Once upon a time there was a speakeasy on the Danforth, dark and dingy and secretive, with a black and red sign that pointed straight to it. On the sign, it said, Open One Below. I always wanted to go inside, but I was too scared.
On this particular night however, there were scarier things on the Danforth than that sign. That sign was only one of the many signs that led to its inner darkness.
It is hard to explain the events exactly, as they did not completely occur on the street level out in the open, as it were, but rather in part on the astral plane, and therefore not in sequence as we usually understand it.
This whole tale is hard to tell, which is why it took me so long, and it really does not have a beginning or a middle or an end, and this in itself is of course a problem.
Everyone who knows anything about telling stories, knows that a story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I really don't know where to start with the devil: is it the swarthy night I saw him on the Danforth, so full of his liquid rebellion against God, or is it the night he came trotting past my house, chewing gum, kissing me sleekly in the midst of his eternal jog which he was taking for his punishment, kissing me without skipping a footstep; or is it the night when he got out of his car, a short little man bearing his black umbrella and wearing his slick little business suit admirably along with his balding pate - I mean, which devil do you prefer?
Personally I think he was at his most devilish that night on the Danforth.
I learned about the causes for his expulsion from heaven before I ever was taught how to read the Bible. I knew the history intuitively. It was because he wanted to exist in the flesh like we do: it was because he wanted a human woman, someone like me, and who could blame the man, except that he wasn't a man, but an angel, a being destined to exist in the other dimensions, to dominate his sector of the spheres, not to mess around in the blood and muck of physical existence - of course he was wrong to do it, and yet I can say with conviction that I comprehend his motivation.
My brother Lucifer and I have a long history of mutual comprehension. Indeed I daresay that he loves me too.
Meeting the devil on the Danforth is not something you talk about very often. It is something you prefer to keep to yourself until you're absolutely sure all the shrinks have cleared out of the place; meeting the devil on the Danforth is just not something you freely admit to having done, even if it did happen a long, long time ago.
When I say to you that I met the devil and that he spoke to me in fluent Greek and that I understood every word he told me, and that I had a vision involving the Pope on that very same night, and that I realized the connection between the Pope and the devil even then, you may have to understand that none of this has anything to do with fiction, but I am not insisting on it.
I am telling it to you as fiction simply because I do not want you to believe in any way, shape or form that I am even remotely suggesting that any aspect of it could have "really" happened. Look: I am not stupid.
I mean: when you say "really happened," what do you really mean? In what precise sense do you mean "really," and what do you mean when you say, "happened?"
Define: "really." Then, define: "happened."
I don't want you to think ... well, badly of me.
I don't want you to start thinking too much, because that is what they say got me into the troubles in the first place.
I'd prefer you think any number of things, but not that.
Anyway, it was a cold and rainy night, my favourite kind, just the kind of night in which I used to love to go for lonely walks on the Danforth. Just the kind of night in which I enjoy testing the limitations of space and time by sitting in the middle of the Danforth at its busiest point and making the cars pass through me.
To be precise, I love to sit among the speeding cars on that bridge across the Don River. I sit down somewhere at a point before you reach Castle Frank, but I can't say exactly where. I would not dream of recommending that anyone else test the thesis. I do not recommend this as a place to sit, as a rule, as such, and I wish to make this very clear, but I'm telling you that, in a sense in which "really" and "happened" are just things for us to think about - I really did love to sit there.
I am also telling you this just as a story because I don't want you to believe in the devil as such, in any other sense than as a possible, plausible character. I don't want you to have any actual faith in the devil, because that would be playing directly into the devil's hands. It is just something I've been saying for twenty years: cars passed through me on the Danforth, and I met the very devil on that beloved street, and he always carried a black umbrella with him at all times, except that other time when he was on the eternally linear jog for his punishment along Dundas Street; the night in which Dundas Street became an infinite line stretching into eternity from left to night, with negative integers to the left into infinity, and positive to the right, into infinity: I met the devil precisely at point zero on his jog, the spot in front of my house, the house with the open door, and that would be the only time when he would be allowed to kiss a woman, and the only woman brave enough to kiss him, would be me, the only woman qualified to kiss him: the only woman with the guts to do it and to live and tell the tale, so that all may know for all time that he got what he deserved.
I found it exceedingly curious that he was considerate enough to chew Dentyne. It was the aspartame kind (even though he knows I detest those nutrasweet things). The devil knows full well that sugar ferments your breath; therefore it was the right choice, all things considered. His mouth was, accordingly, perfectly fresh.
That is why this is a novel. It is not a journal or a diary. These are not the annals of my travels through space and time. These are made-up stories, right?
Right!
It could just be proof of how awesomely good the drivers in Toronto are. That is what I would prefer you to think in any event, if you do think anything of it at all.
If I personally enjoy playing in the traffic, it doesn't mean that I am suggesting it is fact an enjoyable way to pass the time.
Besides, playing in the traffic is a solitary sort of a game. It's really not a sociable sort of thing at all. It wouldn't work if you took a buddy along. It wouldn't even work if you went on your own.
I went there; that is not to say that you can.
I am probably an adept, but I do not in fact know what I am doing.
I don't even know what an adept is, so please do not make too much of it.
Anyway as I was saying simply in a manner of speaking, as an expression, it was a cars-passing-through-me type of a night. I was having a tremendous amount of fun walking about in the rain, inadequately dressed for the occasion (one must be; one cannot go on these excursions in proper coat and boots! No, one must be barefoot; and there again, it is a metaphor of course, just like my conjugal love for Canada!) and if ever anyone suggests that I did any of this for real, I shall remind them that authors write all sorts of things for the entertainment of their audiences, and every student of literature (not to mention any student of the occult) knows that one never, ever assumes that any of it ever happened as a matter of fact.
As a matter of fact, it never happened.
