Chapter Three: I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Part Four

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human call, and the unreasonable silence of the world.

--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus p.31f.

“Give yourself to me. Let us become one.”

“You mean…possession?”

“Possession!” I apparently had just told a very funny joke myself. He roared with laughter and wiped a tear off his face. At least, that was the motion he pantomimed. Can the devil cry? It took several seconds for him to compose himself from laughter.

“Certainly if you want to talk in those…archaic...terms. Possession.” He harrumphed. Leaned back. Spread out his two arms as if gesturing to the whole world. “As if we were separate, you and I, and I wanted to take you over and force you—cause you—to do something that negated your nature. But if I took control of you, and made you eat a delicious meal, whatever your favorite meal is…”

“Steak I guess.” I said this absent mindedly, not really expecting the question. I pictured myself anyway eating your lover’s flesh after I killed him. I imagined it tasted more like chicken.

He rolled his eyes a little, as if bored, as if everyone he talked to said steak. I can imagine that if I had actually said what I was thinking he would have been much more impressed. Cannibalism after a victory sounds much more up his alley.

“Yes you see!” he said, not missing a beat after his eye roll. “If I took control of you and made you eat steak, precisely at the moment you craved it….would this be an evil? An overriding of free will, or some diabolical control? Or if I made you make love to a beautiful woman, or enjoy some divine ambrosia…” He cut off for a moment as a few more employees escaped the restaurant and they, too, headed for their cars. “No, leave aside that term, possession. I make you do nothing. I empower you to do everything.”

Both of his hands started to grip my shoulders. I couldn’t tell if it was the moonlight or the shadows, but his appearance was now slightly different. More familiar. His jaw was suddenly like mine.

“If I made you beat in his brains,” his lips smacked, “or curse him, threaten him, crush his veins, would that be against your will? Will your philosophy cry in outrage against me? What a cruel thing that fate should make you do exactly what you wanted!” A pause. A deadly pause.

“But forget that word too, fate. Do not think in such great terms. What if I was but a small spark? A charge in the neurons. Your scientists say that the basic component of reality is vibrating strings. What if I was that small? Not grandiose fate but a tiny, infinitesimally small vibration, a furrow in the void. And that small spark traveled from the string like a violin cord, into atoms. And molecules. And I formed into a nucleobase, some ribose sugar, and a phosphate group? And they formed a nucleotide, and the nucleotides formed a chain of DNA. And then I became different alleles, and a genotype. And then phenotype and mask and hair and emotion and desire? The violin would swell into symphony. What then? What if I was just a small catalyst, a whisper in the emptiness between synapses? Or what if I was just a purely parallel force to your impulses, a delectation, a delight. What if I was the motion itself, between your desire and the goal?”

“A spark,” I murmured, distantly.

“Yes. My son you are free. So free. Do as you wish.”

And I made friends with the great Beast, and he sank his claws into me. Mephistopheles, reaching up from the Beneath. And he whispered to me the names of my enemies. Is this what it was to be free?

And in the night the leaves fell. The gray eye of the moon departed beneath clouds like cloth; the black sky a monolith of night. The great convex of the firmament peering down, spilling through the dull electric lamps. A stillness, crisp Autumn’s breath. A flicker of the lights.

“He’s coming, isn’t he?” I asked.

“He is. He will be. You clever child, smart thing. This is exactly as you planned those fearless nights, belabored with grief.” Those endless nights. A great hum began in my ears. Like the hum of insects singing on a summer night. But sinister. And everywhere. The hum was like all the strings of The Plan were suddenly plucked as they wound and crossed into an intersection through all the infinite worlds.

“His tips were immaculate tonight as well. I made sure of it. A present to you. He is happy. He is not ready for you. Not ready.” The suffocating dark. It was his throat. His larynx. His teeth and tongue bursting, humming. Finding sympathy with my soul.

“In fact,” the voice the arm-stroke of a great conductor about to conduce the notes of my body and melody, reconciling them with his every gesture. “In fact, all he can think about right now,” he pressed his fingers to his temple as if this helped him read that bastard’s mind, “is her. Her delicate voice, her green eyes.” The darkness thickened. “Her naked breasts. Her kiss. The heat of her body pressed against him. It consumes every neuron.”

Nature itself coaxed me forward, in rage and pain. The sycophantic hum invaded my hands from the night beyond, my heart ached with a warring mouth. The poem of my pulse agonized. I knew the world would not be the same. I laughed. A part of me cried. Some of me was silent. I tried to lay a hand upon the world order, too great for me but yet I felt I could seize it. I was bursting under the strain. The long night itself seized me and gave itself like a weapon.

“Be brave now,” he whispered.

I rolled the window down. Smelled the autumn air, almost winter. Breathed it in. The great refreshing North crept down into our spaces and cities. Indifferent to the heat of our towers and buildings. Boasting of a jagged, gorgeous winter, its promises cascading through autumn’s last words. Its last leaves brushed and swirled to the caprice of the wind. I winced at police sirens shrieking by on the far side of the parking lot, the street, the ebullience of light and spirit with its wheels and chrome vaulting by. But not for me.

“Not for you,” the Devil coaxed, “how powerful. Don’t waste this moment. O’ powerful and anonymous.”

The silk of his tongue stretched amongst the length of my car. “Right now you are the envy of nations. One who has the energy and gall to effect, yet remain unknown, like some Archon that is yet a ghost. Diffusing into the darkness.” He looked me in the eye. “But perhaps this is not enough for you.”

In the distance, the tragedy of fire. A red fire engine also screamed by. Not for me. The tragedy of death. An ambulance deafening, warbling like a sprinter by us. Ignoring the stoplights, ignoring the after-hours traffic.

“You could just go home.” The Devil said in the full bastion of darkness. His face. Oh God. His face was some great, sweet menace. His voice like cellos beat against the air, their warping cords moaning in the dark. The sea sighing in collapse against the sand. Its everlasting bite. Like it was my heart itself speaking, singing some chthonic melody. With such power. Some dark requiem. All for me.

The night was, suddenly, the throat of my great bellowing heart, combusting, convulsing beside me like a beloved sephiroth, my hypostasis, my own demon, my own ragged angel standing expectant to aid the attack. It was a gate collapsing. A throat. The Mayan’s designed the entrances to their important buildings, each as a mouth. Because each space was a different world, a different axis beckoning. Different like the internal anatomy of one animal from another—thus each microcosm had different bones and breath as one left one world for the next. And the night outside my car, the back exit to the restaurant you worked at, it was a Hellmouth, just like the Medieval paintings. Waiting to devour. As if Justice was just awaking, trembling and shaking as it stretched, having been asleep for centuries, now hungering. All for the great future of the next few minutes.

Oh God come to me. Help your servant.

“I have no home.” It was true. It was gone. I felt the words not. I heard them not. I only anticipated his reply. My words were like arrows; their only essence the goal. I saw his eyes, suddenly like my eyes. I saw his cheeks, suddenly taught as mine were. “Not anymore.”

“You have nothing to lose, then.”

The Devil and I wore the same clothes.

There was a hand on my shoulder. The other perhaps in my heart, sliding its mechanism and machinery, tilting the gears with nimble orchestration.

A secret. This is a secret, you see. I have told no one of this event. Ever. This mention is the final proof. The one mark pressed upon time as it marches.

The machine of my heart overheated, and it began to cook my brain. The house of my spirit trembled. Heaved. My bulk was a hammer lusting to strike. I pictured you and him kissing. Looking like lovers look, at each other, in the night like two shadows, coalesced. I saw all of your striations, your muscles, heat, the piping of your heart and hips thirsting for each other; thrusting, threading in interlace. Infinite lines at play. Infinite pathways undulating. And The Plan added to their infinities and spoke to me of your meeting. First a small fire, a flirt as he trained you. A touch. A glance. A bad customer you shared and the jokes in small private spaces he generated, the calm between collecting plates and disappointing tips. Your frustration with me and my faults. The rising attraction between you and him some diabolical numerology calculating how I failed you. Our fighting. Falling away from ourselves. And on and on. Spiraling through our history. Flaunting in front of me as if you were indifferent to me; I was a small sound in distance to your darkness.

Your embrace was a riot of my failure, and my molecules convulsed, knots needing to burst, threats of tension, of tumult. A wild force of nature. I felt all my strength. The car and the ground winced as my spirit and flesh flexed. I punched the handle of the wheel. The side of the door.

Roared.

I was hot.  Sweating.  Shaking with anger.

And sadness coursed through me.

But then I think the Devil disappeared. From my car into the night he went, towards the door, that door that broke between worlds and wisdom, between me and the motion my body ached toward. My hand was already upon the door latch. Wanting to fling myself into the pensive night. The other hand a fist. I felt like the fulcrum and point around which the world turned. The light continued to shiver. On and off. On and off. God, my strength surged. Every nerve was active. Every fiber found some sympathy with the air, with the ground. I was merely a moment in the night, a moment of darkness, a denser shadow in communion with other gravestones. The air and the far mountains, the northern cold. Like family, like furious cenotaphs, they spoke to me, and gathered round the Devil, devious but friendly. Familiar. Like great monuments to a victory yet to be won. Graves yet to be dug.

I will erase this pain.

I held the night, in my hands, like a weapon.

You are nothing. A voice said. A fuel for my rage. So pathetic. So small. You will never know enough. Love enough. Be enough. It spoke like a rush of wind. I saw the Devil now outside, near the door, standing with his head down and fists clenched near the door. A silhouette. A silhouette waiting to breach into form. I saw the Devil’s face slightly, a contour from the shadow and the great background of black. Palid features crept in sinews of dark and diasporas of the bleak light. I saw a scar on his forehead. Like my scar, from my childhood. I saw his grimace. Like my grimace.

“Be brave now.” I said to myself.

The Devil in the night outside bowed, his right hand tucked beneath his breast, the other, the left, outstretched toward the door. A finger pointing. He was coming, so soon now. Is this how God feels as the nunc stans, the eternal point around which time rotates? Oh God spare me. The Devil was presenting me with a gift. A gift. It was hard enough to turn down a normal gift. How does one refuse the Devil? A Devil who now looked exactly like me? But he was gone. Maybe, maybe I had imagined he was ever here. He was a Dreamlet who burst from my skull. Athena, Neith, Minerva, the Goddess of War bursting from my forehead like the mythologies reported of Zeus. A parthenogenous daughter of my malice. It was just me now. And War, my lady.

“Be brave.”

My rage abstracted. As if I exploded from the car and became the veins of the night.

Exile took my mind. I left the car as if in exodus. As if a path arose from the concrete. Away from my life. Away from the known.

A shade and silhouette; I left the car like it was a fortress. Like it had been my tomb and I was Christ emerging after the third night, glorious. Christ. I laughed to myself. No, better. Sweet vengeance.

I was so sorry. Lumbering in silent night. Longing to say, to scream, so loudly in the night’s darkness how much you hurt me. Every actuation of my muscles, every pump of my heart bled it. It was the systole, the diastole, the circulation of my world. The eternal return.

I surrendered to these, the worst of my dreams. In the chill. The harboring dark. Ringing, shrieking, sleepless cries arose from my soul. Oh Lover. I was so hopeless. In deep, silent breaths I despised creation. The world. The concatenation of events that led me here. This was all my doing. Not chance. Not necessity. I could negate everything of that part of me living on vague nostalgia, except this desire for a new unity, a longing, this longing for new resolution, this need for clarity and cohesion. Equilibrium. I could refute everything in my surrounding world that clashed with me or enraptured me; except this chaos. This sovereign chance, and this Divine equivalence that springs from anarchy. The quantum fissure of a November and the novemdecillion urgent quantum events which had led here, suddenly blinking into order.. There was no coincidence of names. Names are the essence the thing, The PLan nodded.

I read about quantum theory. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (who claimed, like the Carolingian church claimed Augustine, that Einstein supported them) wrote the world was not, but it was in its cells a sea of probabilities, vast and indefinite, sets of possibles which collapsed upon measurement. This Wave-Function Collapse meant that observation creation the observed. My energy created worlds. Galaxies. Which led me to wonder, was I brought here, or was the Here I was now brought by me? Was my rage now physics collapsing the Real to make the object of my hate? Or was my hate real?

I didn’t care now.

The Plan flooded through me. Yes my love, my fire. You see now. You see.

In my self-creative anger I not only made myself. I gave legitimacy to Nietzsche, funded the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  All in this small locomotion.  My petty hatred.  My tiny life.  Many do not see how their actions are inscribed with words. But in that moment I did.

God, was I talking to two others in the night? The Devil and The Plan? We were some unholy Trinity.

God where are you?

Come to think of it, where was the Devil now?

So deep. These breaths, in silence, I felt all our loves rendered to lies, the sins of our life. I stepped away. One foot from the car. Another. I stepped beyond the spotlight of the lamp, flickering above. A trail of The Plan calculating. I was cradled deeply in this endless breach of night, wandering through it.  I was a wolf.  A lion roaming about, looking to devour.

I breathed you. Lover, you clung to my eyes. Painted on everything I saw. Every motion of mine was all our secrets unfolding. Through lies. Through my hatred.  I took your memory with me. Into the night. That abyssal siren, the seducing nihilist. Your hot blood the ashes of war within myself, falling, creeping like a guilty thing, crawling towards outcome, the blessed floor, telos.

The quanta were forced to form. My meaning wrenched, convulsed, contracted the world. I was God. The Babylonian God Marduk in the Tiamat, forcing order upon the chaos of indefinite waters. Separating them. Light from light. Dark from dark.

I felt so alive.


Entelechy sprawled from my soul and serene movements through the sparkling air of a night threatening to rain. Forward, I kept bursting forward like a seed blooming into blossom and form, bark, trunk, arms, those terrible branches, a strength longing as if pulled from some super essential power. Every step was a little ritual, every ache and doubt, some prayer. Every sadness and shortcoming of my life to that point moving ever toward sky and rapture, to Empyrium, Hyperuranion, the highest heavens, in a desperate supplication.  I wondered if my voice would reach the Highest Heaven. Would Christ carry it there? In intercession as my High Priest? The finale pulled my bones; denouement drew my breath, every bracket of my body a dragoon of my soul now galloping into a white silence, a great, weary Messiah waiting to exonerate me. I thought. To be the unbecoming of what we became. I desired.

I felt a small droplet of rain. And another.

My soul was on the soft brightness of the lamp-lit air, a stain moving, shadows of change. A cascade of water now pealing down, through skeins of earthborn light.

God this was beautiful. It was raining. Was this a movie? I became, for a moment, confused. This was too right. Too perfect. Now I only needed an instrumental score as I walked step by step through the thick night. That endless night, a boundless silent sea in which your lover or myself would drown. And as if the Devil’s breath purged the light, the flickering lamps under which I walked suddenly seized, clamped, extinguished. There was nothing now but blackness. My dreams were so empty in this weary walk. This perfect solstice between soul and body, meaning and event.

Scientists be damned. Every motion of my body’s microbes were signs. Letters. An alphabet, a great cryptographic solution to the deep code of the world. All screaming murder in all its synonyms and cognates, in all the dialects and idioms of creation. The Plan weaved its ever complex labyrinth.

Heavy was my bound heart. Aching, limping towards resolution. Their thousandfold shards urging toward darkness.

A light burst forth as a doorway opened in the near distance. Signs and auxiliary symbols furrowed, they flng outward toward me like the epitaph of a tomb, like a memorial soon to be drawn. There he was in the horizontal expanses, a cluster of horrible words. Wandering dumb in the lightless deserts of asphalt. He did not know that soon one last gasping hallelujah would ring from my lips. Or perhaps his. Like a vent of exhaustion.

Or a poem.

Small figures emerged, like shadows cast from candlelight, surging and shrinking, long shadows from the rectangular doorway of light stretching, flickering against the parking lot. Their shadows were slow. Elongated. Anchored by a long night of work.

But I, I moved like a madness, a lightning shrieking jagged from ragged clouds, from the sky towards the target. A big fire. The words describing my wake great ashes, the only warm things in the November night. Their threnody spent itself into the dark. I felt every web of The Plan pulling me, saying the only truth was vengeance now. Then I saw the Devil, The Plan, in unison, watching. (Whispering to each other). I, blurred. Exploding like light in the ebon.

I diagonalized into their diabolical expectations. Stumbled. Fell into them.

I was going to kill, strike, I was—

“Derrick?”

Damnit.

Who?

The Cook.

His voice was some heavenly apocalypse opening the sky. Light. Light from light. I was exposed. I knew it, I knew he always left early. How could I forget? How could it slip my mind? How could I have missed how he out-strided your lover, even by a few steps, from the door?

His voice held me like the sky above held the earth. I froze.

He squinted.

“Derrick?”

I was stretched and pulled from the darkness. No.

The Plan was silent. I saw the Devil tilt his head slightly.  He was now next to me, or at least his whisper was in my ear.  But he no longer appeared.  Kill him too. He rasped. All barriers are now your enemy.  He will ruin everything.  Everything we want.

“Yeah its me.” I said, hoarse. Its sound was like a suicide.

“What are you doing here?”

“I—“ But I couldn’t answer.

Joseph, the Cook, nodded.

(Cowardice is creeping upon you  Mephistopheles hissed.  Eyes black. Big holes in the structure of the world. In the night.)

Joseph nodded as if he knew. But of course he couldn’t.

“I had a bad night too.” He said. “Long, long day.” A sigh. “A long week, a long month really.” He shook his head.

I knew him because of you. You invited him to dinner one night with some other co-workers. I remember he took a liking to me immediately. One of those inexplicable things, where you aren’t quite sure why you are liked, but you can do nothing about it. Like suddenly you are a magnet.

He was a great debris in the darkness now, detritus drifting, lurching toward me.

(You must go through him.  It is the only way.)

Joseph looked so tired.  Defeated.

(The Devil's breath rattled against my neck.)


“It was just a bad night.” He looked away in the dark as he lit a cigarette. Smoke and amber rose and growled. I hated cigarettes. But there is something about their smell if you catch it from just the right distance. In the rain, and the lingering warmth of the day. If the air is otherwise clear, pure. Now it was just the smell of early winter, rain, and smoke. A glory upon the air’s threading, its architecture.
Again his head shook.

The ghostly amber faintly lit the night. Small skeins glowed into the dark as he inhaled. Ancient songs. Not just smoke but like his soul. I saw the oblique angles, the distance; ever so slightly your Lover’s shadow fused into his car. For a moment I thought to leave Joseph. To sprint with Lady War beside me, and kill your lover with no indiscretion. To follow the manifold of lines and purpose. The Plan told me this was foolish. I didn’t care, but Something held me. Cowardice, maybe. Indecision. The thought of prison or regret. The imagined smell of blood on my fists.

But in Joseph’s figure, a simplicity burst upon me.

All the lines of the labyrinth, my edless schemes, disappeared. The Plan evanesced.

“I wasn’t even supposed to work tonight. But we were so damned short handed.  So many people out sick.”

I looked over, enraged. The Plan shrugged its shoulders, stunned and cadaverous.

“My wife is sick, I shouldn’t have come tonight. But we needed the money.” He was worried. Desperate.

"I just called her, my mother says shes sleeping soundly now."  A deep sigh.  "Thats good at least.  A small comfort."

There was a reserved sadness in his eyes. The look where no explicit word could ever bear the weight, so cornea and pupil bowed beneath it; the soul stuttered through them. Wordless but pouring forth speech.

His words were all punctuated by amber breaths into the cigarette. Light and dark flexing, conceding; his existence just concatenations of light as he breathed. He burned, and was gone. Burned. And was gone. And then he drew a new cigarette, renewing, repeating the translucent erosion.

“Its dumb but I get mad sometimes. You know, like I could get even.” He shown for a moment, then was lost in the night and in the smoke. “Wanted to kill a customer tonight.” Why did he have to intercept me? Why did he have to want to talk to me so badly?

“But its just tilting at windmills, you know? Like me getting even with that customer, or with any other asshole that comes into the restaurant, will actually help me.” He took another drag.

I still had said nothing at this point. I had barely acknowledged his existence. Rude and foolish? Yes. Yes. But he was now a mountain between me and the target. I felt your lover slip away. I imagined I blurred away and into the abyss after him without moving, skin and vein and soul stretching like a snake from where I stood, as if my very existence allowed its edges to blur and furl through time and space, while I stood here, I was also breaking from my body into an infinite series of movements. Like a thousand snapshots of a runner superimposed into a single frame. All a fantasy. The dream in the stillness of a coward.

Your lover kept coalescing into the darkness, all the shadows of change shaking hands and become one indifference. Having said his goodbyes to his coworkers he moved on in escape. All he can think about is her, I remember the Devil saying. Where was the Devil? Had he run away?

Go after him. It was smothered. The briefness of a drowning thought.

Regrets already plumed. Mistakes. These things I feared most. My doubtful whispers, unsubtle hurricanes. Oh the wreckage of my soul. Dead before the ship even sank.

The Plan fractured, egressed, dispersed.

Its outline a frame of smoke congressing with the air. Sinking, stretching into it, amorphous. The infinite expanse of sky its ever expanding tomb.

The Bible constantly says, Everything will be destroyed. Over all your cities, grass will grow.  Sometimes I am filled with horror.
But sometimes I think it is fantastic.

All plans will be undone.

The Devil spoke his peace.  Right before he slipped away.

“There are no victories in life. I have only a taste for lost causes. They demand a soul without fissure, the equal of any defeat, the champion of any temporary victory.  Do not think of consequences here!  Do you think lightning thinks before it strikes?  No it merely is the strike, the lance.  One cannot come to the defense of lightning.”

But this too, was his retreat. Somehow I knew it.

Remember this night.  He said in his most deadly whisper.  Remember another of your failures.

Oh how I was failing again.  I burned now only with echoes of The Plan.  I ached with them.  Cowardly wraiths. Sand and fog. Pumping less light than the amber swaths cut by the cook’s cigarette into the November blackness.

He hesitated. The interval that sadness takes, you take.  And unsure how to proceed, I followed his every delay. At a loss how to respond. Hoping the question would not come.

But he asked “I’m pretty thirsty. I need to, whats the word---unwind?” He threw his last cigarette into the asphalt and stomped it.

A fracture, a reorginzation of thought. A purification from complexity. The expurgation of the lines of expectation and plots, fading in the sudden moment of clarity.

“Would you give me a drink?” He apologized immediately.

His English was weak, you know.

“Get a drink with me?” Is what he meant.

I was growing weak. My breath was the fading ashes, the exhausted breaths of a dying empire.

This was the moment. The interval between the infinite possible worlds in their collapse; I felt the unbearable weight of the geometric point of their remainder. What man was I? What would be chosen?

But how could I refuse his request? He looked so, sad.

I suppose I had to help. No matter how vile I myself was.

And what did it matter? I hesitated again.

Your lover turned the key. The solenoid slid into place, it spark grabbed the engine. The churn of his car grumbled in the air. Turned over. Lights lit the distance for a second, a flash as he stepped on his brakes before the stoplight, the small glow of his dashboard as he adjusted the radio station. There was a light squeal as he accelerated in the instance before he took off again, into the absolute night beyond all lamps and plans.

His engine purred against that green light, and was lost to me. To some destination. Not some. To you. He was beyond my reach. I was helpless. I had failed again.

Nature then became so silent. Its symphony of creatures. Still.

Be so deathly still as you breath, said to myself as I tried to listen for some new thought, some new course of action.

But there was nothing.

All that was to be beautiful is leaving. Has left.

My Avalon unraveled. My philosophy died.

The Devil, The Plan, were faceless. Silent. I even missed their company in the naked expanse.

And with aching regret I went with Joseph, and even indulged his weak English and bought him a drink. Two. Three. And we talked of better times. We lamented each other’s wounds. We remembered in the end, none of it.

And I cursed God’s absence in the delirium of our drinking. Why had He not helped me? Even the Devil had appeared in person. Why had God not? Was God what Camus had spoken of? Not even a stranger, but some silent observer, with no emotional connection with us?

(Oh God I love you. Why were you not with me?)

And in that moment my faith was a beautiful little fragile thing, becoming a holocaust. A dream, now gone from me, away, into a secret locked place where I cannot follow.

(I wish you had come to me God. How I miss you.)

It was only later after I had drank with Joseph, after I despaired for so long, that I saw it. I had in a fit of despair read the scriptures. And I saw Matthew. Chapter 25. Verses 35 through 40.

 And I started in the dark beneath the meager light as I read upon my bed in half-sleep. Prayed.

Was that you, Lord?

In the dark, did you come to me?