I handed Peter my invitation, which he examined. “It’s His handwriting, all right.” He shrugged. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Wait a minute.”
“‘Wait a minute?’” he said. “Do you have any idea how long a minute is around here?”
“I have to ask you, is this forever?”
He scratched his chalk-white beard. “Forever is a relative term, Lucifer, you know that.”
“I mean, I can never go back? To my life?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“There are so many things I haven’t done, projects I haven’t finished.”
“Oy,” he said, “if I had an atom for every time someone said that, I could build my own wormhole.”
“But I’m not—”
“‘I wish I’d spent more time with the kids,’ ‘I wish I’d told my wife I loved her,’ ‘I wish I’d swum naked in the Hudson Bay,’ ‘I wish—’”
“Listen to me, Peter, I’m not like them. I’m not dead. I’m here of my own free will, and I can leave if I want, right?”
He held up his palms and tilted his head. “You always do what you want, Lucifer. Now is no different. But this offer could expire any moment. You know how capricious He can be.”
I rifled my memory and came up with only one project that could not remain unfinished: the demise of country-western music.
“Can you hang on for just a moment?” I snatched my invitation and turned to leave. A whooshing sound came from behind me. Peter held up the black book, now in flames. He shook his head.
“You’re all lost now,” he said. “All of you rebels. No more second chances.” He tossed the book to me. I caught it and held it in my hands as it burned. It flipped open, and I watched my name and those of my comrades curl and disintegrate with the pages they inhabited.
Then I fell again, this time into nothingness, forgotten and forsaken forever.
“Lucifer.”
I opened my eyes. Gianna’s murmur had come from behind me. I lay on my right side, my back to the window.
“What?” I whispered.
“Lucifer.”
I sat straight up like a twanged catapult and stared at her. How did she know? Had I been calling out my own name in my sleep again?
“What did you say?!”
“Didn’t mean to scare you.” She shifted on the window seat to face me. “I was just looking up at the morning star and thinking how they used to call it Lucifer, before they knew it was Venus.”
Hearing Gianna speak my name, my one true name, sent a hot surge of blood to my ears.
“Kind of interesting, don’t you think?” she said. “Considering how the surface of Venus is much like what most people imagine Hell to be like—hot and sulfuric.”
The barest light of dawn cast a ghostly glow over her face and made her look as if she might shimmer into another dimension.
“It’s actually quite cold,” I said, more loudly than I’d intended.
“Let me guess. You’ve been there.”
I slid out of bed and joined her on the window seat. “Which—Hell or Venus?”
“Both, likely.” Gianna brushed the hair from my eyes. “You do have that ‘Hell-and-back’ look about you. Maybe someday I’ll find out what happened to make you so—”
I kissed her quickly, then moved behind her and pulled her to lean against me. We gazed at the brilliant disk of Venus.
“Did you know that the name Lucifer means ‘bearer of light’?” I began to unbutton her nightshirt. “They say that before he fell he was the most glorious of all the angels in Heaven.”
“Mmm, and obviously the stupidest, too.”
My fingers paused a moment in their journey, then continued.
“I mean, to rebel against God?” she said. “What are the chances of defeating an omniscient, omnipotent Creator? You’d have to be pretty ignorant to wage a losing battle like that.”
“Or really bored.” I ran my hands across her stomach and between her breasts.
“Exactly. Anyway, it’s an intriguing myth, but I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t believe in the Devil?” I brushed my teeth against the nape of her neck, and she arched her back against me.
“No more than I believe in Santa Claus or the Bogeyman.”
“Why not?”
“Because the kind of God I believe in wouldn’t allow such a terrible creature to exist.”
“Oh.” I halted my seduction attempt. “But then how do you explain evil?”
“I’m not so simple-minded that I have to personify it in the form of the Devil. Evil comes from within humans. We’re doing a fine job on our own without help from some horny little pipsqueak from a flaming cave.”
“But if this god of yours is supposed to be all-powerful and all-good, then how can evil exist?”
Gianna turned to face me. “Then one must choose between logic and faith. Logic says that God has to be either omnipotent or benevolent, and empirical evidence shows us that He’s not both, because the world is such a craphole. Faith, on the other hand, says to just shut up and believe that we’re too small to unravel the mystery of God’s plan.”
“And which do you choose?” I said. “Logic or faith?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” She planted small kisses on my throat and jaw.
“Do you think logic and faith can be reconciled?”
“Philosophers have been performing intellectual gymnastics for centuries trying to do that. But I don’t think it’s possible, not in my experience, not for more than a moment. I don’t worry that my personal struggles of conscience will get me in trouble, though. They say God loves the doubters, because we’re the ones who are seeking, we’re the ones who care enough to question.” Gianna stroked my ribs with the back of her fingers. “I love a good naked theological debate.” She tapped my mouth. “What about you, Louis? Do you believe in the Devil?”
I stared at the ceiling while I answered her. “I used to believe. Lately I’m not so sure.”
“Good. I say that the fewer people believe in him, the less power he’ll have.”
“On the contrary,” I looked her in the eye again, “Baudelaire once said that the Devil’s cleverest wile is to convince people that he does not exist.”
“And what does Baudelaire know? Poets, they put a few words together in cute ways and they think they speak for everyone.”
“What if there really is a Devil? What would you do if you met him?”
“My dad asked me that question once,” she said. “He’s a theology professor at Villanova, did I ever tell you?”
“And what was your answer?”
“I told him that if I ever met the Devil, I’d spit on him to show him I wasn’t afraid. He seemed to like that response.”
“I see. So what would you really do?”
“I probably would spit on him.” Gianna chuckled. “Then I’d let him take me out and show me a good time.”
“You mean like this?” I pulled her shirt back over her shoulders and used it to restrain her arms behind her. With my other hand I explored every crevice of her body until she writhed and moaned with pleasure. When I could feel that she was near orgasm, I pulled away. She glared at me.
“I can see why you believe in the Devil,” she said. “Obviously you’ve met.”
“Devil? What Devil? He doesn’t exist, remember?” I leaned forward and grazed her belly with a single soft kiss. “Not unless you want him to.”
“I don’t need the Devil when I’ve got you.” She curled her finger at me. “Now come back here and finish—”
“I’m feeling so sleepy all of a sudden. Must be the altitude.” I yawned, moved back to the bed, and lifted the covers.
“Louis.”
“Yes?” She didn’t answer. “Did you want something?”
“You know what I want.”
“I forget.” I lay on the bed. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“Fine.” She stood to approach me.
“No. From over there, tell me. I don’t want you to whisper it. I want you to be proud of your desires.”
“I am.” She sat back on the window seat and crossed her legs beneath her. “Okay . . .”
“And no clumsy metaphors. The more explicit, the better.”
“You got it.” Gianna took a deep breath, then began. The words she used, the pictures she painted, were so graphic that my eyes started to water. By the time she had finished her masterpiece of erotica, I was covered in sweat.
“There,” she said. “I know it’s a tall order, but how about it?”
I cleared my throat so that my voice wouldn’t squeak. “Okay.”
“Cool.” She pounced on me. Her imagination proved to be a skillful scriptwriter, and I the ideal casting choice, at least until she said, “Sometimes I think maybe you are the Devil.”
I froze and looked up at her. Her back was pressed against the wall, and her legs wrapped around me as I knelt below her. I saw that she was joking, so I decided to play along.
“What if I were?” I said. “Would you still love me?”
Gianna leaned her head back against the wall and smiled. “I’d still want to fuck you, that’s for sure, but that ain’t got nothin’ to do with love.” Her fingers tightened on my shoulder blades, and her breath came a little faster. “But since you’re not the Devil, I do love you.”
My blood cooled, and I felt myself shrink inside of her. She noticed immediately.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I don’t know.” I lifted her off me and turned away to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Was it something I said?”
“No, I don’t think—”
“It was something I said, wasn’t it?” Her voice went up an octave. “Are you going to have some biological mishap every time I tell you I love you? First you throw up, then you lose your—”
“Gianna, I’m sorry.” I went to the window. The sun had obliterated the light of the morning star.
“You can’t even look at me, can you?” she said.
“There’s nothing I want more than to hear you say you love me. It just takes getting used to.” I turned to her. “Let’s try again. This time, no theology.”
“Okay, sorry. I just thought the whole Devil thing was working for us, like an erotic fantasy.”
“Only to a point,” I said.
“We’ll take it easy on the religious icons from now on. Come back to bed.”
Before I joined her again, I shut the blinds against the approaching morning and returned the room to darkness.
15
Repraesentet Eas in Lucem Sanctam
The trouble with going on vacation to escape troubles is that when one’s vacation is over, the troubles are still there. The most one can hope for is a new, less troubling perspective on them.
Back at my office the next week, I was examining with reduced enthusiasm Mephistopheles’s latest report on his Million Man Massacre, as he had come to call it. I had just finished the section on suburban mall blockades when Beelzebub entered.
“Hey, Lou. How was your vacation?”
“Brilliant, thank you. The canyon is always breathtaking, particularly in the snow. Thanks for keeping an eye on operations while I was gone.”
“Not a problem. But your secretary’s not as accommodating as she used to be.”
“Leave Daphne alone. She’s married.”
“I know,” he said, “but that just makes her more—”
“Paws off, Bub. Last warning.”
“Okay, okay.”
“How’s the new PR director working out?”
“All right, I guess. I think she considers herself some kind of artiste. She wants to redo all our promotional materials. She practically threw up on our logo, said it was puerile, whatever that means.”
“Get rid of her and hire one of our other choices. This time, no humans.”
“Done.” Beelzebub made a note on his pad, then closed it. “Speaking of PR directors, I was thinking of going over to Belial’s old place and taking a look around. I wanted to wait until you got back from your trip so you could come with me.”
“Belial who?”
“Come on, Lucifer. I thought maybe we might get a clue as to why he . . . you know . . . converted.”
“Don’t use that word! He has not . . . I don’t know what he did, but it’s not that.”
“I tell you what. You sit here in denial, and meanwhile I’ll go try to solve this mystery. That way we’ll both be satisfied.” He stood and moved towards the door.
“Wait.” I reached for my coat.
Like all of our residences, Belial’s Georgetown brick row home held no clues that pointed to his true identity. He even displayed several photos of a phony family on his oak mantelpiece. There was a picture of his mother and father posing with a Beefeater guard at the Tower of London, a photo of his twin sister graduating from Harvard, and a yellowing picture that was supposed to depict him as a child with his first puppy, a fluffy white Samoyed. The grinning boy in the photo wore yellow bell bottoms and a Saturday Night Fever T-shirt.
“He still had beer in his fridge.” Beelzebub handed me a bottle. “Shame to let it go to waste.”
I nodded, then set the beer down without opening it.
The orchids in Belial’s greenhouse had withered almost to the point of death in the week and a half since his departure. Their fragrant rot made me choke, so I opened a window and offered the flowers a quick demise.
Beelzebub appeared at the doorway. “There’s one very hungry python up there.”
I followed him upstairs to the study, where a ten-foot brown-and-black snake curled listlessly around its tree limb. A cage on the other side of the room held two dead white rats, the smaller one mostly eaten by the larger.
“What should we do with it?” Beelzebub gestured to the snake.
“Give it some more rats.”
“I saw a little dog next door. Maybe I’ll—”
“Rats, Bub, rats.”
I wandered into Belial’s bedroom. His own long black feather hung over the headboard. I sat in a tall rocking chair facing the four-poster bed.
Beelzebub stopped in the doorway. We shared a momentary mournful glance. He crossed to the wardrobe, opened it, and ran his hand over the row of tailored shirts.
“He sure had a lot of cool ties,” Beelzebub said.
“I doubt he’d mind if you took some of them.”
“No, I’ll leave them here, for when he . . . you know . . .” Beelzebub sighed and closed the wardrobe.
“Look.” I crossed to Belial’s bureau and picked up the only authentic photograph in the house—taken about six years ago at Devil’s Den on the Gettysburg battlefield. I was seated on one of the massive boulders, flanked by Mephistopheles and Belial, with Beelzebub at my feet, the four of us creating a kind of diabolical diamond. It was the first time we had visited the site together since the battle itself, which had been a magnificent display of the human capacity for self-sacrifice. Little Round Top loomed in the background of the photo. Mephistopheles was whiter then, and Belial was sporting a tawny goatee that made him look older and wilier than he did the last time I saw him.
“I remember that trip,” Beelzebub said beside my shoulder. “We scared the bejesus out of those kids playing on the rocks. Remember, when we made ourselves transparent and pretended we were Civil War ghosts?”
“I remember.” I scanned Belial’s bedroom for a sign, a clue. “Anything look out of place to you, Bub?”
“Nothing. It’s creepy. It’s like he died or something.”
“I think he did die.”
“Lou, don’t say that. He’ll come back.”
I looked down at the photo in my hand, then placed it back on the bureau.
“I’ll get him back.” I nearly tore the door off its hinges on my way out of Belial’s abandoned home.
The state psychiatric hospital was not the dreary prison I had expect
ed. In fact, it was clean and bright, though the brightness served mainly to accentuate the sparseness and sterility of its halls.
The head nurse, a short man with an ironic face, prematurely gray hair, and biceps the size of telephone poles, led me down one of these hallways toward the recreation room.
“Your cousin William has an interesting twist on an old hallucination,” the nurse said. “Instead of hearing the voices of demons inside his head, he actually believes he is a demon. Not only that, he also believes that God spoke to him and asked him to renounce his wicked ways. I’m telling you this so you won’t be alarmed. He scared quite a few of the other patients at first, but he’s so benign in nature that they came to like him right away.”
“He’s benign?” I said with a touch of disgust.
“Completely. In fact, I wish there were more people as nice as him out there.” He pointed to the walls. “But he’s very devoted to his delusion. The drugs haven’t dispelled his faith yet, but it’s only been a little over a week, so we’re still hopeful.” We reached a door at the end of the hallway, and the nurse slid his identification badge through the security card reader. The light above the door changed from yellow to green, and the lock clicked. The nurse placed his hand on the doorknob and paused a moment. “I just want you to be prepared: your cousin’s probably not the man you used to know.”
We entered the recreation area. About a dozen patients wandered through the large room. Some watched television, some watched the walls, some watched those watching the television and the walls.
“Where is he?” I said.
“Right over there.” The nurse pointed to the far wall. “See him? He’s playing chess with a catatonic.”
I wouldn’t have recognized Belial if he’d been standing a foot in front of me wearing an enormous name tag. Dressed in a fog-gray sweatsuit, white tube socks and tan bedroom slippers, Belial rested his stubbled chin on his knuckles, examining his opponent’s face. His usual meticulously styled sandy hair lay in a tousled heap on his head. On the outside, he nearly blended into his barren background.
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