Free The Devoted by Eric Shapiro Page A

yesterday,” he said.
    Call me a bastard. Call me insensitive. Call me whatever you want.
    But I had to shrug.
    It was beside the point. I viewed it as a test. If we could stay glorious beyond this point, I thought, then our entire system was worth preserving.

Last Day – 11:57AM
    And here I am, now, in the bathroom. Checking the mirror to make sure the remains of my tears have blended into my cheeks.
    Glorious.
    “But come on, Jed,” I say in my mind, my reflection grinning softly as I do. “You can fuck lots of women. You can go cliff-diving. You can even rob stores and get all zonked on adrenaline.
    “But you gotta admit, what we’re doing here pretty much annihilates everything else.”
    Talk about adrenaline. And gush? Don’t even fucking pretend.
    I exist now in a house full of warriors. Scared, yes. Fucking petrified? Of course.
    But I’d rather exist amongst their bravery than be the turncoat who topples the kingdom.
    I step outside. Here comes Jolie. Her calm, inspiring. We trade rare smiles.
    “It’s noon,” she says, which means it’s Downtime. “Should we fuck each other?”
    For this woman, I would – I will – lay down and die.

Edgar Pike’s Journal
    July, 2009
    To ejaculate is to remove eyeglasses. You’re in one world before the burst and another one after. Then the prior world grows back. When I was 13, it’d grow back in moments. I’d ejaculate and then want to again. Now, it takes hours to a day to recharge, to get the glasses back on.
    At 13, my mother talked every day about how my armpits smelled. She said that when I was a child, I smelled fresh, but all that was ending. To her, it was as though everything was ending.

Last Day – 12:00PM: DOWNTIME
    But fucking means motion, and motion means that I can’t get any goddamn air. In fact, when I unhook myself from her and roll over to the side, I’m surprised to find that my skin’s not cobalt.
    The ceiling’s wrong. I need to eat. Need to fuck. To stop. Go.
    “I think I’m having an asthma attack,” I say.
    She sits up and regards me, but she’s only half-human. The other half is cat. She’s writhing; tongue’s not inside.
    “No, no, you don’t have asthma, baby.”
    Didn’t. Just like we didn’t have a phone. But I have a phone. It’s in my pants, on the dresser. Was I sure to turn it off?
    “Since I woke up this morning,” I say, but that’s not gonna sell her. “Something’s wrong with me,” I go. “Inside my head.”
    But you can’t say things like that in this house. ‘Cause your mind’s not in your body here. Your body’s probably in your mind. And it’s not even your mind, it’s the universal mind. Which doesn’t matter, anyway, ‘cause it probably doesn’t exist.
    “You’re just excited. You’re fine. We’re almost out of here,” she tells me, and did I hear her throat catch on that last part?
    I try to touch her with my eyes. Real contact, beyond any sense of murk.
    When my next words come, they’re not from me (whoever that is). They’re from the collective consciousness. They go back all the way to ancient times.
    “I want to marry you,” I say.
    Now she’s not a cat. She’s gone whole. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” she says, and that effectively makes two of us.
    I stand up. Pace. I sit back down. Change positions. My dick’s hard (then soft).
    “We can marry one another. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
    “Why are we ‘supposed to’?”
    “‘Cause I’ve only made love to you. That’s when you get married.”
    Would you fucking believe it? I was a virgin before her. Heather in high school went down on me a lot, but that was it. Those two chicks in college came close, but with one I had no condom, and with the other she seemed too drunk and I didn’t want to be charged with rape. In the house, there was lots of playfulness, but the fucking only started with Jolie. There was also my cousin Brian in the basement, handful of times, but those were just