The Devil Sure Does: The Anti-Biography of Nathan Dawn

By Vincent Robillard

The Devil Sure Does or the mischiefs and misadventures of a mythomaniac globe-trotting thief in search for his true identity is a maze of memories which carries the reader from Alaska to New Orleans to New Delhi and The Parisian Catacombs through the eyes of a diabolical and hyperbolical anti-hero on run as he recalls the fleeting moments and the significant murders of his decadent life.

To be read at the second degree with a grain of salt and at your own risk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465374516

Book preview

Chapter I

in which I first lie to you

I didn’t ask for nothing - change just happens. It always does and whose fault is it this time? There I am once again ranting in the dark and whatever we are, is not my concern anymore. I don’t care what we did or why. It’s one of those moments when you grow bigger than yourself. Like the time I laid down in a field and pictured myself spinning with the earth, head down, traveling through silent space to dance around the sun. I felt cosmic and insignificant - I felt the change and just let it happen. So what we fight for, who we elect, where we dump our shit and when will we stop? - it all just ceased to matter. It’s that moment before you die, after you cum, while you’re in love or really hurt - when horizons touch to put you in your place as the cogwheel of flesh and soul that you seem to be. Become. Believe to be - and yet that’s just scratching the surface. Who killed what when where how? Try to figure out why you’re still asking the wrong questions? When did who fucked what in where? The answers are not there, they never were and why should they be?

In a breath, in a blink, in your mind, you can ignore to know the endless details and the sense of it all. It’s not an incentive to kill yourself or waste your life, but it will make it easier to do both. I do mean this in the best possible way because we talk a lot, but we’re not any closer to each other. Not even packed by millions in cities of solitude. Packed in habits. Packed in religion and tv sets and freshly delivered at birth. It’s the way we love that makes the way we hate and we hate with a perverse passion. Mother Earth and Daddy in Heaven don’t care, but the Devil sure does.

Hi, I am what you would call a crazy person, but not to my face. Usually, I get polite smiles and agreeable nods when I start talking. Sometimes silence. I can’t conceive to talk about anything without mentioning everything. That can get on your nerves - not mine. It gets on my guts as if I couldn’t digest it all. I’m always constipated and that reminded me - I haven’t gone home in a while.

Home is what you make it and the architects who had built my apartment complex never planned to live in it. What came out was sixteen acres of prefabricated mold for triple digit income folks like me. Home-bitter-sweet-home. I had to take a week long vacation in jail just to break away from this rat maze of colorful stucco and its square sky. The towers were high, but the view was always someone else’s view. That allowed me to spy on my neighbors from the balcony window - one of them in particular had spiked my attention. Across the emptiness that separated our units, I had watched him linger and wallow in his cell while I did the same in mine. They were both on the twenty-fifth floor, both furnished studios, identical - perhaps not so unlike him and me - perhaps, but I never did meet him. Sometimes he stared out while smoking, staring at me staring or at nothing. I followed his evenings, the homemade dinners that he made for himself - never a visitor. The blue tv light strobed all night long until there was nothing left but his sleeping shadow to cast against the bare walls. He usually passed out in the rocking chair and later stumbled to bed after another couple of drinks. He averaged six black sugar cane and rum during the week, twice that on Fridays and Saturdays. Two packs of Lucky’s a week and a bi-monthly fuck with a redhead. I never saw him on the phone. Never sorting mail, but I guess he had a life out of his studio. A job at least - he dressed formal, leather shoes, white shirt, no tie. Every other day, he was out by 8 am and back around 9 pm with an armful of cardboard boxes. Next workday, he took them back out without ever opening them. Usually it was five or six large ones and it took him a couple of trips to his rusted beige two-door. Sometimes, it was a bunch of small ones packed in a box so big that he had to drag it across the lot and tie it to his trunk. From my window, he looked like an ant loading a roach and riding it down the street before turning around the corner. Where he went and what he did - that was none of my business.

Hi, my name is Nathan Dawn, born May 22nd 1981 in Anchorage, Alaska. Conceived from parents I never knew and never knew why - they dropped me off in a bar after chatting for a while, while I slept at their feet. They didn’t tip, but they left me there. After closing, a woman named Theresa found me on the wooden floor as she swept the ashes and the spit under each table and that’s where she found me - quiet as a last breath. No note, no birth certificate, no money, no reason to keep me, but she did.

Theresa had planned to bar-tend Darwin’s Theory for one year. She had come to Alaska to witness the six month night and day cycles. She was a thirty-eight years-old divorcée, black and broke, but quite pretty in dim lights. Enough to get around with younger fishermen scared of commitment. Fishermen gone soon enough to leave her to her poetry. They left her to come back, to inspire her with fearlessness and sweat. With tales of frozen storms and isolation in a blue and white hell. Burned by frost, tanned from the salt cooking their skin under the northern lights. In their universe, the pacific sun caressed the icebergs and the northern sea, slowly sliding from east to west in a permanent zenith. One ear on her pillow, Theresa would listen for hours to this youth grown wise from the forces of nature, grown old in a leather carapace insensitive to touch or emotions above melting point. I was rocked in those hands like a ship in the tempest, I was loved like the fish they brought home to gut and sell - to buy Theresa a round of drinks and the rather public rights to her heart. To buy a future they forgot every time they stepped foot on the deck and they swore - on the morning star, on the raging sea, they swore and spat and declared their love as they bid farewell. Then Theresa waved back as the boat rippled and sunk between two shades of blue.

These stories, she told me long after, the summer I broke my legs in two settings. First, falling down the stairs - ten days later, climbing up. Strapped to my hospital bed at eight years old, Theresa told me that her first intention was to stay for one year, from one summer solstice to the next in order to drain my soul - her words. She felt like an old sponge I guess, gorged with toxic thoughts and anecdotes, a life she left behind like my parents left their baby - without regrets - and that’s how she raised me. I didn’t want to hear this, but Theresa explained, after Alaska, I was going to go to Hawaii, then London or Egypt, I was going to live the twenties I never had. She meant adventure and sex, survival and dominance over anything she ever expected of herself. I could tell by the way her voice trembled when she described the landscapes that she had never seen down to their scent. Her fingers closed on her second hand dress, her broken nails seemed to bite on the fabric with desires never fulfilled. She spoke with hope of moments that never happened as she watched me grow, but her hope never fainted. Theresa reached over to pick me up that first night - my pale skin turning blue, red, purple as the neon beer signs glowed above the jukebox while The Police sang de do do do, de da da da, the innocence will pull me through - Theresa didn’t buy it. She picked me up and looked at me that first night like a nightmare dropped at the gates of her subconscious, pulling her back to a reality outside her own.

I listened to Theresa pour her heart out because I was stuck in bed, but it made me wish I was deaf. She squeezed her hollow soul over me, draining herself from years of silence. She looked at me that first night and took me out back to the dumpster. She held me in the cold - only her eyes moved. From me to the trash and from the trash to me. She never asked for it, but change just happens. It always does and whose fault was it this time? She ran back into Darwin’s Theory and took a few shots between two sobs before taking me home. As the years went by, she took quite a few more shots, but she never cried again. Theresa felt stranded in the arctic with an extra stomach to feed and yet, despite her grief over the buried pieces of her broken dreams, she stayed. Eight long alaskan sunsets flew before her eyes and she stayed until I could walk, talk, fend for myself. She stayed until it was just her and me in the hospital room with my fractured legs in a heavy cast and Theresa told me that it was time for her to go.

I was used to the departures of my surrogate fathers, all these nameless faces crowding my childhood with moments of joy. I was used to ephemeral joy- its beginning, middle and end too close together. These cycles were revolved right before my eyes, these revolution were spun too fast for me to ignore the fragile nature of everything. A constant is just a variable you follow around as it changes, but don’t be fooled - it remains unknown. The only sure thing, is there isn’t any. Theresa spilled her guilt out, kissed my forehead and left without looking back. If I had sat up in my bed, I could have seen her waiting for the elevator, I could have seen the doors open as she stepped in and watched them slowly close behind her, but I never sat up.

My legs eventually healed - if you want to call it that - but I felt crippled in a deeper way. My muscles and bones were fixed, but I never learned to walk straight. The crooked world I encountered didn’t help, but it was nice when it was just the police station and the orphanage. Then it was the world-world type of world that truly screwed me up.

My first job was like having chickenpox, it was disgusting and embarrassing, but absolutely universal. It was a job you could find in any city, any country and you could never get fired. You were your own boss and it would’ve been a wonderful feeling if only you weren’t a beggar. I always used a hat to collect donations because people’s hands are dirtier than their money. I worked my sad smile, my tired look, my starving face along concrete blocks, down busy streets and under wet bridges. Home is what you make it and without anyone to share it with - no family, no friends, home can be anywhere. It could’ve been an awesome feeling if only I was the last person left on earth, but the competition was tough out there.

Lawyers and bankers fight to get to the top, bums fight for traffic lights where cars pile up three times a day, touristic corners that pay-off and safe shelters - but we were way less vicious than politicians. We campaigned amongst ourselves and waited for some to die and for others to get busted as we slowly scammed our way up the anti-social ladder. Each step offered a slightly more crowded sidewalk, closer to a warm metro grid. Each arrest allowed you to sleep just a little further away from police rounds, each death bought you a bit more time during traffic jams. On a good day, I could make my bread in a few hours - I’ve never been a big eater. I didn’t drink or smoke, I didn’t care for prostitutes or drugs. Of course, I was young back then and people liked that. They stared at my raggedy patchwork of clothes, my teenage beard and they felt bad, but what they saw in fact, was their own kid living in dirt rather than me. I inspired empathy or something like that. I couldn’t play music, couldn’t sing or dance, couldn’t offer any service other than fear. Not horror, just the common phobia of hitting rock bottom before ever knowing what the top looks like. That fear of poverty and uncertainty, that social death that kept folks lined up in their cars as I strolled by to pick up their loose change. They may have been going to a job they hated, but at least they weren’t me and they were willing to pay for that reminder. Some would even strike up a conversation, first casually blessing my soul or wishing me well. Then, they wanted to know my name and what I was doing out here - are you alone? are you alright? - as if I was some kind of financial and emotional investment that might someday yield returns. I was part of their routine, yet remained a mystery and the pity they felt made them proud of sacrificing their dreams for an ordinary urban life. I was all the risks they always wanted to take and all the consequences combined.

Hi, I’m a citizen of the world, but I lost my ID. You can cross this country real cheap and easy if you’re lucky enough to find a military uniform at your local salvation army. There’s no need to sign up for the real thing, but you can’t slack on the details. You need the proper boots and pack, the government-issued belt and cap and the family pictures. You need a story - nothing special, just some stereotype. You’re on permission and your car broke down. Tell the driver to take you to the next big city because you need to get back to base. Cross the city, find a white bucket and paint a red cross on it. By the time you get to the other side of town, you’ll have enough for food and a greyhound bus ticket to some buck-town in the middle of the desert. Play again, same game, different driver. Six American accents later, you will have crossed three time zones on a dime. Insist to pay, it makes it easier not too. I never showed a bill, but always took my wallet out. I had no bills to show, my duffel bag was filled with rags and cans, but nobody ever checked.

Nobody ever questions authority nowadays. Our best critics are comedians and that’s not funny. Rebellion was cured in the 70’s, eradicated by the experience of free-thinking - you know, the drugs and love, the peace and sex era that opened our minds to a better world. Unified. Caring. Respectful. Not the words I would use to describe the rainbow generation. Nor any generation for that matter, but the legend remains. The way Baby Boomers put it, we missed the soul-train in shit-creek, and it’s a long, hard road ahead. I loved those middle-age middle-class middle-America tales. My drivers pointed their finger at The Man, at me, at the stars and stripes on my uniform. They told me of another war, of commies and hippies, another time when they thought the world was changing, but it was just a great soundtrack. These retired mutineers I met on the interstate, they broke the law just by picking me up, but that made them nostalgic of the cool fleeting years when they felt immortal. Wish I Was There, I’d tell them, but didn’t mean it. Not when I saw how the flower children withered, their petals petrified and their seeds infertile. The beginning, middle and end of their dream, so close together, you could wonder if it ever really happened.

Once out west, I had a hallucination in the orange sands. She came across the blurry landscape - a red figure in a storm of rust. We met at the foot of a hollow mountain that stood at the center of the horizon and sat side-by-side at the edge of a howling cave. Absolute light ahead, absolute darkness inside, she spoke with her hand and only used words when she needed to punctuate her gestures. She sang, laughed, smiled like she couldn’t just talk - her fingers drew pictures of emotions for what she couldn’t express with language. She let her hair fly between her lips, her dress above her knee, my hand under her dress. Hours bled like minutes. The sky moved and changed colors every time I took my eyes off her. I saw blue, orange, pink, purple and black and only glimpsed at the stars when she outlined the constellations for me. When she points at the moon, the idiot looks at the moon - and I was such an idiot. When I woke the next morning, she was still there, sleeping like an angel. I took her keys and drove off in her red truck.

It was the first time I drove. First time I had sex too. I was going somewhere at twenty-five miles per gallon, but I ran short on gas before even reaching a state line. I ditched the car and quit the military. I bummed myself out real good and settled downtown for a few days. Sometimes, I wondered if I ever really left town or if I was just dreaming my road trips.

When you sleep on concrete, every city smells the same. The buildings change color, but not shape. People have different cultures, but always keep to their true nature. Anywhere I went, all I had to do was to reach my hat out to hear the coins ring. Ten bucks a day gets you a long way in the U.S. - too bad I barely made five.

It was a full-time job too, but I had never stolen a car like this before. It felt nice to hit the petals and steer the wheel for once. To set the radio dial to something I liked and to check the rearview mirror. That’s the first car ride I didn’t have to talk to anyone. To explain anything you had to mention everything, but not for these precious four and a half hours, not for these glorious miles of freedom between two sidewalks. I moved fast, never staying for more than a week anywhere. If I was going to be homeless, I might as well be street-less, city-less, nation-less. From underground you’re invisible - you fade into the walls and the shadows cast by city lights. Back then, they seemed to shine from outer space and yet never reached my distant subterranean planet. Now, I have become another yellow rectangle hung in the sky, shining in the dark as if there was life inside. There’s thousands, millions of us, locked in this paradise. This is my cell.

The police first got on my case a week after Theresa left without paying the medical bills. The hospital needed money worse than I needed a mother, but they never found her.

Officially - I had never been declared. Technically - I was never born. I had never made it to elementary school because they asked for documentation. So I told the cops a story - nothing special, just a stereotype. My mom’s crazy and my dad’s dead at sea - I’m eight and a half, give me a break! My name is Nathan Dawn, born May 22nd, 1981 in Anchorage, Alaska from a missing mother and an unknown father. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Race: other. They would have written bastard if they could - perhaps mongrel. Anyways, they got their facts, my prints, then decided to send me to St Pete.

We can’t have been more than forty at any time, but kids never stayed more than a year. There were only forty beds sprayed across two floors, a single classroom and a long narrow kitchen where they served food in three services while other children played in the court or the entrance hall. Maybe not an improvement, but it would have been fine if I didn’t have to stay until I turned sixteen. I was only four or five years older than my roommates, but people don’t adopt grown kids like they don’t adopt sick dogs. Then the older I got, the more I realized that my chances of getting out of there with a new mom ‘n pop holding my hands were virtually none. I saw my bed shrink, but it took time and patience. I counted the days backward - my freedom being negative zero, my first day in St Pete, negative two thousand six hundred fifty seven. I was already an enthusiast.

Independence day went unexpectedly. After spending half my life within these walls, I woke up May 22nd 1997 with a kid in my arms. He opened his eyes when I tried to move, then pretended to sleep. He picked a look every few seconds as I packed my bag - a leather duffel with short handles. I told the kid, Don’t worry Pilgrim, you’ll be on your own crusade soon enough.     I called them all Pilgrim. No name meant no attachment. Even the nuns didn’t stay in the orphanage as long as me. Either they went to heaven to actually meet Saint Peter or else they divorced God to live a life of sin in our common hell. Overall, the staff of the establishment changed twice over while I was there. They found hundreds of homes for hundreds of kids while I flicked through every book I could find - a few classics and four anthologies of Bible interpretations. Later, I found science books buried in the abandoned barn, but it burned.

Then, on Independence Day - I got dressed as a few kids gathered to watch me in silence with eyes still full of dreams. I took my bag and said, Ciao Pilgrims, today is the day you all become memories. I closed the door, crossed the main hall to the front gate and stepped into the polar cold twilight. I tried to hitch a ride to the port, but I ended up walking and freezing my thumb the whole way. I dragged my feet like a tourist, looking up at everything as if it was new to me. I took a part-time job in a store because boats and factories didn’t want me yet. Jake, the owner of the shop, was nice enough to let me sleep in the cottage above. That first night alone in the store, I broke in the register and took the ferry to Vancouver. It was strange to leave the only land I had ever known- it felt like bursting out of a snow globe. I was set for disappointment on Independence Day, but it went perfect.

A stroke of luck like that didn’t come back my way until I found Nathan Dawn’s wallet - the folding kind. It was sitting in the gutter a few miles from his address, so I walked to his condo. I knocked – waited - knocked all again. Then I broke in and waited some more. Nathan still hasn’t come home. Mr. N. F. Dawn, born May 22nd 1981 - just a detail in my story. Mention the what, who, how, when and where of anything, then just let people figure out why it happened, why it is so, why you did it. Mention the truth sometimes - it makes it easier to lie. Mention only the beginning, middle and end - keep them close together, tangled at various angles. Mention nothing special, just another story.

I figured, if someone doesn’t come home for a month in America - he’s either dead or jailed. His bank statements showed payments on a loan, so he owned this place. He had left two thirds of a tortilla in the fridge along with sodas, milk, coffee and frozen junk food. I ate a mix of all that in his fake velvet sofa. On the armrest, a book laid face down on page 98, it read:

[…] painter whether and how he would place him under his protection if he wanted to. Even now, he made hardly any movement as the painter bent over him and, whispering into his ear in order not to be heard outside, said, These girls belong to the court as well. How’s that? asked K., as he leant his head to one side and looked at the painter. But the painter sat back down on his chair and, half in jest, half in explanation, Well, everything belongs to the court. That is something I had never noticed until now, said K. curtly, this general comment of the painter’s made his comment about the girls far less disturbing.

I can’t sleep when I’m around books. I can’t sleep - period. I read The Trial as fast as I emptied the fridge, then I tried to nap. Anyone could’ve come in, but nobody did. I opened every drawer, every envelope and picture book to get familiar with Nathan. I reinvented my childhood memories based on his photos - mostly him and his mother in their basement apartment interrupted by a few occasional family reunions and school events. No recent shots, except the ID. Sometimes I wondered if I was Dawn - we rather looked alike.

Forget me for a bit - just think of yourself, it shouldn’t be too hard. Think of that self you present to the world on a silver platter, in a neat box, under your own-chosen light. It’s not the plot of your existence that matters, but rather, its trivial details. The minute inessentials, the trifle facts that bring life to your tale. The way you felt, the way you choose - that’s what defined you - the rest you can just make-up. You can redesign the house where you grew up, you can imagine the seasons, the climates you never knew, the existence you never experienced. I read somewhere that the only story you can tell is a quest. Your characters can only fight men and their society, natural and supernatural forces, their self and god. They may gain material or spiritual reward, the heart of their beloved or loose it all, but when you break it down, it’s always about a transformation. What precedes it, what comes next, who cares? Books, movies, plays, they drop the curtain at the most convenient moment, but it’s not what they show, it’s what they omit to mention that gives you a sense of completion. After 10, 58, 279 pages, 2 hours of footage or 5 representations, all you’ve read and seen is a fiction. Rehearsed. Rewritten and manipulated, but, let’s face it: that is exactly what happens in the theatre of our minds. In our library of memories. Our private projection rooms where there no one by our lone self and its imaginary friends.

Meet Nathan Dawn - thirty-one years old, two inches, twenty-three pounds over me. Some buck town high school diploma over me. Three years worth of college credits and a varsity trophy over me. The papers, I burned. The cup, I drunk out of. Every morning I hit the streets and every night I return, but as long as Mr. Dawn stays gone, I can pretend. Still pretend that I’ not me.

Chapter II

in which insanity is the dream of one

Just by looking at Nathan’s nightstand, I could tell you about how much he ached every morning. There were empty packets of anti-acid in the drawer and under the bed. Six boxes full by the lamp. Mild painkillers and sleeping pills in the bathroom. His stomach