Unsoul'd (10 page)

My seat from the previous day was empty. I settled in. I opened the laptop.

Magic time.

A momentary, vertiginous panic settled around me like dew.

And then I shook it off and began typing.

"Going pretty well, huh?" the devil said.

I looked up. I thought mere moments had passed, but I had actually been writing for a good hour. Torn -- stop and talk? or keep going? -- I erred on the side of politeness.

"It's going
really
well," I told him. I suddenly became suspicious. "Is this your doing? Are you making it go so well?"

The devil chuckled. He broke apart the brownie and -- considerately -- began separating out the walnuts for himself. "No. Wish I could say it was. Believe me, considering all the evil shit I get blamed for -- most of which isn't even my fault -- it would be nice to get credit for something good for a change. But no. This is all you, brother."

I tapped some keys with satisfaction. "Why now? Why is it coming now?"

He waved a hand as though he smelled something foul. "How should I know? Despite your species' fondness for that loathsome phrase 'The devil made me do it,' I'm relatively powerless when it comes to you guys. I can affect your perceptions a bit. Make you see and hear things you wouldn't otherwise see or hear. But it's not like I can control you."

I snorted. "Right. Then why is history filled with examples of the devil tempting people into their own damnation?"

He leaned forward, genuinely angry for the first time since I'd met him. "Why? I'll tell you why. Because there's a huge fucking difference between me 'tempting' someone and me 'controlling' someone. Look it up in a fucking dictionary, Writer Man. You people will point the finger of blame anywhere but at yourselves. I've been a convenient target since Day One."

"Since the..." I couldn't believe I was actually about to say this. "Since the Garden of Eden, you mean?"

"Yeah."

In for a penny... "So that was a real place? It really happened? Evolution is a lie?"

"Evolution is the complete truth." He popped a walnut in his mouth. "So is the Garden of Eden. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Surely you of all people understand the power of metaphor."

"I guess. So in that case, you are the source of all our woes. You were the serpent who made Eve eat the apple and--"

The devil roared with laughter, so loud that the other Laptop Warriors in Construct all turned around to glare at him with contempt. The devil ground his teeth and snapped to the nearest one, "Hey, Conner -- when are you going to tell your wife that you're gay?"

Conner blanched and folded up his laptop and fled to the outer room. Everyone else just stared.

"Anyone else want a dose of reality?" the devil asked, and all eyes returned to their screens.

"Is that guy really gay?"

"How should I know? He's confused. Feels way guilty about the way he looks at men, and I can smell guilt and confusion like a cat smells tuna, dude."

"I guess at this point, you're going to tell me that you invented gay people."

"Me? That is so homophobic of you. And heteronormative. Look, I'll cop to this much: If I had known how much misery, pain, condemnation, hypocrisy, and idiocy would be caused just because some of you people can't handle the idea of a dick in a man's mouth... I
wish
I'd invented gays. I had no idea it would be a problem at all. That was all the Old Man. You know what
my
problem is? My problem is that I give you people too much credit for being rational, compassionate creatures. I keep letting myself forget how craven and pathetic you really are."

"Thanks."

"Now where was I...?"

"You were laughing about the serpent in the Garden of Eden..."

"Oh! Oh, right." The devil shook his head. "Stop being so literal-minded. When the Old Man started narrating shit to Moses back in the day, I told him: 'Don't be so flowery and poetic. People are gonna take this shit literally.' And he was all, 'This is my Testament to my Creation. It requires a certain panache.'"

"God said 'panache?'"

"Well, yeah, only he said it in the Ineffable Language that preceded Babel. Because he's too fucking stuck-up to speak in the vernacular, which is why the sound of his voice fucking turned Moses into an old man before his time. Anyway, my point is this: You can't take that Biblical shit word-for-word. Take the serpent, just for starters. The serpent was a
metaphor
. I've never been a serpent in my life. I wouldn't even know how to turn into a serpent. And why in the world would I
want
to be a serpent?" He shuddered. "Gruesome little slithery, slimy fuckers. No, I wasn't a serpent, man. It was symbolic, me being a serpent. I just fucked her. That's what changed the world. Adam never tried anything but missionary and that just didn't do the trick for Eve. The first time I flipped her over and pounded her doggie-style, believe me, that opened her eyes. Believe me, that changed the world. She couldn't be satisfied with paradise after I showed her the pleasures of the flesh."

"Aren't you technically talking about my great-great-great-many-times grandmother?"

"Your great-great-great-many-times grandmother was hot. She was, by definition, the hottest woman in the world." He leaned back and gazed wistfully at the ceiling. "Best piece of ass I ever had. First piece of ass I ever had. I've spent millennia trying to replace that. Can't do it. Now
that
is what I call hell." He grinned at me. "But you know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

"What do you mean?" But I knew.

"You know." And with that, the devil did a new trick: His voice became Fiona's. "You finally found the perfect pussy, the perfect body, the perfect set of moans and groans you'd been looking for since the first time you yanked your crank back at age ten after seeing your first Victoria's Secret catalog. And now you've lost that and everything else is a poor substitute, isn't it, Randall?"

I don't know what bothered or shocked me more: His dead-on Fiona impression, that he knew exactly when I'd started masturbating, or that he was completely right.

"I really have a lot of work to do," I said, my voice hoarse.

He winked at me and scooped the remaining walnuts into his hand. "I know you do, baby," he said in Fiona's voice. "And I want you to keep working on that book." He stood to leave and his voice returned to normal. "It's gonna be
huge
..."

Wherein I Finally Do It

I made my way immediately to Construct's cramped, dank bathroom and splashed water on my face. The sound of Fi's voice... The devil's too-accurate assessment of my own strange psychic flaws and yearnings...

Most disturbing of all, though, was his parting shot, that my current work-in-progress would be "huge."

My stomach shook and vibrated like a washing machine agitator.

Of course, this is what I wanted. This is what I'd signed away my soul for. And yet for some reason, it hadn't felt real. Not when the words weren't flowing. Now the words wouldn't stop, and on top of that, the devil had sat across from me, eating walnuts and confirming our pact.

I caught myself in the cracked, tarnished mirror and realized I was smiling. Of course. The spin cycle in my gut? This wasn't caused by fear or anxiety. It was
joy
. Sheer, unadulterated joy, an emotion I'd not experienced in so long that I mistook it for something else, something dark. But I was
happy
. I was going to get what I wanted. A "huge" book.

Fucking-A.

I dried my face on the end of my shirt, Construct being out of towels in the bathroom (as per usual) and returned to my spot, where I gleefully, for the second day in a row, ejaculated more than ten thousand words onto the screen. By the time the sun had gone down, I was practically cackling in self-satisfaction. A part of me felt overwhelming compassion for the other keyboard-wretches, but a larger part felt disdain for them. Disdain for them and triumph for me.

On my way out, Lovely Rita offered her scary smile and a dirty, upturned and empty palm. I shrugged. "Sorry. Don't have anything today."

"That's OK," she said. "You're good for it."

That was true. I was. I felt only the slightest pang of guilt (wondering, briefly, if the devil could smell it, if he lurked nearby) and hustled homeward. On the way, I bumped into Gym Girl, coming out of Body by You. Today was my day to lift weights, her day to do pilates. We usually saw each other in the hall as I went from one weight room to another.

"Hey, partner!" she said brightly. "Missed you in there today."

And I missed your ass on the pilates mat, I thought. "Yeah, sorry about that. I was working."

"On the book?"

"Yeah."

"The one you couldn't work on before?" Her eyes lit up with a hope so selfless that it almost hurt.

"Yeah. Something just...clicked. Yesterday morning. I woke up and boom! It was happening."

"Our drinks the night before must have done it," she teased.

"Maybe it wasn't the drinks," I said. "Maybe it was the company." And immediately thought,
Holy hell, what am I doing?
There are ways for a man to say, "Maybe it was the company" that are not suggestive, flirtatious, or come-hither-ish. I had managed to avoid every single one of them. I was hitting on her, no question about it, and I hadn't even given it a second thought. I'd barely given it a first thought. I'd just done it. And why not? Was I married? Was I engaged? Had I even called Manda my girlfriend?

She shifted her gym bag on her shoulder and gazed at me levelly. "Maybe it was," she acknowledged. "Maybe I'm your Muse."

I didn't believe in Muses. But then again, until recently I hadn't believed in souls or the devil, either.

"In that case," I heard myself say, "I think I probably owe you dinner. Or at least a drink."

I had just asked Gym Girl out. There were no two ways about it. I had just asked her out on a date. She, with a boyfriend. Me, with a Manda.

"There's a place in Soho I've been dying to try," she said without the slightest pause. "Do you have time?"

"I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't have time," I said smoothly, perhaps more smoothly than at any other time in my entire life.

The next thing I knew, we were on the F-train to Soho. She had her gym bag and I had my laptop bag and neither of were really dressed to go out, but we didn't care. The place she'd heard about in Soho turned out to be Asian fusion. The service was slow as a dying sloth, but we didn't care. The food took forever, but the drinks came lickety-split and soon we were having a drunken, terrific time.

"You know what?" I told her. "I just realized that I haven't left Brooklyn in, like, a month. So I really owe you for this."

"Oh, I get it," she said. "I do that, too. I'll look up and realize it's been forever since I've even left the neighborhood. It's so easy to just put down a taproot and stay, like, in those twelve square blocks. When I moved to Brooklyn, I told myself I wouldn't become one of those Brooklyn snobs, but, well... Here I am!"

"In Soho," I said drily, and she laughed and touched my arm for the third time that night, and I wondered about James and I didn't wonder about Manda.

By the time the food came, we were already giddily soused, and we fell on our meals in a ravenous, somehow sensuous melee, splitting dishes, holding forks out to each other, eating from each other's plates as though we'd been dining together for years. Once again, I insisted on picking up the check, and when I saw the triple digits there -- we'd had a lot to drink -- I heroically kept from expressing my surprise and instead simply tossed down my credit card as though I spent two hundred bucks on dinner and drinks all the time.

"We should do this again," Gym Girl said as we emerged into a perfectly cool July New York evening, that sort of cool that is perfect not merely for itself, but for its juxtaposition to the sticky heat of the earlier day. She was drunk. I was drunk. She was touching my arm, my shoulder, as though for balance. I offered to carry her gym bag, and she demurred and said that was sweet and squeezed my wrist.

We stood in the cool and in the awkward moment where we should really split off to our separate subway lines, and I was just about to suggest we split a cab back to Brooklyn when three clearly drunk college girls stumbled over to us.

"Hey!" one of them shouted unnecessarily. "Hey!" She pointed at Gym Girl with the seriousness only the truly drunk can muster. I considered pointing back.

"Hey, what?" Gym Girl asked and giggled, grabbing my arm as though I were her boyfriend.

"Look!" another one shouted. "Look!"

Soon the three of them were clustered around us. I say "us," but they clearly only had eyes for Gym Girl, circling her like wagons in a Western.

"You!" one of them said, pointing again. "You need to liberate your vagina!"

"Yeah!" said another. "Liberate your vagina!"

"Liberate!" they all three chanted in unison.

Gym Girl and I glanced at each other and shared a frozen moment of bafflement before cracking up.

"Liberate your vagina!" one of them shouted, caring not for the befuddled, annoyed, and offended looks from passers-by.