Let me introduce you to my lover. He is known in the mind of man as Satan, Pan, the Prince of Darkness, or whatever you may call him. Children do not need to learn of him from their elders; he is an Archetype, already a part of their minds, like the instinct for hunger.
No, he is not merely a devil, a symbol to stand in for Evil itself, an embodiment. That's what everyone shrugs him off as. A playful demon having his way with a young, naive man like me. I know he is the One, the Evil One. When he is inside of me I can see all of the universe, from the dark eye of God. God once had two eyes, and when he saw pain and Evil through his left eye, he gouged it out with his own hand and cast it to Earth.
Out of the boiling mud in which the eye landed came my lover. He grew slowly, taking shape as a fetus does, leeching off of the material around him, the eye becoming more and more aware of its new and independent state of being. Finally he ballooned up, coated with black filth, and sat up, hungry and groggy as though he had just awoken from a long slumber.
He was hideous at first. A gnarled being, like the branches of a dead oak, shapeless and unlike the man he appears to be now. He told me all this.
In a park in summertime with children playing fetch with their dogs and the lilacs giving off their weakly scent, he told me this. It was the first time I'd seen him and I loved him instantly.
I had been taking a stroll in early evening, drawn to the ghostly odor of the river, and was going along the bank, watching my feet crush the snake grass underneath me. Mosquitoes churned in little prickly clouds. The sky was dim, the air was at such a temperature that you could not feel it, and he--sitting at a bench and watching the elms tickle the sky--was just an ordinary man amongst the joggers and college students throwing frisbees.
At first I didn't take much notice of him. Yet he had long hair, longer than my auburn, shoulder-length hair, hair to the middle of his back, and I always look twice at men like that. Something androgynous, and therefore unearthly, always surrounds men like that, and it takes a great deal of care and affection to grow your hair out, a delicate task that only a few men are capable of.
I walked along the bank for another minute or two, slowly approaching the bench where he sat, before I really began to examine him. Yes, long black and slightly wavy hair, and he was turned so that I could see part of his profile, his slim nose. He wore a hat, the kind of hat an old man would wear, a jean jacket, and he had his legs crossed with a light brown leather boot resting just off his knee.
Like a child I dared to come down off the bank and creep up behind him, edging up against an untrimmed lilac bush so that I could watch him. As always, the fragrance of the smoky ethereal flower was dream-like and all at once a bombardment of childhood memories came to my mind as vividly as the sun, yet the scent was too weak...too weak. God had been prudish and frugal when he infused this flower with scent.
The tiny petals brushed at my cheek and felt a little cool, while the leaves were rougher and scratchy. I could see the very small movements of the beautiful man, see the whole of his mane of hair shift slightly, that wave becoming more crunched and that wave straightening out, as he turned his head from a little girl across the park at her swing to a golden retriever running circles around his master.
Master. I wanted to be able to call him Master.
From what I could see he had very dark eyes, and equally dark and thick lashes, which shaded the crannies underneath his strong brow. He looked almost like a Native American if it weren't for his very fair skin. His nose was smart and angular and had the slightest bend in the middle, giving it a somewhat Roman look, his lips full yet compact like a woman's. I could make out the shadow of a beard on his strong jaw.
I was in such a complete stupor that I almost didn't hear when he spoke. He looked ahead, away from me, he perhaps looked up at the sky to see an airplane and its trail of smoke scraping against the darkening oblivion, and he said, distinctly so that there was a delicious movement in his throat, "Good evening, Joel."
For a second I didn't absorb this. But soon enough in a small panic I jumped, shaking the leaves just like a startled squirrel. He didn't look at me, and I didn't believe he'd said my name, but I thought I heard it correctly, the way it's supposed to be said, "Jo-elle," like a girl's name, not "Jole" like people usually pronounce it.
Finally he turned to me. "Evening, Joel," he repeated, "are you going to be rude and ignore my greeting?"
I immediately felt ashamed. He must know me from somewhere, I thought, a friend of my family's? Someone who met me when I was a child? In horror I realized this might have been a cousin of mine that I hardly knew.
I skulked out from behind the bush, shoulders hunched as if from the cold, and sat down next to him. Instantly and without hesitation he introduced himself as Satan. I would have walked off then and there, scoffing and shaking my head and not even giving him a second thought, had he not mentioned his name.
"Perhaps you know me better as Thon," he said.
My stomach did a little sour flip. Who knew that name except for my parents and me. Thon, from the Greek word chthonic, meaning from the underworld. I had liked that word since I first saw it, the impossible arrangement of consonants, and instead of Hades or Pluto or Satan, names for the Dark God that I hated because those names had no meaning for me, I made up the name Thon. In this name I could see the grayness of the walls of Hell, the dark, bleak, earthen colors that were the devil's only comfort. He must have ached to see the celestial color of blue, or the bright green grass that a fawn, reddish-brown and speckled with bright white spots, would lay down on. That name made me feel as though the devil existed and that he was not just part of myth.
"Why are you speaking to me?" was the first thing that came out of my mouth.
