nothing compared to the seasons I claim for and unto myself. May the slaughter of the gods begin.
THIS WAS IT. I WAS WARM IN MY FINE NEW COTTON LONG johns, flannel-lined britches, thermal socks, my cashmere sweater and watch cap, shearling coat, and lightweight Sorel Avalanche Trail boots. Warm with barely cooked soft-scrambled eggs and good hot coffee going down my gullet. Warm in the repose of the infinite change whirling round and through me as I sat on my new bench watching the world shiver past, fleeing from nowhere to nowhere.
I was warm and I was ready. I was ready to cut through the nylon again. Ready to cut the past to shreds and leave it for the hungry wild dogs that roam that netherworld of nonexistence, that wasteland of the past. Ready to look on and howl with those dogs as they devoured those shreds, then cut those wild dogs to ribbons as well. Ready to cut away all the residue of bullshit and lies, mine and the world’s, that so stubbornly clung to me and in me. Ready to cut myself free, once and for all, of the whole fucking world of bullshit and lies, which is the only fucking world we have beyond ourselves. I was ready to cut into a good big greasy slab of swine. I was ready to cut the throat of anything called God and all the fools that knelt before it. I was ready.
The new bench the spook Heraclitus had led me to was a big part of it. Not only a great change in itself, but a change that brought with it more change. The few buddies I had who congregated at the bench in front of the bar rarely ventured to these benches, just a block away, in little Duane Park. That brought more solitude, more repose. And there was a change in pussy as well. There were new legs galore, legs that would rather walk the path through the trees than pass by the bar on their way from nowhere to nowhere. Even the sky seemed to change as seen through the branches of trees so nearby, so much closer.
As I closed my eyes, smiled, and raised my face to the sun of the new sky, I could almost see the rushing blood of the slaughter of the gods. There were whisperings in the wind. They were hard to make out at first. But in time they grew clear.
The first of the whisperings that I was able to grasp came to me in a voice that I recognized. It was the voice of a young woman I remembered from somewhere. Slowly I became aware of whose voice it was. Yes. Her. But her name eluded me. I had forgotten it, yet it seemed to lie so tantalizingly, so frustratingly, in the periphery of vague memory. Yes. It was her. Sandrine. The redhead who liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. Yes, of course, Sandrine, the first of those whose blood I had tasted. Sandrine, who, with her young friend Marie, had met her end in a doorway on Thompson Street on a cool spring night.
She whispered nothing of her death, nothing of her young friend Marie, nothing of Thompson Street, nothing of blood or of flesh. But she did speak of some sort of doorway, some sort of entranceway, which may have been of this world, or the world within, or some kind of otherworld.
“You were there,” she whispered to me, “but you did not enter. You did not go beyond where you had been led. You did not go to what awaited you, to what you did not and do not know. You did not enter.”
None of the other voices was recognizable, except for my own, which at times seemed to be whispering to me from outside myself. But most of the voices, like Sandrine’s, spoke in a cryptic way, like seers, soothsayers, or the deranged. It was all rather peaceful, like playing with the pieces of a puzzle: pieces of a mystery that the voices brought to me.
Then one day, that peacefulness was gone. There was, as always before, but a single whispering. But all of a sudden it was joined by a multitude of others, speaking all at once, and all these whisperings became a babel of screams that rose to a maddening pitch.
I jolted up from the bench, and as my heart pounded and my legs quaked, I tried to concentrate on the sounds of the cars, trucks, and people nearby.
The babel of voices in my head subsided, but I feared they might return. I walked slowly away, and it was awhile before my heart beat quietly again and my legs regained equilibrium.
I could not remember anything of what these whispering, shrieking voices said. I did not want to.
As I walked, I tried to con myself into believing that all of this was the whispers and cries of a book gestating within me, calling out to me to be written. But I wasn’t buying any of it. This had nothing to do with words destined for paper. It was something else, completely different; something I had never before known.
Why was I walking, in a roundabout way, to the bar? It was, I told myself, because I needed to hear familiar voices talking the same old familiar bullshit. Real voices.
Then again, were they not all real? The ones from which I had fled, and the ones to which I was fleeing?
I shot the shit awhile with a buddy of mine. We both fell silent after a few minutes, then I thought he was resuming our wayward conversation.
“What did you say?” I asked him, raising the brim of my wool cap from my ear and leaning a bit toward him.
“I didn’t say anything,” he said.
SWEET, FAIR VENUS CAME FORTH FROM THE WAVES OF clouds that were like froth in the cold night sky.
Myrtle of the sun god. Lover. Purifier. Seducer of slayers, born of severed cock.
THE VOICES WENT AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS, THEN LATE ONE night as I lay in bed, I heard Sandrine whispering for me to rise. A soft, lone whispering that brought no alarm or unease. I found it in fact to be rather soothing, and rather welcome: an emollient of sorts, an opiate tincture for my troubled mind. The return of a familiar.
She whispered that I tarried, that I must be on with it. She whispered that I knew this. She whispered that the turmoil of voices that had beset me were all merely trying to tell me this, and that among the assailing voices had been my own, descending upon me with the others, telling myself what the others, and she herself, had been trying to tell me.
The manner in which she spoke was different from what it once had been, in life. Her voice, too, had about it a more dulcet tone. I felt it to be somehow beatific. The voice of Sandrine, yes, but the voice of Fra Angelico’s Angel of the Annunciation, too.
I asked her about this business of tarrying, this business of getting on with it. She whispered to me words that were my own:
“To betray one’s nature is to be betrayed in turn.”
And then she whispered more:
“The entranceway. You must pass through it. You await yourself on the other side.
“There, as one, you will find change. There, as one, you will find repose. True change. True repose.”
I saw things in my mind: abominable, unutterable, and worse.
She was in me, seeking revenge, seducing me to wreak it for her upon myself.
Fra Angelico’s angel was tempera and gold leaf on a piece of poplar wood. And it was sometimes better not to look too closely at such things. Had not art restorers recently uncovered the image of Satan lurking in the hallowed clouds of a fresco by Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi?
No, this was no Annunciation of any kind at all. It was a trap, a damnation, a snare.
“Trust me, my love. Trust me.”
I could feel myself glaring. I stood and paced forward on the floor, my forefinger extending and waving in anger at her who was not there.
“Trust you!” I growled aloud. “Trust you!” I cocked my head to one side, menacingly. “You fucking bitch. You dirty rotten little fucking bitch. I killed you once, I’ll kill you again.”
“Yes, my love, yes.”
If only she were really there. If only I could kill her again. Oh, how I wanted to kill her again. And again. Kill her over and over, again and again, forever and forever.
“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”
There were knives everywhere, all sorts of knives. The Walther in the closet. The capped black iron pipe. Oh, Christ, how I wanted to kill her again, fuck her corpse, jerk off on her dead fucking face, then kill her again; murder and desecrate her again and again as she said those words through a bruised and swollen mouthful of blood, broken teeth, and ebbing breath:
“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”
I took a step back, took a few breaths, each calmer than the last.
“I put you here,” I said, tapping my head and lowering my voice, to her, who did not stand before me and was not to be seen. “I put you here, and I can take you out of here.”
I felt suddenly strong, not with anger but simply stronger, as if with the weightless armor of tranquility.
“For no one has power over me.”
There was something then like the trace of a whisper—no more, probably, than the cold wind entering through the slight opening of the kitchen window—and then there was nothing but the familiar and faint shrill ringing in my left ear.
That was the end of the whisperings, the end of the voices. But the things that I had seen in my mind, abominable, unutterable, and worse, they stayed with me.
THEY WERE SCENES OF RAPE AND TORTURE AND BUTCHERING, and of things far more horrid, things on which I will not dwell lest they become further embedded in my mind. I walked down the street, and with the merest of glances at them, set people afire, caused them to clutch their hearts and drop dead with a scream, made little schoolgirls to tear away their skirts and blouses and masturbate in a frenzy, shattered windows here, brought about terrible crashes there. It was all so horrifyingly delicious, especially those visions of which I cannot tell. And I was immune to all consequence. It was my own world, the world of these visions, a world of crime without punishment.
At times I yearned for it to be real. At times I wished to banish it all from my mind. At times I merely wondered at the darkness of an imagination given more to seeking beauty in the sky.
I brewed some coffee, stuck another pin in the voodoo doll, and reflected that this day belonged to me, and that it would bring whatever I willed it to bring, if only within myself.
From the window I saw, like cockroaches down in the street, hurrying little figures of hurrying little people, flinching and cowering in the cold and the wind. This made the hot coffee taste and feel even better. I looked at my thick leather and shearling coat draped over the chair.
At the bar I sat with another coffee, in a paper cup, from the corner store across the street. Candlemas was only a few weeks off. On the television set above the bar, I noticed a commercial for what seemed to be a Christian dating service called Christian Mingle. The ichthus, the Jesus fish, was part of its logo. I thought of Lorna on her cross, scaring away whatever kind of suitors she might find through Christian Mingle. I wondered if anybody ever got raped and strangled through Christian Mingle. I thought of the origin of the Jesus fish thing. It was a stupid fucking acrostic in which the five letters of the ancient Greek word for “fish,” pronounced ichthus, were taken in order to stand for the first letters of the five words in the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” A stupid fu
cking acrostic. The goddamn Church made the Word Jumble look high-class, if not downright divinely inspired, by comparison. Fucking mah-jongg mackerel.
No, it would probably be impossible to get away with it, raping and strangling one of these Christian Mingle cunts. Ah, but what a sweet thought.
THERE HAD TO BE A WAY OUT. OR A WAY IN. OR A WAY. I WAS free, but I was lost. There was something beautiful in this. But something scary, too, when it began to get dark.
I CALLED BENNET, MY ACCOUNTANT, AND ASKED HIM WHAT HE thought my annual living expenses would be if I had little or no income. I also asked him what I would get in social security payments if I began to take them now.
I called Greg, my lawyer, and asked him what the statute of limitations was on bank robbery.
My accountant responded by saying it all depended on which Nick I was taking about: the Nick who had once lavished away eighty grand in a week, or the Nick who had calculated that he was now spending eight grand a year on coffee and cigarettes, and reacted with the shocked resolution that measures must be taken to reduce this sum. The fact that both Nicks always stopped to stoop and pick up pennies in the street—not only, as I saw it, a habit of perspicacious economic prudence, but also damned good physical exercise as well—signified nothing to him.
My lawyer said: five years, if no killing was involved. He also advised me not to get any ideas.
Of course, I had already considered several possibilities. I could live lavishly for a year or so, then sell my apartment for a million bucks or so and be the wealthiest homeless guy around. I could take what I had, less a few hundred grand for a private plane to London, and try to double it at the blackjack tables at the Ritz Club. But every time I pondered this particular idea, I saw myself sitting weeping on the edge of a bed in a three-grand-a-night hotel suite. And there was always the prospect of selling my apartment, getting that imagined little place with a hammock in the sticks for a quarter of what I would get for my place, and pocketing the rest for living out the rest of my allotted days at a far lower cost, but in comfort. But this would mean cutting the umbilical cord without any period of acclimation to new surroundings, which I might end up hating, and which in any case would seem to irrevocably seal the fate of solitude and loneliness. I couldn’t see, in such a place, the occasional nine stone of sweet young gal-meat on nights of need, let alone love that might be mine to have and to hold, in my small town in the sticks.