“Did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” he smiled back at me.
“Put all that in my head, all the . . . stuff I just saw.”
“Timothy,” the devil said, reaching over and putting his hand on mine. “I am here to teach. You want more. I’ll help you be more. But it means seeing life the way it really is. Did I put those things in your head? No. Did I open the door a little so that you could see what’s already there? Yes.”
I bowed my head, as if ashamed, as if the weight of the world’s failure were on my head. “It’s not enough, is it?” I asked weakly.
“Love? No, it’s not. Not the way this world’s set up.” Then he muttered under his breath, “Wonder whose fault that is?”
I called out Jill’s name, and I cried. But when I looked up, no one was there.
So I got up and went over to my desk. Floodgates had opened within me. No, that’s not right. That makes it sound as if the waters continued, the waves washing over me as they had when the devil had opened my mind to the complexities, the frailties, and the ledger-balance nature of human love along with its inabilities, its failures, its broken promises. No, at the computer keyboard it was different. I had felt all that; experienced it. But sitting before my computer, I was transformed. The devil had been gone just a few minutes, but the experience felt an eternity away. And now. The experiences opened up to me, the images that cascaded from my mind, pulling, yanking, tugging every emotional rope in my psyche, had now become simply data.
I stood in a vast cavern, frozen, the floods of memory now icy monuments, hard as stone. And I began to examine them, know them. I caressed the cold outlines of everything I had seen. Yes, I thought, this is it. To see, to have the experience is one thing. But to examine it, that’s another.
To recognize the experience of love, I saw, was a first step; to be carried away by the sudden recognition of its costs, another; but to be able to describe it in its deliciously detailed intricacy, that was the writer’s gift, or so I thought.
And so I wrote. Not a story, not a novel, but scenes. I knew this to be practice, to get good at writing these telling scenes, these rip-the-veil-from-the-reader’s-eyes scenes that would uncover the nature of human existence. And building on these scenes of frozen emotion, I would build a fortress of solitude, and my insights would result in The Great American Novel.
I was on a tear; I wrote a hundred scenes; then I deleted them all. Real practice, not pretend. And then I slept satisfied, but not without dreams. A dwarf in a cave came to me, and over and over he sang, a beautiful tenor voice I was sure I knew but couldn’t quite place:
Das ist nun der Liebe
schlimmer Lohn!
Das der Sorgen
schmählicher Sold!
In my dream, of a sudden, I knew myself not to be in a cave, but in an audience, watching an opera on stage. I turned to the man to my right, starting to ask what the song meant. It was too dark to see him, but his warm breath fell on my ear as he repeated the song, but with words in English:
Now that’s awful compensation for love!
That’s disgraceful reward for my care!
And as I looked back up on stage, the dwarf and cave were gone, and it was only Jill and me in our apartment, bickering. Then it switched to my home, as a child; then to Jill’s. Homely love, made nothing but homely by the perspective of song.
4
Frantic days of writing—just for practice, so every computer bit and byte was trashed at night—brought on odd dreams at night. After a week, I began to wind down a little, and for the first time since the devil’s visit I thought I might need to leave the apartment for a while. Maybe a nice dinner out. My stomach growled. I couldn’t even remember the last time I ate.
I went through the motions of getting ready for a night on the town; again, I couldn’t really remember the last time I had taken a shower, brushed my teeth, or shaved. I had some stubble, but I have a pretty meager beard that’s a bit shy of the daylight, so I can go a fairly long time without shaving and not look too bad. It had been a couple of days since the last shave; had it really been the full week? I didn’t know.
I dressed casually. Orly’s down the street had a nice quiche, with layers of different cheeses baked into it. A really good quiche, it was. I liked it.
Just as I reached for the doorknob on my way out, the doorbell rang. A bit perturbed, because I was really hungry and the prospect of being slowed down didn’t sit well, I opened the door and issued a somewhat less than polite, “Yes?”
Standing there in khakis and a blue polo shirt, the devil flashed a grin. “Finally hit the wall, eh? Probably famished.”
“Pretty hungry,” I replied, opening the door for him to come in. But he stayed put.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. “Nothing better than good food and conversation.” Basically, he invited himself to dinner.
I guess I must have been craving companionship, so I stepped out the door, closed it behind me, and off we went.
I couldn’t have had a finer companion. Small chit-chat all the way to the restaurant wove an aura of intimacy between us. He occasionally would place his hand familiarly on my shoulder as he leaned toward me to give emphasis to some little one-liner, usually of quite ironic import. By the time we reached the restaurant, we seemed fast friends.
It wasn’t crowded, and a little sign declared “Seat yourself.” We headed off for a little table in the corner, away from the few people who sat around nibbling greens or enjoying some after-dinner coffee. We pulled menus from the little stand on the table, though I already knew I wanted the quiche. The devil quickly eyed the offerings, then sheepishly looked at me.
“Not to be forward, dear Timothy,” he stated, “but you do realize I don’t really carry cash or have a credit card.”
If I had been as suave as the devil himself, I would have responded about two seconds sooner and without the initial “er, ah,” before getting around to saying, “No worry. I’ll take care of it.” Then, trying to cover up my lack of smoothness, I winked at him and said, “I owe you, anyway.”
“Indeed?” the devil asked, a look of surprise (though fake, I realize now) on his face. “How so?”
I placed my menu down in front of me and leaned forward, a conspiratorial tone of voice, a loud whisper, issued from my lips. “I’ve been writing,” I said.
“Oh ho!” the devil replied, a careful elation spreading across his demeanor like paint being spread over a wall with a roller. “Tell me!” he demanded, as if he simply had to know all the details.
“So many images, feelings, insights,” I said, on the verge of a breathiness that, from a woman, might sound a little like seduction. And there was a carnalness, a sensualness, to my newfound ability to wrap my mind around the frozen shapes in my mind and convey those things to paper. An act of creation, in the fleshiest sense possible. So new to me; so powerful.
“They hang there, in my head, and I try out different words for them, poking, prodding, sensing what’s right, what’s wrong, what works!” Even thinking about it, my whole body trembled, as if I verged on verbal orgasm.
“Easy, isn’t it,” the devil said, a look of understanding and confidence reaching out to envelop me, “when you really see things for the first time.”
But before I could continue, I realized a waiter stood by the table, head cocked, examining me as if I were some exotic creature, a cockatoo in a cage perhaps. With some reserve, he asked, “Are you ready to order?”
Quickly, shyly, quietly, because he knew I was paying, the devil said to me, “Just a caesar salad, please, and a glass of water.”
I