Requiem for the Devil

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  Whatever I want will happen, I reminded myself. But what did I want?

  I’ll start with an order of complete freedom, please, leave off the tomato and the consequences. And a bottle of anything to accompany it.

  “Hey, don’t get too loaded on that stuff.”

  Beelzebub stepped onto the balcony and closed the sliding glass door behind him. He had put his shirt back on.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he reached into his pocket, “I have something better.” He unwrapped the foil from a small brown block.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It ain’t a chocolate bar.”

  I took it out of his hand with the reverence of communion. “Where did you find hash in this city? It’s not exactly the most fashionable drug these days.”

  “Actually, I’ve been saving it since my trip to London in October. Remember, Lou, when we lived there, the nights we’d sit in St. James Park and drink and smoke and—”

  “Yes.” I inhaled the sweet, woody fragrance. “Beelzebub, what are you up to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I missing something? What’s the occasion here tonight?”

  “No occasion.” He hoisted himself onto the top railing of the balcony. “It’s been a long time since we hung out, just the two of us.”

  “We had lunch two days ago.”

  “I mean, like this.” Beelzebub tilted his head back and let the chill breeze stream through his hair for a minute. “Besides, I thought I’d give you a night to remember before you took off for the little town of Bethlehem.”

  “You mean,” I crept towards him, “sort of an anti-holiness inoculation?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  I placed my hands on the railing, one on either side of him. A mere breath from me would have propelled him into twelve stories of cold air and eventually an uncooperative sidewalk. He took his hands off the railing and crossed his arms in front of him.

  “Nice evening, huh?”

  “Gravity doesn’t care how much you flirt with it,” I said. “It still does its job.”

  “I’d survive the fall.”

  “But you’d be a mess for a little while, and we’d have so much explaining to do to the witnesses, so many memories to cleanse. Tedious work.”

  “It would put a damper on the evening, wouldn’t it?”

  “Quite.” With a swift move, I slid my arm around his waist and pulled him off the railing. Before setting him down, I turned so that I was between him and the wide open city.

  “Nice to know you still care.” Beelzebub pulled the hash out of my shirt pocket and held it up. “Now or later?”

  “Always now,” I said. “Always now.”

  “How’s the chicken look so far?”

  “Looks good,” I said. “Smells great. I just put the rice on, so we have about forty-five minutes.”

  “Perfect.” Beelzebub sat cross-legged on my living room floor next to the coffee table, intent on his work. On a folded piece of paper in front of him lay a small pile of tobacco next to an empty cigarette with the filter torn off. With a small knife he shredded tiny pieces of the hashish into the tobacco. Humming the latest post-grunge hit, he fashioned a new filter from a tightly rolled strip of cigarette box and inserted it into the shell of the original cigarette, which was then refilled with the pile of chemically enhanced tobacco.

  He held his finished work towards me. “Do you want to do the honors?”

  “Outside.” I moved toward the balcony door.

  “It’s freezing out there.”

  “I won’t have my apartment smelling like smoke,” I said. “Don’t worry, after a few hits of that, we won’t feel the cold.”

  On the balcony, we settled into a couple of lounge chairs, side by side facing each other. He handed me the hash-laced cigarette. I put it in my mouth and lit it with my fingertip.

  The first drag lingered in my lungs long and sweet, as did the second. By the time I passed the burning stick back to Beelzebub, my face was beginning to thicken and tingle.

  “How is it?” he asked as he took it from me. I just stared at him. “You’re quiet. That’s a very good sign.” He closed his eyes and took a deep drag. When he finally exhaled, he barked and pumped his fist in the air. “Yes! I done good, bro. I done real good.”

  “That you have.”

  “Man, it’s been too long since you and I got high together.” He settled deeper into his chair. “You sure I can’t get you to try heroin again?”

  “I can’t stand being that relaxed.” I took another hit.

  “You just don’t like heroin because it’s trendy. Gotta be different, you.”

  “If I’m not different, then who’s going to be?”

  He blinked at me a few times. “What?”

  “What?”

  “What did you mean by that?”

  “By what?”

  “What you said.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Give me that.”

  While Beelzebub puffed away, I stretched my arms back over my head and listened to my skin sing. “Sometimes it is so good to be human.”

  “It’s always good to be human,” he said. “You think those assholes in Heaven ever have this much fun?”

  I shivered. “Fun isn’t everything.”

  “Yes, fun IS everything, Lou. It has to be, because it’s all we’ve got. Here, have some more of this before you get gloomy on me.” He passed back the cigarette and returned to his deep slouch. After a few moments he said, “Dude, I can’t feel my face.”

  I leaned forward and whacked his cheek hard with my free hand. “How about now?”

  He didn’t reply, only stared at the skyline. The drug slithered through the spaces between my brain cells and forged new lines of communication. A minute, or perhaps ten of them, passed.

  “Did you just hit me?” he said.

  “Hit you?”

  “Yeah, just now.”

  “I’m not sure. I think I wanted to.”

  “Oh.” He scratched his face. “Why?”

  “I don’t remember. Here, I’ll make it up to you. Finish this.”

  “You’re a pal.”

  After he had finished, he pulled out a regular cigarette. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “You sure? Between the carbon monoxide and the nicotine, it totally intensifies the experience.”

  “I know, but I’m perfectly happy exactly as I am right this second.”

  “I’m glad.” He gazed at me over his glowing cigarette.

  The wind ripped harder over the balcony now. We were both quaking from the cold, but made no move to go inside. The chill was more of an intellectual perception, anyway, as my skin now felt like it was several inches away from the surface of my body. I rolled up my sleeves to enhance the sensation.

  “Lucifer, what do you wanna be when you grow up?”

  “I want to be the Devil.”

  This remark sent Beelzebub into peals of laughter until tears squeezed out of his eyes. He nudged me with his foot.

  “You already are the Devil, man. Which sucks for us, because I want to be God.”

  I stared at him and felt the world wobble. “What did you just say?”

  “Yeah, I said his name, Goddammit, I say it all the time these days, just never around you. I say, ‘Thank God it’s Friday,’ and I scream out ‘Oh, God!’ when I’m fucking someone or getting fucked, and you know what happens?”

  “What?” I shrunk back in the chair.

  “Nothing! Precisely dick, that’s what.”

  An intense attack of paranoia gripped my body. I slid out of the chair, crawled to the wall, and huddled there with my back to the building.

  “Yo, man, don’t bug out on me,” Beelzebub said. “I was just joking. About the ‘Oh, God!’ part, anyway.”

  “You were?”

  “No.” He threw back his head and cackled at th
e moon, a spurt of laughter that slid into an unknown high-pitched melody. “Ohhh, shit, my high is so high, so high.” Beelzebub eased into a supine position on the chaise lounge and stabbed at the sky with his cigarette.

  “Lucifer, your fear is a prison, man, a fucking prison, with bars of cold hard wasted energy, and you feel lucky ’cuz sometimes you get recess, a chance to break some rules and write graffiti on the prison walls and sneak back inside like you’ve done something bad.” He lobbed his cigarette over the edge of the balcony. It arced like a meteor out of sight. “Flames and smoke and terror and all the nasty smells of Hell, I love it, if I love anything. I’m bad ’cuz I wanna be, but with you it’s always looking over your shoulder hoping you’ll get some recognition, but who cares, you gotta do it for yourself, ’cuz like Belial said, no one believes in us anymore.”

  Beelzebub stood and slapped the top of the chair, speaking like a preacher at a revival meeting: “Strip off that fear, boy, or it’ll weigh you down, drown you like concrete boots when you try to plunge into freedom, freedom from the God that ain’t there, the God that doesn’t care.” He peered over the edge of the balcony. “Look at them down there, our precious humble little ants, shuffling their days and nights into their pasts, squandering their hours, leading gray, subterranean existences in the hope of salvation, as if practicing for the eternal boredom of Heaven. They forget how to want, after years of telling themselves that wanting is evil, or that wanting makes them miserable, and if only they could stanch the mad flow of desire and find peace, maybe they could sleep at night, but there’s no sleep in the world as deep as mine, and I want, I want, I want all the time . . .”

  Beyond the drone of Beelzebub’s voice, I thought I heard crickets chirping. My mind grasped on to this sound and clung to it for several minutes before I remembered that it was December, when all the crickets are on vacation.

  “. . . just stiff ghosts of themselves, passing their years going to Labor Day sales at the mall and putting together jigsaw puzzles of kittens playing with yarn and inventing ghastly new recipes involving Jell-O brand gelatin and taking them to the church picnic, and always with these vague smiles on their faces until one day they’re found in a Motel 6 in a Bo Peep costume harnessed to a bewildered sheep, and everyone thinks they’ve gone batty when in fact it’s their first real step toward self-actualization . . .”

  Beelzebub was tapping into an underground reservoir of vocabulary. My mind and mouth were too dry to keep up. I wished for the crickets again.

  “. . . God is great, God is bad, let us thank him, dear old dad, for the sweetest thing in the world, a taste of humanity without mortality, life without end, amen . . .” He was still clutching the railing and staring down at the street. His slow sway mesmerized me. “. . . So happy in my hate, in my bed of darkness, because I created it, we created it, so Lucifer, don’t ever feel guilty on my account for making me lose Heaven, it was the kindest thing you ever did for me, and I only wish I could prove to you that it wasn’t a mistake, that we’re better off without God,” his voice came faster and louder, “so you can stop pining away for the good old days, because the good old days sucked, and if he doesn’t want us, then fuck him, and fuck them all is what I say!” He shook his fist at the stars. “I’m not afraid, and I won’t crawl on my belly in the dust like a worm, just to feed the ego of some distant, megalomaniacal tyrant!”

  Beelzebub leaped onto the balcony railing. He flailed for an instant before achieving an unsteady balance, then ripped open his shirt to the sky.

  “Go ahead, God, you fat, filthy motherfucker, lightning-bolt my ass into oblivion if you’re so tough.”

  I buried my face in my arms. My head felt like it was full of gyroscopes. This is not happening, I thought, or maybe I said it out loud, this is a hallucination. Except hash doesn’t make you hallucinate—it just makes reality feel like a hallucination.

  I heard Beelzebub’s feet slam to the surface of the balcony, then his voice came close to my ear.

  “See, Lucifer, God doesn’t care. No matter what we do, he doesn’t care. We could bring this planet to its knees, and he wouldn’t blink.”

  “That’s not true. He’s waiting for us to fuck up, I know it, then he’ll destroy us.”

  “No. There’s nothing we can do anymore to piss him off enough to even look at us.”

  “Then what’s the point?!” I reached up to clutch at Beelzebub’s collar. The cold air hit my face and made me realize it was soaked with something salty.

  “The point?” he said. “The point of what?”

  “Of all this! Of all we do! Is it just evil for evil’s sake?”

  He scratched his chin and thought for a moment. “Yeah, whatever. I say it’s just for the fun of it, the what-the-fuck factor, you know?” He wiped the cold sweat off my forehead with his sleeve. “The funny thing is, Lucifer, you’re really the one who wants to be God. I’d settle for just being the Devil.”

  “You want the job?” I said. “Take it.”

  “It isn’t that easy.”

  I tried to focus on his face.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s been you since the beginning of time, and it’s gonna be you forever.” He stood and offered his hand to me. “Come on. It’s time to eat.”

  When he joined me at the table, I told him, “You’d make a good Devil, Beelzebub.”

  “And you’d make a good God.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, definitely. You never would have let things get so fucked up. You’re a good manager.” He passed me the rice. “Hey, you never know when there’ll be an opening. Keep an eye on the classifieds. People are always looking for God.”

  “Would you mind not saying his name around me from now on?”

  “Sure. Hey, do you remember anything I said outside just now? ’Cuz I don’t, but I have a feeling it was pretty wild.”

  “I might be able to reconstruct it,” I said. “Have you been reading a lot of Nietzsche lately?”

  “A lot of what?”

  “Never mind.”

  I don’t remember much else about dinner, only that we ate voraciously and that halfway through the meal I couldn’t feel my tongue anymore.

  “Let me clear the table,” Beelzebub said. “You look too stoned to be carrying things that break.”

  “Okay. I think I’ll go stare into space now.”

  I sat in my living room chair and faced the empty fireplace. When Beelzebub returned, he handed me another glass of whiskey and sipped a new bottle of beer.

  “Want me to build a fire?” he said. I shrugged and nodded. He picked up a log. “Should I build it in here or—”

  “Here’s fine.”

  He lit the wood, then sat on the fireplace and looked at me. “I didn’t mean to buy the quiet hash.”

  “It’s really good,” I said, “just to have a blank brain once in a while.”

  “Yeah, I guess. ’Course, my brain’s blank most of the time anyway, right?” I smiled with the half of my mouth that was working. “Damn, Lou, you look so . . .”

  “Peaceful?”

  “Peaceful. Actually, I was gonna say ‘mellow.’ Peace isn’t something we get a lot of.”

  “Peace is good, Bub. You really should try it.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to find it.” I gave him a goofy smile. “I see,” he said. “I gotta find a girlfriend of my own, huh?”

  “You’d be surprised what it can do for your outlook.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my outlook.”

  “And there’s something wrong with mine?”

  “Well . . .” I could see him struggle for diplomacy. “There are some things about your . . . thing with Gianna that disturb me.”

  “Such as?”

  “Everything.”

  “Beginning with . . .”

  “The idea of you celebrating Christmas with a cozy little Catholic family would be hilarious if it weren’t true.”

  “What if I was spending Christmas with s
ome Pentecostals?”

  “Lou, you know what I mean.” He stood and began to pace, drinking faster from the bottle. He seemed to be coming down off the high already, much sooner than I was. I envied this talent of his, the ability to toss off a buzz like it was an extra layer of clothing. At that moment he held a commanding coherence advantage.

  “I know we usually go to Vegas at Christmas,” I said. “But things are different this year.”

  “They sure are.” He set his beer on the table. “Lou, to tell you the truth, this whole thing scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to see you get . . . you know . . .”

  “Get what?”

  “Remember in the movie Rocky, what Rocky’s trainer made him chant while he was hitting the punching bag?”

  “No.”

  “‘Women weaken legs.’”

  “You’ll be glad to know,” I said, “my legs have never been stronger.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m speaking . . . you know . . . not literally, but . . .”

  “Metaphorically?”

  “Yeah.” Beelzebub pointed at my lower extremities. “Your metaphorical legs are practically paralyzed by this woman.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice lacked the intensity I felt. The clouds still surrounded my head and made me an easy target for Beelzebub’s lasso.

  “You’re not yourself lately, Lou. It’s like you’re possessed. What excellent revenge—the Prince of Darkness possessed by a mere human.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “If you want,” he circled my chair, “I’d be happy to perform the exorcism.”

  My brain struggled through its bleariness like a tadpole swimming through gelatin. “No, thanks.”

  “No one knows you like I do. This woman doesn’t even know who you are. How can you be real with her? How can you be your true self?”

  I didn’t answer, thinking how he had it all backward—it was with Gianna that I was real, and with Beelzebub, pretending.

  “I don’t want to continue this pointless argument,” I said. “You’ve spoken your mind, and I appreciate your frankness. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Fine.” He stretched out on the floor facing me and propped his head on his hand. “Better yet, let’s not talk at all.” He fixed his eyes on mine and began to unbutton his shirt.