The devil came to my house

The devil showed up and he stood outside the front door, a little impatient I guess, I guess I could read that in his posture, his black hoof tap tap tapping. He seemed generally displeased with the state of the sky, which was end-of-the-day electric orange fusing into bottom of the ocean blue. His bright red body held itself quite still, unnaturally so, most likely I figure because he wasn’t breathing, because he didn’t have to. He held a small naked boy’s hand. I was shocked, for obvious reasons sure, but also because I knew that boy — he was me, or I was him, maybe I should say, some thirty plus years ago. Down to the last detail. Same birthmark by our lips and in our inner thigh. I knew this from photos better than I did from memory, which made sense because in those days we were so rarely outside ourselves like we are now, always able to take a look at how we are reflected back in the digital mirror. Plus back then, just looking at me, I remembered all these feelings I had forgotten I still had somewhere buried in the under-used configurations of my brain: how big the yard felt, how crisp the air this time of year, how long a month was, how impossible that the decades would change, how I couldn’t wait to see what it felt like when we moved from 89 to 90; how no separation existed between the creative impulse and the act of creation, no art to make: instead days and nights to shape,, how I described God clearly to my sisters; how I dreamt for one whole week of every episode that would air the next day of Looney Tunes, and was right; and here I was, nude under the hyper-present sky, and the devil was standing there at my door with a bunch of papers and a pen, impatient, waiting, all I had to do was sign and it would all be back again, I would be all mine.

Check Please!

There was philosophy, and then there was philosophy. That’s how he explained it. With his mouth chewing on a mix of meat and bread. He pointed the fork at you and swallowed. He wanted you to acknowledge that people had a hard time making choices in accordance with what they claimed to believe. You had two glasses of wine in you, red from grapes grown just about as far away as you felt from him, psychologically, at that moment. Maybe, you offered, softly, so not to alarm him with your disagreement, what people believe is more like a goal that guides them toward the kind of person they want to be. Like a lighthouse, it keeps you off from rocks of real bad behavior.

“Real bad behavior?” He said it and licked his lips clean of that last bite, but you could tell he liked that. He wanted to know what you knew about quote unquote real bad behavior. So you told him about some people say it takes a deviant mind to understand one, and whether or not that was true, in your line of work you it was actually — literally, you said — your job to understand. Or at least try. In his line of work, he designed abstract structures that moved information from one place to another within a network of electrical components. It seems unrelated, he said, but actually we are both interested in eliminating bad behavior. In computer programming, we call that debugging. And maybe you as a psychologist or therapist or whatever are also tasked with designing structures that intervene in the electrical components albeit biological that make up a brain, thereby removing the “bugs” — he air quoted that phrase loudly — in human behavior. 

To which you replied with a big old maybe and debated between a third glass of wine or a check, because you suddenly felt tired from all this. You knew there was a moon outside, above your heads, and it was practically glowing it was so full of silence. You knew you could take his hand and tell him he was a genius, that his smarts were sexy, and if you lowered your voice you could ask him if he wanted to see real bad behavior. Then when he assented you could take that fork with the glossy shiny of meat grease on it and plunge it directly into the flesh of his hand, and maybe even hard enough to pin his hand to the table, and casually ask if he liked this kind of bad behavior, if this is what he meant. Because it was your job to understand, and understanding requires identification. You had to get him by seeing yourself in him, and sometimes there was no better way than going right inside, past all the boundaries, and watch what comes rushing out.

The Island

It was right there all along. I saw the sea, and the twinkling lights that stood for the spot where land ended, where the boundary between things vanished whenever you zoomed in. It was December, no one was at this end of the island. It was the kind of island people forgot was an island at all. There were too many rooftop bars, penthouse apartments, tall office windows where the lights never went out; and then down on the other side of things there were gutter villages, temporary cities of sleeping bags and dogs, and markings on the underground walls that you let you know it was possible for life to drag you down there. There were places you couldn’t get into, and places from which you couldn’t return. I thought of all the bodies, beautiful or unloved, in various configurations and contortions. None of them were here tonight. I breezed in the sea and it became me. I breathed out and for a moment I was gone; I had evacuated myself; I was free.

*

They were closing the prison. The prison was an experiment in an alternate form of society, and it failed. So the prisoners were going to become prisoners in other places, smaller prisons, scattered across the island. Inside the prison were places for solitary confinement; inside that were men inside prisons inside prisons; inside them were thoughts, feelings, and impulses, which is how life happens — by which I mean, how God muscles out intention from the dizzying electrical ocean of neurons fire in the brain; how the brain collaborates with the gut, which itself is another brain left over from when each of these men were still in the womb — when their bodies were folded in themselves, and the matter the became the head pulled from the center and left neurons wrapped around the gut, which will continue thinking for the rest of their lives, no matter what spaces they are enclosed in, no matter if they ever go outside.

*

“I like your tattoo… what does it mean?” he said. She winced. “Ohhhh-kkkay there…” She froze me out. He felt belittled. He felt small. He tried to joke. “You don’t know what it means?” She said nothing. He left the store and waited. Her shift was the last one. When it was over, it was easy to follow her into the subway. It was easy to take the car next to hers and watch when she got out. The city was full of places to hide. She didn’t get her keys out in time and that was that. He knew in the long run, he couldn’t get away with it. But the system breaks down if you don’t think in terms of the long run. He left her contorted in a position she never knew in life. He thought about that when he went underground. Suddenly everything was possible. There was no way to know the boundaries of the world until you pushed on them. Some walls were doors. Some people still left their windows unlocked.

The Women

I heard the plan before I knew what it meant. “And that’s when we finish her off?” “Yeah, that’s when we finish her off.” Two pairs of eyes turned their lights on at me from the other side of the diner. I turned away, put coffee in my mouth, and wondered if there would finally be a consequence to the games I play in my head with strangers. Over nine million people in this city — how many have I fought, made love to, fucked, or killed in the span of a train ride, over the course of a block, as eyes locked and left? Never a consequence, not really. Once a woman switched train cars because I kept looking. I felt who I was in her eyes and didn’t like it. And now who was I to these two men? They were a collage of grays and eye slits and stubble. They were knife wounds for mouths. They stared to colonize my space and I felt a loss of ownership over my body. I thought of that woman again, the one who I made uncomfortable. If she had confronted me I would have apologized. I would have said, I’m sorry, I was just thinking how I have a similar sweater and jacket but never thought to wear them together. I would have presented as hyper-soft to excuse myself from the image of myself she gave me: a colonizer, planting the flags of my eyes in her flesh. So maybe we were not so different, these men and I. At least they wore who they were on their skin. I crossed the diner. I sat at their booth. “I want in.”