Me and the Devil: A Novel (13 page)

I felt like sharing this morning. Sharing. That’s what they called it. A very big A.A. word. As if unloading your bullshit was a gift unto others. Then again, if it inspired somebody else to do the same, maybe it was. I wanted to tell of how, earlier that morning, I had woven myself with tortuous knots of circumpressure in a camouflaged attempt to cogitate myself into drinking without even knowing what I was doing. This was how insidiously the alcoholic mind worked. It was like the snake in the fable of the Garden of Eden. That snake was so good at what he did, such a consummate master of deceit, that few even noticed his coup de grâce of transferring the blame for the fall of man from himself to Eve. You could talk about Satan all you wanted. But that snake shot straight out of an alky’s skull.

When I thought of Eve, I thought of Melissa, upon whom I indirectly laid the blame for the fall I myself had very nearly brought about. I got ready to raise my hand. The chair of the meeting acknowledged another raised hand. Then I heard him, before I even saw him. “Hi,” he said, drawing out this simple syllable into a lofty arc of the longest possible duration. “My name’s Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a sex addict.”

Shit. The little cocksucker had not succumbed to AIDS or age. Fuck him and fuck this. I wasn’t going to sit here and listen to him and the gumdrops of self-pity that he dispensed while adjusting himself as if heeding the requests of a photographer but careful
always to keep intact the curl of his prissy, shit-eating Chessy-cat grin. And I wasn’t going to talk to an audience that included him. Better a bunch of filthy, stinking, sick and contagious bums who had come in off the street just to escape the cold. I got up, put a cigarette in my mouth, walked out, and let the door slam behind me. I had already once today barely escaped driving myself to drink. I wasn’t about to risk being driven to drink again, not by somebody else, and surely not by someone like him.

I walked over to Patisserie Claude on West Fourth Street. That was another thing, the proximity to this little place, I liked about the morning meetings on Perry Street. Claude made the best, maybe the only real, croissants in downtown Manhattan. Rich, soft, buttery, flaky, hot from the oven. I got two to go and a cappuccino. I crossed Sheridan Square to the downtown station.

Sometimes I made it to a meeting just in time. Sometimes I escaped a meeting just in time. Today I did both. And I still felt as great as I had felt when I first stepped outdoors this morning. With every breath, in fact, I felt better, stronger, more perceptive. And now I had in one hand a couple of hot croissants in a little bag and in my other a cup of hot cappuccino. I could smell the butter in the pastries, the thick froth in the coffee. I could smell them as if I were tasting them. Never before, in fact, were the scents of such simple pleasures so full and satisfying that I could only wonder with anticipation at the possible new heights I might experience when actually tasting them. I descended the subway stairs with greater agility than I had earlier; adroitly juggled the bag and the coffee, and swiped my card through the turnstile without a thought or a moment’s hesitation as to the movements involved.

The coffee and croissants were still hot when I bounded from the Franklin Street station, quickly walked the two short blocks to my place, and set them down. Three subway stops, some
wintry air, and they were still hot and the spume on the cappuccino had subsided a bit but was still thick and foamy. I had been eating Claude’s croissants for twenty, maybe twenty-five years, and they were always good. But now, as I bit into the first of them, my taste buds bloomed as never before, and my tongue discerned everything in that croissant, the traces of milk, egg, sugar, and especially butter, individually and in sublime concert. I remembered walking most mornings to one of two bakeries not far from where I lived in Paris, on rue du Dragon. These two bakeries sold the best croissants I had ever tasted, and I knew precisely when they came out of the oven. I could not remember those croissants tasting as good as the soft delicious croissant that I stood in my kitchen eating right now, washing down mouthfuls with coffee as if they were the savorous consecrated elements of an unimagined Eucharist of earthly delight.

I thought of the movement of the sparrow’s wings, the faint faraway wind, the flimsy sheet of newspaper in the gutter across the street. I thought of the cold that did not enter me except through deep pleasant breath, the assured musculature in my legs as I moved nimbly, the natural ease of my maneuverings. These croissants, I then realized, were not special. In fact they were, they had to be, inferior to what they had been when I purchased them, and almost certainly not as fine as those superb morning croissants fresh from the ovens of the two patisseries I favored in the sixth arrondissement. The magnificence of these croissants, good as they were, was not in them. It was in me. As I could hear the near-silence of the unseen sparrow’s subdued fluttering wings, the hushed murmur of a wind I could not feel, the faint, almost soundless stirring of newspaper in a gutter not near to me; as I could see and read clearly without my eyeglasses—so I now could taste, relish, and discern the morsels and draughts of what pleased the tongue with a new acuity that raised the mundane pleasure of
these simple croissants and coffee to the sensuous Eucharistic delight I was experiencing.

Last night I had taken a long hot bath and cleaned myself well. Beneath two of my fingernails, however, there remained, almost unnoticeable, slight dark traces. I raised these fingertips to just beneath my nostrils. I could smell the scent of blood. More than that. I could distinguish it as the scent of her blood.

The heightening of my senses and the strengthening of my body, of which in recent weeks I had at times felt passing intimations and inklings, were real. My dulled mind and senses were growing ever more delicately and sharply attuned to every subtlety of every sensation in me and around me. My tired, worn-out body grew ever more kinetic and vigorous.

My body. My soul. My life. I had discarded them. But now I was regaining them. A sound mind in a sound body, as Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages, is often believed to have said in the sixth or seventh century
B.C.
, and as the Roman poet Juvenal, whether or not he stole it from Thales, said in the second century
A.D.
A sound mind in a sound body. All my adult life I had mocked this definition of a well-tempered and happy life. What, I thought, was a sound mind in a sound body but a plain and pretty flower in a plain and pretty vase? The world was full of such parlor-piece lives, I thought. But things were different now. Old dogs sidle with lowered heads and dragging tails toward that at which they once had snarled and bitten. A sound mind in a sound body. This is what I felt myself becoming.

I took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, and brought it to the couch. I found myself looking at my forearm. The skin seemed to be tighter, less parched, less cross-hatched with the witherings of age. The thin, frail veins and the large, wormy veins that visibly pulsed were less protuberant, as if the skin was not only younger-looking but also more solid and substantial. I did
not understand what was happening, but I knew myself to be blessed, to be reentering the realm of rosy health. The deterioration of my flesh and faculties was in remission.

Remission? No. What was happening went far beyond that. The god within me was coming forth. This was not remission. This was apotheosis. My apotheosis. I was becoming a god.

I looked away from my forearm. I lit a cigarette. I looked away from everything. I very slowly nodded, then just as slowly smiled.

T
HE AIR BROUGHT AUGURY ON THE AFTERNOON PRECEDING
the night of the full moon, the eve of the vernal equinox, the spring harvest festival of Isis.

The winds were strong and the sky was overcast, but the weather was otherwise balmy and pleasing; and that morning I had opened a few windows slightly to let in the air of the day. The afternoon light through the gray cloud cover was beginning to diminish when I saw it resting on the sill beneath one of the narrowly open windows. A dried pallid tawny-brown oak leaf.

Living six flights up, with not a tree in sight, I could not recall a leaf entering my home, not even in the late autumn gusts. And the branches of what trees there were in the neighborhood had seemed to be starkly bare since the harshest days of this harsh winter. And the windows I had opened this day were ajar hardly a hand’s-breadth. But there it was, resting and still, awaiting me. The last leaf of winter, on the last full day of winter, on this afternoon preceding the night of the last full moon of winter, this eve of the spring equinox.

The full moon now rising was a rare one, a big and full perigee moon, raising tides as it drew closer to the earth than it had been in eighteen years. This powerful perigean effect on tides and other natural forces had not been so strong in all the years since that long-ago night. Melissa then was in her infancy. Perhaps she had howled at the light of that moon as she lay in her bassinet.

I knew it was an oak leaf. I found its likeness in my little Golden Nature Guide to trees. The oak was sacred to Zeus, god of gods. I seemed to remember that, according to one cosmogony, Zeus and Isis were the true parents of Dionysus. I looked through some books to find confirmation of this, and found that this belief was based on a fragment of Ariston. While looking through the books I searched, I discovered that the grandest of the festivals of Dionysus, the great Dionysia, was held in Athens in late March, at this same time of the Egyptian spring harvest festival of Isis.

In a fleeting reverie of whimsical imagination I envisioned the oak leaf wafting over ocean waves for thousands of years, from ancient sacred grove to the here and now of my windowsill, passing through the veil of time but showing its antiquity through that strange dry pallid tawny-brown that made it appear as delicate as it was enduring.

This was mere dreamy fancy, of course. But the presence of the leaf was not. I placed it carefully on my desk and I looked at it awhile. It was just a fucking dead leaf. But the convergence of all that surrounded it—moon, equinox, gods and goddesses, hallowed tree and hallowed turn of hallowed days—evoked a sense of magnitude, like a precession of some vast unexplored astronomy, of which this leaf was a silent betokening.

As with the return of my youth, I did not understand what was happening. Less so, in fact, because I was at least sure, or believed it to be sure, that my rejuvenation was being nurtured by my physical and spiritual immersion in, and merging with, the vital youth embodied in the vitally youthful flesh of another. I was, so to speak, being born again in the flesh. And in the blood; for I knew, or believed I knew, that this most intimate of acts was at the heart of it all, the most powerful and the highest aspect of our merging and the sustenance I received from that merging. It
seemed like magic, but maybe it was nothing more than simple, science-based physiological cause and effect. The better part of medical knowledge—the better part of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise—lay unknown in plain sight, waiting to be known. Postulate precedes theorem, the empiricism of natural law precedes the formulae of its laboratory explication.

But this, the appearance on this day of what I felt to my bones to be a sign of the supernal, this leaf of augury, was to me a greater mystery. A mystery to whose meaning I had not a clue. Yet I somehow knew that, whatever it was, whatever it meant, it was good. Very, very good.

A new season of my life was upon me. And it would be like no other season of any life that had ever been lived. That’s what that leaf said. And that’s what I knew.

I
SLEPT THROUGH THE EQUINOX THE FOLLOWING EVENING.
I had been awake the previous night, gazing at the big silver moon until early morning, then had slept only a few hours before waking with a feeling of auspicious currents flowing through me. In the late afternoon I drank a cup of coffee, began to feel sleepy, and shuffled to bed to take a nap. It was still light outside. When I got out of bed, it was almost eight o’clock and dark. I had fallen asleep in winter, woken in the spring.

There was still some coffee, quite cold now, in the cup. I drank it, enjoying the subtle changes in taste that time and temperature had brought to it. Hot coffee turned cold had never tasted so good. It also made me aware that this first night of spring was colder than the last night of winter. I turned up the thermostat, but my new boiler, which had failed me through the worst of the winter, gave off no warmth.

Spring was now here, and with it the promise of warmer days to come. But the long winter’s end still lingered in the air. I made more coffee and dug out the boiler manual and specification sheets. The crowded, complicated diagrams and the dense technical terminology concerning the intricacies of the machine’s plumbing and electrical elements were so immediately and overwhelmingly daunting that, before the first sip of coffee, I almost returned the stuff to where I got it. Then I took that sip of coffee, lit a cigarette, and calmly stated to myself the words of Terence: “I am human,
and nothing human is alien to me.” Now of course the boiler was not human, nor were these pages of impenetrable diagrams, charts, and undefined specialist terms. But they were the convoluted product of the convoluted human mind. The alarming sound and fury of an idiot gizmo on the blink, and nothing more. With newly heightened perception, my own enhanced mind raked the detritus from what confronted me.

My coffee was still hot when I figured out how to fix my boiler. I needed to disable what was called the night-setback function. And that was that.