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.

“Because,” he said. “Because, you are to be my lover, my Chosen One, and I must tell you this at some point or another, am I right?”

“How do you know I’m going to be yours?”

He laughed softly. “Because. It’s just going to be, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Are you psychic?”

A sweet smile, a smile that brought out the delicate curl of his eyelashes, melted across his face. “Don’t you know, dear Joel, that I am eternal, and that compared to my lifetime, your life is so brief that it passes by in an instant? That it passes by so quickly and has already happened, that it is already gone away? Your past, your future, your present…they are all the same thing. I know your life as you mortals know a fleeting rush of sensation, a pinnacle at the end of your lovemaking, a feeling that is fought for so tenaciously, and once it has happened, when it is done, that’s all it is–done. Gone.”

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

“If I’m gone already,” I said, skeptically although I knew I understood what he said, “why bother coming into my life?”

“Because, though you are gone,” he answered, looking at me straight-on for the first time, “you are also here.”

This paradox was so sweet and sad, barely understandable, like a forgotten dream just on the verge of being remembered.

“Why do you pick me,” I said, more as a statement to myself rather than a question posed to him, because I thought it was too big to understand, or maybe there was no rhyme and reason to it, just another event in the chaotic universe that warranted no logical explanation.

“I am the lover of every being,” he answered anyway. “I do love mankind. But in such a way that sometimes humans mistake it for hate, for evil. Some return my love. I cannot accept it though, because like I said, their love for me comes in such hateful gestures. They murder, they destroy, they bring filth into this world, all in my name. They forget that I am not a wretched and regrettable creation of God, rather I am part of God, and we created the universe together, He and I, giving birth to this exquisite palette of balance.

“Do I need to explain to you that you returned my love with much humane expression, coloring my life with the bland colors of the Underworld? You used bland colors, that is true, but even as you did that you gave me a life in your mind that was more colorful than a rainbow on a dewy hill.

“You know why God allows suffering? You ask this over and over, throughout the centuries, you humans. It is no test. There is no test. God and I created the universe and mankind before there was this schism, before there was this distinction between good and evil. Everything was in balance and harmony until he looked through me, his left eye, and saw the pain and misery he caused when he created the human mind. That was too much for him to bear. So he cast me off, he cast his own eye out, and it was then that he was unable to see your suffering. It is I who sees your suffering. God only sees good, the majestic mountains, the supernovae, the downy wings of a bird, and therefore he is blind to the evils of holy wars, he is blind to everything bad in the world.

“But when he cast me out he didn’t know that he also deprived himself of some aspects of goodness. It takes much compassion and understanding to perceive suffering, am I not right? That’s the part I brought with me. To see the beauty and usefulness of all forms of sexuality, the indulgence in food, those are sins to him, but to me, they are forms of goodness.”

I listened with delight as he told me of himself and of God. He told me of his fall, of his birth in the muck, that over millennia he was able to muster whatever creative force was left in him, and gather this earthly material to make this horrid creature that he was in the beginning.

Without God and him being One, he had such little creative power in him. Even God has just as little or even less creative power without him. That is why the universe is essentially static, consisting of the same forms, that is why creatures of the Earth have changed only a little through evolution. Evolution is the lame attempt of both God and Satan to create as they once did.

I listened for hours into the night until the moon like a fingernail hung in the sky and we were the only ones left in the park. The chill began to bite, so I pleaded with him to please come home with me.

In my bed, under the covers, we lay naked, me on top, pressed together in a toasty warmth, never making love. He stroked my back as he continued to tell his story, and I could feel the whole length of his hardness on my belly. There was so much for him to tell, and I wanted him to go back to the beginning and tell everything again in greater detail, so that his story lasted for eternity.

As he told the story of the legendary serpent, he reached down and wrapped his hand around my stiff cock. Casually he went on.

“I managed to muster all my strength and transform myself from this wretched shapeless thing into a serpent, long, like this.” He tugged gently and playfully at my cock, making me almost moan out loud. “I slithered into a tree,” he said. His hand moved smoothly up and down the shaft. I thrilled at how clever he was, how he used my penis to tell his tale, how he let my penis be a part of his story. “And I watched with delight the very first humans. What an awkward blunder. So naive, so exquisite. Eve herself came to me, to a fruit I had made to grow on the tree where I lurked.”

His stroking was timed so perfectly, so teasingly. It was pleasurable enough yet made me want more, made me want to buck in his hand and press myself tight against the hard bone of his pelvis.

“Eve herself, the legendary goddess Eve, came to me, her breasts jiggling slightly as she walked, and I could smell the moistness already dewing up in the gauziness between her legs at the sight of me. I told her to eat the fruit, that it would give her tremendous knowledge, that it would transform her into a being like God and myself, and she hesitated coyly at first. ‘But God forbids it,’ she said, but little did she know. How could she know what it would bring, this fruit of my creation. God had made her naive and blind to suffering, as he himself was, and I gave the gift of knowledge of Good and Evil to her and to mankind.

“She ate of the fruit, and with her first bite, the sweet juice came dripping down her cheek, down her plump breast, the droplet tickling her nipple just correctly that a shiver of delight came over here, and she moaned, throwing her head back and letting the fruit fall to the ground.” At this he fingered the liquid that began to bead up on the head of my cock, and it quivered, nearly sending me into my final spasm.

“Oh, how even then she knelt to the damp earth and picked up the fallen fruit, and hungrily and greedily she placed it in her mouth.” With feline movements he placed me on my back and moved his wet lips down my stomach, and placed the whole of my cock into his warm, burning mouth. With a single ravenous suck, he moved his mouth up the shaft and lingered there at the tip, moving his head playfully and slowly from side to side, grazing his slightly rough tongue on the most tender and tingly parts. He released his grip with a smack of his lips and licked at those full red lips as if to taste every particle of pre-cum smeared there.

How gorgeous and animalistic and even dangerous he seemed, those dark eyes peering at me across his stony brow, his hair fallen across one shoulder and dangling low enough to tickle my leg.

“In her lust the beautiful, curvaceous woman laid back on the earth, licking her fingers clean of the sticky fluid, and she opened her legs to me, her eyes closed, and I could see the wetness glistening there. Mankind, bound to me through the fruit, was ready to heed my call whenever I called to their minds. I summoned Adam to the scene. He came, curious and enthusiastic, his mop of light brown curls so soft-looking that I wanted to kiss him on the head.”

He moved his fingers through my hair. His hand slid down to the hair at the base of my cock, and he stroked it, tickled it, as if it were the hair on my head.

“Adam came, dumbfounded to see Eve spread out on the ground, in heat like a cat and beckoning to him with a smooth, writhing arm. ‘Come to me,’ I made Eve say, with her mouth and her voice, but with my mind. ‘Come inside of me. Put your serpent here.’ She slid her finger in the folds between her legs. Her hips bucked, what a wild thing she had become!

“I, the serpent, crawled up his leg like a spiral staircase, towards his flaccid, useless genitals. I merged with my twin, the small dangling thing that had never been used. I merged with him and he became hard, erect, and he was suddenly flushed like a man, staring at his wife in new wonder. At once he entered Eve on my command.”

He began to stroke my cock feverishly, stopping only to lick it, leaving a generous amount of moisture, and then continued stroking. I grabbed the pillow beneath my head and moaned loud, dizzied by the electricity of all this.

“Adam entered Eve, and you must understand, every time a man enters a woman, it is me, my whole body, the serpent, entering her, feeling her warm slickness envelop my soul, oh, what ecstasy that is, to always feel that pleasurable tightness, the shocks, as if my whole body were a penis, as if my whole body were always feeling this,” he said, stroking harder and faster to demonstrate what he meant, and I cried out, knowing that in any other circumstance I would have long felt the pinnacle much earlier, but he had the power to make it drag out in me, to make me feel this as more than just an instantaneous moment, to make the pleasure feel as if it would go on for eternity.

“He rode her roughly and savagely, as a man does when he is deprived of this for so long. In unison they came to ecstasy, and I spit my venom into her, my life-giving venom. You should have heard her scream, you should have felt her grind her hips into Adam’s. They lay there on the dirty ground in that same climax for days. Days passed, and they hungered not for food. They lay locked together in this passion, this interminable peak, never weakening, and at last one morning the orgasm subsided.”

With one final stroke, a suprisingly gentle one, he brought me to the peak. I breathed out heavily. My cock throbbed, the shocks pulsating through my body, and I grew deaf for an instant, hearing my own sounds from within, the sloshing of my blood, my hearty breaths. The slickness came, between my cock and his hand, and he laughed delightedly. He continued to stroke me lazily until I became soft and useless. I fell into a deep, dark sleep.

I dreamt of cloudy days. Of a cold, biting, winter chill, the air dry, the sky gray and the leaves of the trees a very dark green. I dreamt of wind chimes tinkling so mournfully. It was the sound of a lonely spirit walking the snow-covered earth, looking for something it has lost, yet never knowing what exactly that was. A large-eyed little girl sat down in a corner of a shabby house and warmed herself by the heater. There was music, an original composition, playing somewhere, perhaps it was a ghost playing in a hidden room somewhere in the house. The girl finds the room, spies the piano, but as soon as she sees it, the music stops playing, as if the ghost never wanted to be caught.

I awoke slowly. I saw his black hair framing his face as he laid propped up on his elbow, looking down on me. His eyes were sad and his face softened and streaked red, as though he’d been crying for a long time. His palm came to lay warmly on my cheek.

“Do you remember the time,” he said, “when you were sitting idly on your front step, and suddenly in a flash there came to your mind an image of what your front gate looked like, many many years ago before your father built a new gate? You didn’t even know you still had that memory in your head. It was a simple, meaningless thing, something you hadn’t thought of in years, and now it was all of a sudden in your mind for no reason. And then you cried…copiously you cried, and you couldn’t decide if they were tears of joy or tears of sorrow.”

I pondered quietly for a while. “Yes, I remember that.”

“It was that day a terrible storm came. The winds thrashed and made you run inside and close the door, and you watched it from the window. It rained and hailed, and throughout it all, the sun was shining furiously through a chink in the clouds.”

“Yes, I do remember.”

“That memory of yours, it made me cry. I cried and cried. To cry over something devoid of meaning! I made the biggest storm. God kept saying you cried to rejoice, as a celebration of your childhood suddenly realized. He made the sun shine brutally.”

“Yes, I remember that day, my love.”

He let his eyes dance on my face for a moment. He said, “That was the day I learned that I loved you.”

THE END OF CHAPTER ONE