“Booo! No negotiating with management,” a minor Demon shouted. Minos gave a quick nod and the dissenter was decapitated.
“Braaaap!” his neck hole blarted, as a pair of demons dragged him away.
“Come on everybody,” Minos shouted. “Back ta work. Look fierce. Balial, brandish that trident like you mean it. These souls ain’t gonna damn themselves!”
“Nicely done, sir,” Nero said as he and Satan walked away. “But I fear that if more demons find out Death has been fired and there is no replacement this unrest will spread. And you know how demons gossip.”
“I’m getting a replacement,” Satan said.
“As soon as possible, right?”
“Would you stop pressuring me? I’m on it. Book me a ticket for Los Angeles.”
Sister Mary Renfro finished adjusting the idle on the carburetor and slammed the hood of the old Chevy. She slid her screwdriver back into her tool kit, and latched its cover. She removed her work gloves, folded them in half, and tucked them into one pocket, then she picked up her tool kit and took it over to the porch and carefully put it down. Returning to the Chevy, she shook out her work mat and then folded it into precise quarters. Then she checked to make sure that each of the doors of the Chevrolet were locked. Way out here in the suburbs of Minnetonka, Minnesota there was no one to steal it, but it was the proper thing to do. When she was certain the vehicle was secure, she went into the garage.
On Saturdays, Sister Mary Renfro took an envelope recycled from the week’s junk mail and on the back of it she wrote a list of the chores that needed to be done at the monastery. She picked up today’s list and carefully drew a line through “Adjust idle on carb.” The next item was, “Check connection on DirecTV dish.” That would require the ladder. Sister Mary smiled to herself. She loved the ladder.
Sister Mary also loved chores, and she loved lists, but most of all she loved routines. At thirty-four she was already an old lady in her heart, and the only passion in her life was her passionate embrace of repetition, routine and habit. Especially now, after that terrible experience at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She had been on her way home from the wonderfully boring God is Green: Environmental Efficiency in Religious Communities Conference and suddenly, while changing planes at the airport, the world had stopped making sense. She had seen people murdered by their own carry-on items. She had seen those same people restored to life twenty minutes later. She had seen a man who was referred to as Satan (very disappointing looking, to be honest). She had seen beautiful, glowing creatures who must have been angels. She had seen a TSA Employee strip naked and attempt to copulate with a Rosetta Stone vending machine. She didn’t know how drugs worked but she suspected they worked a lot like this. The whole experience had left her shaken.
There are two types of nun. One was the type who braved hails of sniper fire to minister to the sick in the Sudan. These nuns risked their lives to smuggle human rights workers out of North Korea. They held hands with convicted serial killers as they were executed. They were God’s warriors of mercy. Mary Renfro was not that kind of nun. Mary Renfro was a hiding-from-the-world, please-don’t-bother-me kind of nun. She was in it for God, of course, but she was mostly in it for the stability. Nuns couldn’t be fired. Nuns couldn’t be laid off. When you joined the Church you were in it for life.
Sister Mary’s father had been killed in a freak cosplay accident when she was young. He had loved Star Wars but something had gone tragically awry with his reproduction light saber at a convention and suddenly he’d been engulfed in flames on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, Hall B. It was random, it was bizarre, it was unexpected and after that Mary Renfro had yearned for predictability. She had spent months asking grown ups what jobs were the safest and which careers were the most orderly. Finally, she drew up a list, reviewed it and made the only possible decision.
And so, when she was twelve years old, she had marched up to her mother and informed her that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had smiled, opened another bottle of Scotch and assumed that her daughter would forget all about it once she discovered boys or drugs or masturbation or all of the above. But twelve-year-old Mary Renfro walked to the local library (safest mode of transportation) and made a list of all the things she needed to do to become a nun and then, on her nineteen birthday, she did them. There was no college, no backpacking around Europe, no hitchhiking adventures in Northern California. Within six months of her high school graduation, Mary Renfro became a nun. Two weeks later her mother killed herself, but Sister Mary told herself that the two events were probably unrelated. Probably.
Being a nun was a good way to live. A precise way to live. And after the horrors of the airport, Sister Mary embraced her familiar routines like a drowning swimmer grabbing a life preserver. Every boring chore, every mundane task, every tiny ritual was a wall that she was building to protect herself from the chaos she had seen on Concourse C. But no matter how strong her wall was, there was still The Other Problem. The one that nagged at her. The one that whispered to her from the back of her mind, telling her that maybe it was already Too Late. The one that filled her every quiet moment – the one that ate at her before she fell asleep, while she sat on the toilet, while she untangled extension cords. The one that suggested she might be beyond salvation.
Sister Mary fetched the ladder from the garage and leaned it against the roof. She shook it once to make sure it was secure and then she climbed up and stepped onto the shingles. Carefully, she made her way to the short brick chimney where the DirecTV dish was attached and began looking for the problem. And there it was. Three of the brackets securing the coaxial cable had been torn out and downward pressure had caused the connector to become unseated in its receptacle.
Sister Mary did not like television, but St. Clare was the patron saint of television and she was a Poor Clare and so it made sense that they had a set. And recently they had been compelled to purchase a complete DirecTV package after Sister Helen lost the use of her legs. While laid up in bed, barely able to move, Sister Helen had grown quite addicted to the wide variety of channels and new movie selections on DirecTV and now she felt that she could never return to basic cable. Sister Mary tried to find tolerance in her heart for Sister Helen’s dependency and, as usual, after a reflective moment, she did. She re-seated the cable and then tidily installed four new brackets.
Chores completed, a day of quiet contemplation and private prayer stretched ahead of Sister Mary. Previously, she had spent her time ministering to the sick and needy until about a year ago when Sister Barbara and Sister Helen came to her and pointed out that there were fewer and fewer sick and needy people all the time in this part of Minnesota and thus they needed less and less ministering. That made sense and so Sister Mary had devoted herself to doing odd jobs around their monastery, a split-level ranch-style home located way out in one of the remote subdivisions surrounding Minnetonka. In the past year, the single-story, four-bedroom house had become the first Northwestern monastery to receive LEED certification and be designated 100% “green.” It had also received th. “Teeny Tiny Carbon Footprint” Award, the “Low Impact I Heart Trees and Badgers” Certificate and the “Stewardship of the Earth” Medal. All of these awards were actually very easy to win since the monastery only housed three nuns. The population of the order of the Poor Clares of Minnesota had declined dramatically in the past decade and these days only Sister Mary, Sister Helen and Sister Barbara were left. And the way Sister Helen’s health was going, soon it would just be Sister Mary and Sister Barbara.
“Sister Mary,” Sister Barbara called up from the front yard. “May I speak with you?”
Sister Mary descended the ladder.
“Good morning, sister,” she said.
“Have you been praying for Sister Helen again?” Sister Barbara asked.
“Why, sister?”
“Because she’s gotten worse.”
“Then I must remember her in my prayers today.”
<
br /> “Stop praying for Sister Helen,” Sister Barbara hissed, dropped all pretense of civility. “You’re killing her.”
“That is not true,” Sister Mary said.
“Listen, sister,” Sister Barbara said. “You prayed for Father Malony and he passed.”
“Father Malony had just had a triple bypass.”
“You prayed for my mother and she passed.”
“She was eighty-six years old and protesting the use of land mines in Cambodia. It was hardly an unexpected accident.”
“You prayed for Sister Pat and Sister Colleen and they both passed.”
“They died in a car accident.”
“They were having lunch at Wendy’s and a car drove through the front window.”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
“What about when you worked at Shadow Grove? Was that an accident, too?”
Sister Mary couldn’t speak. She’d heard what had been whispered about her during those dreadful six months at Shadow Grove Retirement Village. The orderlies had renamed it “Shallow Grave” after thirteen of the fifteen residents passed away during the brief time she spent doing prayer visitations there. If there had been a local paper it would have had a field day reporting o. “The Nun with the Death Touch Prayers.” As it was, Big Bob’s Pre-Owned Vehicles had run a full-page ad in the local PennySaver demanding the removal of Sister Mary from Shadow Grove. Big Bob’s mother, Little Tina, lived in Shadow Grove and he didn’t want his mama to die at the hands of the poisoned nun.
It was after Big Bob’s ad, but before Little Tina passed away from a rare tropical lung fungus, that Sister Helen and Sister Barbara had staged their intervention. Sister Mary had taken the news of her prayer ban stoically, and to their faces she had agreed that what they were saying made sense. But after they had left she curled up on her quilt and cried for hours. Sister Mary had never believed that people could be so cruel, especially other Poor Clares, but here she was, judged a killer by her own order, and all she had done was pray for others as Poor Clares were ordered to do by God. After that, she lost herself in an endless list of odd jobs and chores around the monastery, making repairs, earning environmental accolades and spending her time in quiet contemplation. But she had secretly felt like she was walking around with a scarlet PN (fo. “Poisoned Nun”) hanging around her neck.
“I’m sorry,” she said, bludgeoned into submission by the mere mention of Shadow Grove.
“Don’t be sorry,” Sister Barbara said. “Just stop praying for Sister Helen.”
“Yes, sister,” Sister Mary said. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t enjoy the rest of her morning.
“I have been on the telephone with Sister Susan. She met you at one of your construction conferences. You are going to go to Minneapolis to meet with her.”
“I don’t want to go to Minneapolis.”
“Remember your oath of obedience. You are called to Minneapolis, and you will go. Pack your bags, because after today you’re going to be their problem, not ours.”
“I’m being expelled?”
“That’s up to them. Did you repair the garage door?”
“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Mary said suddenly, and she started for the front porch. Sister Barbara blocked her way.
“You still have chores to finish before you leave,” Sister Barbara said. “The garage door keeps sticking and the mailbox needs a new door.”
“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Sister Mary said again.
“You have to finish your chores and go to Minneapolis.”
“But I’m pregnant,” Sister Mary said, and she pushed past the stunned Sister Barbara, and ran into the house.
Enar Chakara’s office at RG+E looked completely empty, like the waiting room in an aromatherapy clinic. There were no chairs, only seating surfaces. There were no decorations, only indirect lighting and neutral wood. Enar was sleek and anonymous, too. He had enormous biceps and a tuft of hair on his face that changed size, shape and location every time Satan visited. Right now it was nesting beneath his bottom lip. A tribal tattoo was smeared across the side of his neck. In other words, he looked like everyone in LA.
“Satan, my brother by another mother,” Enar said, putting his hands together and bowing his head in the traditional greeting. “Namaste.”
“Sure,” Satan said.
“What can I do you for? You want a water?”
“No.”
“Let me get you a water. We have it brought in from Tibet,” he said reaching into a hidden receptacle behind a wall panel. “Oh, wait. No, it’s just Evian. Still, you want one?”
“Thank you,” Satan said.
“We have other water if you’d prefer that.”
“I’m fine with this,” Satan said, taking the bottle. He’d never left a meeting with Enar without a bottle of water. Since he didn’t drink water he usually poured it into the plant by the elevator, and then dropped the bottle on the floor of the parking garage. He was Satan, after all. Littering was part of his whole MO.
“Alright, okay, zeroing in on why you’ve come to me today,” Enar said. “Let’s focus: Death. You’re thinking it. I said it. We need to talk about Death. The board is very concerned that you’re here.”
“Why?”
“Very, very concerned.”
“But why?”
“Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t coming from me, it’s just a general feeling in the air that you couldn’t even pin on any one person. Just a free-floating mood that’s no one’s fault. But it’s here and I have to say it. It’s a reality. Let’s face it. Everyone is very appreciative of what you’ve done for us over the years. Very appreciative. And I think that shows in our ceremonies. I hope it shows. Does it show?”
“I don’t know,” Satan said, getting uncomfortable.
“So that’s an ‘it doesn’t show’?”
“No, it shows,” Satan said.
“Okay, because we feel it, truly, in our hearts, so it should show. But the board – not me, them – they wanted me to ask you that...if...see...wow, this is worse than when I came out to my fiancé’. Okay, what they want to know is...you’re not here for Leo, are you.”
“No,” Satan said.
“Because everything that kid touches these days turns to gold. Everything.”
“I’m not here for Leo,” Satan said. “I just need a new Death.”
“Who isn’t Leo?”
“Who isn’t Leo.”
“Okay, phew. That is a load off my mind. A huge load. Let me just pack that up in a box and drop it off the Memory Cliff and let’s move on down the road. New business. You need a Death, I am here to service your needs. I want you to picture this: Nic Cage.”
“I don’t want Nic Cage.”
“He’s up for another Oscar this year. Big buzz on Nic Cage.”
“No.”
“Give it a chance. Close your eyes. Visualize with me. You’re in the hospital, tubes running out your nose, your nearest and dearest draw close, dressed in widow’s weeds – if they’re widows, otherwise, business casual – each breath is harder than the one before, and then...cardiac arrest. You cross the threshold between life and death. The machine that beeps goes beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... A great wailing goes up amongst your kith and kin, your vision fails, and with dimming eyes you look up and hovering over you in a hooded black cloak is Nicolas Cage. ‘Come with me,’ he whispers.”
“I don’t see it,” Satan said.
“Do me a favor. Live with it. Give it a chance to grow on you. Nic and I have the same dietician, he’d eat this part up. Now what about a girl Death? Ellen Page? She’s hot right now. Lost all that Juno weight.”
“It’s not a starring role, Enar. It’s the personification of an abstract, metaphysical concept.”
“Ellen Page was in Inception. That was very metaphysical.”
“I don’t need a name, I just need someone who can do the job.”
“What about Morgan Freeman? He’s got gravitas.�
��
“I don’t want Morgan Freeman.”
“Did you see Invictus? He played Nelson Mandela in that one. So brave.”
“He’s a name. I don’t want a name.”
“So you’ll take anyone?”
“Who isn’t a name.”
“What about Sam Worthington? He was in Avatar and Clash of the Titans but no one can ever remember who he is. Forgettable face, great abs.”
“Again, he’s a name. Who do you have who isn’t a name?”
“Well, everyone we deal with is kind of a name,” Enar said. “I mean, thanks to you, all of our clients are big, big names with deep brand equity. If you want someone who isn’t a name, as far as our roster is concerned, you’ve only got two options: Michael Cera’s a little past his prime, so you could come back for him in two movies, or I could give you Kevin Spacey now, and you could just cross your fingers and hope he doesn’t do a John Travolta and make a comeback in a few years.”
“Those are names,” Satan said. “I can’t use any names.”
Satan felt so frustrated that he unscrewed the cap on his bottle of water and took a sip.
Enar watched Satan drink his Evian with a sinking feeling. In Hollywood terms, they were having a “Bottle Meeting” in which someone came in, you chatted, and they went away with an unopened bottle of water in their hand. It was mutually understood that in order to make that happen no one drank their water during the meeting. You could hold the bottle, you could roll the bottle between your palms, rearrange the bottle, place your hand on the neck of the bottle as if you were about to twist open the cap, but actually drinking the water in the bottle Was Not Done. It was freaking Enar right out.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said to Satan. “It’s way outside the box, but you’re a way-outside-the-box kind of guy with unique and distinctive needs.”
Satan Loves You Page 3