Easter Sunday, 2009

A sudden rush of cold water from the leaky shower dissolved the nihilistic nimbus surrounding the maniac on the bench below. Like the reader, I had temporarily lost sight of him in this blog because of the steam. Like the reader, I slowly opened one eye to the significance of the loss. Then I opened two. Our fiendish friend was no longer sitting like a philosophy student, removed one step from Reality, as he had been until a moment ago.

Now he was standing somewhat further away, at a more educated distance, leaning against the hot ivory tiles of the wall, the glassy look of learning in his eye. The delicate fingers of his delicate hand were attached to the argent chain hanging from the shower valve above: and, for all I know, they have been delicately entwined there since Wednesday, waiting for the present paragraph to be written.

Released now, from a spell, he lifted his lips languorously toward the icy rain, rinsing his teeth, letting the water bubble effervescently down his torso from the corners of his mouth.

…

I am not certain when it was, exactly, during our discourse—probably in the short, opaque interval between the Book of Genesis and invention of Voltaire—while you were busy bargaining for deceased Victorians in Connecticut—when I realized that the lad not been summoned from the sulphurous depths of Hell in order to murder me—not necessarily, anyway—but that he had, in fact, been enlisted by other forces for a more shocking purpose: INSPIRATION.

“Get Thee behind me, Sir,” I growled, “I will not have myself being inspired by the likes of you. You, and your master, Beelzebub, be damn’d.”

The poor literal-minded fool merely blinked at me with incredulity, as if I were insane. What else could he do, Madam, I ask you? Nobody talks like we do nowadays, do they? He simply surveyed the steam in the room. Satisfied we were alone, and unlikely to be disturbed for a few days, he shrugged his shoulders and followed my instructions to the the very last tip on the very last toe of the very last letter.

Wow.

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…


Whether the creature was damn’d or not, we shall never know. He certainly was good to me. A priapal putto brandishing a tiny black bow and arrow on his left buttock leaves some doubt in this writer's mind as to both his Earthly pedigree and his Eternal destination. Whatever his Future, he disappears from our story now—into Infinity—with our benediction.

It is with more than the ordinary pang of regret that I admit to the reader, and to myself, before I could could acquire a name, a telephone number, a lock of hair, a leg, some material reassurance that he actually had existed—and a dialogue between us had actually taken place. He had not even patted my knee. Aside from some residual redness around my ear, a fading blush, and some prickly sensations elsewhere, he had evaporated—leaving behind only a hazy memory, a chain of images—a chain of events—in my mind linking us together these last four days.  

...

All I know is this: wherever he went, I wish him well. I can still hear those florescent yellow flip-flops, flop, flop, flopping in the locker room, growing ever fainter, as he hurries away.