And now he knows he’s had too much to drink.
He was trying to reach the place where he wouldn’t feel, but he thinks he might have passed it, wandered somewhere worse. His head spins, the sensation long past pleasant. He finds a couple pills in his back pocket, slipped there by his sister Muriel on her last visit. Little pink umbrellas, she told him. He swallows them dry as the drizzle turns to a downpour.
Water drips into his hair, streaking his glasses and soaking through his shirt.
He does not care.
Maybe the rain will rinse him clean. Maybe it will wash him away.
Henry reaches his building, but can’t bring himself to climb the six steps to the door, the twenty-four more to his apartment, that belongs to a past where he had a future, so he sinks onto the stoop, leans back, and looks up at the place where the rooftop meets the sky, and wonders how many steps it takes to reach the edge. Forces himself to stop, press his palms against his eyes, and tell himself it is just a storm.
Batten down the hatches, and wait it out. It is just a storm.
It is just a storm.
It’s just …
He is not sure when the man sits down beside him on the step. One second, Henry is alone, and the next, he is not.
He hears the snap of a lighter, a small flame dancing at the edge of his sight. Then a voice. For just a second, it seems to come from everywhere,
and then from right beside him.
“Bad night.” A question without the question mark.
Henry looks over and sees a man, dressed in a slick charcoal suit beneath an open black trench, and for a horrible second, he thinks it’s his brother, David. Here to remind Henry of all the ways he’s a disappointment.
They have the same black hair, the same sharp jaw, but David doesn’t smoke, wouldn’t be caught dead in this part of Brooklyn, isn’t half as handsome. The longer Henry stares at the stranger, the more resemblance fades—replaced by the awareness that the man isn’t getting wet.
Even though the rain is still falling hard, still soaking through Henry’s wool jacket, his cotton shirt, pressing cold hands against his skin. The stranger in the elegant suit makes no effort to shield the small flame of his lighter, or the cigarette itself. He takes a long drag and leans his elbows back against the soaking steps, and tips his chin up, as if welcoming the rain.
It never touches him.
It falls all around him, but he stays dry.
Henry thinks, then, that the man is a ghost. Or a wizard. Or, most likely, a hallucination.
“What do you want?” asks the stranger, still studying the sky, and Henry cringes, on instinct, but there’s no anger in the man’s voice. If anything, it’s curious, questing. His head drifts back down, and he looks at Henry with the greenest eyes he’s ever seen. So bright they glitter in the dark.
“Right now, in this moment,” says the stranger. “What do you want?” “To be happy,” answers Henry.
“Ah,” says the stranger, smoke sliding between his lips, “no one can give you that.”
Not you.
Henry has no idea who this man is, or if he’s even real, and he knows, even through the fog of drink and drug, that he should get up, and go inside. But he can’t will his legs to move, the world is too heavy, and the words keep coming now, spilling out of him.
“I don’t know what they want from me,” he says. “I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and I’m just tired…” His voice breaks. “I’m tired of falling short. Tired of
being … it’s not that I’m alone. I don’t mind alone. But this—” His fingers knot in his shirtfront. “It hurts.”
A hand rises beneath his chin.
“Look at me, Henry,” says the stranger, who never asked his name.
Henry looks up, meets those luminous eyes. Sees something curl in them, like smoke. The stranger is beautiful, in a wolfish way. Hungry and sharp. That emerald gaze slides over him.
“You’re perfect,” the man murmurs, stroking a thumb along Henry’s cheek.
His voice is silk, and Henry leans into it, into the touch, nearly loses his balance when the man’s hand falls away.
“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”
“But I don’t want to be in pain,” says Henry hoarsely. “I want—” “You want to be loved.”
A small, empty sound, half cough, half sob. “Yes.” “Then be loved.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is,” says the stranger. “If you’re willing to pay.”
Henry chokes out a laugh. “I’m not looking for that kind of love.”
The dark flicker of a smile plays across the stranger’s face. “And I’m not talking about money.”
“What else is there?”
The stranger reaches out and rests his hand against Henry’s sternum. “The one thing every human has to give.”
For an instant, Henry thinks the stranger wants his heart, as broken as it is—and then he understands. He works at a bookstore, has read enough epics, devoured the allegories and myths. Hell, Henry spent the first two- thirds of his life studying scripture, and he grew up on a steady diet of Blake, Milton, and Faust. But it has been a long time since any of them felt like more than stories.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“I am the one who sees kindling and coaxes it to flame. The nurturer of all human potential.”
He stares at the stranger, still dry despite the storm, a devil’s beauty in a familiar face, and those eyes, suddenly more serpentine, and Henry knows
this for what it is: a waking dream. He’s had them once or twice before, a consequence of aggressive self-medication.
“I don’t believe in devils,” he says, rising to his feet. “And I don’t believe in souls.”
The stranger cranes his head. “Then you have nothing to lose.”
The bone-deep sadness, kept at bay the last few minutes by the stranger’s easy company, now rushes back. Pressure against cracking glass. He sways a little, but the stranger steadies him.
Henry doesn’t remember seeing the other man stand, but now they’re eye to eye. And when the devil speaks again, there’s a new depth to his voice, a steady warmth, like a blanket drawn around his shoulders. Henry feels himself lean into it.
“You want to be loved,” says the stranger, “by all of them. You want to be enough for all of them. And I can give that to you, for the price of something you won’t even miss.” The stranger holds out his hand. “Well, Henry? What do you say?”
And he doesn’t think any of this is real. So it doesn’t matter.
Or perhaps the man in the rain is right. He just has nothing left to lose.
In the end, it’s easy.
As easy as stepping off the edge. And falling.
Henry takes his hand, and the stranger squeezes, hard enough to reopen the cuts along his palm. But at last, he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel anything, as the darkness smiles, and says a single word.
“Deal.”
