Rick Moody - Demonology

My role was to watch. I was not bad at it.

Celine Grimm, laughing, at the threshold. If she passed under, made her body narrower than a first-class envelope filled with bad news, perhaps she would be swept into a flock of gulls or cormorants, and it would be the last we saw of her as she headed toward a first-class cabin in the heavens. I was happy therefore when she, too, stirred the limbo bar, as had her brother before her, as had we all in our day. There was no winner. Hawaiian Night hurtled toward repose. We of the northeast Atlantic returned to the Pacific Islanders their paradisal heritage, returned to them this imagery of travel advertisements. Had I ever been more surfeited by a simple falling into darkness? We gathered up lost children, we looked for stray garments, a blue ribbon draped across the tennis net on Court No. 3, a pair of cross-training sneakers separated one from the other, we restored the beach balls to the closet in the clubhouse, plucked up that doll sprawled haphazardly in the gravel parking lot beyond the pool. Somebody’s cocker spaniel fetched a mossy tennis ball, left it at my feet, and would not be placated until I tossed it for him again. Moments later the hound was back.

She called it an armoire, which was the problem, which was why he had dragged it onto the beach behind the house, and surveyed its progress over the course of a week, the elements driving down their varieties upon her armoire, their drama of erosion upon her armoire, a winter of steady rain, and had she been willing to call the armoire a chest of drawers like anybody else maybe they never would have arrived at this moment, or maybe he would never have arrived at this moment, he would not have found himself on the deck, in the rain, overlooking the beach, overlooking the armoire buried in sand up to the bottommost drawer (the work of tides), strands of kelp like accessories arranged around it, gray driftwood, lobster buoys, a Clorox bottle, a red plastic shovel, the pink detached arm of a chubby doll, plovers piping there, alone on the wet deck with a stiff drink despite the newness of the day, with a Sears deluxe crowbar with lifetime warranty he intended to use on the armoire, if you want to know the goddamned truth, specifically the top drawer of the armoire, which was locked now as it had always been locked in his presence, though when they bought the imitation 18th century, Sheraton-style armoire at a flea market in the city, it hadn’t bothered him then that the drawer was locked and that she had taken control of the little antique key, with its pair of teeth, Anyone should have been able to pick that goddamned lock, open that drawer, and yet, for all his accomplishments in the world of franchise merchandising, he couldn’t do it, though maybe he had picked it and had forgotten, plenty to forget in these last few days, maybe he’d asked the boys with the cooler and the Frisbee who’d chanced along the shoreline, maybe he’d asked if they’d give a hand opening this armoire, using her word when he said it, but they had backed away, politely at first, then vehemently into a temporarily radiant dusk, even when he called after them, Show a neighbor a little good cheer! I got a thousand and one jokes! Hadn’t bothered him at first that he had no key to her armoire, had no tongue to share the word with her, the tongue which calls an armoire an armoire, not a dresser, not a chest of drawers, as his father and his father had said it, hadn’t bothered him when the armoire was damaged in the relocation to the seaside, just a chip off the side, just a dent, but she’d gotten apoplectic, she’d taken photographs of the armoire, poorly lit Polaroids, she’d called the dispatcher at the van lines demanding compensation, though they had a hundred other pieces of furniture, deck chairs, poster beds, and a joint bank account, and she had her own room to work in (painted a stifling blue), and he’d left her alone, he’d walked upon the beach whistling lullabies, but he’d never learned how to say the word armoire with any conviction at all, and he would have included demitasse and taffeta and sconce and minuet, actually, he’d gone gray trying to learn all these words, he’d become an old unteachable dog trying to learn how to say these things, how to say Ilove you he supposed, an isolated backyard hound in bare feet upon the coastal sand the goodly heft of a crowbar and the way wood gives under such an attack he would burn the damned thing plank by plank and heat the house with the past tense of her, would burn her diaries, leaf by leaf, in the antique potbelly stove, weather descriptions, breezy accounts of society functions, he would consume her secrets and her reserve so hidden as to be hidden even from herself, Lord, these people who never gave a goddamned thing.

F airest monarch of our empire, great king, conduce in me, lowly tanner of hides, a righteous song as I embark to tell the tale of your origins, spinning for townsfolk the narratives of the province whence you come, that savage northern province of brigands upon highways who accost travelers with blunt, crusted foils called, in those lands, squeegees, or in due course how you came from the prolific farms of Jersey to rule over all this principality of scribes and divers musicians, how you brought probity to scoundrels of disputatious cast. Lead me as you have led others, eternal administrator, make your tongue my tongue as my inscriptions cover this stone and I tell of your reign, to those in the crib, to those upon sickbeds rank and odiferous; let it be me, the tanner, who paints your masterpieces, paints your portraits in tongues of men, as if tales were altarpieces of historical churches, let me be as a butterfly with your paintbrushes, as you climb down from your folding chair.

There was a lad, born in the first third of our century, precocious stripling, much given to reverie and to silence. In his bedchamber, he labored over problems mathematical and geometrical, never venturing forth, even should he chance to see a fair maiden dancing on the village green beyond his mullioned windows. He paid no mind to her jolly braids, nor to her furious dancing, nor to the particular brother of this particular girl, a woeful prince (for any comely lad of means was potential regent during the bloodshed and disorder of our interregnum), whose acute melancholy was said to have been owing to his terror of ascending to the throne. No, our future king secreted himself in his chamber, covered with animal skins, studying magics and potions through which he might better the station of workers of fields and shopkeepers and salespersons of viands and pickled vegetables. The lads formula, for the upstanding meritorious valor of aforementioned salespersons, was said to have been called the Formula of Surplus Value, completed by him in quill on goat’s parchment, under a candle that, according to spell of witchery, never burned down.

One day, our yet-to-be monarch and chief agonist, buoyed by the influence of a thick Turkic potion known as espresso kaffee, and because of faintest impropriety of speech that by and by inhibited the correct recitation of spells, turned the comely nervous prince — Maxwell Hennesy Charming, brother of the flapper maiden already mentioned — into a performing monkey, or hanuman. As I say, it was inadvertent. The young artist of physick was making as to formulate a concoction of creamy distillate for his beverage. Nevertheless, wherefore Prince Maxwell, with fashionable opiated eyes and bulbous cheekbones, had dressed in long flowing garbs that might as well, in a dreamer’s tossings, have been the robes of women, now, as hanuman, he became the dandy. Breeches of a dusty rose and a blue waistcoat with diamonds and rubies all upon it and stones as these days are called by the name rhinestones, such that he shimmered when he crawled on all fours or hung from a bough by his serpentine tail. Wherefore Prince Maxwell had been known to help a blind woman of our village, Miss Hogg, ahead of the carriages thundering by at street trivia, only to be named infernal scamp on deliverance of her to the farther side, as hanuman the prince was a rake and a Lothario, and would as soon inflict his manly endowments on a maiden as he would devour a banana in payment for his games of chance. I tell you, Inever liked that particular prince, when he was under the curse, and would occasionally seize his tail and dip it into inks or poisons.