All the time, improbable things are happening to people with otherwise reasonable lives.
…
Did I ever tell you about the time I met the Devil?
We (the Boy and I) were walking home after visiting with a friend. We were in That Neighborhood—every city has at least one, the refuge of the artists, the druggies, the bohemians, the hippie kids living off the dregs left by the legacy of the Love Generation. None of the bland menace of Surburbia here; the buildings tumble together in a hodge-podge of colors and styles, all different but all dingy and not a little worn around the edges. In retrospect, it wasn’t particularly surprising to find him there, going about his business. It takes away credibility from the bogeyman in the closet image, at least.
In any case, dusk had set in, and we were looking to get home before total dark. But it was winter, and before we had made it halfway, night crept in and overtook us. It was clear and very cold, and the stars had rallied against the smear of streetlights to show an impressive strength of numbers. In fact, I was so caught up in gawking at the stars that I almost didn’t notice the man standing on the edge of the road.
He was talking on a cell phone when he caught sight of us. “No, no. Of course. Hey, let me call you back later. Okay. Ciao.” He snapped the phone shut. “Hey!” It took me a second to realize he was talking to us. He was standing next to a telescope, grinning and waving us over. Behind him, another man, short and stocky and wearing an oversized fur coat, was loading boxes into the back of a truck.
I glanced at the Boy anxiously. This guy seemed on the shady side, and I didn’t necessarily want to get drawn into talking with him. The Boy just shrugged and waved a greeting to the man. As we walked towards him, I eyed him suspiciously. He was a tall, swarthy fellow with dark close-cropped hair that came to a widow’s peak at his forehead. Now that we were closer, I saw that he had a thin scar that snaked down his left cheek. He was still grinning; it seemed vaguely out of place on his rather severe face.
“Here to catch the show?” he asked amiably. We exchanged puzzled looks as he waved, taking in the sky with his gesture. “The show,” he repeated, patting his telescope fondly. “Venus and Jupiter are dancing together tonight, folks, right above the crescent moon. Those cosmos are smiling right down on us.” He was still grinning, and the light was slipping and sliding across his teeth. It was beginning to unnerve me. As he went on to list other rare astronomical occurrences, I watched the other man load boxes and mentally named him “the sidekick.” Then the first man paused, looking at us.
“And do you know the next time this—all this—is going to happen? Hm? No?” His grin grew wider as we shook our heads. He looked over at his sidekick.
“2012.”
“Twenty-twelve!” he repeated brightly, sounding like a manic game show host. “Yes, 2012, that’s when it’s all going down. Big party, bi-i-ig party. Everyone’s going to be there. You guys should come.” We nodded, laughed a bit nervously. “Didn’t catch your names,” he said, looking at us. His eyes were hooded, and I couldn’t quite make out their color. We hesitated, then told him our names. He repeated them slowly, committing them to his memory. “Look forward to seeing you there,” he told us. I wondered how soon we could extract ourselves from this.
“Hey, are you guys in love?” the sidekick asked suddenly. The Boy and I looked at each other, taken aback.
“Um, yes, actually we are,” I replied. The Man (he had gained capital letter status in my mind) nodded. He held one hand out in front of him and brought the other one back, drawing an imaginary bow. He aimed at and “shot” the Boy, who played along, putting his hand to his heart.
“Yeah, that’s good,” the Man said, lowering his hands. “We’re gonna need more people like you two. Good people. Smart people.” He was grinning again. “You know.” We laughed again. Yeah, we agreed, we knew.
No one said anything for a moment, then the Boy mentioned the new Metallica album, which the Man seemed quite enthusiastic about. They threw that around for a while, then we finally made our good-byes.
“Very nice meeting you,” the Man said. “I’ll try and remember you guys…keep an eye out for you.” He winked. And as we turned to go, I thought I saw his eyes, for the briefest of moments, gleam bright red. I blamed it, like anyone would, on a trick of the light.
We continued along the street in silence, but when we got to the corner, we both spoke simultaneously.
“Was that--?”
“Did we--?”
We stopped and looked at each other, then kept walking.
After a moment, I said casually, “I’m thinking we just had a chat with Satan.”
“That’s funny, I was thinking the same thing.”
“Should we…I don’t know, go to church this weekend or something?”
“Nah. Probably wouldn’t help.”
“You’re probably right.” I thought for a moment. “That new movie’s playing tonight. Want to go? It’s still early.”
“Sounds good.”
So we continued on our way. I only glanced over my shoulder twice the rest of the way home.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Ashes to Ashes
We sat on a grand, sweeping staircase leading to nowhere. It was a cold, solid shade of ivory, but the floor below us was a dizzying whirl of checkered patterns. They seemed to be moving almost imperceptibly of their own accord and I felt a little woozy looking at them, so I turned my attention elsewhere. The hall, if that’s what it was, didn’t end, but stretched on and on before us until distance grayed it out into a dull infinity. An army of potted plants lined the walls, standing at attention between huge windows that looked out only onto a gentle, featureless brightness. I looked up. The ceiling wasn’t visible either; the walls just stretched up, seemingly interminable. Somewhere very far off, a maddeningly slow version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” played, thin and scratchy as if it were on an old record.
I looked over at him. He hadn’t yet spoken and was absently studying the patterns on the floor, seemingly lost in thought. I took the chance to study him, and tried to be discreet about it. He seemed real enough, certainly more so than our surroundings and much more than my memories of him, which grew more abstract every day. I could even smell him, he was so solid and close—that scent peculiar to each individual. His was instantly recognizable to me, even after months of its absence. I was surprisingly calm. I was vaguely aware that I should be upset, or angry, or something at least. But I had no urge to slap him, or spit on him, or get up and walk away, though I had played out all of these scenes over and over in my head with a vengeful glee.
Finally he looked up, offering me that sheepish, crooked grin of his. I quirked an eyebrow in return. We continued to sit in silence. One beat passed. Two. But can you subdivide it? I thought wryly. Tri-puh-let, tri-puh-let…then he spoke, interrupting my mental rhythm.
“So… how’ve you been?” His voice didn’t echo as I’d expect in the huge room, instead it sounded close, intimate, as if we were in a small room. I shrugged, said nothing. My gaze slid off him and over to the potted plants, which now appeared improbably to be waltzing with one another. A few more moments of uneasy silence passed. He shifted and seemed about to say something else, but I cut him off.
“Why?” My voice was flat, dull. If I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t happy to see him either. I wasn’t anything, in fact. The guilty pit of emotion I kept hidden specially for him was gone, replaced by an airy nothingness. It was actually quite a relief.
I still wasn’t looking at him, but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was still looking at me. “Please…don’t ask why what. You know damn well and if you pretend you don’t, we have no business talking.”
“I wasn’t going to ask why what,” he muttered, rather in the way of a child sulking. I had preempted his ploy of circling the matter, as was his expertise.
“So, why?” I looked up, and our eyes met. There was a flash of something—pity? Guilt? Smugness?—in his.
“It...it’s not important,” he said softly. “Trust me.”
I laughed, a harsh sound that surprised me. “Trust you? Trust you? You’ve lied to me every chance you’ve gotten since we met. And then you—just—and you expect me to trust you?” I grimaced. “You’ve asked a lot of me before, but this is a bit much.”
“Once you would have trusted me with your life without a second thought.”
I just looked at him, then looked away. I didn’t really have to stay here and listen to this, did I? Then he raised his hand and softly cupped my face in his hand. I was too shocked to recoil. He had never so much as touched me without some kind of provocation, and never, never so gently or solemnly. He brushed my cheek with his thumb, and I saw it glisten. I was crying; I hadn’t even realized it. I turned my face and pushed his hand away. Insults were one thing; even a tussle would be normal. But this, this I couldn’t deal with.
“It doesn’t even matter now, does it?” he said in the same soft tone. He sounded almost apologetic. And I realized begrudgingly that perhaps he was right. No reason he could give was going to change things, really. I should have let this go long ago. So I just shrugged.
After that we talked for hours, not that time mattered much in that room. Rimsky-Korsakov had long since stopped and turned into the soundtrack to Hairspray, which turned into The Nightmare Before Christmas. We didn’t talk of anything of consequence, just related silly little anecdotes and musings on the past to each other and debated things like the best way to resolve a certain chord. We never went back to the subject of our strange relationship or how it had ended.
But as our conversation went on, I realized that there was something I still had left to say. There were three words I thought I could never bring myself to speak, not to him, not after all that had happened. But there they were, on the tip of my tongue, waiting for me to open my mouth. I figured I might as well say it; after all, I had nothing to lose here, and it might finally bring me some peace, or at least closure.
“I forgive you.”
He said nothing, only smiled slightly. I realized I was smiling too. The music was growing fainter, and his face was fading away along with the rest of the room as the light grew brighter. Finally, finally, I thought. It’s over.
And I woke up.
------------------------------------
That day I burned our pictures. It was symbolic, a funeral with a body of memories to put to rest. I watched in silence, dry-eyed, as the fire licked at snapshots I had locked away for so long, unable to look at. Ashes to ashes, I thought. But as the edges of his crooked grin began to crackle and curl in the flames, I felt my throat close up and a familiar pressure on the back of my tongue. Not sadness, anger. And I realized that I had lied. I hadn’t forgiven him. How can you forgive a phantom, a demon that lurks in the corners of your mind, popping out at the least opportune moments? For he was no longer a person to me, only a knot of memories and pain that wore his face. And I could not bring myself to forgive that, not really. The fire had burned down to a tiny pile of cinders. So this is what it all came down to. Ashes to ashes, I thought again, grimly.
So I turned away, letting the wind scatter the ashes as it wished. The whole ordeal seemed a failed exorcism, and now the priest was shaking his head, packing up his crosses and holy water, and going home. But in the end, we all have our demons.
I looked over at him. He hadn’t yet spoken and was absently studying the patterns on the floor, seemingly lost in thought. I took the chance to study him, and tried to be discreet about it. He seemed real enough, certainly more so than our surroundings and much more than my memories of him, which grew more abstract every day. I could even smell him, he was so solid and close—that scent peculiar to each individual. His was instantly recognizable to me, even after months of its absence. I was surprisingly calm. I was vaguely aware that I should be upset, or angry, or something at least. But I had no urge to slap him, or spit on him, or get up and walk away, though I had played out all of these scenes over and over in my head with a vengeful glee.
Finally he looked up, offering me that sheepish, crooked grin of his. I quirked an eyebrow in return. We continued to sit in silence. One beat passed. Two. But can you subdivide it? I thought wryly. Tri-puh-let, tri-puh-let…then he spoke, interrupting my mental rhythm.
“So… how’ve you been?” His voice didn’t echo as I’d expect in the huge room, instead it sounded close, intimate, as if we were in a small room. I shrugged, said nothing. My gaze slid off him and over to the potted plants, which now appeared improbably to be waltzing with one another. A few more moments of uneasy silence passed. He shifted and seemed about to say something else, but I cut him off.
“Why?” My voice was flat, dull. If I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t happy to see him either. I wasn’t anything, in fact. The guilty pit of emotion I kept hidden specially for him was gone, replaced by an airy nothingness. It was actually quite a relief.
I still wasn’t looking at him, but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was still looking at me. “Please…don’t ask why what. You know damn well and if you pretend you don’t, we have no business talking.”
“I wasn’t going to ask why what,” he muttered, rather in the way of a child sulking. I had preempted his ploy of circling the matter, as was his expertise.
“So, why?” I looked up, and our eyes met. There was a flash of something—pity? Guilt? Smugness?—in his.
“It...it’s not important,” he said softly. “Trust me.”
I laughed, a harsh sound that surprised me. “Trust you? Trust you? You’ve lied to me every chance you’ve gotten since we met. And then you—just—and you expect me to trust you?” I grimaced. “You’ve asked a lot of me before, but this is a bit much.”
“Once you would have trusted me with your life without a second thought.”
I just looked at him, then looked away. I didn’t really have to stay here and listen to this, did I? Then he raised his hand and softly cupped my face in his hand. I was too shocked to recoil. He had never so much as touched me without some kind of provocation, and never, never so gently or solemnly. He brushed my cheek with his thumb, and I saw it glisten. I was crying; I hadn’t even realized it. I turned my face and pushed his hand away. Insults were one thing; even a tussle would be normal. But this, this I couldn’t deal with.
“It doesn’t even matter now, does it?” he said in the same soft tone. He sounded almost apologetic. And I realized begrudgingly that perhaps he was right. No reason he could give was going to change things, really. I should have let this go long ago. So I just shrugged.
After that we talked for hours, not that time mattered much in that room. Rimsky-Korsakov had long since stopped and turned into the soundtrack to Hairspray, which turned into The Nightmare Before Christmas. We didn’t talk of anything of consequence, just related silly little anecdotes and musings on the past to each other and debated things like the best way to resolve a certain chord. We never went back to the subject of our strange relationship or how it had ended.
But as our conversation went on, I realized that there was something I still had left to say. There were three words I thought I could never bring myself to speak, not to him, not after all that had happened. But there they were, on the tip of my tongue, waiting for me to open my mouth. I figured I might as well say it; after all, I had nothing to lose here, and it might finally bring me some peace, or at least closure.
“I forgive you.”
He said nothing, only smiled slightly. I realized I was smiling too. The music was growing fainter, and his face was fading away along with the rest of the room as the light grew brighter. Finally, finally, I thought. It’s over.
And I woke up.
------------------------------------
That day I burned our pictures. It was symbolic, a funeral with a body of memories to put to rest. I watched in silence, dry-eyed, as the fire licked at snapshots I had locked away for so long, unable to look at. Ashes to ashes, I thought. But as the edges of his crooked grin began to crackle and curl in the flames, I felt my throat close up and a familiar pressure on the back of my tongue. Not sadness, anger. And I realized that I had lied. I hadn’t forgiven him. How can you forgive a phantom, a demon that lurks in the corners of your mind, popping out at the least opportune moments? For he was no longer a person to me, only a knot of memories and pain that wore his face. And I could not bring myself to forgive that, not really. The fire had burned down to a tiny pile of cinders. So this is what it all came down to. Ashes to ashes, I thought again, grimly.
So I turned away, letting the wind scatter the ashes as it wished. The whole ordeal seemed a failed exorcism, and now the priest was shaking his head, packing up his crosses and holy water, and going home. But in the end, we all have our demons.
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