Satyr

Before Lars had even opened his eyes he knew his world was somehow changed. The proof of this alchemy rested loosely in his hand. He allowed the coarse pad of his thumb to palpate its many facets, smooth and glassy and divided by ridges which felt to pour into one another like the lips of geometric waterfalls. Nothing good ever happened to him. He resolved to keep his eyes shut and his mouth closed and waited serene as a monk for the punctual bugle of heaven to sound all over, so that his world might once again commence its cyclical ending, its tragic, hapless renewal.

Sixty Mississippi and he allowed a squint. Then his bleary hounddog eyes bugged and what he saw itched him all over, itched him in places that mall patrol might see as very uncouth if he chose to indulge the rake of his free hand.

It was the strangest gem he’d ever seen. Even in the shade of his cupped palms and bowed head the jewel possessed a fey dichroic light at its center, a furtive little spark that reminded him of the sun’s surface in Nasa captures, almost insectoid in the way its movement never ceased in distressed little waves.

He looked up from where he sat between the brick wings of the mall entrance. Nothing stirred except litter, dirty gray napkins pinwheeling across the concrete apron of the walkway like a weightless kit of dead pigeons. The noon sun glared down on the parking lot and made hot shiny plates of the scarce car roofs scattered there. He couldn’t recall why he was even here. The American Mall might have been made of wattle and daub for all its current relevance. Perhaps, like Romero’s walking dead, he had been drawn to the big beige stele out of some old repressed habit. He probably looked the part enough to qualify.

He regarded the jewel again, his breath coming in a shallow wheeze. Its weird light murrined the blacks of his pupils. No, he hadn’t quaffed so much that he wouldn’t recall filching a jewel. Even the time he’d bar crawled all over Salt Lake City, bankrolled by a meagre inheritance from his late father’s minor estate, he could point to every bruise in the mirror the following day and tell its story.

His head swam. For a brief moment he considered approaching the mall jeweler. Maybe there would be something in it for him. But then he saw his whole life in the gem’s myriad pavilions, the ups and downs, the topsy-turvies. No matter how soused he’d ever been, he had never stolen a single thing, not once. A blind man had once handed him a c-note by mistake for some errand or another and Lars had never hesitated in voicing the mistake. He wasn’t very religious, hadn’t been to Mass since his grandma had dragged him there all those years ago during summer break. Still, whenever some heinous temptation bore down on him he would see the stained church glass reflected in his mind’s eye, the bloody and beseeching image of Jesus looking down at him with long drawn face from the Calvary prop, and then a modicum of spirit would invariably wilt his feral hand. Faint as it was, an idea of goodness did exist in him.

Well old boy, maybe this is it, he thought. Maybe this is what those tidy looking clergymen mean when they spout off about Providence…

The gem grew very warm in his hand. He opened his palm and saw the rainbow light at its center had formed a face. Then the face spoke, the words echoing in some empty amphitheater within his head. “Hello, Lars. Pray do not be alarmed. I am the Devil. I have chosen you, and you alone, for a very special task.”

Lars’s jaw went lax. Something inside of him ticked. He gibbered weakly, “Oh, oh fuck, oh christing Jes —”

He fainted.

--------------

When Lars woke up it was evening. A cold rain had soaked him all the way through his green surplus jacket, his hair and beard ornamented with vitreous little beads. He turned over and saw the dark vandal clouds scudding east, their bellies almost seeming to graze the freeway above the wide embankment in the distance. The cars in the parking lot were all gone. People had seen him lying there being rained on, had walked right past his limp sodden figure. What a strange dream, he thought as he righted himself, his bones cold as pewter.

The fitful light of an old Yankee Candle showed him a nickel-sized gash just above his left eyebrow in the bathroom mirror. He hadn’t even felt it. The rain had sluiced the darkest of the blood away, a thin pink trickle stinging his eye just as he’d walked through the slat gate wedged between weary, overgrown hedges out back. The bungalow sat like a blank space on Sydow Street. The electric hadn’t been paid for over a month, ever since the last of the inheritance ran dry. His sweet reckoning had a name and that name was Jezebeth. Jezebeth was a one-legged hooker who carried out her business in a dim apartment above a dilapidated arcade across town. Someone who didn’t love her might have called her a one-trick pony; she only did missionary. The sex had become almost ascetic after the third time, but coming always felt like some grand penance being paid, not just for his own sins, but for all his agnates down to Adam. Jezebeth was the only girl he’d ever been with who left him feeling clean after the deed. She was still bashful about the stump; he wasn’t allowed to touch it. The one time he’d asked, she had tensed and threatened to call up Elonzo. Elonzo was her handler, a big German with a white starburst scar over his left cheekbone. Lars had then tried mitigating by asking if she ever had any phantom pains, but she had just turned her head towards him on the mattress and looked at him, her eyes little more than glittering inkwells in the gloom. Then, very austerely, and with a hint of pride, she’d said, “I don’t believe in ghosts. ”

Lars brought the candle into the kitchen and set it on the round wooden table at its center, the dark trembling at the edges like something with an appetite. He grabbed a transistor radio next to a scummed-up draining board and scooted one of the spindle chairs back and sat down, fingering the dial until Robert Johnson crackled out “Crossroad Blues”. He reached for the dusty cooler lid on the floor. Three cans of Pabst floated in water. He needed more ice. He needed to get a job. He needed someone, anyone, to tell him—

“Is it all that bad, my friend?”

Beer jetted out of Lars’s nose and mouth. He hopped up so fast his knees thumped the table’s underside, nearly upending it. He’d shed his sopping clothes and so stood absolutely naked. His damp body shone in the candlelight, his eyes canvassing the trembling dark like some caveman spooked by a world still slowly revealing its teeth. He didn’t see anything.

“I have a gun,” he stammered.

“You do not.” The voice was like water, like a sentient brook that purled in his brain.

“Yes I do!”

“Okay…where?”

“Where?”

“Yes, where.”

Lars shifted his weight, eyes still scanning. The candle guttered with an audible thwoop, smoke twisting up in the paltry silver moonlight coming through the small case window over the sink. His heart crashed against the bony brace of his ribs.

“No, Lars,” the voice said, “here.”

---------------

The rainbow light pulsed with each word it uttered. Sometimes it seemed to form a little featureless face like a drama mask. Lars sat hunched over the table, listening with his chin resting atop his folded arms. He listened to the talking jewel for well over an hour. His mind reeled but was unable to refuse the strange reality of it all. He’d been so consistently soused for so long that reality for him always seemed to have one precarious foot still perched in his dreams. And, besides, didn’t it somewhat validate his life’s misery? Maybe suffering actually had some noble purpose after all, maybe—

“No,” the rock said coolly.

Lars’s eyes started in their sockets. “No what?”

“Perhaps it is best we move matters along.”

Lars drummed his fingers on the table, chewed his lip. “How do I know this—you—whatever, is real?”

Just then the house lights clapped on, every dormant appliance in the house chittering to life. The abruptness of it jolted him.

“Ok, so what. Not like I couldn’t have done that myself,” the words petering out as he brought the beer back to his mouth and downed it.

The gem sighed. “Do you find my terms agreeable?

Lars cracked another beer top and slurped the fizz. His mind worked. “You say you don’t need my soul, but I’d sign the pink slip right now if it meant Jezebeth’s being happy.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” the gem burbled.

Lars leaned over and pulled another beer from the cooler, ice rattling. Another genial parlor trick. Mother, the beer is cold and the lights are on. He thought about Jezebeth lying there on the bed in her shoebox flat, nursing her shame in the dark.

“Ok,” he said. “Tell me one more time what I have to do.”

--------------

Lars took a Greyhound up north the following day. A part of him still couldn’t reconcile with the fact that a man named Bob had somehow bested the Devil. “There is a man of most savage repute,” the Devil-rock had seethed with a harsh inner glow, “who managed, by his trade, to acquire several clay fragments bearing a few choice words of Sanskrit. As the matter of how my entrapment came to be does not directly concern you, I will spare you these details, for the wound to my pride is yet tender to touch upon.”

Bob owned a pawnshop. Bob must have a colossal pair of swinging lead balls to have pulled off his stunt, Lars thought. He pictured some leather-strapped rogue avenger with twenty-inch pythons and cross tattoos, a brick chin fit to crush pop cans.

The ordeal was simple: get Bob to admit he was, in fact, Bob. Retrieve a single strand of Bob’s hair. Then say a few words of Latin to seal the deal. Cake. The Devil would be free and everything would be okay. The Devil said Bob had a nasty temper and would likely blow up at the prospect of being bested.

Lars walked through the pawnshop doors, a little bell chinging his entry. He approached a long counter where a young girl in her late teens pored over an artsy looking magazine. A big industrial fan droned in a corner of the store, drowning out his question.

The girl looked up with a scowl. “Huh?” She had hoop earrings and little silver stud piercings all in her face.

“Is…is Bob around?” He made a concerted effort to not sound meek, resting his hands on the counter edge to steady them.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Hah, the way he still sucks on those sticks, I doubt for long.” She turned around and, making Lars jump, barked “Dad!”

A beaded drape behind the counter clattered open. Bob stepped out. He plodded up to the counter like a pale sack of fleshy duff with a squeak in his wake. He looked like the worst possible version of Naill MacGinnis. He was shorter than his daughter, their faces sharing a certain congenital truculence between them. The accompanying squeak was not the sleek hull of a golden fiddle he dragged along the floor, but an oxygen tank. It was very clear to Lars the man was sustained by spite as much as by the cannula which bisected his mean, jowly face. Bob looked at his daughter, then at Lars. “Yeah?”

Lars straightened himself, suddenly feeling tall. “You, uh…you Bob?”

Bob’s brow drew down into a stormy chevron. He looked at his daughter, then back at Lars. “I’m sure as shit not the goddamn Easter Bunny.”

Lars shifted his weight. “So you are Bob then?”

The senior pawnbroker gave a derisive little snort. This brought on a coughing fit which lasted almost a minute, his glassy blue eyes never leaving Lars’s. “Yes,” he rasped, “I am Bob.”

Lars nodded. With a few dregs of confidence still loitering from the beer, Lars reached across the counter in one swift motion and plucked at the man’s scrimpy white Karswell goatee. He’d overcorrected, ending up with a plug’s worth of gray whisker pinched between his fingers. Bob stumbled back, eyes shocked wide, covering his chin with his hand. His daughter squealed, “Hey!”

Lars said the words. He was pretty sure he said them right. He just hoped the girl appreciated all of this.

The room went quiet, or seemed to. It reminded Lars of the time he’d accidentally fired his grandpa’s old .44 Smith and Wesson in the house. The ringing quality surmounted, gaining strength. Bob, still clutching his chin, mouthed something like, “Oh you stupid motherfu…”

Before the sentence could be completed, Bob’s head exploded. Blood and brain and bone slapped the counter, the walls, Bob’s daughter. Lars stood blinking. Red mist hung in the air. Flecks of the stuff were spattered across his own slackjaw face. The acoustics of the room returned in a blip of sound, the daughter screaming like a banshee until she suddenly collapsed with a heavy thud behind the counter.

Lars reached a trembling hand into his jacket pocket, withdrew a dusting of crystallized shards.

“Thank you,” a voice said from behind him. Lars swiveled and saw the air before him shimmering in a vague humanoid shape, oily and iridescent. “Sincerest apologies for the technical blunder. That was—what’s the colloquialism—my bad. The progeny will remember nothing when she awakens. The camera feed is likewise taken care of.”

Then with a wet laugh that stretched itself like a long and cindering rain, the oily image dissipated.

Lars felt numb all over, blinking at the space where the shape had been. He then dragged the sleeve of his surplus jacket across his face frantically, which only served in smearing the blood. The door chimed as he bolted out the door. Then it chimed again as he rushed back in, shaggy hair flying in greasy tendrils, using the hem of his jacket to swipe at the counter where he’d touched it.

Then he ran back out with a prayer on his heels.

--------------

She still had a hard time believing people would pay a premium to sleep with an amputee. Her handler, Elonzo, had told her a while back there was nothing under God’s own sun some sad sack wouldn’t pay extra for. And he was right. The hardest part about it was just how stiff she got with the whole charade.

Elonzo had modified the mattress and frame. She would slip her right leg into a bored-out hole just before some disgruntled sod with a wedding band would mount her. Elonzo always buzzed her when a man was climbing the switchback stairs to her room. The lights were always dimmed so low in the flat that no one could make out the trick. Jezebeth would situate herself in front of the lamp on the nightstand so that she was in full silhouette when a customer entered. Her knee would be bent, the prosthetic leg held firmly between it and the floor as she balanced herself between a pair of crutches Elonzo had bought at a yardsale for a dollar. He did things like that a lot, making whim purchases with the vaguest of notions for some future purpose. He liked to say it was divine intervention which moved him.

Keeping her body faced forward, she would then make a brief show of removing the prosthetic, hopping sidewise into the bed. Elonzo was emphatic with regards to the rules: “Jezebeth only fucks flat because of the leg. Anything else hurts her, both physically and emotionally. She doesn’t like guys touching it either. If you do, you’ll be sorry.”

Most of them were fine with these set parameters. For most people, she discovered, it was merely the idea of doing dirty with some broken thing that got them off. She figured it said more about them than it ever would about her. The world could sometimes be a real jagged pill, but, at twenty-four, she’d learned that as long as she was paid the pill could sprout barbs for all she cared.

Evening light limned the blackout curtains with a red edge. Just as she was stretching to yawn her phone on the nightstand buzzed.

She hopped up and almost stumbled, her legs feeling stiff and uncoordinated. She had approximately forty seconds before someone walked in. She put her hand on the dimmer switch and stopped cold, looking down at herself and feeling a mixture of horror and unreality wash over her. She didn’t even hear the door open.

Lars walked in with the quiet, self-conscious stride of a man approaching the confession booth. He noticed the room was brighter than he’d ever seen it. Despite the nightmare tableau from earlier in the pawnshop, it made him smile to think that Jezebeth might be feeling new and proud, that perhaps her unforeseen fortune would inspire sensual permutations between them to see the sun rise twice over.

For the second time that day, he was startled by a woman’s scream. Then he saw the reason why and he screamed too.

Below the hem of Jezebeth’s silk slip stretched three tan legs.