Me and the Devil: A Novel by Nick Tosches Page B

fingers to where the back of her thigh and her buttock rested on the chair. “Maybe here. Next time. Maybe you could bite me here.”
    She took a sip of coffee. An extravagant wind whistled through a narrow breach in the window. A beautiful elemental sound.
    “I don’t think there’s any blood to be had there in that sweet meat,” I said, then slowly smiled. The coffee was good and hot. I leaned against the black granite countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen, facing the little table where she sat, so that we both looked out on the same sky, the same pink wisps andblue, all but gone now, and the gray clouds that grew bigger and began to roll, fuller and darker, in the wind.
    “It’s the blood, not the biting?” she said, and her voice seemed as lost in that sky as she was.
    “Yes,” I said. “It’s the blood.”
    It seemed that she was waiting not for me but for the lowering clouds and umbrous sky to explain my words. She drank her coffee. There was another whistling through the window, and a rattling of the pane; and then distant thunder.
    She asked about the lines of poetry on the refrigerator, and I told her.
    “From Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus, from Dogtown’—
‘We drink / or break open / our veins solely / to know. A drunkard / showing himself in public / is punished / by death’
—and there’s more, but those are the lines that mean something to me.”
    “And what do they mean to you?”
    “I can’t put it into words. It’s hard to dissect or explain beauty or power.” I gestured to the sky through the window. “Maybe if you can dissect or explain it, then it’s not beauty or power. Maybe true beauty and true power defy reason and intellect and explanation by their very nature. They hit below the belt of those things. I don’t know. To me they’re like a light in the sky of a faraway star that died a thousand years ago. The light of Gnosticism.
‘Solely / to know.’
The search for freedom through wisdom beyond learning. But the Leviticus of fear and morality cannot allow such a thing. As far as the poetry of it goes, you can see Olson’s brilliance. Seven lines, and the central line, the fourth line, is shared by the Gnostic infinitive—
‘to know,’
followed by a full stop—and the opening words of a killing law set against all that is inherent in that infinitive, the freedom and wisdom, no matter how high or how low, that fears, laws, and moralities must destroy. But that’s not why I like it, not really. The bedrock of the thing—therhythm, the meter—is majestic. It could bust a bronze Homeric pickaxe. But it goes so much beyond that. Like I said, I can’t say because I just don’t know. It’s like that whistling wind, that thunder a few minutes ago. I can feel it but I can’t explain why and what it makes me feel what I feel.”
    “Damn, you can talk.”
    “Yeah, I know.” I smiled. “Without saying much of anything that makes sense.”
    “That’s not what I meant. You talk beyond sense. You leave it in the dust. I like that.”
    “Maybe that’s where it belongs, in the dust.”
    Was this her way of saying she understood about the blood? Her way of telling me I didn’t have to make sense of it for her? Or was it just idle talk over coffee, to be forgotten when the cups were rinsed? I didn’t know, I didn’t care.
    “I’ve got a paper due next week,” she said. “I better go and get to work on it. Can I borrow that book you have in there,
Whom Gods Destroy,
I think it’s called? There’s some stuff in there I want to paraphrase.”
    “Don’t paraphrase. Steal,” I said.
    Soon after she left I experienced a ravenous appetite. This was somewhat out of the ordinary, as my usual coffee and cigarettes left me with little desire to eat on most mornings, and breakfast for me was either desultory and meager or more often completely bypassed. But on this morning I feasted on a thick broiled pork chop, pan-fried potatoes with sage, thick smoked