I’ve seen how I was supposed to die.

In Afghanistan, in the Korengal valley, at 19 years old with the sun in my eyes and a snipers bullet in my brain, as I stepped out of the Humvee to check for a flat tire. I’d seen it in another life: in college, tripping out of my mind on research chemicals in a dorm room with the blinds drawn down at 5 in the morning. From that dorm room, which smelled like several generations of stale beer, I saw myself in the desert, the blood draining out into the sand as the wind whipped around and someone called my name.

But that had never come to pass. I had never joined the military. I had never walked the path that would have brought me to that place in the desert. I had never dropped out of high school. I never went to the desert. I never met the devil.

I’m starting to think time is like the highways, what could be and what is and what will be extending and intersecting out into the distance infinitely. I theorize that we catch glimpses of ourselves walking these paths when we dream, as our brains are flooded by endless waves of dimethyltryptamine. I have no idea why I didn’t end up in the desert like I was supposed to, I speculate that I was caught up in the wake of infinitesimal chain reactions caused by the presence of another time traveler. These are just theories, and quite possibly ravings. I will probably never know for sure, and it is besides the point.

Its August 2011 in North Carolina, in the life where I went to college, when I saw my death in the desert. Barack Obama is still on his first term as president, and I’m stayed on campus over the summer to take some of the classes I had dropped that year, but right at this moment I’m in my friend Taylor’s dorm room watching a blonde pixie in a neon bra and cut off jean shorts heat up a metal nail with a butane torch.

I have an anthropology class at 10 am, which is in about five hours, and I won’t make it. I’m tripping hard, and the heat from the torch sends incandescent purple sparks dancing around her eyes, which are light blue and guileless. In a little while, she’s going to place a dab of THC-infused butane wax on the nail, and inhale it through a bong, and I will be expected to join her. Her name is Charlotte, or Hannah. Maybe Meredith. She has a bassnectar tattoo in the small of her back, right above the base of her spine.

I crane my head back and look up at the stucco ceiling. The colors of this girl are too bright, and I must avert my eyes towards something more drab colored or the cones and rods within them might become volatile from unnatural exposure and explode. There are no colors like those within nature. Man was not made for such gross juxtaposition.

Taylor, whose dorm room it was, must have left hours ago. To get beer, accompanied by the giggling and gangling redhead. How long could it take to get beer? What could happen in between the dorm room and the gas station fifty meters off campus that sells 12 packs of beer with names like “Indiana Ice” and “Wisconsin’s Best” for seven dollars each that could take so long?

I didn’t know it, but Taylor and the redhead, whose name actually IS Meredith are fucking downstairs in the parking lot, in Meredith’s beat to shit white Honda, which smelled and maybe still smells like the kind of pretzels that come in little plastic bags on airplanes. They are sitting in the back seat, with Taylor facing forward, and the skinny redhead Meredith sitting in his lap facing him. She bounces on top of him, sweat infused with the past 32 hours of drugging and drinking dripping down her alabaster white skin. Taylor can see rays of the sun as it begins to rise over her shoulders. I’ll never see any of this, but Taylor will tell me about it the next day, and then on many concurrent-repeating occasions after that.

Inside the dorm room, which smells like mildew and stale beer, I’ve taken the dab, and now I’m lying on my back on Taylor’s bed with my feet on the floor, and the blonde pixie girl is between my legs, her head bobbing up and down. It’s very quiet. I want to ask her to get up and put on some music, but I’m afraid that it will be rude, and that if I did ask her she might put on dubstep, so I just lie there in silence.

The blowjob is nice, but after a while I get tired of propping my head up to see her blowing me, so I let myself lay back on the bed fully, which is infinitely soft and welcoming, despite how many disgusting skanks Taylor has undoubtedly made disgusting sweaty love to on those very same blankets. If I’m honest with myself, Taylor really doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to wash his sheets, but I’m tripping too hard to care. I study the stucco ceiling yet again, as the patterns begin to swirl around each other like an insanely speeded up version of the celestial movement of the galaxy. It’s too much, so I close my eyes. Once I do, I’m alone in the dark.

I see myself, in the desert. I’m skinnier and my head is shaved. I’m wearing black-wrap around shades and a tan camo suit. I’m holding a gun in my hands. I can feel its weight, I can smell the cold metal. I look down and there it is. I look up, and I’m there, in the desert. It’s the same day, august 21st, 2011. The same sun that is rising over Meredith’s pale shoulders in the parking lot is beating down from high in the sky. The desert air smells like burning garbage, and there I am, stepping out of the Humvee.

The sand crunches underneath my boots. Private Ben Scoli, who is my best friend in this whole piece of shit country, hollers something at me from inside the Humvee just as I swing the door shut behind me, and I lean in to open the door and ask him what he said, and there is a POP and that’s when I die.

That’s it. Pvt Ben Scoli scrapes up the pieces of my skull from the pavement of the desert highway. My folks get a call in the middle of night, then the two men in uniform at the door. Theres a lot of tears. They bury me, American flag, graveyard in Massachusetts, more tears. Someone plays taps on a trumpet. It’s done. The world moves on. Soon all that remains of me is an obituary notice, a cringe inducing Myspace profile from when I was 13 that I never figured out how to properly delete, and a laptop filled with writing in various states of incompleteness, that no one else will ever read. All of this will be wiped from existence in the next few hundred years when we all accidentally bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.

A pop, a moment of falling and pain and then I was standing on a flat endless plain with the devil. He didn’t look like I thought he would, he looks just like me. He said some stuff to me, told me some things, and I just stood there and listened. I remember the desert air whipping around us, and the cold, those nights man, it used to get so cold in Afghanistan, up in the mountains, but at least you can see the stars. I remember that specifically, it was dark, but there were no stars: just him and the endless plain and the wind. Except it wasn’t a plain, it was a cave. The sky held no stars because it was not a sky, but some place deep in the earth.

He lives in me now, lurking in some corner of my brain, or maybe stored and calcified in my spinal column, like the old stoner rumor that says LSD can be, and if you crack your back you might have an acid flashback. He talks to me nearly every day. Whispering to me to just close my eyes and jump when I walk to the end of the rooftop at the birthday party that the girl who for a short time thinks I love her drags me along to.

I ignore him the best I can. Sometimes he takes my hand and leads me away. Sometimes I wake up in places I don’t know with people I don’t remember, doing things I wish I hadn’t. I try to fight him, but the devil is strong.

He’s sitting in the corner of my room as I write this, legs folded Indian style, just smirking. He’s smoking a Camel cigarette, which is my favorite brand, and the smoke creeps to my nostrils and makes my eyes water. You’re tired, he says. Better lie down. No one loves you, he says, or ever will. In the end, you will die alone.

He sits besides me when I lie down to sleep, gently reminding me of all my sins. Sometimes I wake up without opening my eyes, and for a little while I forget about him, but then I open them and he’s there, sitting besides my bed. In my proudest moments, he lays a dark hand on my shoulder and reminds me of my shames.

He was there the first time I made love to the woman who would be my wife, standing with arms crossed in the bathroom doorway, and he was there when our son was born, standing amongst the cooing relatives gathered around the crib he had smirked at me, his eyes crinkling at the edges.

But look, the devil didn’t make me do what I did. I killed her because she cheated on me again, and I wasn’t gonna take it. Goddamn. I loved her, you know, like you wouldn’t believe. That woman was the sun around which my life orbits, but it was too much. Three times I caught her. Yeah, the devil showed me the signs, but I followed them.

The first time I noticed, it was a smell on her. She came home late one Friday night, a “ladies” night with her friends. I had such trust in her then, when I still thought this world might hold someone who loved me. The bed had felt strange and lonely without her, so I had stayed up, sitting on the couch and fading in and out of some movie on AMC, nursing a beer. I had heard her car pull up, the crunch of her heels in the gravel of the driveway, and then the thumps of her steps as she climbed up the front porch. By the time the key turned in the lock, I was up and standing. The door opened and she spilled into my arms.

I wrapped her in my arms, burying my face in her hair and breathed her in: her familiar perfume, the underlying sweaty scent of her, the bitter sharpness of tequila (her liquor of choice) but through it all, a mannish funk. The devil caught my eye from where he stood behind her as the final smell hit my nostrils, and shrugged. “Sorry buddy” he mouthed. He looked genuinely sympathetic. The bastard.

I tried not to let her see the horror on my face. She stepped inside the house, and the devil followed a pace behind her like a ruthful chaperone. I went straight to bed, tossing my beer in the garbage can half full. Later on, she came in, her wet hair now smelling of shampoo, and lay down besides me while I pretending to sleep. Eventually, she curled up besides me, laying a milky white leg over mine and rested her head on my chest like she usually did. I froze, still as a statue, afraid to breath. I knew then. From where he sat at the foot of the bed, the devil gave me a sad smile, and took another pull from his cigarette.

The second time was another Friday night I spent alone, except this time it was because she had passed out early, as soon as she had gotten home from work, saying something about how she hadn’t slept all the night before, in a tone of voice like it was my fault.

I know I snore sometimes, but I knew that wasn’t why she hadn’t slept. Throughout the night, her cell phone would hum from the bed stand on her side of the mattress, and she would rise and walk with slow silent steps to the bathroom. She would shut the door behind her but not turn off the light, and stay in there for a long time. I could see the blue glow of her cell phone from under the door. Eventually, she would come back, closing the bathroom door slowly behind her, and slide back under the covers.

So that Friday night, as I sat there, beer in hand, with her making up on her lost sleep in the other room, and her phone buzzed from within her handbag, which she had left besides the front door, I didn’t hesitate for a second. I stood up, and with the devils eyes on me, walked over to where her bag lay. I reached down and pulled the phone out of the bag.

“Hey baby”. From “Dan.” She loved being called baby. It was her fetish, along with being choked so hard I was afraid of killing her. I swiped her phone open, she had never bothered to install a passcode. I read the whole conversation, scrolling through the biggest blocks of text where her and “Dan” went into excruciating detail, trying as best as I could to not look too hard at the pictures they had sent each other. It hurt so bad.

I rose, taking the beer with me. I drained it in the five steps it took to traverse the living room and reach the bedroom door, and tossed it, the most perfect throw of my life, into the garbage can in the kitchen ten feet away. Swish. I had barely even looked. I opened the bedroom door, and let myself in, shutting it behind me. Catherine Sweeny, or “Cat” to her friends, 32 years old and just beginning to lose her beauty, lay half-swaddled in the sheets. Her face was buried in one of the pillows, her perfect half moon of a bottom, which I loved very well, faced upwards, bare to the world.

I came and sat down on the side of the bed. The devil followed a few paces behind. I reached over and put a hand on her behind, and shook her gently. She stirred, and groaned something into the pillow.

“Cat.” I said. “Wake up.”

She groaned again and turned over, her head resting in a tousled halo of sleek black hair.

“You need to wake up Cat” I told her. She made a sad noise and rolled over towards the side of the bed I was sitting on, and laid her head on my thigh.

“Shhhh” she said. “Come to bed.” She reached up and pulled my head down towards hers till my nostrils were filled with the clean shampooed smell of her hair. She touched my lips to hers. I became intensely aware of her body, thin-boned and fragile and glowing with soft warmth. For a moment, I let myself forget, and sank into the bed with her.

We retraced the familiar steps: her resting her forehead against the curve of my stomach, which she called “the house that Budweiser built”, as she unzipped my pants, and pulled them down to my knees. The line of kisses that she traced from my mouth down my neck to my collarbone, the moan when I reached an arm around her waist and pushed her down on the bed. We walked well-tread paths with each other. What had once been incendiary had come to seem perfunctory, her kisses a chore, the moan practically pre-recorded in its sameness. But this time it seemed different. Maybe she sensed the finality.

When I was ready to fuck her, she lay back on the bed, raising her knees up to her elbows as she proffered her body. Her eyes were unfocused and stared past me, but I grabbed her by the chin and made her look me in the eyes. She looked up at me with the same huge eyes as when she was 24 and we had first fucked in her roommate’s bed. I kissed her roughly, and she moaned in pleasure.

As I entered her, she grabbed one of my hands, and put it on her throat, her eyes willingly meeting mine now, pleading. Just another step in a familiar dance. I wondered for a moment if she did this with Dan. I cast a glance over my shoulder, but the devil was not there.

“Harder” she called, and I did. She wrapped her legs around me, pulling me deeper into her with every thrust. I tightened my grip on her neck and she grinned up at me with a strange joy that I will never understand. “Harder” she rasped. “Please.” The penultimate step in this old dance.

If I have a fetish, it’s the world “Please.” I lost myself them, in the smell and the feel of her. I closed my eyes, or maybe I went blind, it doesn’t really matter. My whole body clenched like a muscle, and I was falling, falling, falling, till I spent myself, and came to with her limp in my hands.

I didn’t try to do CPR. I didn’t look for a pulse. I just got up from the bed and put my pants back on. The devil lit a cigarette and passed it to me. He patted me on the back. “Its ok Arthur.” He told me. He’s very considerate sometimes; he even called 911 for me. We sat there together, sharing the cigarette, while we waited for the Sheriffs department to arrive.

Am I worried about the future? Not really. It sucks in here I guess. The food is bad and you don’t get to see much daylight. The guards are real assholes to me, and sometimes the other inmates jeer and scream at me when they walk me down the hall. They scream that they are going to kill me, but I’m not afraid.

I’ll spend the rest of my life in this little concrete box, most likely, and that’s ok with me. It’s not as bad as they make it out to be: it’s hardly “Solitary Confinement” because the devil is here with me. He’s a great roommate: doesn’t snore, doesn’t stink, and hes always got cigarettes. He’s sitting next to me on my bunk right now, smiling that smile of his.

We’ve become good friends, me and the devil. He’s stuck by me like no one else has, not Private Ben Scoli, not Cat, not anyone else. I think we will be ok, whatever the judge decides to do with me. I don’t really care. Hopefully he gives me the needle, so I can get out of here sooner, because it is getting a little bit boring. Only so many games of tic-tac-toe you can play with someone till you know each others moves too well for it to mean anything. Oh well, I’ll be out of here sooner or later. I’ll see you around.