I listened intently, blocking out all the shocking truths that continued to go on all around me. And my fake father, if he truly was fake, was the only one among them all that I wasn’t afraid of, or disgusted by.
My father stood in front of the glass door. He wore a plaid, long-sleeved button-up shirt tucked neatly in his Levi’s. His dirty-brown hair combed back neatly, revealing the balding area around his forehead.
“Are you real?”
But he can’t be if he’s here. He wouldn’t even know me.
“You came here for the seed,” my father went on, ignoring my question, “but I hear you have to face the truth before you can find the truth. That’s what they say.”
“I had a crush on Norman,” said someone in the crowd behind me, “but bein’ his cousin an’ all, I thought I shouldn’t say anything. I just fingered myself looking at his picture a lot.”
“I couldn’t believe I got away with it,” said another voice, “and still, twenty years later I’m running free—I liked killing them both.”
“She had six kids; and the baby, the one that pulled that hot pan of macaroni off the stove will be horribly scarred forever—she poured the water on that baby. She lied and put on a great show. I saw it happen from the window...but I never said anything.”
My favorite uncle, Uncle Bill, sat at a table talking with a small girl, no older than seven who I realized was my cousin. My uncle said to my cousin, “I’m sorry, Rachel, but I just can’t help myself when I touch you. Just keep it a secret from mommy for a while longer until I get some help, okay?”
The young girl lowered her head. “Okay, daddy, I won’t tell.”
I turned away from my father and looked more closely. I felt like my head was about to explode with fury. My chest heaved with rapid breath. I marched over to the table, grabbed my former favorite uncle by the throat, and lifted him off his feet, slamming him onto the tabletop. The table wobbled side to side, almost turning over completely.
“You molested her?” I was out of control. “You sick fucking bastard! What the fuck is wrong with you?” I pulled back my fist and started pounding his face with it. Uncle Bill did not fight back, and despite the crushed nose and the blood that flew everywhere, Uncle Bill did nothing and said nothing.
Neither did my cousin, Rachel.
She sat there staring eerily up at me, and this was the only thing that brought me back from my murderous rage. She didn’t flinch, or scream, or run.
“My daddy can’t help it when he touches me.”
“Just like I couldn’t help myself when I raped that woman in Central Park last year,” said a man who I refused to look at.
Everything about this was wrong. Dumbfounded, I pulled myself off Uncle Bill. Blood covered me.
“I told him he needs to learn to control his anger,” said the woman who looked like my grandmother.
“Great,” Kate said, “a sex obsessed stalker and a violent murderer.”
“Nah, he’s no murderer,” said my fake ex-wife, “and I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed with sex, either. I tried to get him to engage in a little harmless Slave and Master, but he wouldn’t even go for that—hate to say it, but I felt forced to screw around on him as much as I did. Now his boss, Hugh Westardi, he was a good lay, and Danny, his worthless best friend—”
“What’s wrong with you people?” I raised my hands in the air. “All of you! You’re crazy and you’re sick!” I almost had tears in my eyes, or maybe I did, but wiped them away before I let myself notice them too much.
“I’m outta here!” I pushed my way right past my father and left; the echo of voices telling all sorts of truths I only wished were lies faded in the distance as the door slowly closed and swallowed them up. And when I looked up and all around me, I saw that I was not in, or anywhere near Fiedel City anymore. I was in the city of my hometown, not far from my job and the park and the apartment complex I lived in...or used to live in. My old city was now a gray place, much like the coffee house I just left. Where there should’ve been hundreds of people marching up and down the sidewalks, there was no one. There were cars everywhere, but all of them abandoned. It appeared each one had been deliberately parked in a tidy straight line. Motors shut off. Windows up and doors closed.
The buildings towered over me and a great black sky with thick, stagnant clouds hovered over them. It was cold, nearly freezing, and I pulled my trench coat closed and let the sleeves fall down over my hands, which covered all but my knuckles and fingers. The wind was not constant, but when it whipped by, it was ruthless and cruel.
A crow landed on the hood of a car and cawed, startling me, but then flew away and joined a murder of crows soaring high above me. They seemed like the only sign of life in the city. I looked toward the window of Lou’s Coffee, but there was no one inside. It appeared as empty as the city streets.
“Helloooo!” My voice echoed between the tall buildings.
I shouted several more times, each one less strident as I knew in my heart that no one was going to answer. Then I leaned against the nearest car and slid down to sit on the cold asphalt. I drew my legs toward me and wrapped myself tighter within my coat, trying to keep warm, but the frigid air was not the heavy thought on my mind.
“I wish I had never gone through with this.”
And against yet another one of the Manly Codes, I buried my scruffy face in the palms of my hands and cried. I cried for many minutes as so many questions, regrets and blame went through my mind. I had given up, completely. I intended to go no further, but instead to sit against the black car and let the afterlife, or whatever it was, do with me whatever it damn well pleased. And as if I expected that very thing to happen, I finally found within myself that ounce of courage that one always needs just before they die. I was no longer afraid. But that thing did not happen. Nothing happened, and so I opened my eyes and lifted my head to the black churning skies and I screamed, “Don’t leave me here like this!” And I damned God, cursed Him and tried calling Him out, but still, nothing happened. The streets were still motionless and dead. Everything around me seemed like the backdrop of a grim play, and only the clouds and the crows and my coat, whipped by the brutal wind, were animated with any sort of movement.
I let my head fall against the car door, my arms dangling over my knees at the wrists. I could taste the blood from Uncle Bill’s face and could smell the poisonous, yet attractive scent of a burning cigarette.
My eyes popped open and I jumped to my feet looking around frantically for the source of the cigarette smoke.
And I cursed myself for almost being delighted to see the Devil again.
“Yeah,” said the Devil, “The truth is always the hardest to face, isn’t it?” He began to dance around, and with a harmonious voice he sang, “Tell me sweet little lies and I will forever be in your debt. I will love you and follow you and be whatever you want me to be, so long as you hide the dreadful truth from me!” His display was dramatic, as if he were putting on a play.
“Skip the games and the riddles, Lucifer, and let’s talk.”
The Devil wore a dingy black top hat this time, a matching black suit and glossy black shoes. He reminded me of the twins. The Devil smiled, took a puff from his cigarette and let it come out of his nostrils and his mouth as he spoke. “So now you take this seriously,” he said and smiled some more. “It’s about time, which I might add, is something you don’t have much more of.”
“How can you be here?” I said. “Here in Creation—how?”
“This isn’t Creation. No, this is Earth, and you’re standing on the real street just blocks from where your real apartment used to be. And up that way,” the Devil pointed, “is your terrible place of employment, and back that way—”
“I get the point.”
The Devil waited as though expecting me to say something angry, but then his bright smile faded quickly. “You’re no fun anymore.”
“I’m not here for fun!” I stepped right up into the Devil’s face. My
eyes were slanted and furious, my lips pressed together over my grinding teeth.
The Devil, barely fazed by my display, raised his index finger and twirled it about in a surrendering fashion. “Fine,” he said with a disappointed grunt. “Look, Norman, this world, this place you call home where you live out your fake little lives, is just a mask. I created it, and...” the Devil smiled again, looking proud and in thought, “...did an excellent job.”
“So, everything is fake?”
“Geez, no, you watch too many movies. Everything is real, right down to your first love and your second screw, but people have to be blind to most of what really goes on, or else they might start believing in...” he looked up, “...well, Him.”
“What a tragedy,” I scoffed.
“It would be!” the Devil shouted and threw up his hands. “I’d have next to nothing!”
“Forgive me if I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“Forgiven.” The Devil hopped up onto the hood of the car, his legs dangling. “Did you know that every disease was created by man?”
The Devil nodded and continued, “They were, Norman. AIDS, Diabetes, Cancer, Alzheimer’s—all of it made by people just like you. I mean sure, I had a hand in it, but I can only be credited for influencing the stupid things you people do. It’s way too easy.”
I was fed up, too beside myself to say anything; at this point I cared little about anything the Devil had to say. I just wanted to walk away and never see him or speak to him again, but I knew it would not be that simple.
“I admit it,” the Devil went on, though he suddenly looked more discouraged than proud, “I influenced some of the greatest man-made catastrophes the world has ever known: the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, Hiroshima, the Black Plague. I whispered in the ears of Manson, Dahmer, Gacy and Jack the Ripper—Now, Belle Sorenson Gunness and Nannie Doss were more difficult than I expected, but that was only because they were women.” He laughed quietly in thought. “Funny how women seem so frail and soft, but they often turn out more cunning and brutal than most men.”
“You’re sick, you know that right?”
“Ah, that’s what your mother said, too.”
“My mother?” I was paying more attention now, and getting madder by the second. “What does she have to do with it?”
The Devil shook his head under that odd top hat. “You know how she was before she ‘found God’?”
“Yeah, she was rebellious and liked Vodka and cigarettes too much—hardly puts my mother in any of your little categories, now does it?”
The Devil held up his finger and tilted his head. “What she did do and what she was capable of doing are two different things, and that woman, she was a disaster waiting to happen. Often the ones who find God can be the most dangerous. It’s the balance of things, like something, or someone...” he looked upward again, “is pulling them back, interfering where He shouldn’t be, like He just can’t help it.”
“Of course He can’t help it,” I said, looking befuddled. “He’s supposed to do good.”
“No, that’s not what He can’t help, you cretin, He can’t help sticking it to me!”
I burst into derisive laughter.
“So, it’s all back to you again. It’s always all about you. I think we’ve lost track of the point again...no, wait,” I opened my mouth and my eyes widened, pretending to be shocked, “the point is you, you, you!”
“The point,” the Devil stopped me and he appeared goaded, “is that you’re here to face the truth, all of it, if your mind can handle it. Though, judging by that stomp off tantrum back there, you aren’t doing so well.”
I pulled up the collar of my coat and buried my face in it as far as I could. I turned my back on the Devil for just a moment. My cold breath crept up and around the corners of my coat like puffy wisps of smoke.
“You’ve come a long way,” the Devil went on, sucking on another cigarette which seemed never to shorten, “and I think you could just be the one to finally pull this off. In over one thousand years—really, I lost count—few have gotten as far as this, and they couldn’t face the truth. One couldn’t bear that it was his own mother who brutally murdered his younger brother at the age of three and left his body in their attic to rot. You see, his brother was born with Down syndrome, and his mother just couldn’t accept that she gave birth to a defect. After all, she grew up richly, never having to work for a thing in her life. She bullied girls at school who were less fortunate than she was, and made them believe they were the worthless scum of the Earth that they were. One even committed suicide three months after the Prom.
“But yes, he was one of few. He made his way to the comic book store, the one place he frequented more than any other place—like you and Lou’s Coffee—and he went through the same phases you’re going through now. He learned the truth about just about everyone he knew.”
“You may have no choice, my friend.” The Devil appeared somber as he looked out at the thick sky. “I may be who and what I am, Norman Anthony Reeves. I may be the Prince of Lies, Darkness and Evil. I may be the most notorious villain in the history of history, but even I can’t stomach a lot of what you people do, what you’ve resorted to and what you’ve become. Sure, I take pride in doing what I love, but evil is evolving.”
“It’s evolving out of your hands, isn’t it?”
“In a way, yes,” the Devil answered, but he looked more concerned than ashamed. “Things are happening that I’m not even influencing....”
I smiled. “For a moment there,” I said, “I thought you actually had limits. The only thing you can’t stomach is facing your own sort of truth, that there’s something out there better at your job than you are.”
The Devil had no rebuttal.
“Walk with me,” he said suddenly with the wave of his hand.
I was willing, but also very reluctant. Maybe the Devil had bewitched me, I didn’t know, but I realized I could not be mad at him anymore even though I tried my damnedest to be as I walked with him away from the coffee house.
“Where are we going?”
There was a pause, but the Devil kept walking, his hands clasped together behind his back.
“To Hell,” said the Devil.
And before I could protest, or run like...well...the Devil reached up and brushed his hand across the sky, and then everything went black.
“The reason why in life nothing lasts forever.”
--
BLACKNESS. NO LIVING SOUL can comprehend the true meaning of it. To understand it would be like trying to understand the origin of the Nothing. And as I walked with the Devil through this infinite darkness, I could only wait for it to recede. It was the strangest feeling to be here. I felt as though every one of my lingering human emotions had been instantly sucked from me, yet curiosity had been left behind in shards. My mouth was dry, yet full of saliva, which tasted unnaturally salty as if it were sweat. I realized I had no heartbeat, yet there was breath emitting from my nostrils and it felt thick like humidity. But most of all, I felt empty, metaphorically and literally. My body felt light as though made of nothing but skin, but instead of feeling I might float into the air, I thought that at any moment I would fall like a feather into the blackness beneath me.
We pressed on for hours, or maybe only seconds. No words were exchanged. No glances or acknowledgments. There were no sounds; not even our shoes striking against the invisible floor. No echo in a place where it seemed the tiniest sound would surely stir one.
It was the place of nothingness, yet we were there, the Devil and I, like two particles of dust that might some time in many billions of years evolve into something more.
But then suddenly the Devil turned and held out his hand, his fingers pressed together softly as if there was something minuscule between them that he meant to show me. I looked down, barely curious, and saw a tiny black cloud. When I raised my eyes to Lucifer again, Lucifer and I were standing in a desert-like wasteland. Somehow, I knew the tiny black cloud w
as the infinite blackness that we had walked through before. Even still, I was not intrigued; no part of me wished to ask questions about that blackness as the Devil carefully placed it between his lips and swallowed.
Feeling more human now, I reached up and roughly scratched my face, now hidden behind a long, gray beard. My bones ached and the skin on my hands was shriveled and dry and covered in liver spots. I reached into my coat and retrieved Vanity’s Mirror, peering into it at an old man that looked very much like me, but how could that be? It must be a trick, I thought, but as I looked deeper into the eyes of the strange face staring back at me, I knew they were my own. The eyes never change; they are immune to age. I felt a knot in my stomach. How long had we walked through the blackness? I tried to think back to those seconds before, but I could barely remember, as if it happened so long ago in my young age. Did I ever really walk through the blackness at all?
I hid the mirror away, fumbling for the secret pocket with my now arthritic hand.
The wasteland was vast and endless like the Field of Yesterday, but there were hills and caves and rocks and dead trees here. It was completely bright, but neither hot nor humid to my relief. And there was not a cloud in the sky...but then there was something odd about that span of yellowish space above us that gave me a feeling it may not be a sky at all.
It hurt to walk, but I did so with my back hunched over slightly and the need to stop and rest every now and then to catch my breath.
“I can’t go any farther.” My voice was old and raspy.
“Oh,” said the Devil, “it’s just up ahead.”
“Hell?”
“No, no,” the Devil shook his head, “you’re already in Hell...well, sort of.”
“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”
The Devil looked at me from the side. “Hell has two phases: the First Phase—this one—is before the Judgment, where each damned soul spends its time in waiting for the Second Phase. Here, punishments are given according to an individual’s sins, and no punishment is the same. Everyone you see here is being punished in his or her own private Hell, day after day, century after century. It begins and ends the same way as it will until the Judgment comes and the Second Phase begins.”
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