Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  I lugubriously composed words, lugubriously enunciated them. It was like moving heavy stones.

  “So, my friend from here and there and everywhere, my friend of many and many years, Devil mine, grant me four and twenty years more, to live in voluptuous happiness. Surely that is yours to spare and give me.”

  “I would,” he said pensively. “But it is not what you want. It is not life or happiness that you wish. It is death that you crave. Look at yourself, look into yourself. It is death that you pursue. You are not one of those, the great common multitude who rush to obliterate their lives, whose beginning is their end: a brief, nervous twitch of panic and dread between cunt and grave, and nothing more. But so much of you has been self-killed. You have been your own attrition. This is why I say I am your better half. I am what of you has endured. I am what of you stays you from the grave. But if truth be told, you seek death, not the years of life and happiness for which you petition me. It is death that you love. I feel that to keep you from it would be to deny you the true desire in you that goes unuttered.”

  “Is that why you force drink upon me now? To kill me?” I could feel the anger in the moved stones of my own voice.

  “I force no drinks on you. I merely serve you. I give you only what you want.”

  “Then give me the four and twenty years more. If not of happiness, then of misery; of this.”

  “I feel that what remains of you, the you that is apart from me, can take care of that.” He sipped. “But you can forget about those four and twenty years.” He sipped again, then lit a smoke. “You will write three more books, and then you will die. Then to your true love you will go.”

  “And what if I do not write three books more? I’ve had it with that, anyway. I don’t want to write three books more.”

  “Then you will die anyway.”

  “When? Not tonight?”

  “Is that disappointment or relief, eagerness or fear? No, not tonight.”

  My glass was empty again. His was still almost half full. He asked politely, “Should you like another?”

  I wanted to say no, but I was not strong enough to say no. I took the drink he brought, and I drank from it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Nice socks. Very nice socks indeed.”

  “So tell me. Is there a soul?”

  He began to say something, then hesitated with an “oh,” then laughed a slight laugh. “Excuse me. I had mentioned socks, and I thought for a moment that you were asking if a sock had a sole, which of course it does, so I was thrown off for a second. You were talking about the other kind, that breath-of-life thing, mortal to some ways of thinking, immortal to others.” He shrugged. “I know only the wisdom that you have forgotten, or that you still retain. Plus a few things I’ve picked up on my own. Ways of thinking. Thought. The root of all evil.”

  “Picked up on your own? If you’re my better half, how do you pick up things on your own, without my picking them up?”

  “Because I’m not only your better half. I’m the better half of everything, all that was and all that is, and all that ever shall be.”

  “You talk more like God than the Devil.”

  “You can call me that, too. I don’t mind it at all.”

  “I thought the Devil would be good for more than some imitation of Robert Preston in The Music Man.”

  “Ah, another sucker for conjuring tricks.”

  He began to sing to the melody of a vaguely familiar Irish air:

  Oh, make me a pentacle on your floor, Gertie,

  Oh, do me wicked black magic galore, Gertie…

  An unlit cigarette hung from my mouth, and from the side of his own mouth there shot a laser-like blaze of fire that halted at the tip of that cigarette. I drew smoke. After this unsettling ignivomous feat, he drew a cigarette from his golden case, placed it between his lips, and lit it casually with his golden lighter.

  “How about a clandestine jaunt, in the blink of an eye, to the pope’s privy chamber? We shall be quite unseen, I assure you. And I can also assure you of some vintages in the papal wine vault that few have ever tasted.”

  I felt all strength ebbing from me. No. Worse. I felt all life ebbing from me.

  “Oh, well,” he sighed. “World-weary indeed is he who declines that one.”

  My head was lowered, and I peered to him. I tried to say something, not even knowing what I was trying to say.

  “The puking sphinx,” he said. “Remember that one?”

  More than forty years ago, the poet Ed Sanders had shown me an old engraving of one of the most bizarre and arresting images I ever saw: a frontal view of an open-mouthed vomiting sphinx. It made quite an impression on me, as it had on him, and seemed to bespeak all manner of lost, unspeakable mystical powers and arcane, unknowable meaning. Just a few years ago, never having forgotten that image or the impression it made on me, I asked Ed where he had got it, where it had come from. He remembered it well, too, but could recall only that it must have come from an old volume that he no longer possessed and whose title and any other details were lost to him as well. Yes, that old engraving seemed to reveal all while revealing nothing. The puking sphinx.

  “I could take you there,” he said, “there and back, in a blink as well, to confront that wondrous thing, and not as an engraved image, but to see and touch and feel in the reality of this very moment.”

  How could he even know of this?

  “But that would, I must admit, be rather a cheap shot, for what you took to be the engraved image of a puking sphinx was indeed merely an engraved image of one of the four water-spouting sphinxes sculpted in 1858 at the lower basin of the Fontaine du Palmier in Paris. It was an old engraving of one of those sphinxes you saw. The etched spewing water was to your eyes a spewing of a different sort. And from there grew the great mystical icon that has captivated you for all your adult life. Folly, fancy, and falsehood. But, nonetheless, I could take you there. If we’re lucky—six hours later, daylight there now—the fountain will be working and the water will be spouting.”

  I shook my head as rapidly as I could, as if to clear it. It made me dizzy and nauseous. I drank. I leaned forward and labored to work my feet back into shoes.

  “And where to now?” he said. “To bottomless perdition, there to dwell?” He took a sip. “Or there perchance to die?”

  I had got my shoes on, and it was taking all my concentration to try to tie them. I was panting with the effort. His words broke my concentration, flustered me, angered me with frustration.

  “Look,” I said, “you only want to give me what I want? Gimme ten kilos of gold. Twenty-four karat, triple nine-point-nine.

  “Credit Suisse or Johnson Matthey?”

  “I don’t care.”

  I returned to my shoelace, but was distracted by the grotesque bulging of his neck. The first of ten heavy kilograms of gold hit the floor with a loud slam.

  “If I were a prick,” he said, “I would have shit them out.” He rubbed his neck and coughed modestly, then took a sip. I stared at the gold. My shoelaces were tied.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Think nothing of it,” he said. “ ’Tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.”

  “All the same, thank you. Not a bad pastime, sitting around spitting up gold.”

  “Oh,” he said lackadaisically, “never cared much for it myself.” He began to softly sing “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”

  “Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, that other fellow—what was his name?—Ray Henderson. Nineteen twenty-seven. Everybody and his mother recorded that one. What a bundle they must have made with it.

  “That DeSylva was something, all right. He also made a bundle with ‘Wishing Will Make It So.’ And they call the blues the Devil’s music.” He sang again, softly.

  The best lies in life seem true…

  I stood unsteadily. Looking down at the gold bars on the floor made me feel better. I coughed out one of those rat-things, a small one. I wipe
d my mouth.

  “It’s good to see you smile,” he said.

  “I feel good,” I said.

  “I’d hate to see you feel bad.”

  He cast his own eyes to the gold on the floor. “So,” he said, “off to the melter for the gelt through your swarthy-complected intermediary, is that it? And so it is that Jew and Christian and Muslim become one, brought together by greed and stealth. Selah, selah.

  “Shall we have one for the road?”

  He brought more drinks.

  “What’s the difference between Satan and the Devil?” I asked.

  “Words, words. Nothing but words. The former, as you should know, is a word rooted commonly in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The latter, in Greek and Latin alone.”

  He took a sip, lit a cigarette, went on.

  “You really are a fool for words. Immersed as you are in the wisdom of Ch’an, you seem to hew your way through it, embracing what you wish, discarding what you wish. You bear close the wisdom regarding the foolishness of thought, but not the wisdom that follows close after: ‘How can one obtain truth through words?’ I am not really criticizing you, for, to the best of my knowledge, no one has had the wisdom to counter this wisdom by asking what it is if not just another bunch of words.” He raised his glass. “Thoughts. Words. Hang them and fuck them. Let’s just drink.”

  “Save me,” I heard myself say.

  “Save you?”

  “Yeah. Save me. Enough of this. I want to go back to where I was. I don’t want to go through the hell of life again just so that I can return to the wonder of those butterflies, those fireflies, that one lone blue jay, the magic in the clouds, the sense of illimitableness that only a child could know. Just take me back to where I was not so very long ago, when serenity and rebirth were in my grasp. No, don’t take me back there. Bring that back to me, in this here and now.”

  “Serenity and rebirth were in your grasp? Nothing was in your grasp but a whip handle and the haunches and loins and thighs of females as lost to themselves as you were to yourself.” He ruminated, snorted. “Drinking their blood to gain their youth. From what comic book did you get that ridiculous African ritual notion from?”

  “It was real. For a while I was well, better than—”

  Then, again, cutting me off this time, that lilting voice of his, which now was maddening to me:

  Just keep on wishing and care will go…

  I cut him off in turn. “You know I’m telling you the truth,” I declared. “You know it was real. How can you say it’s not happiness that I wanted, that it’s not happiness that I want still?”

  “Because you can’t lie to me. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to all of yourself.”

  “Save me.”

  “Save you from what? Long ago ere this you would have slain yourself had not the sweet pleasures I gave you conquered deep despair.”

  He kicked at one of the bars of gold on the floor.

  “You unappreciative prick,” he said. “Though your brain can barely function, you gather the poetic bullshit to slur of butterflies and blue jays and magic clouds and happiness. You beg for salvation, and the while all you crave is gold and self-annihilation—a most odd combination as I see it. As the universal proverb has it, there are no pockets in a shroud. And you hardly need money to hasten your self-annihilation. There’s no more smack about the place, but you’ve still got all that good old crushable oxycodone and a bag of insulin syringes right there on the shelf. And there’s all that liquor still there waiting to be drunk. And all those other pills and shit you’ve got tucked away.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “What you want to do can be done here. Besides, there are others out there.” He cleared his throat. The pitch of his voice changed slightly as he delivered the quotation: “ ‘I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.’ That quite fits your own feelings, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I know that one. Henry James. Or was it Somerset Maugham?”

  “No evidence that either of them ever said it. I’m the one who said it, whispered it long ago to a barkeep in Trafalgar Square. If either of them said it, they got it from that barkeep. A moment of weary discontent, of wanting to turn my back on and turn away from it all. A moment such as this.” He sighed. “But such is not one of the conjuring tricks allowed me. One might say that Nature casts her lots.” He sighed again. “And you want four and twenty more years of this. Why not four and twenty thousand more years? Fool. If I had my druthers, if I had the powers of a storm god of olden myth, I’d blow it all asunder this very moment.” Then a nuance of cheer entered his voice. “Or after the next drink, in any case.”

  I belched and sneezed in sickly counterpoint. Some sort of bitter bile-like substance rose like a burning in my gut, and ran from my nostrils and gurgled from my mouth onto the front of my shirt. I held my stomach, for there seemed to be a pool of churning acid within it. With my free hand, I wiped at the slobber from my nose, lips, and chin. My body was rejecting and expelling the whiskey. Or maybe, worse, it was the water. I needed to switch to beer, to see if that would stay down. The rising acid in my gut would not subside. I felt my stomach constrict and convulse. Tremors ran through me.

  “Well, pal o’ mine,” said he, “if we’re to venture forth into society, no matter how low, I suggest you don a bib and diaper and try a change of trousers. Besotted, piss-sodden, befouled, and adrool. Thou biddest thyself adieu.” He tsk-tsked as he beheld me.

  I tried to speak, to force words through the rising bilious tide of acid that would have swallowed them in its undertow. Only guttural sounds and a spittle of vocules came out.

  With two shaking hands I raised the near-empty glass to my mouth and tried to swallow. Sour saburral vomit spewed from my mouth and nostrils.

  “Ah, in sooth, the puking sphinx!” he commented with a celebratory note in his voice.

  “Gimme a beer,” I demanded, wheezing. Words after all had come.

  He rose, returned with a cold bottle of Asahi Super Dry, put it in my outstretched quivering hand. It felt good against the skin of my sweating palm and fingers.

  “Enjoy it,” he said. “It’s the last one.”

  I pursed my lips and sipped tentatively. I belched deeply. It stayed down. The last one. I didn’t ask myself how one who could emit gold kilos couldn’t cough up a cold bottle of beer or two. I just opened my mouth wider and drank more freely. I belched, and my whole body shook when I did so—but the beer stayed down. I inhaled slightly—I could not take a deep breath—and lit a cigarette.

  “Gimme Lorna.”

  “Oh,” he said dismissively, “why her? Lorna. That boring crucified bitch in her peek-a-boo slicker. She ought to put a poor box at her door.”

  “Lorna,” I said. “She would help me.”

  He waved his hand, with a more decisive, albeit silent, dismissiveness.

  “Though I must say,” he reflected calmly, “I did rather enjoy that night with the stun gun.”

  Yes, that night. It was her idea. I never asked her where she’d got the damned thing. A slim sort of two-pronged thing. At barely five inches it was mostly all handle, and weighed less than a pound. I had never held one in my hand before. It was black plastic with Z-FORCE SM and a lightning bolt and 100,000V printed on it, and it felt like a remote control, a small one, with most of its slight weight coming from the single nine-volt battery within it. She herself had no experience with one, either. She said she had been told that this was one of the lowest-powered stun guns available; that even the three-hundred-thousand-volt model was considered a lightweight. A hundred thousand volts didn’t seem so weak to me, I said. But she just smiled, said “come on,” and told me what she wanted; and it sounded good to me.

  After our usual routine, as she began to climax spread-eagled on her cross, I stroked her sopping cunt with the plaited leather stock of the whip, hooped the whip over her head, placed a thick length of it in her open, eager mouth, whic
h jerked forward for it. I stepped back, watching her head move to the sounds of her breathing deeply as she chewed and tongued the whip; seeing her sweet bared buttocks clench and unclench beneath the raised and bunched raincoat; watching and hearing it intensify.

  I switched off the safety on the stun gun and when I heard the garbled feral scream “Now!” from round the whip in her mouth, I swooped my hand fast and stuck the two contact probes of the damned thing upward directly to her pussy for barely a second. She was praying for a clit-hit, and maybe she got one. The whip fell from her mouth and she screamed again as the jolt hit her, sending her body into a seizure of sorts before she passed out.

  It was, she said later, cradled in my arms, the most unbelievable orgasm she ever felt. She offered to shoot me in the cock as I came in her face, but I demurred and ultimately declined. With the safety switched back on, she fell softly asleep sucking it like a beloved childhood thing.

  “Yes, quite an evening, that,” he said with a smile.

  “Lorna,” I said.

  “Oh, enough of that. And why is it that you can only reach out for another person when you can barely reach out for another drink? What do you fear?”

  “Death,” I said, wandering back to his earlier words.

  “Oh, that old farthing fuck-all of endless drivel. No. What are you really afraid of? Answer that in truth and we shall celebrate it, and you will be saved.”

  I drank the last of the beer. My mind was blank. There was nothing in me. Nothing but weakness, sickness, dread, and desperation. And together they were a black emptiness. Nothing. I could not answer him. All I could say was “No more beer?”

  He sighed deeply, gravely, a bit whimsically.

  “No,” he said. “No more beer.”