Wherein I Hang with the Devil
With my apartment only sporadically safe to live in, I found myself spending several nights a week at Manda's. The guilt I felt at cheating on her with Gym Girl hadn't lasted long; it had peeled off like a Band-Aid in the shower.
I still hadn't told Manda I loved her, mainly because I still didn't know if it was true. And even if it were true, didn't she deserve more than the love of a man who'd sold his soul to the devil? (For that matter, could someone soulless even love in the first place?) In the days after Lacey Day, she'd been instrumental in keeping me grounded as I suffered a combination of the dual shocks of sudden fame and the knowledge I had damned myself. I couldn't just repay that by breaking up with her, could I?
Just because I was soulless was no reason to be heartless in the bargain. I swore to myself that I would be as good a boyfriend as possible, that I wouldn't stray again.
Besides, if I couldn't be with Gym Girl, I should be with someone, right?
Nights when I wasn't at Manda's, I slept at the devil's Cobble Hill studio. He had the most comfortable futon I'd ever slept on.
I had to admit that when he first offered to let me crash there, I was a bit nervous. Before Lacey's emergence, he had not exhibited much in the way of devilish behavior, coming across more as a genetically recombined offspring of a frat boy and a hipster than the First of the Fallen. But what was he like the rest of the time, I wondered? What was the devil really like?
Apparently, I learned, much like the genetically recombined offspring of a frat boy and a hipster.
There was a lot of beer drinking. A lot of "Dude" and "Bro." A lot of TV marathons, usually of shows that had been canceled after -- or during -- a single season. Hanging out with the devil was no more frightening or interesting than just hanging out, period.
He tended to disappear for long stretches, during which time he left me the keys. When I asked where he went on his travels, he would merely shrug, straighten his hat, and say, "To and fro. Patrolling. Wandering. Pick your translation."
One time, I worked up the courage to ask him about my soul. "Where is it now? What's happening to it? I sort of thought selling it meant that you would get it when I die, but I slept with Gym Girl and I didn't feel guilty and--"
"It doesn't quite work the way you think it works," he said, leaning against the kitchen counter with a beer and an expression that told me he wouldn't bother with a straight answer. "Like, this one time, I took this kid's dad. I had a pretty sweet gig as a fisherman back in those days. It was like I decided to take the Kid's 'fisher of men' thing seriously, you know?"
I said nothing.
"So anyway, there I am, off the coast of England, right? And what I do is this: I set up under the water, pretty deep down. And as the ships sail overhead, I cast out my line, up into the air, and yoink them down below. Stick 'em in lobster cages. Not terribly efficient, I grant you, but not a bad way to laze away a few years.
"One day, this kid comes looking for me. Seems I took his dad a few years back and the kid wants him. He's got -- get this, Randall -- he's got a skin of magic wine. Can you believe that shit? I am not making this up. Magic wine. It's like he read the New Testament and took that shit way too seriously. He says he made it from the blood of dead sailors and then he challenges me to a drinking contest for the soul of his dad." The devil slapped the counter and chortled. "Can you believe this nonsense? Challenging me to a drinking contest? Hell, I invented--"
"You invented alcohol," I said, bored.
All of our conversations tended to devolve like that. But he kept his fridge well-stocked with beer and fruit. And I could always scrounge a frozen Snickers bar from somewhere in the hidden depths of the freezer. The devil and comfort food -- go figure.
Which is why, after leaving Sam's office that day, I went back to the devil's apartment. The devil was nowhere to be seen. I flopped onto the futon and eyed my laptop balefully. I knew I should be working on the new book. If I could manage to turn it in before I signed the contract, I would get my signing portion of the advance plus the Delivery and Acceptance portion. Something like two-thirds of the total advance, all in my pocket at once. Swoon.
But I wasn't ready to show anyone what I'd written already. And despite my free time, I just wasn't ready to write.
I thought I knew why: The party.
The launch party for Down/Town. To be held that very night. It wasn't the party itself, I guess. It wasn't that pretty much everyone in publishing was going to be there. It wasn't even that it was being held at Deux Livres, the snootiest bookstore on the island of Manhattan, a store that -- I had to admit -- had never even stocked my last three books, but which now suddenly was my biggest fan.
It was that Lacey would be there.
My publicist had had a brainstorm. Shortly after her time in the limelight, Lacey Simonson had quite completely and quite deliberately vanished from sight, to the point that some inelegant and crude person had even joked that maybe she'd been kidnapped again. (Oh, all right, I was the one who made the joke, but I only told it to the devil and he, of course, laughed his ass off.)
Despite offers of frighteningly huge sums of money to tell her story on TV or in books, Lacey had steadfastly refused. For a while, I wondered why, but then I remembered a line from my own book, from Flash/Back.
"The things we're known for and forgiven for aren't always the things we've actually done."
Henry, the main character of the book, realizes that in a crucial epiphany -- the "flash" of the title. And it sends him "back" to his hometown, even though he's on the cusp of greatness in the big city. Henry's a misunderstood hero -- right place, right time, wrong reason, but no one cares about the reason. No one even knows. He pulls two girls from a burning building, but the only reason he's even in the area is because he's cruising a bad neighborhood looking for drugs and a prostitute he can piss on and maybe -- with a combination of the those two -- a tiny piece of understanding of his own past. And then luck and fortune descend upon him and he's a hero.
Almost, I realized now, the same thing that had happened to me. Except where you see "luck and fortune," read: "the machinations of Satan."
Read: The rape and torture of a young woman.
Henry returns home to a hero's welcome. And the book ends with him in a rented apartment, the detritus of a homecoming celebration all around him, powerless as he flicks through Craigslist looking for a whore.
"The things we're known for and forgiven for aren't always the things we've actually done."
Somehow, most of my massive influx of new readers seemed almost to deliberately misapprehend the whole point of the book. I heard constantly about its "uplifting," "life-affirming" qualities so often that I actually flipped through the book to make sure the ending I'd written had actually seen print. And there it was, just as depressing and brutal as I'd always intended it.
Lacey had spent months reading and re-reading Flash/Back. She would understand Henry and his choices. That sometimes we get things we don't deserve. Sometimes we get things we don't even want. And that no matter how something appears from the outside, it's usually much, much better or much, much worse from the inside.
She wouldn't speak to the press again. No one knew why, but I thought I did: Because nothing she said or did would ever change the initial impression people had from that first impromptu "press conference." Just like Henry could go home and be a hero by day and indulge in golden showers at night.
Yet Sherrie, my deviously smart publicist, managed to get in touch with Lacey and -- promising me she'd never used the words "the man who saved your soul" -- convinced Lacey to make one more public appearance: At the launch party. She wouldn't have to speak to the press. She wouldn't have to speak at all, if she didn't want to. She would just need to be seen.
She could even leave early, if she wanted.
The thought of meeting her.... It did things to me that I didn't understand. Turned my mind into a chainsaw juggling routine. In pa
rt, I wasn't sure what was expected of me. And in part, I just wanted it to be over. I didn't know this woman. I had written a book that -- through sheer coincidence -- she'd had in her possession when kidnapped, a book her abductor had allowed her to keep and read between torture sessions. What if he hadn't? Or what if she'd had someone else's book? I wasn't quite so arrogant as to believe that only my book could have preserved her sanity during her ordeal. Given her torment, it's likely that any book, any lifeline to the reality of her non-abducted life, would have sufficed. If she'd been carrying a copy of The World Almanac, it would have done the same.
So what was she going to expect of me? What was the world going to expect of me? In the hundreds of interviews I'd done over the past months, people kept asking me about Lacey and her reaction to my book. I eventually settled on, "I respect Ms. Simonson's privacy too much to speculate as to why she may have responded to my novel the way she did." Usually followed up with, "But of course, I'm so humbled and honored that it helped her, and I'm similarly thrilled by the reaction of so many others since then."
The "humbled and honored" bit was suggested by my publicist. She's right out of grad school and she's deviously smart. And cute. It's obvious to me that it would take very little on my part to get her into bed.
But I couldn't do that. Not to Manda. Not again.
As insane as the past few months had been, I knew that it was only going to get crazier. The timing of it all -- Lacey's rescue coming just before a new book of mine hit shelves -- combined with the frenzy over my new book extended what could have been a flash-in-the-pan. And it would get bigger.
The devil had promised that, after all...
"Randall, my man," he'd said that day, "you are not gonna believe what happens next..."
And, true enough, I didn't believe it. But then I did. I had no choice.
As big as my career had suddenly become, it was destined only to get bigger.
The one ripple on an otherwise perfectly glassy, bucolic, and smooth lake was Tayvon. He had shocked me two weeks after Lacey's appearance by informing me that he was healed enough that he would be going back on active duty in the Marines and returning to Afghanistan.
"Are you insane?" I asked him. "You were there for two years already. More than two years, really. Twenty-six months."
"People are still dying over there," he said, and no matter how much I pressed him, he never said much more.
"You served your country," I argued. "You put in your time."
"People are still dying over there."
"You could get killed or worse."
"People are still dying over there."
"What about your career here? You already put it on hold once. Now you're doing it again? Don't you deserve a life of your own?"
He grinned at me. "People are still dying over there."
My best friend was going away again, to the worst place on the planet. I bitterly held the devil accountable for this for several weeks, but eventually even I had to admit that he'd had nothing to do with it. Tayvon was just That Guy. His own life had no purpose other than the betterment of others' lives. Taking himself away from me when I really needed his centering, his counsel, his rock-steady presence was a small price -- maybe no price -- to pay.
So, we communicated via Skype, he from a base near Kabul when he wasn't deeper in country, I usually from the devil's sofa. I suppose an argument could be made by some that I was actually in more dangerous territory.
I hauled my laptop over and checked Skype. Nothing. It was just past midnight in Kabul, assuming Tayvon was even in Kabul. Assuming he was even alive.
I was his "death contact." If he died, I would be the first civilian to be informed, but how long would that take? Was it possible he was already dead somewhere in an Afghani desert and word was slowly wending its way back? Could it take days? Weeks? Every time I opened my laptop, I braced myself for the worst. What if he'd been killed a week ago and word was going to reach me -- finally -- right at that very moment?
I shut my laptop.
Just then, the devil breezed in after being gone for four days. He flashed me a grin and said, "Tayvon's not dead, dude. De-stress," then dived into the fridge for a beer.
"How do you know that?"
He flopped next to me on the futon and arched an eyebrow. "Give me the remote. Women's crew is on. I love women's crew."
We watched women's crew until it was time for me to get ready for the party. I had -- by this point -- a stash of clothes at the devil's place, tucked away in a flimsy wardrobe bought and hauled over there for that purpose. (His dresser drawers were filled with cargo shorts, neatly folded skinny jeans, and wildly patterned short sleeve shirts and faded vintage tees, which he wore even in the cold of November.) I dressed in my usual Public Writer Outfit: khakis with a gray blazer, white shirt open at the collar, artfully scuffed sneakers.
"I guess I'm still not invited?" the devil sulked.
"It's open to the public," I told him for the millionth time.
"Some people got invitations. I want an invitation."
"I'm sorry that I didn't put you on the list for the actual invitations. I couldn't tell them to put 'the devil' down, could I?"
He grunted and switched over to sumo wrestling on a different variety of ESPN.
I didn't have time to babysit the devil and assuage his hurt feelings. "If you change your mind, it's at 33rd and--"
"I know where it is," he said, somewhat darkly. "I know where everything is."
I treated myself to a cab from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, confident that Fatima would get that ten grand into my account soon enough and I would have a little more financial breathing room going into Thanksgiving.
I still hadn't decided what to do for Thanksgiving yet. Of course my dad, down South, wanted me to come visit. And in a shocker of shockers, Manda had, about a week previous, asked if I wanted to go with her to her parents' house in Connecticut. That was a little more serious than I could reasonably handle at that point in time. I had a ready-made excuse, though: My tour was beginning, and I would be traveled out. No desire to add Connecticut to an already-hectic schedule. I made all the appropriate "wish I could"-type noises, and declined.
When my publisher asked if I minded being on tour so close to the holidays, I said -- honestly -- that I didn't care. And so, I had absolutely no plans for Thanksgiving. Which was, actually, fine by me. I had never understood the mania for holidays, the relentless and almost desperate quest for memories and moments, the yearning for a familial felicity that doesn't exist during the non-holiday times, so why should it exist now? As a child, I'd never understood the hoopla and pomp of Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. Even birthdays (my own included). They were just days, like any other, days arbitrarily denoted by tradition or myth to be somehow "special." I watched everyone run themselves ragged in an endless attempt to out-do previous years and previous events, only to end up the same -- torn wrapping paper confetti-ing the carpet, barely edible leftovers in the fridge, cranky kids dragged to bed, cranky adults refusing to speak to one another unless to snark or yell.
And at the end of these special days: Night. Sleep. And then a morning like any other, a day like every other. No matter what the "special occasion," we go to bed each night and awaken the next morning to just another day.
Even on this, the biggest launch day of my career.
The cab got me to Deux Livres early. I paused a moment outside to peruse the storefront, a massive tri-partite window I'd walked past any number of times, in vanity and in vain looking for my book in the window.
That night, my book was the only thing in the window.
Thirty or forty copies of Down/Town, artfully arranged around a gigantic cardboard standee rushed into production by my publisher. More copies of my other books, arrayed in a straight line like a soldier's rank at the bottom of the window. And a sign that read, "MEET THE AUTHOR! LAUNCH PARTY TONIGHT!"
I stared. This day felt special. But I knew in the
morning I would wake up and it would be just another day.
Another day without my soul.
"Hey, there," Manda said, coming up to me and taking my arm. She was coming straight from work, so we'd agreed to meet at the store. "You look great."
"So do you," I said automatically, leaning in to kiss her cheek. She was dressed for work, which -- given that mommytobeeyotch.com's dress code could mean anything -- translated that day into tights, black skirt, a green, flowing blouse under a black vest. This was highly conservative wear for mommytobeeyotch.com.
She gripped my hand tightly, as if I needed support, and we went inside.
Wherein My Book Launches
No one was there.
Two men rushed to greet us when we walked in. The store's shelves and bookcases had been rearranged to provide a large space in the center of the store for guests to mingle, only there were no minglers present. A smallish raised platform had been set up near a display of my books, with a table and chair and a microphone. I guessed that this would be where I would be signing later. If anyone bothered to show up.
One more reason not to get invested in the idea of "special days."
"So wonderful to meet you at last!" one of the men said, pumping my hand with more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary. "I'm Roger, the store manager. This is Blake, our literary buyer."
"Such a fan," Blake gushed. "Can't even begin to tell you."
Then why haven't you carried my last three books? I thought, but did not say, did not even let slip onto my face, which I plastered with a poker player's lazy grin. "Thanks," I said. "That's always nice to hear."
"We're expecting a big crowd," Roger went on, "but you know publishing people -- late to everything." He chuckled as though it were a private joke, something he and I had concocted years ago, just the two of us. "In the meantime, can I get you something to eat or drink? The caterers won't be circulating for another ten minutes or so, but I can--"
"I'm fine," I interrupted. "Manda? Anything? Oh," I said before she could answer, "I'm sorry -- this is Manda. Manda, Roger and Blake."