Free Me and the Devil: A Novel by Nick Tosches

distance afforded.
    Fuck them. Their lives, their death-in-life, their soulless devotion to mindless ulterior greed, the lowest of monotheisms, werethe cast lots of their own ruin. Unlike them, I was free. If I could not cherish their inevitable demise, I could escape. I was resistant to the idea of fleeing from invaders. But I was not resistant to the idea of fleeing from pestilence. This city, once so full of life, was now little more than a necropolis. I could get away from this putrid stinking shit hole of Judeo-Christian perfidy. I could get a nice little stone house somewhere, in the countryside near some small town. An acre or two would insure peace, quiet, privacy, domain.
    But these thoughts were unfinished. There was the matter of my desires, the matter of my continuance in the new world, the new life, that was just now opening to me. There was the matter of willing young flesh and warm blood, so plentiful in this city of night. Then again, maybe willingness was not of the essence. Maybe willingness was an unnecessary nicety. I shook away this thought. As I drank the last of my milk, my mind wandered through an entablature of images of bucolic solitary quiescence. Maybe someday, I thought. Yes, someday, somehow. Little more than a month ago I had felt that death was near. Now I could envision smiling at the late afternoon sun of my eightieth year and more.
    Melissa returned the borrowed book that evening and placed it on the shelf where she had found it. As she did so, my eyes and hands savored the curve of the small of her back and her flanks.
    I had a girl that other men—younger men and older fools too—would dedicate the sum of lies, sacrifice, and shifting purchase to have and to hold, to be with and to woo, to follow to where their dreams might come true. I too wanted to have and to hold her. And I did. But my dreams were not of the garden path variety. Since that night in the bar to this night, we had come to breathe in unison; and that breath gently blew away the years between us like so many feathery pappus harls from the seed head of a dandelion fondled by a sigh of soft summer air.
    I more than liked her, more than luxuriated in her. I felt at times that I was falling in love with her. Was this a dangerous state of affairs? After so long in cold darkness of heart and soul, I had come once again to believe in love and happiness. Indeed, I now was beginning to feel their goodness banishing the cold and the dark with warmth and light. And the transformation from which the restoration of mind, body, and being grew, the miracle born of deathward desperation, was a rare and marvelous flowering. But it was a flowering not of the sun but of the moon. It was a flowering in the deep foreboding woods of night. A flowering not by spring rain but by the blood of those who, rambling lost in the springtime of their lives, chanced upon it and paused to wonder.
    Melissa had paused and not turned away. She was one with the flowering. Her nectar and its nectar were one, and I alone drank of it, the nectar of new and full life. That she was still a child, sending into the air as a child might, playfully, the dandelion fluff of the years that imposed, did not trouble me. She was more mature in her ways, brighter and more intelligent, than many women twice her age. Her beauty was far from childlike. I could easily imagine living happily ever after with her. I had the means to provide for her, to lavish on her.
    What troubled me, what quenched my moments of daydreaming, was the simple fact that there was not much blood in a human body. The three or so pints she had lost that horrible night when her artery opened had been very nearly enough to do her in. My flourishing would be her wasting away. The transfusions she had already received were bad enough. There was no knowing where that blood had come from. It could have come from that old bitch asking about grass-fed beef. I needed young blood, fresh and full of life. I wanted