Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  The Devil assumed the baby was descended from some long-dead fallen angel, although he had never seen the supersoul effect to quite this degree before.

  “This little guy is turned all the way up,” he remembered thinking, that night in Bethlehem. “We’ll be seeing more of him, someday.”

  And there he sat, in a grove of pines, amid other youths: olive-skinned, with long hair and shocking, multicolored eyes. He toyed with the grass between his knees, looking troubled.

  “What’s happening?” asked the Devil, ducking into the grove.

  “Micah dared Jesus to shave off his beard,” said the roundest of them.

  “And he did,” said a redhead with one eye.

  “And now,” said the round one, “he’s mad.”

  “Not mad,” said Jesus. “Just not sure it was the thing to do, after all.”

  “See?” said another of the youths. “There’s the Uncertainty Constant. I told you we couldn’t predict how he’d feel about it later.”

  “My parents,” said Jesus, looking up at the Devil, “never did get that puzzle box open.”

  “Who’s this?” someone asked.

  “A friend,” said Jesus.

  The Devil, having traveled in Judah and knowing how Jewish men felt about their beards, appreciated that Jesus might have regrets.

  “Why’d you do it?” asked the Devil.

  “He told Berlios,” said One-Eye, before Jesus could answer for himself, “that the mysteries of the heart were stronger than the Law, and Berlios said, ‘Even Jewish Law?’ and Jesus said, ‘Of course,’ so Berlios dared him to defy Jewish Law by shaving off his beard, and Jesus said, ‘It’s not so much a law as part of the spirit of the Law,’ and Berlios said that was even better, and … so. There we are.”

  “Took him three days to make up his mind,” observed a dark-eyed youth. “It’s not like I pushed him into it.”

  Jesus stood, gathering up a burlap shoulder sack.

  “Tomorrow?” he asked his friends, looking from face to face.

  They all nodded. They almost seemed to bow, and the Devil realized that despite the jokes and bantering, this circle of young men had a respect for Jesus akin to wonder and dread.

  The Devil bowed goodbye and followed Jesus out of the glade. They hiked together uphill in gathering dusk.

  “I missed some kind of argument,” said the Devil.

  “A debate,” said Jesus. “I’m teaching them how to explore ideas through argument, the way we study the Torah in Judea. And they’re teaching me Skeptical philosophy.”

  “Skeptical—?”

  “It’s a method of inquiry. Teaches you to ask questions, that there are always more questions, that nothing is ever known completely, or for certain.”

  “What’s in it for you?” asked the Devil.

  “Let’s just say I’m sharpening myself.”

  “To practice law?”

  “Beyond law. Law, we have. Nature has law. Scripture gives us Law. Rome gives us law. What I want to find is our heart. Man’s heart. I wonder if people can’t learn to be good and fair to each other out of love, not just because the law compels them.”

  The Devil considered.

  “You’d meet resistance,” he said. “They’d have to take responsibility for their own actions, and thoughts and words and feelings, instead of laying it all on some faceless authority.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Jesus replied, pausing to pick a rock out of his sandal, grasping the Devil’s shoulder for balance. “People always want to bring God into it. They might not want to hear that they, themselves, are in control. Who do you use for a crutch, when you’re in control? Who do you blame things on?”

  “Dangerous work,” said the Devil, “telling people new things.”

  As they reached the fringes of the hillside garden, the Devil’s belly rumbled, and he realized he hadn’t eaten since his last supper with Arden.

  “Want to get something to eat somewhere?” he asked Jesus. “You hungry?”

  They found a dive in the bath district, and ordered lamb.

  WHAT HAPPENED afterward was simple, and it was not simple.

  Because of course the Devil told Jesus about Arden, and of course Jesus came home with him right away, and laid hands on her.

  The Devil didn’t see why the healing mojo should work for Jesus, and not for him. Even if he had fifty or a hundred extra souls all smashed together inside him, he was still a human. He would never be an angel, or be able to heal or harm an angel, if he lived to be a thousand.

  But then Arden’s eyes fluttered open, she sat up in bed, then fell right back down again, moaning, “My head!” and the Devil forgot all about that.

  He held her hand. He brought her whatever she needed, which was mostly water, and didn’t notice until after midnight that Jesus had slipped out the door.

  “Thank you,” said the Devil to the door.

  Returning to Arden, he found her asleep. Panic rose in him for a moment, until he saw that her sleep was the sleep of ordinary rest. Healthy, and full of the little movements that signal good dreams.

  HE LAY DOWN with her without undressing, and didn’t know when he fell asleep. But he awakened after midnight to discover her face hovering close above him, her breath on his lips and eyelashes in the dark. What little light the window admitted made silver moons of her eyes.

  She silenced him with a finger before he could speak. “I felt you,” she whispered, “while I was asleep.”

  The Devil knew immediately what she meant. He felt something like regret. The regret quickly became shame.

  Shame was a new and devastating experience. He opened his mouth with a wild croak, but she kissed him, hushing him.

  And quietly she told him how she had known she was not awake, how she couldn’t feel her body and had walked strange, dreamy corridors and floated on strange seas of time and space, unable to find her way out for what seemed like an age.

  “And then I felt you,” she said, brushing his hair back, caressing his forehead. And she told him how a slow fire had risen inside her until she seemed to return to her body entirely, feeling the mattress beneath her, the breezes from the window against her naked skin, and feeling him, feeling him touch her. More, unbelievably, she felt the desire course through her motionless limbs. Still, she couldn’t break free.

  But he had awakened her. Awakened her enough that she didn’t fade, was still there to be brought out of it when the mysterious young healer had come.

  She thanked him, and kissed him and called him “my love” over and over. They moved together like two halves of the same storm until the mattress was reduced to a haystack, small cracks appeared where the walls were weak, and the next-door neighbors hid their children.

  THE NEXT DAY—bathed and whole—the Devil found Jesus in the grove again, among the Skeptics, and thanked him.

  He meant well, he really did.

  He bowed, and tossed Jesus a glass ball, and Jesus looked into it.

  When he put the ball down in the grass, Jesus looked older. He looked like a man who has lived a whole sad life in the space of five minutes. As if he had seen two thousand years of people doing hateful, ignorant things and saying it was all his idea.

  “Maybe people aren’t ready to take charge of their own hearts. Maybe the time isn’t right, yet,” Jesus said, looking at the Devil.

  It wouldn’t matter, the Devil knew. Whatever he said, now or years from now, they’d make a religion out of it, and the religion, like all religions, would go mad.

  Jesus rose, stepped carefully around the Skeptics, passed between the pines, and vanished from public life for ten more years.

  WHEN THE DEVIL got home, Arden was gone.

  Again? Why?

  She had left a note, with lovely swooping letters that burned without consuming a sheet of expensive papyrus.

  It wasn’t complicated. She was scared, that’s all.

  What kind of world was this, where even an angel could be struck coma
tose by a piece of clay? She might have spent ten thousand years in that limbo, and he knew it.

  Maybe she would be back when Earth was less earthy. Or when she was braver. Maybe it was her fault. Yes, probably. She was sorry.

  THE DEVIL RODE FAR into the country, where he kept an olive farm, and sat brooding at an upstairs window with a view of the highway and an aqueduct a hundred feet high.

  Egypt had fallen short.

  Rome, too, would fail.

  The thought of it broke his heart. It broke the heart of everyone who knew Rome.

  The years passed, and his hair grew, and the house crumbled around him.

  Sometimes news reached him. He heard about it when Jesus resurfaced, back home in Judea, and died of free speech.

  Three hundred years passed, and grass grew over the road. Trees grew in the aqueduct.

  People forgot.

  Like cavemen, they built cook fires in the shadow of the aqueduct, puzzled by the ruins, and wondered what gods had built them, what purpose they had served. They pulled stones loose, and used them to build little houses roofed with sod, and little stone churches.

  Trees grew up around the Devil, and he slept.

  28.

  The Car Wreck Song

  Los Angeles, 1984

  JUST AS SHE WAS GETTING really good and mad at the Devil for wasting her life, Memory became famous again.

  Funny thing about not being greased up on heroin: Normal life didn’t bug her as much. She was getting along okay without headlong, everyday superstardom. She had learned to ignore the voice in her head that insisted there was supposed to be more.

  It charmed her that people still bought Purple Airplane albums. That she was talked about and admired. Sometimes she got a check in the mail—a big check—along with a report saying how many more records and tapes had been sold. But it was just numbers.

  She wasn’t that person anymore, anyway. The haunted, doe-eyed sorceress on those records wasn’t the same woman she saw in the mirror now. The woman in the mirror had memories. She had frown lines and gray hair.

  She had a job, clerking at a library. The job was the routine and rhythm that kept her from the bottomless pit of shooting up.

  THEN ONE DAY she got a phone call from a producer named Dennis Hogg, with Jupiter Productions.

  “Kind of part of Universal,” he said. “How you doing?”

  He practically shone, right through the phone.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Great,” said Dennis Hogg. “Super. Listen, to start with, I’m a big fan of your music—who isn’t?—but let me save us both some time and cut to the chase, as it were. You listening?”

  She was listening.

  “We’ve been working on a pilot down here. Not much, we don’t even have our own soundstage. Anyway, there was an article about you in Parade, and everyone in the cast was like ‘I didn’t know she lived right here in L.A.! I thought she was a San Francisco gal!’”

  “I moved,” said Memory. “San Francisco’s expensive when you’re not working.”

  “Well,” said Dennis Hogg, “we all said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if she were involved with the show?’”

  Dennis Hogg shut up, and was waiting for her to say something.

  “What’s it about?” asked Memory. “The show.”

  “Would it be possible … I mean, it would be a lot easier to just show you. I could come and get you tomorrow. We’re shooting in … I can’t remember where, some burb somewhere.”

  Memory was stunned. It sounded like a fly-by-night kind of deal, but … they wanted her! They loved her!

  “Please?” said Dennis Hogg.

  “All right,” she said, playing it cool. “Why not?”

  MEMORY STOPPED HATING Dennis Hogg the second she opened her door. It was like meeting someone you’ve listened to on the radio, thinking they look like a preacher, and they turn out to have dreadlocks and a lazy eye.

  That was Dennis Hogg, with the hair and the eye. Her first thought was that she was glad he wasn’t one of those shiny West Coast people. Her second thought was that there was no way a freak like this was ever going to get a TV show off the ground.

  They got coffee at a drive-through on the way.

  “I’ve been on TV,” said Memory, “but I’ve never worked in TV, you know?”

  “I love TV,” gushed Dennis Hogg. “Can I just tell you? Love it, love it, love it, love it!

  “Oh, wow,” said Memory.

  THEY WERE FILMING at an ice-cream shop when Dennis Hogg arrived with Memory.

  Not the usual kind of ice-cream shop. The eighties were a kitschy, fun little decade, with new twists on the usual things. The good old-fashioned ice-cream parlor was now a frozen yogurt place. Yogurt was supposed to be healthier because it had a live bacteria culture in it. People were also wearing their hair big.

  The second Memory walked in, there was screaming and excitement, because they were her biggest fans. They lounged around the tables eating frozen yogurt and asking questions. First, the cast and crew asked Memory about being her famous self. Then she asked them about themselves and their show.

  There were six of them. It was kind of like a band.

  Jenny was loud and friendly and sort of pretty.

  Rob, a tall, pale, quiet man, was the male star.

  Katie, a short girl with long black hair, had a way of being astonished by everything in a way that was contagious. You could say, “My frozen yogurt is becoming unfrozen,” and Katie would go, “No way!” in a way that made you look at your frozen yogurt with a real sense of betrayal.

  SHE SAT OUT of the way with Dennis Hogg while they filmed.

  It was the strangest show she’d ever seen.

  There was a plot, kind of. Rob and Jenny were trying to think of someone for Katie to go out with. They kept suggesting different fictional people, and sometimes people in the yogurt place, and Katie would say, “No way!”

  The frozen yogurt store remained open and went about its business. That was part of the show. Dennis Hogg liked having a little reality in his TV.

  “You know you wouldn’t get paid,” Dennis Hogg told Memory, “until, you know, unless the pilot gets picked up by a studio. A big studio.”

  Most pilots didn’t get picked up.

  “It’s okay,” said Memory.

  MEMORY AGREED TO be the show’s narrator. Every show would begin with her sitting to one side with a guitar, opening with a question or a casual observation. That first day, in the yogurt shop, she told the camera: “Secrets are usually dumb. You know what I mean? Most secrets are secret because nobody wants to know them. Take Jenny, for example.”

  Then, for the opening theme, she improvised a soft but psychedelic tune while the camera drifted over to find Jenny and Rob. And the secret, the “core” of the show, as Dennis Hogg called it, was that Jenny was naked under her not very long overcoat, because she’d locked herself out of somewhere (the scripts, all agreed, lacked clarity).

  At the end of the show, Memory would make up another song. It was okay if the song was stupid.

  They went ahead and recorded music for the end of the pilot, too. The song she made up at the very end went like this:

  Na na-na na, nanana na

  Na na-na na, nanana na

  Out on the street, on the other side of this huge

  Yogurt-store window, a car just hit another car

  Not hard enough to hurt anybody, just like a tap

  I can’t think of anything else to sing about

  You’d think it would be easier, but hey

  That’s why I’m singing about the car

  That hit the other car

  The words weren’t bouncy, but she sang them in a bouncy way:

  Now the guy in the car that got hit

  Is getting out of his car

  He looks all mad

  Why? It was an accident

  It doesn’t even look expensive

  There’s all kinds of serious shit out there
<
br />   To get mad about, but

  People only get mad about petty shit anymore

  You’ll probably have to cut out the parts where I said “Shit”

  And that last part, too

  Na-na naaaaah, na-na!

  Nanna-nunt nunt muumuu nunna na-na …

  The song made Dennis Hogg cry, and they all hugged. They were like a little family.

  The show was called Random Planet.

  “We’re the Random Planet family!” Dennis bawled.

  THAT NIGHT, feeling pretty good and looking forward to the next Random Planet shoot, Memory left the bathroom with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, and the Devil was sitting on her sofa in the dark.

  “Nanna-nunt nunt muumuu nunna na-na!” sang the Devil.

  “Shut up,” she said, sitting down at the other end of the couch, still brushing.

  The Devil looked at her without saying anything. His eyes, which could be warm when he wasn’t being full of himself, or menacing, or an asshole, were suddenly the oldest safe place she knew.

  Before she quite knew it was happening, they had come together in the middle of the couch, and she was kissing him.

  HE BRUSHED HER HAIR back and cupped her head and drew her to him. What she liked best about it was she could tell he had never kissed any other woman (or angel, or cow) in quite this way, because this was how she and she alone needed to be kissed.

  She pulled back. Her robe had come undone. Realizing this, she was suddenly self-conscious.

  “If we’re going to start doing that kind of thing,” she said, “and if I’m going to be famous again, I want to get some work done first.”

  THE RANDOM PLANET family met seven more times at different public places, finishing up the pilot episode. Then someone took the unedited footage to Universal, where it vanished into a time warp and they didn’t hear anything for a long time.

  Memory used the time warp to get a face-lift. Afterward, it was as if the doctor had gone in with a scalpel and removed twenty years of smack and wine and resentment and disappointment. She looked her age. That was fine.

  She rented a black-and-white movie where everyone in it was either really old or dead, and went home to watch it by herself.