Requiem for the Devil

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  “Then why is he sitting in an asylum right now instead of rehearsing in the heavenly choir?”

  Raphael fidgeted with his straw. “We haven’t received orders yet as to what to do with him.”

  “So you’ll just let him rot until then?”

  “Look, I know it’s not ideal,” he said, “but it’s out of my hands. Like I said, I’ve learned not to—”

  “Not to question, of course.” I passed him the dessert menu, covered with photos of luscious sweets. “You know, if you came to work for me, you could have a say in how things are run.”

  He laughed. “You never change, do you?”

  “I try not to. Come on, Raph. I’ll buy you a piece of Dutch apple pie à la mode.”

  “As always, your offer is tempting, but no thanks.” He handed me the menu, and his face turned serious. “I meant what I said before, though. You should be careful.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Michael.”

  Raphael held up his hands. “Hey, these aren’t threats. More like warnings. Like I said, I like you, and I don’t want to see anyone get hurt.”

  “Like who?”

  “I should get going.” He crumpled his napkin and dropped it on his empty plate. “I’ve already said more than I should have.”

  “Just like that? No hints? No advice? What good are you, then, coming here and letting me buy you lunch so you could fuck with my head?”

  “You want advice?” Raphael glanced around, then skimmed his gentle brown eyes over my face. “I’ll tell you a secret.” He curled his finger at me, and I leaned closer. “If you follow love, you can’t go wrong, even if it leads to disaster. Trust it.”

  He slid out of the booth and stood up. “I’ll get in big trouble for that one, but what are they gonna do, fire me? I’ve got tenure.” He touched my shoulder. “Thanks for lunch. I’ll see you around.”

  Raphael grabbed several toothpicks and breath mints on his way out of the diner. When I looked at him through the window, he was standing on the curb watching the pedestrians. He helped an old man with a walker board a bus. As the man’s legs passed in front of him, Raphael’s hands hovered behind the rickety knees. I knew the healing would come gradually over the next few months—remarkable from a medical standpoint, but not quite miraculous. Raphael was never one to grandstand.

  He waved to the grateful gentleman, then looked directly at me. With a casual salute, Raphael turned and meandered down the street.

  30

  Quidquid Latet Apparebit

  On a tree-lined avenue near Woodley Park, Gianna’s scent became stronger. I quickened my pace.

  Warmer. Warmer. Warmer—shit, colder. I turned and followed an almost hidden alleyway. All at once the tips of my fingers began to tingle and burn. She was here. I looked up.

  She’s clever, I thought. Faithless, but clever.

  I forced my legs to carry me up the wooden stairs, then placed my hand on the church door. It creaked open.

  Gianna was kneeling behind the front left pew, her head bowed. I crept down the aisle until I could see the edge of her face.

  “I could feel you looking for me,” she said.

  “You could have lost me if you’d kept moving.”

  She said nothing.

  “But you wanted me to find you here,” I said.

  “How dare you enter a house of God.”

  “I’d follow you into much worse.”

  She looked up then. Her eyes were red. They made my knees weak.

  “Come here,” she said. I sat on the bench next to her. “No, here, next to me.”

  “I am next to you,” I said.

  “No. Down here. Kneel.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  In fact, she did not. I stole a glance at the altar.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” I said.

  Her eyes were steel. I stared at the wooden floor. Another test. She must stay in my life at all costs.

  I reached out one hand, then the other, to grasp the back of the pew, then pulled myself forward slowly, carefully. The kneeler, though cushioned in vinyl, bit into my bones. I waited until I was sure I would not pass out, then looked at Gianna. Her eyes were wide.

  “What else would you do for me?” she whispered.

  “I will not claim Jesus as my personal savior,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Then stay with me until you do.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  She glanced at the crucifix at the front of the church. “I don’t want to be alone with you.”

  “Then let’s find a crowd. I have many things to tell you.”

  “Now before we start,” I said, “promise me that even if you don’t believe a word I’m saying, you won’t accuse me of lying. That could get very tedious and frustrating, and you don’t want me to get upset around all these animals.”

  “So that’s why we’re here.” She gestured to the sleeping panda in front of us. “Zoological diplomacy tools.” There were only half a dozen other zoo visitors—a Norwegian couple and a Japanese family—milling about the panda house. They all looked disappointed at the natural sluggishness of the famous panda.

  Gianna sat at the other end of my bench. “The most mind-boggling part of your existence is that it means that God exists, too.”

  “Did you ever doubt it?”

  “Sure. I went through an existentialist-atheistic phase as a teenager. Even after I returned to Catholicism, my intellect raised doubts, but I always shut it up with a heaping dose of faith. Somehow I always felt like my faith was a form of denial.” She pulled her feet up on the bench and rested her chin on her knees. “But if you’re real, and if God’s real, then the Bible has it right. We have the correct version of the story, and not just another take on the myth.”

  “Let’s not get carried away. The creator of the universe has many names and forms, as do I, some male, some female, some many ages extinct. All the myths are true.”

  “How can that be?”

  “The truth is much huger than anyone, even we angels, can comprehend. But whenever the mythmakers—writers, artists, thinkers—seek the truth with a passionate mind, they’ll find it, or a piece of it, anyway.” I slid closer to her. “That’s why humans are so special. You’re always seeking, always trying to find or invent bigger and bigger pieces of this truth. You’ll never grasp even a fraction of it, but you keep trying, and that’s what we all find so charming, so compelling. I think it’s why he loves you all so much, not because you’re more precious in his eyes than pandas, because you’re not. What makes you different from pandas is that you’re never happy.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Maybe not good, but it’s beautiful.” I stood and gestured to the panda. “He’s having panda dreams right now. You know what pandas dream about? They don’t dream about lounging in a bamboo field, or a fight they had with their mate, and they don’t dream about their own deaths. Right now that panda’s mind is full of soothing abstract shapes in shades of gray, pieced together from images he saw during the last two hours before his nap. A child’s face becomes a drifting oval next to the cylinder of a bamboo stalk and the odd shape of his keeper’s hat. It’s nice, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s not beautiful.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I’m telepathic, of course.”

  “Of course.” Gianna covered her face. “I should have guessed.”

  I sat beside her. “I swear to you, Gianna, I’ve never probed your mind, not even once. Okay, once.”

  “When?”

  “When we first met,” I said. “I had to convince you to go out with me, so I gave you a little push.”

  “A little push?”

  “Aren’t you glad I did?”

  “No!”

  The eager expression melted from my face as her declaration
sank in.

  “I’m sorry.” I stood and walked out of the panda house.

  “Lou, I didn’t mean . . . Lou . . .” Gianna caught up to me.

  “You wish you’d never met me.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re happy you met me, then? You thank your lucky stars every day that you fell in love with the Devil?”

  “No, I—”

  “Which is it, Gianna? Are you happy or not?”

  “I’m human, aren’t I?” Her voice tightened. “According to you, I’m never happy.” She glared at me. “What about you? Are you happy?”

  “Since I met you, yes. Closer to happiness than I’ve been since I was in Heaven. Right now, though, I’m not happy, because I don’t know if in twenty minutes, you’ll still be in my life or not. And I don’t think you know either, do you?”

  Her face contorted, and she took a deep breath. “I need more time.”

  “Time. I’ve got plenty of that. I’m twelve billion years old, and unless I do something colossally stupid I may be permitted to exist another twelve billion years.” I touched her arm and felt her flinch. “But Gianna, nothing would make me happier than spending the next forty or fifty of those years with you.”

  She began to cry. “Don’t say that. I can’t be responsible for your happiness.”

  “Sorry. I guess that was a pretty codependent remark. How about this: if you leave me, I’ll set all these animals on fire, one by one.”

  “What?!” She shoved my hand off her arm. “Don’t you dare!”

  “I was only kidding.”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  “Because you know me,” I said.

  “No, I don’t. Not anymore.”

  “Yes, you do. Gianna, forget everything you think you know about the Devil, and remember what you know about me. You love me. Remember that.” I moved towards her again, helpless to stop myself. “You do still love me, don’t you?”

  Her tear-filled eyes answered me. I bent to kiss her. When my mouth was an inch away from hers, she said, “Where were you during the Holocaust?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Tell me the truth. I need to know.”

  “I wasn’t where you think I was,” I said.

  “Where were you?”

  “I wasn’t working with the Nazis. Germany produced Hitler all by itself. I never even met the guy—not while he was alive, anyway.”

  “Then where were you?”

  “I was . . . uh . . . setting up a gulag in Siberia.”

  “Oh, that’s much better,” she said. “No shame in that at all.”

  “What did you expect? That I was planting victory gardens and running the local USO?”

  “Did you know what was happening, what the Nazis were doing?”

  “Of course I knew. I’ve always had informants around the world. I knew from the moment the genocide began.”

  “And you didn’t do anything to stop it?” she said.

  “I didn’t do anything to stop it?” I wanted to shake her. “Gianna, I may be the second most powerful being in the universe, but I’m a very distant second. What about the great and merciful What’s-His-Face?”

  “You mean God?”

  “Yes! Where was he during the Holocaust? I’ll tell you where he was. He was there. He was there, because he’s everywhere. But he turned away, like he always does in the face of suffering.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, “and besides, who are you to accuse God? I know humans who have done more to alleviate suffering in a few years than you’ve done in your whole life.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Gianna. I don’t alleviate suffering. In fact, I increase it. But that’s my job. That’s why I’m the Devil, and he’s not. And you’re not. And all the very nice people you know, they’re not the Devil, either.”

  “What if you did something good for a change? Would you still be you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if you did something that wasn’t in your job description? Like taking care of the one you love when she’s sick, or risking your professional reputation to save hers, or sacrificing your own well-being to make her and her family happy? Would you suddenly cease to exist?”

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  “Suppose for a moment that you did something good that was really big, something that was within your power to change, an enormous act of generosity or kindness, or even thwarting an act of evil. Would you still be the Devil?”

  “I am who I am.”

  “You’ll always be Lucifer. But what if someday the name of the Devil wasn’t Lucifer? What if there were no Devil at all?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” I put my hand to my forehead, “I’m having an existential aneurysm.”

  “Think about it. I bet you’ve already thought of something you can do, something that will make a difference. Why don’t you try it, just for kicks, and see how it feels?”

  “But Gianna—”

  “How can you expect me to love you, to look at you without disgust, when you’ve resigned yourself to this role you play?”

  “It’s not just a role, it’s my fate. It’s who I am.”

  “It’s who you’ve been.”

  “Yes, for ten billion years.”

  “It doesn’t matter how long. Anyone can change.” She wrapped her scarf around her neck. “Look, I’m not asking you to be a saint. I’m only asking you to perform one righteous act, for its own sake. Then try to tell yourself about fate.”

  She walked away, and a dull ache was born in my stomach, as I realized what I had to do.

  31

  Libera Eas de Ore Leonis

  This is just for kicks, I told myself as I broke into Mephistopheles’s office. Just to see what it feels like.

  He’d be out of town until that afternoon, performing an urgent errand I’d assigned to him in Richmond, Virginia. It was a legitimate request, so that if I lost my nerve and didn’t do what I came to do, he’d return unsuspecting, and our lives would go on as usual.

  I stood in front of his inner chamber office door in front of the keypad. I knew that if I missed any of the entrance codes by one digit, I’d spend days reattaching my severed limbs. My photographic memory served me well, though, and a minute later I booted up his main computer.

  Just for kicks. Using Mephistopheles’s passwords, observed and cached in my own memory over six weeks ago, I found his elaborate file directory.

  I’m not doing this for the good of humanity. Ignoring the expanding pit of pain in my gut, I deleted the basic program, then the related files for the Million Man Massacre. His strategies, maps, statistics, formulas—I zapped his years of toil into nonexistence.

  Fuck humanity. I accessed the first of three backup files and deleted it. In another two minutes the second one was gone. I found the third one and wondered if it was in fact the last remaining reproduction of his work, or if he had lied to me about how many copies he’d made.

  But Mephistopheles trusted me.

  For nearly ten minutes I stared at the screen, at his last hope for the American future he’d envisioned: flames and blood and rebellion and oppression and murder and chaos. Then, with one steady and deliberate finger, I pressed the Delete key.

  Kicks, kicks, kicks. Whee. I set his computer to do a complete backup of his new, Massacre-free hard drive. In his outer office, I inserted a blank four-millimeter tape into his main server to hold the new backup. Finally, I collected the offsite copies from his and Beelzebub’s apartments, as well as Belial’s house, and returned to my office, where the fifth copy remained. From any of these tapes he could have restored at least a large fragment of his masterpiece.

  I melted them all, lit a cigarette, and waited. At quarter past three, he came.

  “LUCIFER!!”

  “Mr. Mephistopheles, how are—”

  “Where is he, Daphne?! I’ll tear his fucking—”

  “Do you have an appointmen
t?”

  I stood. He threw open my door and glared at me, black eyes blazing, nostrils trembling with fury. I stared back at him with simple, cold supremacy.

  “Lucifer, what the fuck were you thinking? Why did you—what were you . . . how dare you . . .” Mephistopheles pointed at me, but his wrath was already subsiding under my gaze. “Why?”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” I said.

  He clutched at the back of the chair facing me. “If it wasn’t good enough . . . if it wasn’t evil enough, why didn’t you tell me?” He crammed his forehead into his palms. “You didn’t have to destroy it. You took all the backups, too, didn’t you?”

  I nodded at the small pile of melted plastic on my conference table. Mephistopheles sucked in his breath and staggered over to the remnants of his would-be legacy.

  “No . . .” He cradled the disintegrated bits of data storage. “It’s still in my head, you know—parts of it, anyway. I could reconstruct it.” He looked up at me. “But if you don’t want it to happen, I guess I could find something else . . . Lou, this was so random. I don’t understand.” My stern silence pressed him back towards the door. He put his hand on the knob and stopped.

  “Lucifer, that Massacre . . . that Massacre was like a fuckin’ baby to me.” Mephistopheles stepped back through the doorway. “And you killed it.”

  When he was gone, my knees gave way. I sank into my chair and laid my forehead on the desk to keep from passing out.

  “Mr. Lucifer . . .” Daphne’s voice was at the door. “What’s going on?” I said nothing, didn’t even look at her. In a few moments, her footsteps retreated, and the door closed.

  When I reached my apartment that evening, Beelzebub was waiting for me outside the front door.

  “What did you do to Mephistopheles?” he hissed.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” I brushed past him into the lobby.

  “I did ask him, and in between all his blubbering, I got a pretty good idea of what happened. Why did you do it, Lou? You didn’t consult with any of us.” Beelzebub followed me into the elevator. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you trying to destroy us? What are we supposed to do?”