“Put a dress on, drama queen. Admiring anything about him is kind of fucked up.”
“It’s most definitely fucked up. But it’s true. He’s relentless. He’s a force of nature. And he’s always going to be just a little better than me. You should see the old books he’s collected. Half of them are in Latin and Greek. He knows magic I’ve never even heard of.”
“I thought you didn’t need those things, all the books and objects he uses. You can pull magic out of the air.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s not enough.”
“From what I’ve seen and heard he’s jealous of what you can do, which means you’re doing fine.”
“He says he can invoke an angel.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“To gain secret knowledge. Learn how the universe runs behind the scenes. And to prove he can. He says he’s talked to demons, too.”
“Now, that’s just bullshit.”
“Probably.”
“Is that where all this is coming from? Demon and angel envy?”
“I can’t help it. The sheer balls to say it is something. And if he can do it, I don’t know. He’ll be my hero and I’ll have to put up a poster of him, like Bruce Lee over my bed back home.”
“I hope you like this couch ’cause you’re talking yourself into sleeping here tonight.”
“Mason says he’s making a deal with some kind of demons to get even more power.”
“I don’t believe in angels and devils.”
“Why not?”
“I was raised Catholic.”
She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. She was in a Robert Smith mood before I pissed her off, so she’s smoking cloves. The apartment smells like a junior high girls’ bathroom.
“He’s Beverly Hills hoodoo. Going to be big in the Sub Rosa. He plans ahead. I skate by.”
“So? If Mason’s your big guy crush, be more like him and make some plans.”
I smoke for a minute and watch Joseph Cotton following Harry Lime’s girlfriend on the road from his grave.
“You’re right. I can’t just wing it for the rest of my life. Time to turn over a new leaf. I’ll start planning ahead tomorrow. Or the day after.”
“Or the day after that.”
“Maybe next week.”
“You’re better than Mason and you can read people really well. If he starts waving his dick around and wants a Dodge City gris-gris shoot-out, you’ll see it coming a mile away and kick his ass.”
“Maybe I ought to get some of my own demons.”
“Next week. Or the week after.”
“Yeah. There’s always time, right?”
IT TOOK ME months to start thinking of the apartment as Vidocq’s and not mine and Alice’s. François-Eugène Vidocq is my oldest friend. He’s two hundred years old and French, but don’t hold that against him. I’m glad he took the place after Alice died. Six months in, the apartment is so transformed that I can’t find a shred of my or Alice’s life there. It was strange the first time I saw it that way. Allegra told me that in ancient Egypt, when the new pharaoh smashed the statues and hieroglyphs of the old one, it wasn’t just good old-fashioned hooligan fun. The new pharaoh was trying to wipe the old one out of existence, erase him from the universe. To the Egyptians, no images meant no person. That’s how it was when I first walked in. I felt erased. Now it’s a relief not to be reminded of my old life every time I go over.>“Bullshit. I saw this kind of thing when I was Downtown. It might be a book, but you don’t read it like one. It’s conceptual, mental. Like a mystical database.”
“If you know so much about it, why don’t you look it up yourself?”