It's Raining Men

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Smeepy ignored me.

  “I bet you don’t even look out that door any more.”

  No reply.

  I stepped up behind him and looked at the monitor. There on the screen was my permanent record, the most permanent one I know of, screen after screen after screen of ARCHIMEDES. Smeepy was paging through it, grimly doing the eight keystrokes it takes to navigate from page to page.

  I stepped over to the half door and held it open for the waiting dead.

  I could see it in their eyes: no rules!

  The crowd outside filed in, eyeing Smeepy, and made for the elevator lobby on tiptoe. I heard dings from the elevators, and doors whooshing open and shut.

  Smeepy was on my record from the seventeen nineties.

  I reached past his shoulder and hit Alt-Delete.

  The screen flickered. Every field in my permanent record went blank.

  “Keep up the good work.” I clapped Smeepy on the back.

  He didn’t even stir.

  After all, I no longer existed.

  As I took an elevator, I was betting that he went right back to faking manifests, peopling the desert outside with millions of waiting dead to shore up his job security. Poor bum. If he had that much imagination, he could be writing novels.

  I could have taken the little side door, but I had Lido to think of. Baz had told me a few helpful things about his adventures with the great digitizing project of the early nineteen eighties. I went straight to the fourth circle of hell: fornicators and adulterers. It used to be quite the party scene.

  It was chaos in there, but silent. To my left, open fire pits, black with soot, sat empty and cold. To my right was a doctor’s waiting room with pictures of boobs on the walls, endless boobs, all shapes and sizes. All the hideous orange, slippery plastic chairs were empty. Straight ahead stretched a road, or maybe an office corridor, depending which eye I squinted through, and doors hung off their hinges. Ladies’ shoes and underwear littered the cracked asphalt.

  Not a soul or a demon could be seen.

  Way down the corridor, or road, I saw a flickering blue light.

  I took two giant steps and bang, I stood in the doorway to a big room full of desks and more beehive monitors. Only one monitor was lit. I headed that way.

  Nobody sat in the swivel chair.

  The screen showed an antique video game, the kind you run by pushing the Up and Down arrows on your keyboard, and hitting Enter to fire your guns.

  I shook my head and sat. The chair was warm. I worked fast.

  As I’d hoped, the “press Alt-Delete from any data screen” gag that Baz had taught me had completely erased Archimedes, mathematician-incubus, from the Regional Office’s records.

  I did a search on Lido Arabescu, a process requiring more patience than the waiting room outside Purgatory.

  Nothing.

  I looked for his contract. Zippo.

  How about monthly reports? No file as such, but I found a query file in the vast dumping ground of Regional Office records for data wrongly compiled, data entered by dyslexic demons, data improperly duplicated or routed—in fact, most of the server space was taken up by mistakes. More proof that hell had been looking into its own navel too long, with disastrous results.

  In the query file were fifty years of monthly performance reports from Lido Arabescu.

  What the—

  It was a bore, but I’d have to look him up by number.

  Sighing, I scrounged in the desk drawer for a pencil and a scrap of paper. Then I looked for his eighty-eight-digit IIDN—infernal identification number—on the screen.

  It wasn’t there.

  Either Lido’s reports had all gone astray in the system because he lost his IIDN, a thing that can happen to anybody if they don’t tattoo it on the sole of their foot, or he was in the system under another name.

  The mere thought of trying to imagine every other name Lido might have used for three hundred years left me weak.

  Then I realized I could take it from a different direction. I looked up the Ravenswood Project. That file was incomplete, too, I was relieved to note, because the fields where my name and address should have appeared were blank, as was the line where whoever originated the Project Form was once named.

  Although, bless it, I never filled out any Project Form on the Ravenswood Project.

  That was a puzzle for another day. The important thing was, it didn’t mention me anywhere.

  That Alt-Delete trick was a doozy. I’d have to remember that one.

  Skimming the file, I was able to gather that there had only ever been one name attached to the Ravenswood Project.

  Mine.

  Which was now erased from the entire system. Every report, every CC on every memo, every mention of Archimedes was gone.

  Lido, it appeared, had never been there.

  “Hey!” I heard behind me.

  I jumped a foot in the swivel chair.

  A roundish demon with wire-rimmed glasses stood behind me, one arm clutching a load of Ding Dongs, a mug full of steaming cat’s pee in the other hand, and outrage in his hugely magnified yellow eyes.

  “I was in the middle of that game!”

  I got up. “Chill. I’ll get it back for you exactly where you left it.”

  He glared at me, hustled his butt into the chair, and shepherded his mug and his Ding Dongs onto the desk. “You better.”

  “Didn’t anyone teach you this trick?” I leaned past him. The Ravenswood Project was still onscreen. I hit Alt-Delete and bip! It vanished, leaving the project form all blanks. “Now watch closely.” I put one forefinger on Shift and the other on Pause/Break. “Tap once.” I tapped Pause/Break.

  His video game came back.

  “Wow. Thanks.”

  “Least I could do. Hey, where’d you get the cat’s pee?”

  “It’s mine,” he said defensively, guarding the mug. “I bring it in a thermos.”

  “All right, all right, forget I asked.” I looked at my wrist, which I had forgotten to imagine wearing a watch. “Is that the time? I have to be in the field in eighteen seconds.”

  “Down by the water heater, door marked Radiation, you can’t miss it,” my informant said, settling into his video game.

  Turned out, the cure for love could be a lot worse than the disease.

  I’d only been reading Bubbie’s spell card aloud for a minute when I felt like throwing up again. I ran for the bathroom. On the way, I began to feel a hand clutch my heart and squeeze it in a long, slow pulse. It was terrifying. Was I having a heart attack? Would I die feeling like this? Every time the squeeze let up, I cried a huge, hot cloudburst of tears from sheer relief. I felt alternating waves of disgust, chills, self-hatred, sweats, rage, nausea, and a grief so terrible that my heart would squeeze again.

  I made it to the bathroom. Then I threw up twice more.

  Rinse. Repeat.

  This went on for about forty-five minutes.

  When it stopped, I had just time to use mouthwash and stagger to bed before I passed out from sheer relief that it was over.

  The door marked Radiation opened into a crack between rocks with steps cut into it. The crack was so narrow that sometimes my knees brushed the rocks. There was barely room for my upper body to scrape through. The steps went up. Light leaked faintly down from above. I sighed heavily and resigned myself to taking the long way home.

  I climbed for hours. Maybe days. That’s the trouble with the Regional Office: it’s set up for dead people, who have no sense of time whatsoever. That may have been the original design flaw, come to think of it. The staff is totally attuned to the customer base, which is, let’s be blunt, insane, or at least hopelessly masochistic. So the dead people freak out, and the demons try to service their needs by getting deeper into their heads, and nobody’s in charge. Rumor has it that senior management is wandering Facebook in a daze, trying to master social networking.

  So I had plenty of time to ponder, and no marijuana, no beer, no girls, a
nd no rowing machines to distract me.

  Without distractions I was forced to admit that I was a fool. I was also a putz, a flaming idiot, and very likely a tool of the enemy in spite of my efforts to limbo under Her radar.

  I’d hurt Chloe, and then I’d run away.

  What a jackass. Maybe all those years of whammying my way out of women’s memories had let me get soft. Weakened my willingness to break hearts. Robbed me of my edge.

  Yeah, right.

  I had no edge. I’d never been tough enough to break hearts. And now I knew I wasn’t brave enough to give Chloe what she deserved. I felt like a cockroach on the pillow of love.

  The rock all around me began to groan faintly, as if it were thinking about leaning in and squishing me like a bug. The still, stale air filled with a haze of dust, extinguishing the faint light from above.

  I remembered that the whole place was built to cater to the customer. Give them what they want. What was I asking for?

  Better stop thinking about squishing bugs, Archimedes.

  I squirmed until I could get my hands on either side of me in the narrowing crack. Then I pressed against the limitless walls of rock.

  Nothing. I might have been trying to lift a mountain.

  I pressed harder.

  Gravel pattered down on my scalp.

  “C’mon,” I panted under my breath. “You’re not fooling anybody.”

  I remembered that strength, here, came from the heart, and I stopped pressing. Immediately the rock leaned in closer.

  Fuck. If I didn’t get out of here, I’d never have a chance to make it up to Chloe.

  If I thought about Chloe, I felt worse, and the rock pressed in until my organs began to squeak. I tried to wriggle, but there wasn’t any room.

  If I didn’t find a motive to get out of here, however, I’d be stuck until…until I found one.

  She was really the only reason I could think of to go back.

  Huh.

  I stopped trying to move and thought. To my intense embarrassment, I realized I hadn’t done much thinking for, well, a really long time.

  First of all, I now recognized the chant that had sent me here. It was an old love cure that had been current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some French Jew had come up with it. Who knew what it did to the person who used it.

  What it had done to me was kick me out of Chloe’s heart.

  That brought me up short.

  When I got home, she would have gotten over me. I didn’t want to imagine what that would feel like—to be in love and then have that feeling ripped out of you somehow. Even if you were heartsick and sore and miserable and sleepless with sweats and chills and nausea and suffering intense separation anxiety and starving to death for a person you could never see again. It was misery, but it was still somehow a way of being close to my lost beloved.

  Fuck, that was me, wasn’t it?

  She’d got me at last. Aphrodite had won.

  The rock around me went bloomp. It squeezed me. I couldn’t breathe. Panic filled me.

  She’d got me.

  I was in love.

  The rock eased back. I sucked in air. I’d have been more worried about suffocating or getting squished if I hadn’t started laughing.

  I was in love with some woman who would live another sixty or so years and croak, leaving me alone again. Who would want me to put the toilet seat down. Who would break my heart six or seven times, guaranteed, over her lifetime, and I would put up with it because of love.

  If I ever saw her again. If she’d want me.

  Bloomp. The walls closed in again. I yelped, and the last of my air squished out of me.

  After two-millennia-plus, Love had caught up with me, and the girl had realized I was useless and ejected me from her heart, and I was stuck inside a mountain at the bottom of the fourth circle of hell and only now admitting to myself that maybe I could have handled things a little better.

  But the irony made me laugh again, breathlessly.

  The pressure of the rocks around me loosened a bit. Then a lot.

  I gasped in air.

  Surely I’d gotten higher than the fourth circle. Started there, after all. So I must be at the second or even the first hell by now.

  So if I get back, I thought, trying to remember that this was a metaphorical mountain and trying not to let it reduce me to a metaphorical spot of grease between these rocks, when I get back, if she doesn’t hate me too much—

  Bloomp. My ribs began to whine, then scream with pain.

  I struggled to hold onto my train of thought.

  —I can, I dunno, cut a chicken, send up a flare, burn some hair or something, summon the goddess and knuckle under. Promise her anything.

  Aphrodite had won by default.

  And frankly, if I can just get back to Chloe and be with her, then I can probably even bear being a love slave. Or a slave to Love. Or whatever.

  Unless Chloe just didn’t want to get involved again.

  Horrible thought.

  The rock pressed against my head on all sides. My nose was squished against rock. I couldn’t open my mouth to breathe. I felt my ribs bruise, then break, then my left leg, then both my arms.

  I thought about death. Not a bad way out.

  I’d flunked my last suicide attempt. Ended up here, in fact.

  Now I was here, and in my own living body. If I died here, would it finally stick?

  Then I remembered this was the Regional Office, where death is metaphorical. Although it can still hurt like shit.

  Well, hell, even guys going down in planes call their wives to say goodbye.

  “I love you, Chloe,” I croaked in my throat, unable to open my lips.

  The walls around me softened. A red glow began to pulse everywhere.

  The walls went bloomp.

  And I knew where I was at last.

  Inside my heart.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I SLEPT WELL THAT NIGHT for the first night since Archie had kissed me. I felt exhausted and relieved to be out of love.

  I went to Syracuse the next day. It was like a dream. On the outside I was Chloe Danvers, smiling and talking the company line the way I do at work, only this time it was to VPs and the media and Boshy himself, in person. Boshy turned out to be a gnome-like guy with a pointed beard and a bald spot who seemed crazy, in a good way, and very happy to meet me. The product launch was about what I expected: good food, endless drinks, lots of white guys in suits.

  The only things that seemed odd about the experience, aside from Boshy showing me my very own window office tucked in among a dozen window offices, were the on-again off-again glimpses I caught of a sleek, olive-skinned woman with green eyes, wearing a different suit every time I spotted her, always with a drink in her hand. Once she caught my glance and lifted her glass to me. Then I lost her in the crowd.

  The big thrill was Archie’s sketch. They’d made it 3-D and turned it into a little inflatable temple, roly-poly and adorable, with plump white pillars and curlicues on the lintel and the words VENUS DREAMS carved in pseudo-Greek lettering across the top. I foresaw a long summer ahead, standing in front of one of these at Oak Street Beach, pouring endless shots of the faintly pink product…and then I remembered that I’d been promoted. No more product demos for me.

  My smiles were more sincere after that.

  The weird thing was, I felt almost nothing. I felt as if I’d been in surgery and was now post-op, woozy on the anesthesia, with a big row of stitches across my chest that nobody could see but me.

  Two days after that, I was back in the Loop, depositing my last paycheck as a brand bimbo. I wandered over to Millennium Park, hoping to dabble my burning feet in the Crown Fountain wading pool before I took the El home.

  Paddling in the pool, I bumped into a Hare Krishna girl, shaved bald, pale-skinned, beaded, draped in acres of yellow fabric. She rattled a tambourine and sang and spun around in the shallow water in her bare feet. Something about her looked familiar.<
br />
  I stared at her. “It’s you again, isn’t it?”

  The Krishna girl stopped singing and dancing and gave me a blank look, as if there should only be one crazy person in this conversation, and I was not it.

  “You met me at the beach, pretending to be an angel.” The Krishna girl’s eyes widened. “And then you met me in a bar downtown, but you were a redhead and you called yourself Delilah and you told me all that stuff about Archie. You were fishing for something, and now I think I know what it was.”

  The bald girl’s face seemed to change. Her blank eyes darkened. Her eyebrows went up, and she looked suddenly much smarter and livelier. “Okay, what was I fishing for?”

  “You want to know if he’s aware that you’re tracking him. The answer is yes.”

  “Well. That was easy,” said the Krishna girl.

  I snapped, “Anything else you want to know?”

  “Since you ask, I’d love to know if he has any intention of fulfilling his contract.”

  “With?” Oh no, now he had signed a contract? Oh, of course, he must have, if he was working for the Regional Office. I frowned.

  “If you’re not from heaven and you’re not from hell, who the fuck are you? What contract? Why is he so afraid of you tracking him? Why did he try to kill himself? Are they really going to punish him for the Ravenswood Project? And what do you expect me to do, really?”

  The Krishna girl opened her lips, but I rushed on. “And what do I call you, if you’re not Tenariel or Delilah or Puravastishastiwhatever?”

  The Krishna girl waited.

  “And grow some hair,” I added sharply. “I can’t be seen talking to a freak like you. I just made Vice President.”

  The Krishna girl laughed delightedly. “Okay.” She pulled a fold of her big yellow robe over her head, then peeped out, and pulled it away—and presto, she had hair, blacker than mine, cut in a classy bob. Her eyes were shockingly green, and her skin was a darker tone, somewhere been olive and a light tan. Her robe looked more sophisticated suddenly—like an expensive cape over, yes, a chic little saffron-colored suit with black accents that matched her sky-high designer shoes and black patent-leather handbag. She opened the handbag, found a lipstick and compact mirror, swiped on some coral pink color, dropped the lipstick and compact in the bag, and closed it with a snap.