Chapter 2
Damian is the devil’s name.
The devil is a whisper in the wind, the song of the crickets at night, the voice in your head that speaks of sins and death, the shadows that hunt the rearview of your every step, the reflection on your eyes that shines darker after every misstep, the twisting of reality after a manipulative spell chanted by the traumatization of the emotion, the silence after the moment. The devil is the absolute of the universe, the dark side to the moon, the upside-down of earth, and his name is Damian.
The thing about knowing the Devil’s name is that once you know it, there is no forgetting it. The thing about knowing the devil’s name is that once you remember it, there is no escaping it. The thing about knowing the devil’s name is that no matter how hard you try to escape it, sooner or later, the devil learns your name too.
My name is Regulus, now you know it, and so does the devil.
Damian learned my name the day my heart stopped beating. He forgot it the day after. And he remembered it one hundred and forty-seven years after my heart stopped beating; the day I tried to stop breathing to find you again.
Establishing that I know the devil’s name and that he knows mine implies there is a preexisting relationship between us that at least borders the line of cordiality. And the awful truth is that if I were to reflect on the nature of our relationship I would be forced into a confession of appreciation, where he took part in the fundamental experiences of my life, where he became the reason and the consequence of the everything in me, where erasing him from my history, where delimitating our relationship to mere cordiality would imply a complete neglectance of my identity and a shorting of my life.
The beginning of our relationship dates back to the day my heart stopped beating, a hundred and forty-seven years ago.
Staring at a stone, a piece of rock molded into a commemoration for a monster (my mother) better off forgotten, my ears drummed with the atrocious beating of my heart, which threatened to leap out of my chest, out of its cage, and torture my senses as a warning of such threat. The beating of my heart, a drum in my ears trying to fill the silence that followed the death of my father: his voice had already been stolen by the pirates that danced within the flows of the wind and that navigated through time.
And I wonder, if those pirates were so skilled at stealing voices, why couldn't they take a greater treasure and free me from the torment of discordant voices ruling my head? If only those pirates had taken my voice too – and only my voice, not my life – then maybe I wouldn't know the devil's name, and he wouldn't know mine.
Because Damian thrives on discordant voices.
And in the face of death, my thoughts drowned in the finality of it.
My eyes stared at the tomb that was supposed to represent the monstrosity of my own bloodline and all I could notice was how perfectly pure it looked. My thoughts tried to grasp the memories her ghost carried and relate it to the reality that lay before me to no successful attempt. My hand rested on my heart, a reassurance of vitality.
In the face of death, my thoughts drowned in finality. A reassurance of vitality; the same blood composed my mother's body and mine, and it created the hands that crafted the tendencies that ran in this cursed family, against which I had been consciously, recurrently, and continually struggling. I adapted all sorts of measures to contain the violence that my body, my entire family, seemed to be striving to stress, and yet in the blink of an eye, it had culminated in the painting of my hand in red, the staining of the floor, and the spilling of a body; my mother's body.
I killed her
The punches, the screams, the brutality, and the foul play are all tendencies that repeated history between my mother and me, and the mere notion that the tendency of death might follow my blood too was enough to lead to a distraught mind and a deal born from freneticism.
The tendency of death unveiledthe notion of reunion and the comprehension of such implication released such a wrecked desperation within the inner of my mind that forced into motion the wheels that persuaded irrationality to control the depth of my choices and accept a deal with the devil. A deal with the devil with the intention of escaping the chains of death and condemning my existence to eternity is understood as a clear favor of immortality.
However, in the eyes of the devil, who such desire granted me, the eternity of my soul included my imprisonment and condemnation to the underworld, ensuring the continuity of my life but surrounded by those who had already lost theirs and only had their souls left.
A balance: the devil justifies it.
Hell is an all-black place, without moments or occasions, where the passage of time is identified as a social construct that crumbles with each breath that escapes from me.
Occasionally, the essence of a person would pass by, a dim light that barely flickered long enough to distinguish their silhouette. Bound in my place, fearful of the consequences that movement could provoke, I never dared to follow those souls.
I noticed the years passing and my breath continuing even eons after what should have been my physical death. Every now and then, I had to check, even when my lungs didn't ask for it, my ability to inhale; to reassure myself. To convince my head that this was no death, that even when I wasn't living but surviving, I still retained the consciousness of the mind.
It was ironic enough, all of it: that I was trapped in the world of the dead when all I wanted was distance from it; the place where my father resided, the place where I had sent him.
And it was ironic enough, all of it: that I wasn't dying but condemned to a life surrounded by the dead, losing every bit of myself that made me human; lacking in me the capacity for sensitivity. It was ironic enough, all of it: that I was developing a burning hatred for Damian, which, in comparison to the heat of hell, was truly an insignificant truth with no value other than being a fact.
It was ironic enough, all of it, but above all, I was slowly but inexorably becoming a demon myself.
Because the devil's name is Damian. But now, also Regulus.
I am a monster.
I became a monster.
And it is for this reason that upon hearing your laughter, which one day made its way to the underworld and then to my ears, I decided to follow its path, pick up the breadcrumbs it left along the way, and search for you.
Because you laugh, and I cry, but you and I were equally distant from death, and the only difference was that I knew it and suffered, and you enjoyed your ignorance. And this reality didn't seem fair to me because if I was going through decay, you should too.
...
CONSEQUENCES OF A (BROKEN) DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
I never believed, when I conceived the deal with the devil, that I would love you.
I never believed that loving you would shatter my sanity.
And I never believed that my crumbling sanity, born from my infatuation and broken by my deal with the devil, would be the reason I would lose you.
I never believed that stealing the beat of your heart would be my punishment; my condemnation.
R.A.B