Though I cannot really move, I’ve made the most of my time on this deathbed. I watched a documentary that detailed the history of queer cinema yesterday, and this morning I had a riveting Clueless/Legally Blonde double feature. I guess there’s been a theme to my cinematic taste as of late. I also made a Spotify playlist for my crush even though I never plan on showing her. I titled it “Lost Futures.” But most importantly, I’ve been logging lots of hours doing my favorite activity: sleeping. The dreams are what sustain me these days. Most of them are nightmares, to be sure, but I’ve learned to love the horror.
This evening, however, was markedly different from the previous 72 hours I had spent on The Most Comfortable Casket Ever. I received a visitor!
Fading into my line of sight at around 8 pm, there appeared a tall, black silhouette near my door. His body seemed to come into focus the more I stared, and I soon noticed he was wearing giant black aviators, with a black t-shirt under a black leather jacket, paired with black leather jeans, black Chelsea boots, and a black leather biker hat with silver rivets on the brim. The only pop of color was a gold chain hanging around his neck. Oh, and his skin was fiery red, like a tomato.
“Greetings! I am the devil,” he said.
“Hey, gorg,” I replied.
The devil, despite my declaration, was most definitely not gorg. He looked like a cast member of Sons of Anarchy that was late for a Cruising reboot audition. There was a giant red belly peeking from under his shirt, and I laughed to myself because it looked like a cartoon character’s face right before steam lets out from their ears. His sunglasses, which seemed only to protect him from the dull, sepia tones of the light fixture, made him look like an altogether unbearable person. But then again, what did I expect from the devil?
“May I lie down next to you?”
“Sure.”
The devil laid down on the right side of the bed. He took a minute to jostle the pillow under his head, sighed deeply, and asked, “Why are you on this bed?”
“Because I want to be.”
“You lie.”
“I do not! Why would I do anything I don’t want to do?”
“Who knows? But you do it all the time. Everyone does.”
“I think it’s because I’ve been sad.”
“Well, I’m the devil. I could make you happy if you wish. No strings attached.”
“Why the hell would I want that?”
—
I have a notoriously small bladder. A serial bedwetter for years, I became adept at hiding my nighttime (or even daytime) “emissions” out of shame. My parents started buying me adult diapers when I was twelve, but my pride made them impossible to wear. I’d rather piss in my bed and lay in it than hear the soft crinkling of diapers adjusting to the movement of my giant legs.
Dr. Phil says kids wet the bed out of a desire for control of their situations, which I guess is a little true. Were I able to control it, I wouldn’t have done it, and God knows I wanted the bedwetting to stop. However, my personal theory is that God wanted me to feel unadulterated shame for as long as possible so as to build character. I don’t know if it had the intended result.
One day, during that hazy period where I was no longer a toddler yet still didn’t have the fine dexterity to be able to undo the button of my pants, I was watching Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! when I felt the urge to pee.
I stalked over to my mother’s room on the other side of the house to ask if she could help with the button, but her door was open and her lights were off. She was asleep, and I would’ve hated to wake her up for a stupid reason like that. So I went back to my room and continued to distract myself with Saturday Morning cartoons, praying my urine would somehow evaporate inside me.
When I was at the point of bursting, I realized this was an emergency. I ran to my mother’s room, ready to wake her up, and while her lights were still off, I noticed some light was peeking from under the door of her bathroom. Had she been awake this entire time?
I burst in to my mom doing her hair. Had I done my due diligence an hour before, I probably wouldn’t have risked a urinary tract infection. I asked if she could undo my button, and while she was fussing with the denim’s rivet, I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and I just started to pee. The spot on the front of my jeans had only grown to the size of a mandarin’s diameter before she screamed in disgust and pushed me back onto the floor.
Her face was wrenched in horror as she yelled at me to go take a bath. I walked away crying. She came into the bathroom a few minutes later to apologize, but that’s the only part I don’t remember anymore.
—
“Do you prefer cats or dogs?” the devil asked.
God, I felt like I was filling out an eHarmony questionnaire. “Cats, I guess?”
“Good. That’s the right answer. Did you know they can all talk?”
“In what language?”
“Swahili, but they only do it when there aren’t any humans around. A real Toy Story situation.”
“Then why do they meow if they can speak human language?”
“To hide the Swahili, dumbass! Cats aren’t dogs. They don’t show all their cards at once. They know how to watch, and listen, and stalk around quietly. Their power is silence. It’s what makes them sly and seductive. Maybe you lot should learn something from them.”
“But why Swahili specifically? And if they have the knowledge to learn that, can’t someone teach cats any language? Maybe make some cat-human alliances?”
“First of all, cats aren’t interested in the meaningless meanderings of man, and second, I’m not God! I don’t have the answer to every question. Who knows who taught the cats Swahili!”
“Isn’t it weirdly convenient to—”
Bruno jumped up onto the bed. An 8-year-old Siamese Flame Point, he had been my only company since the onset of my “condition.” He traipsed over to my face and sniffed me, then he turned and laid on the devil’s chest.
“Mpumbavu wa kweli, huyo,” whispered Bruno.
—
He lit a cigarette while we were laying in bed. I wanted to tell him the ash could light the comforter on fire, but he isn’t an idiot. I shouldn’t treat him like one. Plus, even if I were burned alive, right here, right now, I wouldn’t care.
I met him two months ago while he was sitting at a park bench. Always stylish, he was wearing a top hat, Ray-Bans, and a Burberry trench coat. It was the middle of summer.
“Are you here for the Inspector Gadget cosplay competition?” I asked.
He smiled.
Now, in the strained silence of my room, I wanted only to hear his breathing. I knew he’d want to leave soon. On average, there was an hour interval between the time he rolled off of me and I dropped him off at his apartment. I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him to hold me and snore in my ear.
For the past few weeks, we had done everything together. Of course, we did all the normal cute couple stuff, like mini-golf, margaritas at Chili’s, and snorkeling, but I’ve also babysat his younger sister! Alone! (Though I did accidentally feed her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich which caused a massive allergic reaction and I stayed (pro bono!) at the hospital with her all night.)
I feel like my eyes are glass when he looks at me. There is no privacy, no boundary, no differentiation between us. I felt a pang for him deep in my soul, and I wanted him to know.
“I love you,” I whispered into the dark.
There were a few seconds of silence, and then I heard him resume his cigarette.
I was mortified. Maybe I was crazy? It’s only been two months after all, why am I so desperate? He’s probably so weirded out.
I got up to go to the restroom, ready to cry of embarrassment. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I noticed my lips were purple.
What a strange place for a hickey.
—
“Did you really trick Eve into eating that apple?” I asked.
“I didn’t TRICK anybody! I told that bitch the truth! God said they would die if they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and I knew that was bull! And what happened next? They ate the apple, they didn’t die, yet all humanity was cursed because of it! I should be the hero of that story! Why should a megalomaniac like God get a whole religion?”
The devil and I were having some great pillow talk. Though we had spent a few minutes trading awkward chitchat, I felt that we quickly fell into a rhythm, and I wanted to trust him. I realized I hadn’t even questioned his arrival. One of the most important theological figures — who I didn’t even believe in before 8 pm today — just waltzes into my room and I don’t give it a second thought! Maybe he really is that charming. Maybe he put a spell on me.
“Anyway, enough about me. I came to ask why you were so sad,” the devil said.
I thought it was strange that the devil should come to hear of my sadness. Had God sent him? Was this some Cinderella shit? Was he my fairy godmother?
“I don’t really know. For a while now, I’ve sort of languished in a sludge. I remember feeling open to the world in some Eat, Pray, Love way before college, but now cynicism is the only lens through which I see everything. I can’t help but think of all that’s wrong. I feel alienated from my friends. I constantly doubt whether they love me the way I love them, and then I feel annoying for wanting validation. Maybe I just love too much too fast? Men suck, too. They always seem to want me for the wrong reasons. The ones I think might be different, who might love me for who I am, end up being like everyone else. Just constant disappointment. It’s not like I want a boyfriend; I just want someone to smile when they think of me. Women, on the other hand, are like majestic gazelles, but they’d never be attracted to me. My voice is too high. Plus, I don’t feel like I have much of a relationship with my parents. Their idea of parenting was buying things and avoiding the hard conversations. What if they’ve left me emotionally stunted? What if I want to feel loved because I never felt it at home? Overall, I think it’s all coalesced into a suffocating feeling of insecurity. I rarely have sex because I don’t want people to see through my veneer. I’m not ready for them to perceive any flaws. I swim with a shirt on for the same reason. I joke around and have a Rolodex of pop culture references in my head so as to avoid any real moment of sincerity. And then, in the same breath, I disregard all my insecurities as some penchant I have for drama. Am I really sad, or just spoiled? Don’t other people have real reasons to be sad? I don’t think I know who I am. I mean, do you have a cogent sense of self?”
—
When I was at the deliciously horrible age of twelve, I was at home listening to The Fame Monster when my father returned home from a business trip. Aside from his single medium-sized suitcase, he carried a Wal-Mart bag full of cash that he deposited on the nightstand before going to the bathroom to relieve himself. To satiate my curiosity, I grabbed the bag and spilled its contents onto the bed. I separated each stack and began to count.
By the time he had finished using the restroom, I had concluded that the bag held $4,000 in cash. I asked him to verify my accounting skills. In Spanish, he informed me that my count was wrong, and that the bag actually had $40,000 (which is kind of a concerning miscount considering my age). I wondered why in the world anyone would need that much money, and he told me it was for the family. For the house, and clothes, and food.
He stalked off in the night to another business trip. I didn’t see him again for three months. That night, we ate the stacks of cash for dinner. In a year’s time, my father would be arrested for money laundering.
Something revelatory did come from the money, however. That same week, my mom took me to Joe Brand to buy me some brand new bright red TOMS, and I proudly wore them to my sixth grade classes like the fashion-forward icon I was.
Whenever I wore those TOMS, other sixth graders would come up to me with the same infernal script:
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
I never understood the need to preface the question. I can tell what they were going to ask by the look on their faces as they approached me.
“Are you gay?”
For some reason, the TOMS were read as a giant sign that proclaimed “Faggot here!” My answer was always no, but I knew nobody believed me. Everyone seemed to know me better than I knew myself. It would be another three years before I was cast as Peter Pan in a high school theatre production where I would fall in love with a certain Captain Hook and realize all those sixth graders were actually quite perceptive.
—
“My sense of self comes from the fact that I am not God,” proclaimed the devil. “You see, if I looked at myself from His perspective, of course I would come to hate myself. I’m literally the devil. The eternal Evil to his boundless Good. But I am not God, so there is no reason to look at myself as if I were. When it comes to learning how to love yourself, you have to realize that your perspective is the only one that matters. Plus, you don’t have the luxury of being semi-omniscient like I am. You literally have no surefire way of knowing what people are thinking of you, so why think about it at all?”
I had kind of already heard some version of this advice before, but there was something about it being repeated by the devil that drove it home a little stronger.
“You only worry so much about whether people love you because you don’t love yourself enough to fill this void you feel. Of course, you scrounge through your past to gain insight on what might have left the void, and that might be important, but you’re letting it keep you from taking the next step. From growing out of the void to appreciate what makes you you. It feels nice to be loved, I know, but I promise you that someone already does. You just need to catch up.”
I was kind of amazed. Was this even the devil? “Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I said with a smile. “Obviously, it’s hard to stop pretending I’m God, with an unlimited knowledge of others’ perceptions of me, but I guess I have to start somewhere. Otherwise, I might not live to prove myself wrong.”
The devil stood up from the bed and stretched. I glanced over at the wall clock. 11:04 pm. Our meeting had felt quite a bit shorter.
“I must go now. There is another spoiled teenager out there whose tears I need to respond to,” the devil said.
“Wait, before you leave, I want to know. Why do you do this? Is this one of your responsibilities? The Universe’s Premier Psychotherapist?”
“I get pretty bored in Hell. All the lava pits and bottomless holes kind of run themselves, so sometimes I wander around Earth and fuck around. Of course, it would be incredibly predictable to cause chaos and misery, so I decided to use my psych degree for something and help the seemingly helpless.”
“Psych degree? Where do immortal beings get degrees?” I asked.
“Sorry, no time for that!” he quipped before fading out of my room.
I hoped I’d meet him again. Tomorrow, I might call someone to help set me loose from here. I might just have to cut all the skin off my back. I hope it’ll be worth the trouble. Before I went to sleep, Bruno (the traitor) came to lie on my chest now that the devil was gone.
“Ikiwa inakufanya ujisikie vizuri, nakupenda. Kidogo tu.”