Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  6. I told Bobby about my new fantasy. I think it definitely excited him. He told me he would come over soon, so I’m just getting ready to see him. I put fresh sheets on the bed, and I’ve been ____ _______ __ _______. I am so excited, I’m almost _______. It’s all I can do not to _______ _______, but I want to wait for him to _______. I think I am going to wear a white dress in the shower so Bobby can tug on it and maybe it will be see-through and _______. Or maybe I’ll wear this white ____ _______ _______ that doesn’t have _______ where _____ should be. I should _______ my _______ _______. I’d like that. Well, I better get the water hot, I think Bobby will be here soon.

  Lev replied instantly:

  I don’t think you mean “almond butter”

  Second, I don’t know what half this is, including the mad lib (?)

  Give me a call please

  I took off early on a Friday, the next day, so I could speak with Lev. I was mortified, but I did not know what else to do.

  “Hi, may I please speak to Lev?”

  “Yeah, here.”

  “Hi.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s, uh,” I started to say.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you. Writer girl.”

  I made a noise.

  “Yeah, one second.” Lev seemed to walk into another room. “Sorry, I’m in the studio. You should come down sometime.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what a pornographer was supposed to sound like. Lev sounded brisk, lucid.

  “OK,” he announced, “I have officially entered the green room. Let me call this thing up.” Time passed. “OK, looking at it. You have too much investment. That’s what I think.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I like it in some ways. I won’t lie.”

  I didn’t say anything. I could tell that Lev was lean. He was not exactly short, but he wasn’t tall, either. He was lean and had a simple countenance.

  “Care less and be brutal. How does that sound?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes? Yes is not an answer to my question.” Lev was typing something. “Sorry, one second.”

  I waited.

  “OK. I’m back. You understand what this is for? I’m not trying to be a fascist.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I would like it if this works. I would like it if it would work.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “You were showing a lot of potential there. You have a nice light touch. But brutal, OK?”

  “I want to try again.”

  Lev said, “There’s a part of it you understand, right, where it’s a game and it’s something you can look at, but there’s another part, too, where it’s only happening. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You can visit the past, but don’t live there.”

  “Yes,” I repeated, uncomprehending.

  “I was hoping we could work together,” Lev said.

  Yes, I was thinking, no.

  My face started shaking and I accidentally hung up.

  The man I was married to got into an accident on his bicycle. He was coming to an intersection at the bottom of a hill. He went over his handlebars and flew onto the hood of someone’s car. The driver gave him $700 to walk away. He came home to lie in bed with a fuchsia bruise hooked from his left nipple to the center of his back.

  The bruise looked like a sickle or thin moon.

  “Good job walking away,” I said.

  The man I was married to was munching some Bayer, flipping through a tabloid.

  “Aaron is leaving,” he said.

  This was the ex-Mormon.

  “He got a job and needs to relocate. He wants to try it for a year.”

  “Is this more acting?”

  “No. It’s more textbooks.”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Not really. Some uncle set it up. I guess he’s going back in the fold.”

  “Maybe they’re running out of men.”

  “Maybe,” said the man I was married to. I could tell his injury was bothering him. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling some of his pain. If I shifted, it would hurt him, I could tell.

  I shifted.

  The man I was married to did not react.

  The tabloid was between us, and the man I was married to turned a page.

  BIG CUTS FOR WEALTHY, the tabloid said.

  I shifted again.

  That night we went out with the ex-Mormon to celebrate his new future. The ex-Mormon’s hair was so light it was white in the bar. He was a large, freckled cat. His eyes were pale green, nearly yellow. He was the product of inbreeding, heavy and thin at once, pale and dark, canny and naïve. I could tell there was something about humanity that he had come to understand, and perhaps accept, that I never would, and I think this made me angrier.

  I observed the ex-Mormon, wrapped in his superior narrative, undeniable in spite of his ex-ness. Maybe even the apostates got to go to a private planet with a low-melanin female janitorial staff, after death.

  The man I was married to was taking an extra-long time in the bathroom, probably because of the injury, but who could say for sure.

  I entered into a fresh Maker’s Mark, noting that my tab now constituted a full ninety minutes of my employed labor.

  “It’s a job,” the ex-Mormon said, “but I’m planning to like it.”

  I realized that he had been talking to me for a little while now about his forthcoming rebirth into the middle class. I hadn’t been listening to him because there was something pounding in my ears. It was the voice I could always hear, once I got wasted.

  The Mormon would marry someday and have children, and he knew it. The man I was married to would marry again someday and have children, and he knew it, too. But what was I going to do?

  It seemed not to be enough for me, I realized, that possibly I was free, forgetting for a moment about the machinations of capital. I was free and could act, and from my actions would be composed an event. And out of a single event, and another event, would be composed yet another event, which was a story.

  But beneath these facts, which I could say to myself and hear myself say, and even understand as a style of logic, there was something else.

  If I could drink another drink, maybe I could listen to this thing. This was the thing where a garland of flowers bursts apart into a ring of porpoises. Beads of foam act as a kind of prism. It can’t be undone but it is being undone right now. The floor of time drops down, releasing a cloud of sand, and from out of the shipwreck, tragic but below us, harmony reconstitutes itself.

  Tomorrow I would be walking up that hill again, soon, because a throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

  Cosmogony

  A few years ago a friend of mine married a demon. There was a liberal in the White House then and everyone was feeling pretty sanguine.

  The demon’s name was Fulmious Mannerhorn Patterlully, and he was approximately 200,001 years old. His legs were blue; his eyes were yellow; he had to gnaw at his own fingernails all day to keep them a reasonable length. He did not wear pants with notable frequency. He was intelligent, gregarious, undying.

  My friend was twenty-eight. She was a human girl.

  We’d always known about demons. They were the necessary, baleful entities that stood on the porches of history, holding up the roofs of civilization with their knotted backs. They were the reason that the past was visible to us at all.

  People kept complimenting my friend on her choice of partner—and I know you get it, too. Although people did not say so in so many words, what they meant was that my friend now partook of the powers of the demon FMP without having to experience any of the drawbacks associated with actual demonhood. The demon FMP could (and, presumably, would) share with my friend his occult understanding of the stock market, his ability to produce fire on demand, his talent for translating himself into a fine mist. He liked to hang, shimmering, from the ceilings of crowded subways,
for example. He enjoyed magnetizing coins and possessing small dogs, speaking to us in funny voices through their squinty wet faces. He was an expert in the objectification of souls and had a long-standing social network.

  And this was good for my friend. But the demon FMP alone experienced that terrible period in April when demons undergo new growth in their horns, not to mention the insidious agony that comes of eternal life.

  My friend seemed to understand the trade-offs, as well as society’s position on the matter. She took it all in stride. “I know he’s an infernal demiurge, but he’s actually just a nice guy.”

  Everyone grinned hard.

  My friend wasn’t talking to us, anyway. She was describing her own happiness, which had its limits. We wanted to believe that she knew more than we did, but, in truth, even my friend did not know where things were going to go.

  Now, my friend had mentioned to me, at some point during the time when she was engaged to the venerable FMP but not yet married, that there is a little-known fact about demons, which is that they have two different names, or sets of names, given FMP’s tripart moniker. There is the name by which they are known to humans, and the one by which they are known among themselves. My friend said that at some point during a certain particularly poignant night of passion and spooning, the demon FMP had let slip the fact of the existence of his other name, his real name, the name by which he was known among demons.

  “It must be hard,” I said, “going all those millennia.”

  She was reserved. “I’m not his first human, you know.”

  I was doing my best not to imagine whatever it was that transpired between my friend and her supernatural other on the carnal plane. “So, what is it?”

  “You mean, his real name?”

  I nodded.

  My friend seemed to contemplate my lack of inhibition. It wasn’t the same thing as rudeness, and I think that she was wondering if one day this lack of tact would destroy me—or if, because of it, I was destined to live an unusual life.

  I kept going. I said, “Wasn’t I there that night you recited Shakespeare to Thom Velez in the motel hot tub? Didn’t I hold your hair until 9 a.m.?”

  My friend blushed. I could tell she loved me.

  “Won’t I be there,” I pursued, “after everything, even when he’s gone?”

  “But you realize”—my friend was daintily reaching for her phone—“that he’s never going to, um, your euphemism, ‘be gone’?”

  My friend thumbed through something or other.

  “I’ll die before him,” my friend continued, gazing into her iPhone 8, which was encased in a piece of plastic designed to resemble marble. “You know?”

  So she never did tell me her fiancé’s demon name.

  But I still found out. I’m sure you understand: I always do.

  It was after their wedding. I was in the supermarket, the one at the corner of _____ and _____, assessing the rows of cherry tomatoes. I lifted multiple pints, gazed up into their see-through bottoms searching for fuzz. And there, suddenly, FMP was. I saw him out of the corner of my eye; it was the blueness of his legs, which appeared weirdly white or violet in the afternoon light. He was tearing pieces off a glistening danish, popping them into his maw as he engaged a young artist whom I recognized as the subject of a recent Artforum pick in a lazy chat pertaining to the shop and, one had to assume, eternal damnation.

  FMP was staring right at me.

  I stared right back.

  I knew it was weird but I couldn’t help myself. I directed my gaze firmly and robustly back to the bottom of the tomato container I was holding up. I knew well it was the wrong thing to do. An ambitious parent had long ago instructed me, specifically and in detail, never to look a demon in their eyes and look away again without acknowledging the encounter. It was a gross offense. But this was exactly what I had done. FMP had seen me, and I had seen his yellow eyes that basked calmly and yellow-ly in their furred sockets. I recalled that line of Edgar Allan Poe’s: “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.” It’s from “The Raven,” something I once memorized in an institutional context. I often remark to myself regarding Poe’s dorky specificity: His eyes (the raven’s) have the appearance of a demon’s (eyes!), and, meanwhile, the demon, and not his eyes, is dreaming. . . . Because grammar and syntax are real! Life is not all about magic and deities, even if it sometimes seems like it is, whether due to one’s liquid laudanum habit (have a nice jarful on your afternoon stroll and get ready to unleash some neo-gothic lyrics!) or one’s best friend’s marriage to a minion of Dis. Edgar Allan Poe, for one, understood that you do need to know whether it’s the demon who’s dreaming or just its eyes. He would never have been so stupid as to do what I just did.

  Anyway, there I was staring into the glossy redness of miniature tomatoes, themselves not unlike a bunch of disembodied eyes, when I smelled FMP’s sulfurous approach.

  “Well, hello,” said he.

  I laughed weakly. “Just researching the ways of very small nightshades!”

  FMP reacted with solemnity. “Of course.” It was always difficult to ascertain if he might be joking, and at this moment the ambiguity was daunting, slimy. “I thought I’d say ‘hi.’” FMP smiled, releasing a fascinating, hideous stench from between his peg-like teeth. “By the way, it’s come to my attention that there was something you wanted to know.”

  I was sure I did not know what he meant.

  “About me? Or have you forgotten so soon? I was extremely touched that you were interested in my True Name.” The way he said it, it had to be capitalized.

  “Um, not sure?”

  “Oh no. You’re sure, you shallow wretch. Even if I were not the life partner of a being with whom you are bonded through shared trauma, nearly identical socioeconomic standing, and level of physical attractiveness, as well as geographic proximity, I’d still know. It was obvious in your desperate attempt to avoid this very encounter. You’re a coward,” FMP told me. “Yet it alleviates the torment of my archaic burden somewhat to watch you squirm. Thank you for that. I like your superficially independent, spineless style, you immature female specimen,” and here he also reeled off my credit score, Social Security number, number of porcelain vs. gold tooth fillings, and the date on which I was currently scheduled to die.

  It’s not, by the way, like this was an anomalous encounter with FMP. He was constantly like this, reminding you of your mortality plus vulnerability to identity theft. A lot of people seemed to find this charming, a cool party trick, but it had occurred to me that this behavior must have been going on with him for centuries if not geologic eras, and I didn’t find FMP all that original, even in his omniscience.

  “Right again,” said I.

  FMP glittered with malice. All his hairs stuck out. He was having a great time. “I know,” he let me know, “that you want what’s mine.”

  I shrugged but had to go fondle some nearby fennel in order to hide the trembling in my hands.

  “I’m going to tell you my True Name,” FMP whisper-shouted. “Then you will know it!” It was all extremely mechanical and ancient. It was the best and the most unpleasant thing. It is such an event to speak with a demon! “My True Name,” FMP hissed across a heap of broccoli rabe, “is 27.”

  “Wait,” I said, “what?”

  “Twenty-seven,” FMP repeated.

  “As in, the number?”

  FMP looked annoyed. “No, it just sounds like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Twenty-seven?” I repeated.

  FMP, a.k.a. 27, was glancing around the store. He seemed concerned that he had made a mistake.

  “27,” I muttered to myself. “27.” I couldn’t believe it. I think I must have wandered unceremoniously off, because the next thing I can remember I was standing on the sidewalk.

  And, just to say, if you thought my encounter with FMP/27 was startling, which, granted, it was, I don’t quite know how to explain the subsequent scenario.

&n
bsp; It was how he looked, because that’s always part of it. But that wasn’t all. There was also this quality about him, a kind of un-believability, and I think I can point to it in this moment, when it was still fresh. I was probably squinting into a device, trying to refresh my email.

  “Hi,” he said. “Sorry to bother you. Were you just in the market over there?” Note that he did not say “supermarket,” just “market.” Note also that he was an otherworldly being. Now that he was present, the light seemed not to originate in the sky but rather from somewhere on the inside of him. “I’m so sorry,” he said again. “Many apologies.” It’s impossible to describe his voice. It was soft, delicately wilted, but also it was like the mighty crash of apocalyptic hailstorms, jet engines, stampeding mares.

  I nodded. Probably I made one of those incoherent noises of assent that have become so popular in postwar America. “Yeah,” I said. “Unhuhn. Mmhmm. Heh!” I was a moron, typical of my time.

  The being smiled. “I thought it was you. I’d like to speak with you. I’d like to know you.” Please note how this was extremely direct. He was tactless, just like me.