A Conversation With The Devil

Or: Against Splinters

The Devil was… what can I say about him? He was… shorter? Than I expected?

One must imagine the Devil as, if imagining a humanoid-type character at all and not one of the more tentacular Lovecraftian beasts, a tall, imposing figure. Towering with skin of red, or black so black it has a penumbra of fuzzy light around it - the space where photons are being continuously obliterated by the sucking dark, or pale and grey and skeletal, like Death, or else, perhaps in more comical or ironic imaginings, the acute tan of a Boca Raton car salesman.

The Devil was of average height, maybe 5’10”, and his skin was transparent like that of a Moon Jellyfish. I could see his organs - and he appeared to have all the regular human organs - right through his skin, which, like the Moon Jelly, had an electric blueish tinge to it along the edges, a tinge that decreased in intensity the further away from the edge, and thus further inside the body, one got. It was like he was outlined in thin blue pen - in one of those classic blue Bics that people like to chew the caps of, and which have a circumference about 30% smaller than they should for comfortable writing.

I met him on a hike on the Isle of Skye. We stopped at the same lookout. It was a shelf of rock sticking out of the side of the mountain, the rocks seeming to grow out of the mountain’s grass blanket like some sleeping giant’s knuckle, the top of which had been paved flat. A small wooden fence had been erected along the shelf’s perimeter, and a small fork in the mountainside trail led to the outcropping. The use of organic materials for the few manmade constructions, that is: the stone paving, wooden fence, wooden alcove structure with small eaves and laminated map, and wooden informational sign, gave one the impression of a belvedere built, architecturally designed, by the mountain itself.

That is all to say, it was quite a congenial spot. And the Devil evidently agreed. I didn’t know it was God’s own angel when I approached the lookout. In fact, I didn’t see him at first.

I was examining the wood-framed informational placard, a piece of white acrylic inset with three paragraphs and two photographs, one of a broad landscape and the other of a provincial species of moss that was apparently of interest for some abstruse ecological reason, when I heard the low crackle of someone shifting their weight on small pebbles underfoot.

I looked up. Whoever it was, assuming it wasn’t an animal scurrying about, was blocked from my vision by the alcove map-thing, which stood about ten feet in front of me and, from my perspective, obstructed about one fifth of the total visual scenic area.

I walked around the map-thing. At first I had no idea, understandably, what I was looking at. It looked like a blueish, viscous version of the full body Organ System diagrams in biology textbooks. I could see the dark brown of the perimetric fence through it, the top of the fence reaching midway up its femur, which, now being able to look harder, I could see the outline of, as I could see of every bone in its body, but  while not wholly transparent the femur was still translucent and clearly denser than the fluid, or whatever filling there was, around it, which made the appearance of the fence on the other side of the creature waver slightly at the border between bone and fluid/filling.

Not knowing what else to do, and feeling that staring might be rude, I walked to the other end of the shelf, which had a diameter of maybe thirty feet, and took in the view. The tops of the fenceposts, on which I laid my palms instinctively, leaning forward with my thighs against the railing, were rough, the wooden lengths from which they were taken having only been sliced and not sanded, leaving many small clefts and edges at the severed top of the low-density wood. That is: big potential for splinters here if one were to move one’s palm or fingers across the post horizontally. I made sure to exert pressure on my hands, on the posts, only perpendicularly and not parallel to the top of the posts’ plane. The downward pressure, I knew, would leave little red marks all over my palm from the needlelike grain of the wood pressing into my skin.

The vista was striking. Green and desolate in a beautiful, emotional, ends-of-the-Earth way that some places in the northern reaches are. Pockets of dirty sheep went about their business in the distance. Over one hundred thousand sheep roam the Isle of Skye, I had read.

I looked to my right and saw it, the creature, who I supposed I could call a him based on what I was seeing in the pelvic region, turn his head toward me. He inclined his head, acknowledging my presence, and turned back to the scenery.

I walked over to him and stopped about five feet away, resuming my leaning position on the fence and matching his gaze out toward the pretty green desolation and the sheep.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

“What?”

“Just - that look you have. What are you thinking about?”

“I, um. I guess… I was thinking about how to start a conversation.”

“And here we are,” he said with a small smile. His lips were difficult, but not impossible, to see. The prominence of their outline was increased by their participation as a kind of foreground to the background of his teeth which, together with his jaw, formed a striking density of bone (or at least bone simulacrum, whatever it was) that truly made his head look like a skull suspended in syrup.

His lips parted slightly now, as a look of consternation came across his face, and a sound that would’ve made Howard Phillips Lovecraft shiver with erotic horror issued forth. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the actual sound was. I can speak only about the experience of hearing it.

It was as though every awful thing I had ever felt were compressed onto a two-dimensional disk, and then that disk were used to slice me, prosciutto-thin, into cross sections. The feeling of being sliced by the disk was both of physical pain, as that of literally being cut, by like, a knife, into one million cross sections, and of psycho-emotional pain - the pain of my psyche and limbic system not only suffering every abhorrent thing I’d ever experienced or imagined, or hadn’t even been able to imagine, but feeling it all concentrated into, compressed into, a blade’s edge. The accreted anguish twisted in on itself and made stronger like a folded steel katana.

If falling through the air were unspeakably painful, it was something like that.

It was wholly indescribable. It made me understand, with its first touch, why people killed themselves.

As suddenly as it began, it ended. My senses returned me to the scenic view from darkness. I existed again. Or rather, I existed as more than a singularity of excruciation, again.

“Excuse me,” he said, “Allergies,” wiping his nose.

My body felt as though every one of its trillions of cells had released adrenaline and that adrenaline was now flooding out of me, leaving a hollow, but not unpleasant, whoosh type sensation in my torso. My mind and nervous system felt as though they’d been annihilated, shattered and ground to dust, then hastily Scotch-taped back together by a toddler. Not a particularly precocious toddler either.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Gesundheit. I have some Claritin if you’d like.” I could feel my fingers again. They tingled.

“Very kind but no thank you,” he said, making a grateful sort of gesture with his hand. We stood in silence for a while. He sniffled a couple times.

“So, what brings you to the Isle of Skye?” I asked, shifting my weight to my left hand and foot and opening my body forty-five degrees to face both him and the landscape between us.

“Oh, same as anyone. The scenery. The hiking. One-of-a-kind countryside,” he said, casual but genuine.

I cleared my throat.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but where are you from? Did you come out of the ocean? To get here, on the Isle, I mean.” I was floundering. “What I mean is - where are you from originally, if you don’t mind me asking. Even as I’m saying this I’m realizing how impolite it is.”

I used my thumb and forefinger to snap the elastic of my hiking pants against my waist, a nervous habit that presented itself only when I was wearing pants or shorts with an elastic waistband. Pull out two inches, release: snap. Sometimes my thumb would hook beneath the waistband of my boxers as well, roughly doubling the resultant snap volume.

He gave a placating smile. It struck me that without any apparent effort whatsoever, he radiated authenticity.

“You’re far from impolite. I don’t come from the ocean exactly, no. I could approximate to beneath the Mariana Trench, with which I assume by the look on your face you’re familiar, but the short answer would have to be no.”

He turned back to the view as he finished and pointed to a particularly energetic sheep amongst the group closest to us, maybe a quarter-mile away. I looked to the sheep, which was sort of hopping around, its head, then upper back, then lower back, then rump coming up and then down in a sinusoidal motion that dipped above, then was level with, then above again, the tops of the surrounding sheep. I looked back to the man/thing next to me, trying to discern what he was pointing out, what he was trying to convey with the point, but it seemed by his expression to be just a cool look at that thing happening over there point, the pointer wanting only to share in the seeing of the thing with the pointee, without even commenting on it. Just looking, and seeing.

“Okay, so, and I’m glad I’m not being ignorant here, or - I am being ignorant, but not impolite as you said, but anyway - is it a supernatural thing? Where you’re from?”

“How do you mean supernatural?”

I thought I could detect the faintest hint of a Welsch accent.

“Well I mean, outside, or above the realm of the natural animal, biological physical world I guess. So: werewolves, vampires, chupacabra, telekinesis, creating a ball of fire above your hand and launching it at something. That kind of thing,” I said. I had begun to cool off when I first moved off the trail to the overlook, the sweat from my hike drying in the breeze and my moist shirt gathering cold as I stood against the railing, but now I was beginning to sweat again.

“Well,” he said, a portion of his intestines contracting and expanding, moving something along inside, “how would you classify dark matter? Or the movements and properties of various kinds of enigmatic quanta not fully understood?”

I thought for a moment, then opened my mouth to reply -

“On second thought, best not to get into it,” he said, dismissing the topic, not unkindly, with a wrist-rotating gesture. He used his forefinger to scratch beneath his baseball cap’s sweatband. “I am Lucifer. God’s own fallen seraph,” he said, with one of those unsure-but-kind pseudo-smiles, where the lips disappear inward into the mouth, making the mouth a creased line, slightly upturned at the ends, and the skin of the cheeks bunching up like you’re storing nuts for winter. The kind of expression shared most often between men who make eye contact passing each other on the sidewalk, and that is accompanied half the time by a small nod.

I suddenly realized, what with the scratching of the sweatband, that aside from a blank navy baseball cap and a pair of dull green Solomon hiking boots, he wasn’t wearing any clothes. The whole issue of clothing just never occurred to me on a creature whose insides I could literally see. Reflecting on it, I had clearly seen enough to warrant, in my mind, masculine pronoun usage, but at the time this connection was not made.

I rocked back on my heels, still making sure not to move my left hand parallel to the top of the wooden fencepost.

“Satan. Lucifer. The Devil,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said, chuckling at the bouncing sheep a quarter-mile away. Sunset was coming on.

It occurred to me fleetingly to run, to run away as far and fast as I could, off of this natural belvedere, down the winding trail, to my rented car, and off the Isle, but the thought went as quickly as it came. The Prince of Darkness, King of the Underworld, Beast of the Pit, what have you, would find me if he wanted to, or could easily prevent me from leaving. Or, and here I shuddered visibly, just sneeze again.

“Actually,” and this made me wonder if he could read my thoughts, which seemed a relatively minor-league ability for One Such As Him, and thus seemed likely, “I’d love some Claritin. If you’re still offering.”

I pulled the Claritin from my twenty-liter hiking backpack and handed him the small bottle, my hand not actually touching his blueish transparent skin, the outline of which matched the blue of the Claritin container. He fiddled with the child-safe cap for a moment, which required you to first push down and then turn counterclockwise, got it open, elegantly shook only one pill out onto his hand with two taps of the bottle against the heel of his palm, and popped it into his mouth, looking very much normal and human.

“I’m not sure what to say,” I said. The closest pocket of sheep all took up a bleat. This continued.

“Am I in hell, then?” I asked, unable to help looking three-hundred-sixty degrees around myself in a painfully unnatural 1950s ingenueish way, as though the environment would suddenly shimmer and melt into a fiery hellscape, like I was having a cartoonish dream. Like, in fact, Wiley Coyote sprinting off a cliff and through the vacant air, remaining improbably suspended until he looks down and realizes his surroundings are not what he thought, only then plummeting to the ground.

“No. You’re on the Isle of Skye,” Satan said with a reassuring smile, and without a whiff of condescension. His voice was a bit deeper than one might expect for a man his size. When I paid very close attention, I thought I could perceive a subaudible bass tone when he spoke through vibrations in my chest, the ground, and the fencepost.

I racked my brain for something to say. It was really cooling down now, and the sun broke beneath the cloud bank hovering over the horizon, headed into its last streak across the sky. The light it cast was a mild hue of gold, and would soon shift to orange and red before its goodbye.

“So, I heard, or… It’s my understanding that one Muslim interpretation of The Fall, er, your Fall,” here Satan inclined his head slightly, “is that the reason you refused God’s command, to the angels, that they, or rather you all, were supposed to now worship the newly-created Man,” I tried to read his face, to see if my words triggered any expression that might indicate I would be immolated, “was not because of undue pride on your part, as Judeo-Christian writings tell it, but rather because your love for God was so great,” and here I clenched a fist in front of my face dramatically and involuntarily, “that you couldn’t swear allegiance to, couldn’t worship another. The purity of the love in your heart, and your loyalty to Him wouldn’t allow you to.” I was panting slightly. I swallowed and wet the roof of my mouth with my tongue.

“And… It’s said - or I mean I’ve read, if I’m remembering right, stop me anytime here - that the source that sustains you, or not like, you personally, now that I’m meeting you, which is very cool, but I mean rather the theoretical, or referential Lucifer in these theological writings, that the source that sustains Lucifer in Hell is the sound of God’s voice when he cast him out.”

The Devil’s face was inscrutable. Neutral.

“Implying, basically, that Lucifer just kind of, replays the sound of God’s voice on like, a mental tape-recorder, saying,” I made my voice much lower here, doing an impression that I regretted the instant I began, “‘I cast you out.’ Over and over again. And that that is what keeps Lucifer going, like, spiritually, down there in Hell.”

When my lips stopped moving I had the distinct notion of having blacked out, though I knew I hadn’t, as I could remember talking for a while, if not the actual experience or process of talking. The compulsion to say… something - anything - to the Devil was like the product of multiplying the compulsions to speak to someone extremely, historically famous, to speak to a parent you haven’t seen in many years, and the wholly automatic compulsion to, upon picking up a pair of kitchen tongs, clack clack them together like a lobster claw.

This anecdote about The Fall had, apparently, been my anything, which I had felt compelled to express instead of just sharing the beautiful view of the crags and sheep and distant ocean with the Devil, who looked for all the world like one of those transparent deep-sea shrimp.

“‘I cast you to the ground’,” he said, putting one foot in front of the other, bending his front knee, his hands on his hips, and stretching a calf muscle.

“Pardon?” I blinked at him.

“‘I cast you to the ground’ is what he said. The Almighty. Also: ‘I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God’. And other stuff.”

He adjusted his baseball cap, still stretching. The sun’s rays began shifting to orange as the star reached the median of clear sky between the cloud bank above and the horizon below.

“That must’ve been tough,” I observed. “So the whole Judeo-Christian thing, religion, the Bible, it’s all true then?”

Satan switched calves, then brought his left hand up from his left hip and waggled it back and forth horizontally.

“So…” I said intelligently, “kind of?”

“Yes and no.”

“Huh.” I was getting cold now.

“It’s frankly not that interesting.”

I blinked at him again.

“Really?”

He shrugged, then smiled out at the vista as the same sheep began bouncing again in the center of the flock, as though it were trying to see something over its fellows. A crow cawed, in what I felt was an ominous tone, from atop one of the map-thing’s eaves.

“And I don’t think it’s just because I’m so close to it,” he said after a while.

I nodded, not knowing why. The ‘SOLOMON’ brand embroidery on his left boot was worn to the point that the L and N were almost unreadable. He must hike a lot.

“But so, you still,” in trying to find the right word or phrase I made a kind of chuffing noise and choked a little on my saliva, “take care of the bad stuff? That happens to people? You… do that?”

“I take care of it, it takes care of itself,” he touched his thumb and ring finger together and the hopping sheep’s jumps tripled in height. It seemed excited about this. “Duality in all things and none, both all and none until the ultimate and in the ultimate, just one.” The light was vermillion now. I swallowed a tremendous amount of saliva. “Like I said, not very interesting, when you get down to it.”

There was a long, long, long silence.

“Well, what do you find interesting?”

Stillness. The space of a few breaths.

“This sheep in the center of the flock is trying, trying not hard or as hard as it can, but rather with its entire being and consciousness -”

“How conscious are sheep?”

“- to see over the other sheep to the grass beyond.”

“Which you know because you can read its mind!”

“It’s existence is indistinguishable from the moment in which it exists. Its purpose obliterated by its lack of conception of purpose. To describe it as merely complete absorption is to misunderstand.” He glanced at me, the beginnings of a sly smile tugging at one side of his mouth, “Or something like that.”

An even longer silence than before. The sun was deep red now, throwing color like a shadow into the strip of clear sky and cloud bank above.

“So you’re interested in sheep,” I said, rubbing my hands along my arms for warmth. The apex of the sun’s glowing circumference disappeared beneath the blue slash of the horizon.

“I’m interested in a couple of guys standing at a lookout, leaning against a fence, having a conversation.” He turned to look at me.

I looked, for the first time, at his heart. Beating right there in his chest.

“And not getting splinters,” I said.

“And not getting splinters,” he agreed.

A quarter-mile away a sheep baa’d, thirty feet in the air, as it saw some grass.