Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  Leaving her with my questions, I went into the kitchen and made my coffee. I sat down on the couch with it and lit a smoke. She had not moved from where she stood.

  With a wave of faintly disorienting presentiment, I felt as if I had been here before. Then I inwardly laughed at myself. Of course I had been here before, I told myself: I lived here.

  “And it doesn’t mean anything to you? You don’t know what it means?”

  She spoke with her back to me. She looked great in her blue jeans.

  “No, not really. Just crazy talk. Maybe it meant something to me when I wrote it. If it did, I forgot what it was, because it didn’t mean anything by the time I found it there.” I drank some coffee, drew some smoke. “Why?” I repeated. “What’s the big deal?”

  No, not just been here before. Been here, in this very same moment, with this same cup of coffee and this same cigarette, in this same conversation.

  I looked out the window. It appeared to be a lovely day. The sky was blue, the light of the sun was like that of soft-glowing hammered gold.

  It was then that I remembered the dream that had wakened me with a current of panic.

  Suddenly she moved. Putting down her cup of coffee near mine, she went to her big black shoulder bag.

  “Because,” she said. There was an edge of distress in her voice.

  Digging into her bag, she took from it a small leather-bound journal and leafed through it in what appeared to be a great hurry for a minute or more. Then she stopped, stared down at one of its pages.

  “Because,” she said again. She brought the journal to me, held it out for me to take from her. As I did so, she pointed to one of the pages to which it lay open. “Here,” she said. “Read this.” The distress in her voice was more pronounced.

  The entry was dated. As I began to read, she told me what I already knew by looking at the date: “That was about three weeks before I met you.” She took her coffee and sat down beside me with a deep nervous breath as I read what was written:

  “Weird dream. Couldn’t move. Lost in the dark. Like a tunnel. Somebody spoke to me in a language I couldn’t understand. He was dressed like an ancient Egyptian. Then I could understand him and I said something in the same language. Can’t remember what we said. I had become somebody else. Then I wasn’t anybody at all. I wasn’t in the tunnel anymore. I was in a tree. High grass all around. I was a big leopard in a big tree. A lot of sun but a lot of shade. I felt sleepy. Where were my children? Then I was still a big leopard in a big tree but I was thinking like a human. I remembered kneeling by a river, a lake, an ocean, something, and praying. Then I was back in the tunnel again and I didn’t know who or what I was. I began to move. I knew that if I moved I would get out of where I was. More like I was being moved. Very slowly. Floating very slowly. Toward some kind of light. And I was praying something again. Or chanting something. Or maybe just a voice inside me. I was moving so slowly I didn’t have to breathe. I felt like I knew something that was more important than anything I knew. I forgot it but could remember it. Something about eternity. I understood eternity. Something like that. Can’t remember. Then”—I turned the page—“I felt something great start to embrace me. Like big arms or something. But soft. Like whatever I was floating in or through was comforting me. Then I felt the light would not be there and I wished I could get up. I wished I could get out of there because something I remembered about what I knew about eternity scared me. Something bad. Can’t remember. Very weird dream. Didn’t really turn into a nightmare but came close. Don’t even know if I was really asleep or half asleep and just imagining. Weird!”

  Then there were some mundane jottings about classes and clothes. I stared at what I had just read. Even in my state of well-being, grace, and strength I found it unsettling. I looked at her. I was at a loss for words. She apparently was too.

  There had to be an explanation. I had written what I had written, what I must have written, and she had certainly written what she had written before each of us had known that the other existed. Yes, there had to be an explanation. But there was none.

  “Are you sure you wrote what you did when you say you did?” she asked.

  “I am very sure,” I said. “And I’m very sure that I never saw what you wrote. The only time I ever looked into your bag was the time I wanted to see that Hesse book.” Reverting to old habit, and also perhaps because of the unsettled abstraction I was experiencing, I said the name wrong. That did not matter. “And the only thing in that bag I ever snooped at was that suicide thing. That’s the absolute truth. Even if I’m confused about when I wrote it—or, I should say, when it appeared on the desk that morning—I know there’s no way it’s connected to what you wrote.”

  “What do you mean: ‘there’s no way it’s connected’?” Her voice rose. I realized too late that I had used the wrong words. “We had the same dream,” she went on. “Or we experienced the same thing, the same vision, or whatever you want to call it. I wrote mine down in my journal. You, because you’re some great fucking writer, wrote it down as some weird fucking poetry. But it’s the same thing.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. I was about to say that I could not write as well as what was written on the sheet of paper on the desk, but I did not say it. I just sat there.

  “This is really fucking weird,” she said. “It gives me the creeps.”

  She took one of my cigarettes, put it in her mouth, and took a few drags before she spoke again:

  “I mean, I don’t believe in the supernatural or anything like that. At least I didn’t think I did. But it’s like…”

  She obviously did not want to finish what she had begun to say. It was as if she did not want to hear herself say whatever it was she was thinking; as if giving voice to her feelings would make them more real, and as if she feared doing so. She finished smoking the cigarette in silence. Then very calmly she said:

  “I think we’re the same person.” She took another cigarette and lit it. “The same soul. Whatever.” She drew smoke, exhaled it. “I’m not talking about in any romantic sense. I’m talking about, like—boo! Two bodies, same person.”

  She looked to me, awaiting a response.

  “Is that so bad?” I said.

  “I don’t know about ‘bad,’ ” she said, her voice once again rising, “but it sure as hell scares the shit out of me.” She inhaled. “It means that I’m talking to you but I’m really talking to myself. It means that I’m sleeping with you but I’m really sleeping alone. It means that you’re sucking my blood but you’re really sucking your own. No way I can get my mind around any of that.”

  As I listened to her, I felt that her thoughts were spinning dizzily out of control, that she was thinking herself into a kind of mental whiplash trauma. And as her thoughts spun more out of control, she expressed them more rapidly, skidding to a halt only to say:

  “It means that when you die, that’s when I die.”

  This was where I was impelled to speak. I knew that I was become a god, but I knew that I would remain always of partly human nature, mortality-bound, a demigod. I also knew that there was neither rhyme nor reason to whom and when death called. But I was more than forty years older than she, and I could not, would not have her believe that her life would end when mine ended.

  “Now you’re going crazy with this,” I said. “Even if we are different parts of the same person, the same soul—not the same person, the same soul, as you’re saying, but different parts of each other that we were lucky enough to find and reunite—we were born apart, at different times, in different places, and we’ll die at different times. It’s not like I was sitting around waiting for you to show up for forty years, and you didn’t know I existed either. You’re talking about some words on some paper, and you’re getting all bent out of shape.”

  “I can’t believe you.” She slowly shook her head and dismally, hopelessly laughed. “You’re sitting there with blood on your face, with a goddamn leopard skull on top of
your television, and you’re telling me that two people undergoing the same, experiencing the same, the same—the same whatever—at the same time without even knowing each other—you’re telling me that this is normal.”

  “I didn’t say that. What I said was—”

  “Please go wash your face. Between you and that skull and all this leopard stuff—”

  I got up, went and washed my face. She was right. It did look grisly.

  “What I said was—” I did not know what I had meant to follow those words. I wished only that I had kept that piece of paper in the drawer. Not that it frightened me anymore. As I grew stronger and more serene, nothing did. But if I had kept it out of sight, she would not now know of my whatever-it-was—my experience, as she put it—and I would not know of hers. Ignorance was bliss. But we were in forfeit of that ignorance now. The strangeness of truth no longer surprised me or intimidated me. I wanted only to restore this morning to calm.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I said.

  “Right now I don’t know what I believe in,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “a lot of the human population does. If you go outside of the big three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—reincarnation is central to all other major forms of religious belief. And even Sufi Muslims believe in it. Even those who dissociate themselves from religion foster ideas of it. The only religion, outside of ancient paganism, that ever struck me as being steeped in wisdom, rooted in it, is Ch’an Buddhism. ‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.’ And you’ve got it there. They don’t dwell on it, but it’s there.”

  Did I know what I was talking about? Did it matter? What was that other one, that other great Ch’an proverb? There were a lot of them. “Those who seek for the Truth should realize that there is nothing to seek.” A lot of them. “The teaching of the truth is not the truth.” Yes, a lot of them. So let me speak of the truth.

  “Maybe it’s true. Maybe reincarnation is real. Maybe what a lot of people have always accepted is actually true. Maybe you and I crossed paths somehow before in different incarnations. Maybe what’s so strange to us would be looked upon as completely natural by others. As a religious experience even. Maybe this shows us that reincarnation is real, and that sometimes we have obscure inklings of past lives.”

  “But the migration of souls isn’t supposed to be the same funhouse for everybody. The Egyptian thing, the leopard—it’s all the same for both of us.”

  She had me there. But what mattered to me was that she was becoming calm again, becoming her usual self again. Did I believe anything I had said? That was neither here nor there. All that mattered was that she, and this morning, were being restored and reclaimed.

  “Do you know what really scares me?” she said, but she now spoke in a voice that was not scared. Serious, yes. Scared, no. “What really scares me is that this is the tunnel, this is the long dark passage. This is it now.”

  KEITH LOOKED GOOD. CLEAN, HALE, AND HAPPY. WE SAT in a back booth at the Minetta Tavern. I had known this joint now through three of its incarnations. I remembered the last days of the old place, which had been there since the late thirties. I remembered when Taka had it. My friend Cami and I had first encountered each other here in the days when Taka had it. I had just come back from Cyprus and my head was shaved. I was at the bar late one afternoon drinking a bottle of Amstel Light, which meant that I did not consider myself to be drinking at the time. And from out of nowhere came this big voluptuous redhead with a smile as open as the Colorado skies whence she had come, pointed at the bottle, told the bartender she’d have one of those, and introduced herself. We got to know each other pretty well. Even went to see the Doctor together one time. How many years had we known each other now? How many years since we met? Ten? Twelve? More? I couldn’t remember. But she remained one of my most cherished friends. And now this new incarnation. It was the most upscale I had ever seen this place look. It was good that they had kept the old caricatures and stuff on the walls, retaining something of the spirit of the place going back more than seventy years.

  “Maundy Thursday,” said Keith offhandedly, as if about to begin a tale.

  And so it was. Maundy Thursday. The Last Supper. We both studied the menu.

  “Let’s eat,” I said, “for tomorrow the Crucifixion.”

  Keith ordered some ungodly-priced steak. I asked the waiter what made the Black Label Burger so different, at twenty-six bucks, from the Minetta Burger, priced at a mere seventeen bucks. When told that the twenty-six-dollar hamburger was made from a mix of dry-aged rib eye, skirt steak, short rib, and brisket, I went for it, along with an order of roasted bone marrow to start. To wash down the dead meat, a bottle of Chorey-les-Beaune 2006, a good red Burgundy that was better than a lot of the shit that glass-sniffing suckers paid ten or twenty times as much for.

  Olivier had told me that one could drink while on baclofen, for one would then be drinking unbridled by the chemistry of craving and compulsion. Free of the snake in the alky’s skull, so to speak. I had been taking thirty milligrams a day for a good time now. I was about to see if he was right, at least when it came to this alky’s skull.

  “To resurrection,” I said, raising my glass.

  “To resurrection,” said Keith.

  We talked about a lot of things. One night some years ago Keith had telescoped the history of rock ’n’ roll into a rushing narrative that began with a certain classical composer, swept through the blues, the early years of rock ’n’ roll, and ended with a crash in the midst of his own then-present circumstances. I had afterward forgotten the name of the classical composer, then thought I recalled it. Paganini. Seeking to confirm this with Keith, I had asked him if this was right. Confessing with a laugh that he himself had forgotten which composer he had been talking about, it turned out that I remembered more of his narrative than he did. I had asked him several times since, and had long given up all hope that he would ever remember. Such a great and breakneck roller-coaster ride through time; and now with its starting point severed and forever lost to both the teller and the told. So the name of the forgotten composer had become a running joke of sorts.

  “Heard any good Paganini lately?” I asked.

  “I hear he’s got a new one coming out.”

  “Speaking of new ones, did you ever finish that ‘Just Because’ thing?”

  The last time I had seen him had been at a studio in the Flatiron district. “Just what the world needs,” he had said with a laugh at himself. “Another song called ‘Just Because.’ ” Sitting on a folding chair in the control room, in front of the control board, putting a pick in his mouth, then not removing it from his mouth as he played the electric guitar loudly over a loud playback of what he had previously recorded; the engineers, who had expected him to be in the empty studio that was prepared for him and not here in the control room, trying to record him on the fly, ending up with recurrent eruptions of distortion that bizarrely enhanced the noise of the guitar.

  “One of these days,” he said, “one of these days.”

  “What about the Hoagy Carmichael album? Are you ever going to decide it’s done and release it?”

  It was true. He must have been working on that album of Hoagy Carmichael songs for a dozen or more years now. It was great, what I had heard of it. But I was beginning to suspect that it might not ever see the light of day, that it would fall victim and be lost to some idea of impossible perfection that Keith had imposed on it.

  “Why don’t you write another book?” he flung back, as if to turn the tables on me.

  “That’s a good question.”

  He had a sly grin on his face that seemed to say: See, you already know the answers to what you’re asking.

  We raised our glasses again.

  It was the best hamburger I ever fucking tasted. At least since that dive—what was the name of that place? May’s?—on the outskirts of Tampa forty years ago, and I may have
remembered that one only because I was starving at the time. It was the rib eye and the short rib fat that made it, I figured. If only all these fucking fancy-ass joints would stop serving the same bland shoestring French fries and start making some good old-fashioned steak fries again like they made in the best steak joints in France.

  I was surprised a bit at how exceptionally delicious this hamburger tasted. The cheese and fruit I had eaten earlier in the day had none of the Eucharistic euphoria of taste that I had come to expect from the new wonders that enwrapped my senses. In fact, my serenity and my strength, as well as my heightened senses, had seemed to fade fast from me today. This struck me as very odd, especially as I had glutted myself for two nights in a row. Had what passed this morning with Melissa thrown me off more than I believed? Or was it something else? I had another sort of craving. After the last two nights, it made no sense.

  Usually we ended up eating in a place that let us smoke. But this obviously wasn’t going to be one of them, no matter how far in the back and hidden away from other customers we were, no matter who the fuck Keith was. We went outside to have a cigarette. Standing against the brick wall on the Minetta Street side of the corner, Keith watched a young man carrying a guitar case pass nearby on MacDougal Street.

  “I wonder if that thing’s empty,” he mused.

  We strolled a few steps down the street and turned in to Minetta Lane. Beyond the light that hung from the corner post, the short narrow passage that wound out of sight at the next bend was dark and quiet. Keith voiced a line of doo-wop into the night air, as if testing the acoustics.

  “Did you ever drink blood?” I asked him.

  “A bit here and there through the years, I imagine. Mostly my own. Swigging from crystal I’d cracked with my previous swig.” He cast another line of doo-wop into the air, then looked me directly in the eyes. “Why?”

  I looked directly back at him, in a way that said: You already know the answer to what you’re asking.