4. My Boyfriend #3
I hide in the bathroom. From my backpack, I take a roll of plastic covering, a butcher knife, zip ties, and a pack of tea candles.
I jump up and down, like boxers do. “I can do this,” I tell the three different mirrors.
My jumping evolves into a psyching-myself-up interpretive dance.
I’m lithe for once, my movements graceful, my face beautiful. I’m powerful. I can do this. Fuck yeah.
The room is pistachio green (carpet, wallpaper) with a pink armchair, pink cushions, and pink tassels on the pistachio brocade curtains, so wonderfully garish they should be charging triple.
My boyfriend and his boss’s boss writhe and moan interlocked in each other.
We should’ve come up with a signal… I don’t know what to shout: I’m here? Hello? Excuse me?
“Hands up.”
They don’t seem to hear me.
“Hands up.”
I unearth the power I just discovered dancing in the bathroom.
“Hands up!”
They unwrap from each other. The bank director’s mouth shines red from all the making out. He looks at Felipe for guidance. Am I part of this sexy adventure?
“Hold him,” I tell Felipe.
Felipe is befuddled. One second ago he was kneading this man’s flesh, and now…
right! He straddles the man and pins him down.
The man complains: “What is this?”… “Get off”…
et cetera. I ask Felipe to flip him over; I need to zip-tie his hands.
Very difficult with a squirming man. He kicks.
Throws punches. Breaks my nose. I stumble.
I’m so into this plan, the pain barely registers even though the blood flows torrential.
At the sight of my beaten face, Felipe’s demon surfaces—eyes turn onyx black, he growls.
The bank director yelps. Felipe, now demonic, flips the man over, easy like a flapjack.
I zip-tie his hands together. Feet. Gag him with duct tape.
I cover a patch of floor with plastic, light tea candles in an oval as wide as the space allows.
Felipe, demon strong, carries and lays the man at the center.
“How do we do this?” Felipe asks. “Is there a chant?”
I pinch my nose to quench the blood, and my voice comes out muppet-like. “I think we just kill him.”
“But what if we kill him and didn’t follow the recipe and it doesn’t work?”
“What recipe? Is there a recipe?”
The demon jabbers in its language.
“What does that mean?” I ask Felipe.
“How should I know?”
The demon growls, stabs the air. I imagine it wants us to get on with it.
I hand Felipe the knife. The bank director squirms. His shouts come out as muffled squeaks.
Before I gagged him, he pleaded, “I have a wife, kids. I’ll give you money, how much?
I never do this type of thing…” as if I were some vengeful angel or crusading psych-prude.
“What if it gets stronger?” Felipe asks. “With a human sacrifice, it might just take over me.”
“I told you I won’t let that happen. Trust me.” I wave the knife. “Take it.”
My boyfriend grabs it. “How do I do it?”
“Stab the heart, I guess.”
“Here?” Felipe points the knife’s blade at the bank director’s sternum.
“More to the left… his left. Down a little bit. You’ll have to be strong, Felipe. One potent blow, yes?”
Felipe straddles the man and raises the knife with both hands. He’s a vision naked and knife-wielding. The man squirms, squeaks, drips in sweat. He cries, thrashes. Snot and tears fly.
He pees himself.
“Oh no.” Felipe drops the knife, climbs onto the bed, covers his face with one of the pink cushions.
Sacrificing a human really is a harrowing endeavor. The fluids, the shaking, the sobbing, the breaking down. “Yikes.”
Felipe’s eyes turn onyx black, the demon roars, and I figure he’ll jump down, all fours, and finish the job, take over us fiddling chickens. But it is Felipe who wins over the demon and retreats farther into the bed.
“You do it,” Felipe says and chucks the knife to me.
“Did the demon say that?”
“The demon doesn’t mind who kills him, as long as we kill him in its honor.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. “We don’t even understand it. What if I kill this guy and the demon dies anyway?”
“Isi, I’m sure.”
I grab the knife, slash one of the man’s thighs, quick, to see if I can actually bring myself to hurt him.
I can.
He bleeds.
I touch his blood to know it’s real, warm and thick and awesomely crimson, to know that I’m not in some sort of delirium, that I’m actually about to murder someone. A necessary sacrifice, I tell myself. I can do this. I’m ready. I’m pumped!
I lift the knife. The bank director’s whimpers cease, like he’s resigned, like he knows this is what I must do, like he’s offering himself to our demon, to the flourishing of our relationship, Felipe, the demon, and me.
I thrust. Felipe tackles me. The knife skitters.
Have I killed the bank director? Nope. He’s still alive in a puddle of blood, piss, and sweat.
I could grab the knife. Finish the job. But Felipe sits on the floor naked and his skinny legs are long and hairy and he doesn’t cry.
He looks at me, like Felipe, like Felipe unpossessed.
He’s cute, undevastating but adorable, and his eyes are his, kind and light and boring, and I realize he truly doesn’t want me to kill the man.
He may have never wanted to; he only wanted to hold on to me.
“Do you hate me?” he asks.
I scooch over and hold him. This will be the last time I kiss his head and smell him—his shampoo, his scalp’s delightful sebum—the last time I get to boop his moles, pull at the hairs on his back, relish the raspiness of his five-o’ clock shadow.
A year later, I see Felipe at brunch on a patio in Coyoacán, far from his usual haunts.
He’s with another man, cute in all the ordinary ways, like Felipe, my ex-boyfriend.
I’m with a book. Relieved to be near a plant, semi-camouflaged.
For a bit, I considered moving to Querétaro, buying a little house close to my friend, but Mexico City’s pull is too strong.
After Felipe left the hotel, I slashed the man’s other thigh, for symmetry and to make sure he remembered not to rat us out.
Of course he agreed to keep his mouth shut.
He was lucky to be alive. He had seen the demon, felt it, hell, he’d been seduced by it.
He would take this night to his grave if it meant the demon never came back to visit him.
Plus I told him I had video of his tryst (I didn’t).
A waiter serves Felipe enfrijoladas. A concha sits on a side plate, Felipe will save it for the end, to dunk in his last coffee.
I imagined Felipe would’ve quit his job.
Maybe he has and moved on to another bank, but maybe he hasn’t and he got promoted, employing the one relic of power the demon left him.
I ask for the check. I can slip out and avoid a scene: Oh my god, hi!
… Hi, oh my god!… How have you been?… Let me introduce you to bla bla bla and whatnot.
I’m signing the check when Felipe lifts my book, inspects the back cover.
“Good?” he asks.
“Excellent.”
“I was going to ask you to join us but you’ve finished eating.”
“Were you really?”
“No.” He winks.
I don’t understand this wink. I try to catch a hint of demon. A wild hope. There’s none.
“You know,” he says, “how people say they would kill for someone but no one actually means it? You meant it. You would’ve killed for me.”
“For you and the demon.”
“Right. Nevertheless, I will keep thinking it was all for me.”
“Even if you’re wrong?”
“Even if I’m wrong.”
“Okay.”
He returns to his boyfriend. The guy is probably asking about me. Felipe says… What does he say? An ex-boyfriend… ugh, too banal. A former lover… a bit better.
He says: A demon I dallied with. And the boyfriend says: So you dally with demons (trying to be sexy). And Felipe answers, Not anymore.
I walk out. I drank too much coffee. I’m jittery and my nose itches, but the sun is high and the plaza pleasant and there’s a lonely bench under a tree where I sit and finish my book.