Me and the Devil: A Novel (17 page)

I unlocked the handcuffs, gently massaging the reddened areas of her wrists, to show that I cared. I unlocked the leg irons, stroked the reddened marks above her ankles, again to show her that I cared, but really because it gave me pleasure to fondle the tendons near the base of her slender calf muscles. I did not touch her where I had slashed her, as I felt that any show of caring here would only serve to bring further attention to my misdeeds. She remained silent, and I took this, though awkwardly, to be a good sign.

“How about that Chinese food?” I said.

“Sure.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “You pick it.” Her voice had a vague, lifeless, bereaved quality to it. She walked very slowly to the bathroom. I heard water running. I knew that she was washing blood from herself, maybe from her raincoat as well. Then I heard the shower running.

By then I had ordered the food. I lit a cigarette and looked for something I could use as an ashtray. In the kitchen cupboard I found a pair of two miniature Asian bowls, like the ones they give you to mix the cheap soy sauce with the fake wasabi for sushi in Japanese joints. Fuck it. Function follows form. I would be sure to wash it out good before I left. To show that I was a nice guy, and that I cared. If she didn’t end up throwing me out before I got around to it.

I felt wonderful. Even the soreness and tiredness induced by my exertions were giving way to a balm-like inner restfulness. Even my anxiety over the wrath of Lorna became dreamlike and inconsequential. My communion with her, and my fill of her succoring blood, had brought new rejuvenation, new life; and with
every renewal this rejuvenation and life became stronger and more magical within me. I looked forward to the Chinese food and my next breath with greater anticipation and appreciation than the wretched and the self-appointed inheriting meek of the earth look forward to the envisioned glories of their eternal paradise.

She appeared clean and lovely, in flannel pajamas, her lovely long hair freshly towel-dried.

“How do you feel?” I asked her calmly, as if we were two souls merged and lingering for a single infinite breath. Her wrath would fall unheard and unfelt on one, a god coming into being, who would use it only to rinse and refresh his palate before the Chinese food got here.

“I feel fucking great,” she said.

She smiled beatifically. At that moment I respected and cherished her with all my being, and her happiness was my happiness. I was proud of her, and I was proud of myself for making her feel as she did.

“Don’t worry, I’ll wash this,” I said, grinding my cigarette butt into the little Asian bowl thing.

The Chinaman came. As usual, I had ordered too much stuff, almost everything that I had been craving from that joint for a long, long time. Roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, dry shredded crispy beef, and more. She got us cans of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke out of the fridge.

As we ate, we talked. As it should be, the talking was secondary to the eating, but on this night they went together well. The talk was natural and easy.

The red light was still leaking from the edges of the drawn black curtain at the doorway of the room where we had spent the last hour. I asked her if she always kept that light on.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Like a night-light, sort of.”

“Who usually does this?” I said.

“Buys me Chinese take-out?”

“Whips you.”

“Sometimes I pay somebody. Usually a chick. Sometimes I do it myself.”

“Why do you pay?”

“Anonymity. I like the anonymity. They don’t know me, I don’t know them, and that’s that.”

“And why usually a chick?” Maybe she was a lipstick lesbian after all.

“They’re gentler. And they seem to understand more what’s going on.”

“And how do you manage to do it by yourself?”

“It’s easy. That free right hand after I lock myself up, I use the crop. That’s the short, stiffer one. It’s got a popper, a little leather loop, on the end, but the popper doesn’t really hurt because it’s pretty hard to crop yourself hard over your own shoulder. Same with the Rose whip, the other short one, the one with the separate leather thongs, the one that’s sort of a candy-ass cat-o’-nine-tails: softer leather, no knots in the lashes. Though I guess you could knot them if you wanted to. I don’t know. The leather strips on that one may not be strong enough for knots that would last.”

“I’d like to see you do that. Whip yourself with that crop. I’d like to sit there and jerk off and watch you do that.”

“Not tonight. I’m beat.”

“Do you come when you do this? I couldn’t tell.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever come in my life. The nuns told us that women didn’t have orgasms, only men had orgasms. I know that’s not true. But I still don’t know if I’ve ever had one.”

“You had something going on there when those juices were flowing.”

“I had something going on there when you pulled up the raincoat and cracked me. I had something going on there when I felt you sucking the blood from where you cracked me.”

“I couldn’t resist. This morning, when you were talking, saying you knew what I wanted—then tonight I just, I don’t know, I—”

“It was perfect.”

“What you were talking about, breaking through, getting rid of that haunting, that curse you were talking about, I was afraid I might be doing more harm than good.”

“No,” she said, slowly, ruminatively. “I’m pretty sure you did more good than harm. We’ll see. I feel great now, but I don’t know how I’ll feel later, how I’ll feel tomorrow night, or the night after. We’ll see. Right now it’s better not to think about it.”

“I’m sorry about the marks.”

“It’s nothing. It already looks like just a couple of nasty scratches. And I’ve got so much vitamin E on them that I’m stuck to the seat of my pj’s. But, no, I really don’t like scars. If we ever end up fooling around again, we’ve got to keep that in mind and figure something out.”

We ate awhile in silence. It was amazing. It was like the Eucharistic croissant raised to the realm of golden heavens.

“What does it feel like?”

“Whipping you?”

“Drinking blood.”

“It feels like I’m closer to the beauty and fresh-blossoming life force that I crave than I could ever otherwise be. It feels like I’m one with it, drawing it into me; drinking everything beautiful about it and being transformed and renewed by it. Like a miracle. Like a sweet, delicious, transporting miracle. Lust, love, and life all at once, with an intensity that’s almost ecstatic. It’s great.”

“And what about those eyes?”

“What about those eyes? Like you said: molecules. The blood
is regenerating me. I feel younger, stronger. That intensity, that ecstasy. I have your blood—you—in me now. There’s bound to be some kind of molecular change. And it all feels good. It all feels great.

“The most renowned scientists alive don’t even know how many trillions of cells there are in their own bodies, in any body; and every single one of those unknown trillions of cells, every one of them, has hundreds or thousands or millions of molecules. You’ve got almost three hundred million molecules of hemoglobin in one single red blood cell alone. Platelets, plasma, this, that, the other thing. Nobody really knows what the hell’s going on in there. These scientists can talk about molecules all they want, but they don’t know shit. At least I know that whatever’s going on with the molecules in me is good. It’s better than good. It’s great. I can feel it.”

“The way you describe it, you make me want to do it,” she said.

“But that’s the thing. You’ve already got it. You don’t need it. The essence of that young flesh and soul, that blue sky, that spirit of illimitable youth. You would just be drinking from yourself. Maybe you don’t feel it now. Maybe you need to break through and let the light out, like you say. But it’s there. It’s in you. It’s you.”

“I sure don’t feel it.”

“You will. That stuff you do in there. You’re not punishing yourself. You’re trying to drive something out of yourself. And it’s the dark, not the light, that you’re trying to expel. Some people cling to their misery. You’re not one of those. Believe me, you gave me more of you tonight than you give yourself. One of these days, you’ll feel the magic that’s in you, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll know the gift in you.”

“Does it feel like—I mean to you, what you’re talking about—does it feel like anything I might’ve ever felt?”

“Well, it sure ain’t like booze, I can tell you that much.” I ate and I thought if there was anything to which I could compare it, even remotely. “Love, maybe. But a kind of love you can’t imagine.” This sounded stupid. It sounded vague and senselessly airy. We ate a little more, saying nothing. Maybe it was the ethereal play of the food on my senses that brought me to say what I said next.

“I used to think that opium was the greatest thing in the world. It turns the world and every breath of this finite life to a poetry so pure it’s wordless and soundless. There’s nothing like it. Nothing comes close. Yeah. I used to think opium was the greatest thing in the world. In fact, I’d love to be able to smoke it again. The real stuff. I hate to travel these days. The only way I want to travel is internally. The only places I want to go don’t involve crowds or security checks. None of that. If I never saw the inside of another airport or airplane, that’d be good by me. But if I ever do travel again, it’s going to be to smoke opium.”

“You make me want to do that too, the way you talk about it.”

“Well, maybe you will. Maybe we’ll do it together one of these days.”

“So, that’s what drinking blood is like?”

“No. I said I used to think it was the best thing in the world. I used to think it was
la chiave d’oro,
the key of gold. Now I know that blood is. The right blood. Blood like yours. Smoking opium can let you dream of youth and love and the magic and poetry in the air. Drinking blood can give it to you. For real.”

“But those eyes,” she said. “They’re otherworldly. They’re beautiful, amazing; but they’re so otherworldly.”

She had said that morning that she had seen in her father’s eyes what she saw in mine. I did not want her mind to be drawn back to the ruinous darkness into which her father had long ago cast her. So I said nothing. I offered her some of the pork that I
had just begun to eat. Her senses would not discern the subtleties of flavor or experience the synesthetic evocations mine did, but it was downright delicious enough to thrill any palate. An antidote for any wayward ramblings through the dark. She loved it. She was letting out light every time she opened her mouth, and she didn’t even know it.

At home, blissfully sleepy, I brought to bed with me a book I had purchased some time ago but, as much as I looked forward to reading it, had not got around to it: the first volume of
The Letters of Samuel Beckett
. Although Beckett was one of my favorite writers, I was not as interested in these early letters, from 1929 through 1940, as I was in those of his later years. But still I was sure that there would be much here of interest and illumination; and it was always better, or so it seemed, to start at the beginning. Besides, when you got right down to it, I had no choice. Cambridge University Press had not yet published the second volume in this daunting undertaking.

It was the wrong book to bring to bed. I don’t know how much this hard-bound book of almost nine hundred pages weighed, but it made for highly unwieldy reading abed. I laid it aside, shut the light, and let myself drift off. While drifting, I encountered good old Keith. At first I wondered what he was doing in the passway through which I drifted. Then I remembered that I had been listening earlier to “Let It Bleed”:

Then I remembered the day’s reveries and talk about opium and eyes, and how on the night we met, at a dinner one spring night about a dozen years ago at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, he
politely asked someone sitting between us to tell me that I had “the most beautiful opiated eyes” he’d ever seen. I may have been directly back from Asia at the time. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that when I left Keith’s suite at the Plaza Athénée at dawn, I had met one of the most remarkable gentlemen I have ever encountered, and this esteem for him, and my fondness for him, grew steadily over the ensuing years as we grew closer.

Though he had spent much of his adult life seeing the world through hotel room windows, albeit the windows of very nice hotel rooms, he did not accept the fate of a prisoner of fame. To the extent that he could get away with it, he did and went as he pleased, wherever and whenever. There was a good deal of common ground in our far-rambling conversation, but there was little doubt that fortune and circumstance had afforded him a greater worldliness and ability to indulge it than me, though he never flaunted it or seemed even to look upon it as having much value. I liked the fact that he considered the library in his Connecticut estate to be one of the very special comforts and chambers of his home and life.

I thought of those old tales, though I knew they were not true, of his having full blood transfusions in Switzerland to renew and detoxify himself. I also thought of an article I had seen in a popular health magazine a few years ago titled “Why Is Keith Richards Still Alive?” I did not bring it to his attention, feeling it to be a reprehensibly vulgar and mean-spirited question to put forth about anyone but a detested personal enemy or a politician.