The imp was with him from the beginning, growing, only he did not know it yet.
As a boy, Clark confessed to his father that he had looked down Angela Velez’s shirt in English class, twice. It was not the first nor the only time he had done such a thing, but the urgency he felt very deep, unfathomably deep inside, that drove him to it, repeatedly, constantly, distressed him, and drove him to confess, to his father of all people.
His father was in his den, playing his beloved Strat-o-matic baseball game, a game involving disks named for real-life baseball players mounted upon a spinner, the disks divided into fragments representing strikeouts, fly outs, walks, singles, doubles, home runs etc. A spin equaled a player’s at bat. A high average singles hitter was at the plate and his father’s finger was poised to flick the spinner. Clark’s confession had interrupted play.
His father cast him a sidelong glance and said, “Well, that’s natural at your age, son,” then flicked the spinner and recorded the result in his tiny, jagged handwriting in the computational notebook he used for this purpose. On the shelf in the closet, Clark knew, was a tall stack of similar spiral-bound notebooks detailing more thrilling seasons of Strat-o-matic baseball than years Clark had been alive. It was in the same pile that Clark had found his father’s hidden issues of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, one sneaking day not too long ago.
The spinner made the background music of Clark’s childhood: Tzdzhzhzhzhzh…
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” Clark said to his father. More: He wished he did not do it, ever. But he did. From the beginning, it was with him. He was bad, it meant. It had to mean that. Deep down inside. Didn’t it? He did not want to be, but he was. Again and again. Bad. Bad. So bad. But not in a gross, conspicuous, hurting other people way. Bad on the inside, like rot in wood that surprises with its weakness because it looks otherwise strong. Bad in the way that if you think it, you have as good as done it.
It was late innings and a spot in the playoffs was at stake. Tzdzhzhzhzhzh went the next player, who had a fat home run space at the top of his disk. His father rolled two dice for added verisimilitude, recorded the result, and said, “Just don’t dwell on it.”
The breasts of Angela Velez and the hips and thighs of Linda Tornabene continued to haunt English class. And in other classes, there were other girls. Don’t dwell on it. It was only seventh grade. Years to go. And years. Clark dwelt.
In his thirties, Clark settled down with a good woman with whom he enjoyed mutually satisfying sex and a meeting of the minds. Yet still he suffered secrets, and dwelt within them, and was uneasy for it. His eyes kept their own counsel, oblivious to conscience, exploring shapes and postures whether he consciously sought to or not. He found himself in the backs of drug stores by the newsstands, reaching high to the top shelves. Eventually he knew the ins and outs of certain kinds of book shops, and cinemas. Around the time of presidents and blue dresses there washed over the world a thing called the Internet – mooting the need to sneak, at least outside the household. Unhelpful.
He developed the habit of thinking of that corrupt, shameful part of himself as something other than his true self. An imp. A separate being that lived inside him and aped his every movement so adeptly that only at those moments when a bit of feminine fabric stretched a certain way, or a young lady’s neckline lapsed in its duty to obscure, or conversely, deliberately provoked, did he notice the stark otherness of this being within him. It was a conceit, he knew, to think of his own baser impulses as somehow not his own, but yet at the same time somewhat, somehow a comfort. It’s not me, it’s the imp.
Still wishing it was not so, he consulted his parish priest. Not surprisingly, the priest suggested prayer, and that Clark join a twelve-step program. Clark thanked him, but considered himself neither prone to prayer nor a “group” person. Before long his wife caught him on the Internet. Are you bored? (Not exactly.) Don’t do it at work. (Be more careful.) Clark, at your age. (…) The kids, Clark, the kids — let’s move the computer to the living room, establish a house rule that all surfing be done there and nowhere else. (Good idea.)
And then there were smartphones…
A shrink laughed to hear Clark had first gone to a priest — “Usually it’s one or the other, isn’t it, religion or medicine?” —and prescribed pills. The pills made Clark sleepy, sweaty, heavy. He switched medications, and became nervous and weepy. He lost stature in his wife’s eyes, inevitably, irreplaceably, and as often as not slept on the sofa in the living room. Where the computer whirred.
Late one evening, in his throes, he stumbled upon an advertisement for one Dr. Emil Wohlgemuth, Imp Exciser. He laughed out loud. He clicked the link and saw that he was right downtown, this so-called doctor.
Clark’s fingers trembled. Sweat limned his brow and made his underarms slick.
He made an appointment.
The imp exciser’s operation was in a new glass tower on the outskirts of the financial district. Clark debarked from the elevator into a quiet reception area of neutral tones, empty of any other patrons. The receptionist, a lovely young woman bearing a name tag that said “Rajni,” handed Clark a form, a clipboard and a pen. Beyond two glass doors, he glimpsed a brightly lit hallway.
Clark sat to fill out the form. Name, address, contact information, the usual stuff up top. But then, the questions…
Prostitution? (No.)
Frequency of masturbation? (Jesus.)
Sex club membership? (No.)
Estimated amount of money spent per month on porn? (None. Why pay for it?)
Swinging? (No.)
Divorced? (No.)
Pornography preferences: Check all that apply… There were dozens of boxes available to check off. More than a few he had never heard of. A few he had glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, on video box covers at peep shows, and fled from. He wound up checking off only a few boxes. This Clark found humbling. A lifetime of secret suffering reduced to three or four checked boxes on a form.
Rajni told Clark the doctor would see him now and pushed a button to make the glass doors unlock with a metallic click. Second door on the right.
He entered a small, white windowless room and sat with his form and his clipboard upon an examining table covered with rolled paper, his feet dangling.
There was a knock and two men entered. The short bald one wore a white lab coat and a knit tie, poorly knotted. The tall, broad-shouldered, younger man was bearded and well-built, like a masseur.
“Clark…Arbogast?” the short man, evidently the doctor, said. Clark nodded and handed him his form. The doctor glanced at it and said, “Oh, wait a minute. Sorry.” He turned to the younger man, who was smiling at Clark in a way that made Clark feel odd. “Not gay, Dirk. Could you send in Svetlana?”
Dirk’s smile turned off and he backed out of the examination room.
The doctor studied Clark’s form some more. “Hmm,” he said. “Quite serious, quite serious. You’re wise to have come here.”
“Serious? Really? Frankly, filling out the form, I was a little—I mean, so many boxes unchecked—”
“Your imp is repressed. Dangerous situation.”
Another knock on the door and in slipped a stunning, petite beauty with a figure no lab coat and below-the-knee hemline could obscure. In just the two or three steps it took for her to move from the door to the examining table and extend her porcelain hand in greeting, Clark’s eyes inhaled a forever after of nocturnal torment. She bestowed upon him a smile so brilliant that it sucked all the air from the room. Her full lips were the color of ravished pomegranates, backed by perfect white teeth. Her eyes, shaped the way almonds dreamed of being shaped, were the color polished emeralds aspired to, and they exuded an interior light that guaranteed that the wonders so abundantly displayed were but the merest, most casual hints at the devastating reality she embodied. She said she was Svetlana and Clark believed her.
“I was just telling Mr., uh—” The doctor consulted Clark’s form again. “—Arbogast that his condition is quite serious.”
Svetlana nodded. “I can see that,” she said.
Before Clark could marshal his thick tongue to form intelligible words and ask how, the doctor answered his obvious question.
“We’ve developed our ability to read certain behavioral tropes in a patient’s reactions, kind of like how professional poker players read the tells of their opponents. It’s our stock in trade. The excision process afterward is merely mechanical. You can see it, right, Svetlana?”
She looked at the doctor as if he must be kidding.
“Well, in this case it is rather obvious,” the doctor said. “Dilation of the pupils, slackening of the jaw, repeated swallowing, trembling at the extremities, and — ” He pointed. “—incipient tumescence.” Svetlana’s eyes went there and Clark became aware that his blood could not decide where it most needed to go – there, or to the blush that threatened to melt his face.
“But, but,” he struggled, finding his voice, “that could be just the normal man’s reaction to meeting someone so … as unbelievably… like Svetlana.”
The doctor made a game show buzzer noise. “Wrong,” he said. “Yours is the reaction of a man possessed by an extremely frustrated imp who must come out. The normal, non-imp-infested man would see Svetlana here, knockout that she may be, and merely smile at her—”
“I smiled.”
“Let me finish. The normal, as I said non-imp-infested man would notice her, certainly, and even, perhaps, try to get to know her. You, on the other hand, went all zing zang kerblowwie. You have an imp that must come out.” He shot Svetlana a questioning look. “Shall we prove it to him?”
Svetlana shrugged her lips. Clark was not sure he liked the sound of this. He asked how.
“We’ll take that question as consent,” the doctor said. “Undress, please.”
“What?”
“We’re medical professionals, don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll turn around,” Svetlana said. She winked and turned her back.
Haltingly, not quite believing he was really doing it, Clark undressed. Shoes and socks first, then chinos. Soon enough he was naked, sitting on the edge of the table, feet dangling again. He covered his private parts with his hands and sat up straighter than normal, conscious of unbecoming love handles.
“Now you, Svetlana,” the doctor said.
She turned and with marked speed and deftness removed her jacket, shirt and skirt. She wore nothing underneath.
“Hands at your sides, please,” the doctor said to Clark.
Clark hesitated, intensely aware of a condition he did not want to reveal.
“Mr. Arbogast,” the doctor said, “we must insist.”
Clark put his hands at his sides. Svetlana smiled, at first to his face, but then, looking lower, more broadly. More meaningfully. As if without thinking about it, she made circles around one of her nipples with one perfect, amber-lacquered nail, and the brown-pink button grew hard and taut as stone. What happened over the next few moments was beyond Clark’s own belief. Svetlana did not touch him and yet, through suggestion, through expression, through the smallest of movements, through being so beautiful and so nude and, apparently, so turned on herself, somehow, the unthinkable and yet also inevitable happened.
“Oh my god,” he cried out, “I’m sorry.”
The doctor handed Svetlana a wad of paper towels from a dispenser on the wall.
“See?” the doctor said. “You won’t find many folks willing to debase themselves like that who don’t have an imp infestation. You’ll want to get rid of it.” He handed another wad to Clark. “You can get dressed now.”
Svetlana dressed even more quickly than she had stripped, lobbed one of her dazzling smiles at the doctor and left the tiny examining room.
“She’s very good,” the doctor said, “wouldn’t you say?”
Clark could not speak.
The walls of the doctor’s office were the color of raspberry sorbet, trimmed with ebony moldings, and were hung with diplomas from institutions Clark had never heard of. The doctor sat behind a massive mahogany desk, consulting a large notebook dense with scribbles presumably in his own hand, in ink of various colors. Clark sat on a hard leather armchair.
“Christ, I’m busy,” the doctor said, “but you know, I had a cancellation this evening. We could do it then.”
He looked up at Clark, a green pen poised over the notebook.
“Can you describe the procedure a bit,” Clark said. “I mean, what does it entail?”
“Risky to do it that way,” the doctor said. “You might balk.”
Clark and the doctor regarded each other across the broad, cluttered desk.
“But any other medical establishment tells you exactly what they are going to do.”
“Do they? The dentist, maybe, because usually you’re awake. But does a thoracic surgeon really tell a patient in any more than general terms what he or she will do when they remove a growth? That he or she will cut through your skin and your stomach wall to get into your abdominal cavity, that for a period of time your internal organs very possibly will be distended and commented upon and arrayed outside your body on a sterile sheet placed above your open belly, and lengths of intestine uncoiled and hung on small wire racks, in order to make room to get at the slippery, indistinct malformation that must be removed, the thing that is probably killing you?”
“Well, I suppose maybe they don’t go into that level of detail —”
“No, they don’t,” the doctor said. “They tell you there is a tumor and they are removing it. There are no details. Details are scary.”
“I guess.”
“So here we are, then. You have an imp. Here.” The doctor pointed to his own temple.
“So, it’s brain surgery?”
“Not exactly.”
“Would there be scars?”
“Depends how you define scars.”
“Jesus. Will there be pain?”
“Yes.”
Clark swallowed. Little bits of convincing frankness, amidst the lunacy, this “doctor” doled out. “Will I be laid up for a long time?”
“Individual rates of convalescence vary.”
“Can I stop the process at any time?”
“No. Once commenced, it must be completed. You don’t want imp ass sticking out of your face, do you? I’ve seen it happen. Believe me.”
Clark jiggled his foot. “You can’t tell me anything at all about your process?”
The doctor sighed. “You’re strapped down to a table so you can’t run away. My assistant and I determine the best avenue of entry. Usually the ear, the nose or the mouth. Sometimes the orbit of one eye. Local anesthetic. We go in and—” He made a pulling motion, like a mime wrestling an enormous, thick rope. “—pull the imp out. Mind you, the imp resists. A bit.”
Clark remembered to breathe. “I need to think about this.”
The doctor flung his green pen down and closed the book. “Of course,” he said.
“That’s okay, right? I mean, you made it sound like we should do this right away. Now, even.”
“We should. That would be my advice. But if you need time, that’s fine. The imp will be there, believe me. Make an appointment with Rajni on the way out. Six months is the usual timeframe. Like I said, I’m busy.”
To his chagrin, Clark felt almost abandoned. “So I go home and talk it over with my wife—”
“No, no, no, don’t do that. What are you, high? She’ll think you’re crazy.”
Clark made his six-month appointment.
Clark’s marriage benefitted for the next few weeks, in a scared straight kind of way. Clark had become a Svetlana-fired dynamo in bed, a better lover than he had been in years. He did not tell his wife what drove his rekindled lust for her, and they enjoyed each other frequently. Until it ebbed and Clark’s head began turning once again, on the subway and in the supermarket, and the wee hours spent with the phantoms on the computer screen reaccumulated, and one night, alone on the sofa in the study once more, he said out loud, “This is what I have become.”
In the morning he moved up his appointment.
Clark had envisioned a huge cavernous operating theatre with a table of menacing medical equipment spot lit in its center. Some sort of stage would loom above it and maybe Svetlana would observe.
Instead he was directed to the same white windowless little room as his first visit. Svetlana did stop by as he was waiting but just to wish him luck. A tip of the finger handshake, a meeting of the eyes, no come on, and he was alone again in the featureless room.
After another little while, the door to the office burst open, startling him, and Dr. Wohlgemuth stood before him, clad in dark, stained coveralls and steel-toed rubber boots, the sort of get-up a chemical plant worker might wear. On his head perched a welder’s visor.
“You gave the receptionist your credit card?” he said. “And it went through?” When Clark nodded, the doctor said, “Excellent. Let’s get started, then, shall we?”
“Just like that?” Clark said.
“Well, why the hell not? Still having doubts?” The doctor pushed the sleeves of the coveralls up to his elbow. “Let me ask you some questions, then. Do you want to continue to feel guilty?”
“No.”
“To continue to have secrets from your loved ones?”
“No.”
“To lose the respect and esteem of your wife?”
“Of course not—”
“To continue to live in dread of the most terrible question a woman can ask her man?”
Clark waited.
“To wit,” the doctor said, thrusting his finger in the air, and dropping his voice to nearly a whisper, “‘Can I trust you’?”
Clark shook his head. And shook it again.
“Then…” The doctor lowered his visor. “Shall we?”
The doctor bid Clark lie back on the examining table and turned the lights down low. His visor had a sharply focused lamp above the forehead.
“You’re going to do this alone?” Clark said.
“Hoping for another go-round with Svetlana? Still presenting, I see.” He strapped down first one then the other of Clark’s arms with thick leather belt loops. “Now hold still.”
The doctor began to poke and probe with cold steel instruments in Clark’s nose and ear, and down his throat. The intrusions were tolerable, hardly more than superficial. After some minutes of this, which produced nothing in the way of results, the doctor asked, “Tell me again, how did the imp get started?”
“I don’t know what—”
“Your earliest sexual memories.”
Ah, the indelible vision of Angela Velez bending over in middle school English class, and the view down her shirt of her nascent mounds… Before that the torture of neighbor Suzie’s little flashing thighs beneath her blue pleated skirt as they played games of tag… Before he even knew what sex was…
He had only just gotten going when the doctor held up that hand again.
“All right, all right, all right. It’s the eyes, then.”
The doctor administered some numbing eye drops and left Clark alone for a few minutes. When he returned, he said, “Numb yet?”
“I guess. I can still see though –”
“Doesn’t affect optics. Just dulls the pain, sorta.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Now, hold on, big fellah. This is gonna hurt.”
It was excruciating. Clark screamed and tried to throw the doctor off but the smaller man was remarkably strong and heavy and would not relent. Clark was pinned and invaded, and on the doctor’s third attempt, by which point Clark’s stomach heaved at the realization that his left eye was now out of its socket and dancing upon his cheek, the hook of what looked like a torturer’s crochet needle caught something and Clark went rigid, his back arched, and a tingly numbness spread through his entire body. The pain was beyond enduring and Clark prayed as he had never prayed before that he could pass out or even die if that was the only way to end it, but it continued to envelop and consume him, and soon the agony was accompanied by something else doubly horrific: a long, whinnying scream in a voice not his own. Clark forced himself to open his unassaulted eye against the pain and was shocked to see the doctor wrestling with a strange, transparent, writhing creature of indistinct shape. It was from that being’s gaping mouth that the strange piercing cry was coming. The doctor had the needle hook high up inside the thing’s nose and was pulling with a level of exertion that made his bulging arms tremble. With a spasm that sent a shudder through Clark’s body, the creature’s final limb surged forth from Clark’s eye socket and doctor and imp fell to the floor.
After a moment, the doctor rose beside the examining table, gulping air. With a spoon and a clearly practiced scooping gesture, he replaced Clark’s escaped eye in its socket, while something on the floor made scuttling sounds as it moved toward the door. A thin hand like a tendril of smoke reached up to try the knob.
“You can’t get out,” Dr. Wohlgemuth said. “It’s locked.”
In the furious struggle, one of Clark’s restraints had come undone, and he was able to prop himself up on one elbow to get a look at the thing on the floor. The imp was a stunted, wan nude of himself. The same tow-headed boyish face beset with premature jowls, the same narrow shoulders and tendency toward whiskey paunch, the same ballast-bearing thighs and hips and otherwise skinny limbs. And there, where his eyes ought not to but did look anyway, blazed an ardent staff of accentuated impish essence, fully engorged and defiant and demanding notice.
“Don’t you have anything the poor thing can wear?” Clark said.
The imp gave him a small smile of gratitude.
“Don’t be such a hypocrite,” the doctor said. Clark was taken aback by the harshness of his tone. The doctor took a remote control device of some kind out of his pocket and pressed a button on it. A moment later the door opened a crack and the large fellow Clark had glimpsed on his first visit — Dirk? — stuck his hand in, hoisted up the imp by the scruff of its neck, and disappeared.
Clark made excuses at the office and at home for the shocking appearance of his face. His cover story was a sinus irrigation gone wrong. Over time the discoloration faded but a permanent effect was a widening of his face across the plane of his eyes. On the advice of his wife he had new photos taken for his work ID, driver’s license and passport.
All of that was mere scenery compared to the joy he felt at the deepest result of the procedure. He was giddy to realize how thoroughly his day-to-day perceptions had been altered by the imp’s presence and how unsullied they were now that he was imp-free. It had been the imp, the imp all along. He was not a bad person. He, Clark, was a nice guy.
His home life settled into a new equilibrium. With a mind uncluttered by the need to shield them from his “true” feelings, his wife became as interesting and charming to him as she had ever been and he perceived in his children loveable and worthwhile young beings that could benefit in pleasant ways from his attentions.
It was what he had hoped for, but dared not expect. He had hoped merely not to lust so much, not to have quite so many secret sexual thoughts, not to have to work so to keep from devolving into a porn-gulping pervert. He had hoped merely that all of that would ease and that he would be able to handle it with judgment and reserve, as he imagined any normal man routinely does. But it was so much greater than he had hoped, this fundamental change in his experience of the world. He did not want porn less. He did not want it at all. At all. He did not immediately picture any attractive woman he met in sexual embraces. Ever. At all. He wept with joy at this sweet, saving relief.
Well well, he said to himself one night, late, in bed beside his gently snoring wife, still aglow after their tender lovemaking. I am, after all, a nice guy. After all.
He met his imp on a park bench the following summer.
He had stepped out for lunch, falafel from a favorite food cart around the corner. After he ate, Clark lingered, enjoying the warm sunshine and watching pigeons darting across the sky and the sunlight glinting on the windows of tall buildings, and university students and workaday passersby and nannies with infants and other lunch-fetchers ebbing and flowing through the busy park.
He almost did not notice the small being sitting on a bench across the walkway from him, sitting there by itself, staring at him.
And when he did, Clark thought to himself, my, that fellow looks like me, only small. My doppelmidget. It was when he looked away, not wanting, in his newly restored state of virtue, to be rude and to stare, that he realized who, or what, it was.
Falafel surged in his stomach.
The imp was not so transparent as it had been when it had first been plucked from its hidden dwelling-place behind his eyes. And it now had clothes on.
It nodded at Clark. A slow, severe little nod. It rose to its feet and approached.
When it was just a few paces away, it said, in a quiet, whispery voice, “You thought they killed me, didn’t you?”
“Go away.”
“I will, don’t worry,” the imp said. “Just let me ask: How’s the ol’ conscience these days? Satisfied, I presume? Smug, perchance?”
“Please, go away.”
“Been watching you.”
“Have you? Well, stop it, please. I’ll have you arrested.”
The imp snickered, a nervous sound like a wasp trapped in the screen of a window. Then it turned to make kissy lips at a pretty young woman walking by. The girl thrust aloft her middle finger in reply.
“See?” the imp said. “I’m real.”
Clark, sitting, yet feeling he might fall, grasped the edge of the park bench.
“You’re not crazy,” the imp went on. “No, sir. Crazy isn’t the word for it.”
Clark looked into its eyes, but only for a moment.
“Doomed is more like it,” the imp said.
The word hung between them and Clark felt his thudding heart begin to obscure his other senses.
“I don’t listen to you anymore,” Clark said. “You’ve been removed. Excised.”
The imp leaned close. “There’s something they didn’t tell you,” the imp said, “and it’s this: It’s the little things – like me! — that define you. All that…stuff? It’s all still —” The imp jabbed Clark in the temple with a hot finger. “—in there.”
“I r-remember things, yes. If that is what you mean.”
“I’m not talking memories.” The imp sat down and sidled close beside him. He craned his head upward as if to whisper in Clark’s ear. For a paralyzed moment, Clark thought the thing was going to kiss him.
Instead, it made a low, murmuring sound, sibilant. And while it did so, it pointed at a passerby. A particularly lovely young lady, blonde and slim and tall enough to be a model. She wore a short skirt and a sleeveless top and two-inch heels and her proportions were just perfect, their undulation divine—
The imp’s whisper intensified and Clark found himself suddenly visualizing the girl on her back, on her back, on her back…
The imp nodded, and inside his head Clark felt a familiar stirring. “Please,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Don’t let that newfound self-control on the Internet fool ya,” the imp said. “It’s all around you. Pretty blondes like that one, for instance.”
“I’m not— Not— ” Clark swallowed. “Not that kind of man. Any more.”
“Aren’t you?” The imp pointed to a billboard visible above the trees across the park. It depicted a beautiful woman laughing in delight as a frothy beverage erupted from the mouth of a bottle toward her face. “Inspiration abounds. It’s not the Internet, friend, it’s you. The real you. Deep, deep down inside. Good soil. Fertile. Rich and loamy.” The imp peered into his face, as if trying to see his own reflection in Clark’s eyes. Then he waved. “Yep. I see my brother in there. Hiya, you!” The imp shifted his gaze, from what he saw inside Clark, to the Clark-face Clark wished to present. “Yes, I see a fond kinsman a-comin’.”
The imp rose and gestured as if he were a magician completing a trick. With a grin, he went on tip-toe and tousled Clark’s hair, turned on his heel and walked away, slowing now and again to stare and comment on the pretty girls who crossed his path.
And Clark had to agree. They did look delicious.