“He beat up a lot of kids,” said Newill, embarrassed.
“Yeah, but mostly you. Wouldn’t you like to get some payback, Scott?”
Then they cut to a commercial for something called the White Pill, a new drug that made you feel nice inside.
When they came back, Scratch offered Newill five thousand dollars to go beat up Phil Hilbert.
“He lives eight blocks from here,” said Scratch. “We can be there by the end of the next break. All you have to do is knock on his door, and when he answers, punch that asshole in the face.”
Newill said it was a ridiculous thing to ask a grown man to do. His wife, off camera, remarked that it wouldn’t be the first childish thing he’d ever done, and the TV audience got the impression that Mrs. Newill was thinking about how much they could use the five thousand dollars. They also got the sense that if Newill didn’t step up to this particular live-TV challenge, he was going to get made fun of for the rest of his already pretty embarrassing life.
When they came back from the second White Pill break, Newill was knocking at the door of a small, run-down bungalow with one boarded-up window.
The door opened, and there was Phil Hilbert.
He had been a large child. He had grown into a large adult, but something had happened.
He was a sick, shrunken man with all the signs of a bad cancer fight.
Newill looked over his shoulder at Scratch, who gazed back, expressionless.
The TV audience froze. People held their breath, Cheetos halfway to their mouth.
Newill punched him.
Coast to coast, people gasped.
It wasn’t a good punch. But it was enough to seal the five thousand. Newill turned away, wearing a complicated look. The cameras zeroed in.
Phil Hilbert, a tough bastard, cancer or not, grabbed Newill by the shoulder, and hit him in the neck hard enough to drop him. Newill got up and took another swing, but Hilbert, coughing, kicked him down and stomped on his wrist.
Then he went back in his house and shut the door. Newill lay on the concrete walk, obviously trying not to cry. The cameras filmed a check for five grand placed gently over his left ear, and then the credits rolled.
THE DEVIL DROPPED BY Memory’s room the next day.
“We debuted at number one in the ratings,” he told her, kneeling by her bed. “That’s eight hundred places ahead of your Coma Channel. You might even say it makes your ratings look a little sleepy.”
Only the Devil sinks low enough to fuck with people when they’re in a coma.
Memory’s hands had curled into fists. Sometimes the nurses straightened her fingers, in order to trim her nails, to keep her nails from growing right through her palms.
“Well,” said the Devil, in a high-pitched voice, pretending to be Memory, “congratulations on your hugely successful TV show.”
“Thank you, baby,” he answered, in his own voice, standing to go. He kissed her on the forehead.
Then he flew out west to Jenna’s, and she screamed “Johnnyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” and made him give her a pony ride before they went out and got drunk and got ice cream, and got photographed a lot, celebrating.
39.
His Big Season Opener
Los Angeles, 2003
FOR A WEEK AFTER his big season opener, the Devil got mixed reactions in public.
Driving around in the Kennedy limo, top down, John Scratch was easily recognized. People shouted at him and took pictures with their phones.
Others watched him pass in an uncomfortable silence.
He kept wondering what Memory would think. About the show, and other things. The weather. Lightbulbs. Medical billing. Ostriches. She had become his compass, he admitted. He needed her.
Pulling up to a stop sign, the Devil waved to fans. Girls hooted at him. Some boys pumped their fists in the air.
Needed? He was getting soft.
He was getting soft because the world was getting soft.
“Humans have such small souls these days,” he growled. “We live in small times. Otherwise people would talk about stuff that really happened, not what they saw on TV last night.
“Who are you pissed at?” he asked, as if in reply. “What’s the real problem here?”
He realized he was sitting at a stoplight, hyperventilating and talking to himself.
Some girls on the opposite corner took his picture.
LIKE A SNAPPING TURTLE, he hardened on the outside. His eyes were charismatic lances; his TV smile shone like a mouthful of combat knives. He tried not to think about what was happening on the inside. He didn’t look there anymore.
There were more shows to film, of course, now that they knew Think It Over was solid TV gold.
They filmed a show in a school, where he dared a teacher to tell the parents of his students what they really needed to hear. So the guy told a group of parents, at Open House, what everyone knew but wouldn’t say: that kids in America were getting dumber by the minute because parents, at home, didn’t challenge them to read or behave themselves. The parents got indignant. The teacher got fired, but he walked to his car with a big smile on his face.
They filmed a show where anonymous and respectable people, pillars of communities, were offered five hundred dollars to walk around the parking lot of a Babies “R” Us letting the air out of pregnant women’s tires. Most of them wouldn’t do it. It was a surprising episode. They came back the next week and offered a thousand, and it was a whole different story.
Their ratings went up and up.
Then they did a show with a woman whose husband beat her and threatened to kill her if she left, and she had been going around saying she was going to kill him, first.
This show became known as “The Mistake.”
John Scratch showed up and dared the woman to put her money where her mouth was. The producers assumed that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and the point would be that saying something like that and doing it were two different things. The night of the show, she let the cameras in the house an hour before the abusive jerk got home from work. When he walked through the door, she opened a cabinet, pulled out a sword—a sword!—and ran him straight through the gut.
The camera crew, and Scratch himself, came diving out of the next room and pulled her off, but the jerk died on the way to the hospital.
His wife went off to prison with her head high.
The Devil had better lawyers, so he got out on bail for a while before his trial started. Right away, he fled south to the Never-ending Mexican Party.
People brought him drinks and pills, and showed him new dances. He began to feel almost free, but the lawyers found him and brought him back to reality.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” they cautioned. “You’re going up the river unless you know some kind of magic spell, ha-ha.”
Ha-ha. Assholes.
He was drinking alone in a third-floor bedroom when the Great Dane, Fidel, appeared before him.
“Listen,” said Fidel. “You’re going to learn something in prison. Something hard, but very important.”
“Far out,” belched the Devil.
Fidel turned to go, but stopped at the door.
“Just so you know,” he said, “the thing you’re going to learn? It’s something dogs have known for a long time.”
Then he lifted his leg, drowned a basket of geraniums, and disappeared around the corner.
40.
The Devil Goes to Prison
San Quentin, Spring 2004
THE COURT GAVE THE Devil three years, and locked him away.
He could have escaped with a snap of his fingers, of course. But the idea of going to prison intrigued him, and he decided to serve out his sentence.
He learned more than he bargained for.
The first day he was there, a skinhead gang dragged a black inmate into the shower, held him up to one of the nozzles, and forced water into him until he drowned. The Devil, with a lot of other men, stood back and watched.
You had to admire their inventiveness, he thought.
He accepted a job mopping floors, and that’s what he was doing when the Aryan Brotherhood sent a kid named Ernie to talk to him.
“Hey, white brother,” said Ernie. You’d think an Aryan recruiter would be a huge corn-fed dude with swastika ink, but not Ernie. Ernie had boobs, as if his hormones didn’t know he was male. Ernie must have run to the Aryan Brotherhood to keep worse things from happening to him.
I’m not white, dammit! thought the Devil, gritting his teeth.
“No thanks,” he told Ernie.
“Got a problem with the Aryan Brotherhood?” asked Ernie.
The Devil nodded.
Ernie’s brow furrowed. He was out of things to say.
The next day, another Aryan showed up, and this second recruiter was everything Ernie had not been. He was corn-fed. He had swastikas tattooed on both sides of his neck.
He took the Devil’s mop, placed it in the bucket, and whispered, “We seen your show on TV. Good show. They do reruns, since you been in here.”
“I didn’t know that,” said the Devil. He reached for his mop, but the corn-fed Aryan slapped his hand away.
“Ernie says you got a big mouth.”
The Devil didn’t answer, so the Aryan hit him. The Devil staggered against the wall. The dayroom regulars, black and white and Puerto Rican and Mexican, started wandering over.
The Aryan looked like he was about to hit the Devil again, but something happened. What happened, exactly, depended on who you asked.
Some said the Devil forked his fingers at his big white enemy. Some swore they heard him say “Je vous corse!” Others said the Devil said nothing, but flashed his eyes like the flash on a camera. Others said he just stood there and looked sort of annoyed.
What all agreed on was that the Aryan’s penis fell off, tumbled down the inside of his left jumpsuit leg, and rolled onto the floor. The Aryan went out of his mind, screaming, and guards poured in. They were going to haul the Devil off to solitary until they saw what had happened, and were told the Devil hadn’t lifted a finger.
Prison docs fumbled the reattachment, and that was the last the Devil heard from the Aryan Brotherhood.
JENNA STEELE CAME to visit when he’d been in prison for a year.
“You abandoned me,” she snapped into the visitors’ phone, tapping the window with a long, black nail.
“I’ve been in here,” he pointed out.
“How selfish is that?” she cried, and stomped away, forgetting her purse, coming back for it, and stomping away again.
AN UNHOLY REPUTATION began to hover and whisper about the Devil. His fellow inmates made efforts to gain his approval.
They showed him things, sometimes. Things calculated to impress in the only way they knew how.
The leader of the Vietnamese gang showed him a collection of human scalps.
The oldest inmate, a ninety-year-old man-rapist who worked in the cafeteria, showed him a hole in his leg big enough to lower a dead rat through.
Someone left him a freshly cut human ear, like a Secret Santa gift.
Even the guards wanted to impress him. He woke up one night and found three of them in his cell, peering at him over the edge of his top-bunk mattress.
“Come with us,” said one.
“Come with us,” echoed the other two.
They stepped back and let him climb down, and then led him through the double doors leading to the next block, through the darkened cafeteria and the weight room, to a stairway leading down, down, down, to the special dungeon cells every prison has but doesn’t talk about. There, they locked him in a cell with another prisoner, saying, “We thought you might find this interesting.”
The Devil was puzzled. Then his eyes adjusted, and he got a look at his cellmate.
His cellmate was a skeleton.
A human approximation, anyway. He breathed, he had eyes that looked here and there. But his hair was gone, and so were his teeth.
“How long have you been in here, bro?” asked the Devil.
The prisoner made a gagging noise. The Devil realized that this was the man’s attempt at language. His mind was peanut butter.
The Devil tried to get his cellmate to count to five, to say his name, to say how old he was or what year he thought it was. But all he could ever get was the gagging.
At mealtimes, the man moved. He crawled, moaning, to the slot near the floor, ate from his tray right where it appeared, and pushed it listlessly back into the corridor. Then he crawled back and sat down again.
When the guards let the Devil out, they let him know that this man had been in solitary for fifteen years. He was their prize, their cautionary tale.
The guards had to be worse than the prisoners, explained the guards.
It made sense.
AFTER THE GUARDS showed him their pet, the Devil found prison more disturbing than before. These were people? This was the species he’d thought could challenge God?
He almost let himself out. But staying had become an exercise in discipline and pain management, like a kung fu master holding his palm over a burning candle.
He tried to stop thinking about the creature in the dungeon, but couldn’t. And when you couldn’t stop thinking about something, the Devil knew, your subconscious was trying to get your attention.
Hiroshima and Auschwitz should have clued him in, he thought. A thousand things should have clued him in, but they hadn’t grabbed his attention the way this single, mangled human had finally done.
He had raised humanity as if they were his child. Like any parent, he believed his child’s mistakes were just growing pains. What if you had a kid, and like all kids, he wasn’t perfect, but you had high hopes for him, and sometimes he was bright and showed promise. Sometimes he even amazed you. When he was mean to other kids, you tried to teach him better. You tried not to notice when he pulled wings off flies. He would grow out of these things, you thought. But what do you do the day you find out he’s been killing people and burying them in the vegetable garden?
That wasn’t being a proud rebel. That was just being a sick-ass motherfucker.
The Devil came smashing out of prison like a comic-book demon.
HE WAS BONES and flames on a flying motorcycle, screaming east like a meteor, to New York, where he burned to a stop beside Memory’s bed. He locked the door and switched the Coma Channel to play reruns.
“Wake up,” he commanded. His voice cracked.
She lay still.
He burned himself naked. He froze himself hard.
He missed her, wanted her, so badly. He was sick with the crazy tide that comes with panic and not knowing what to think or do.
He gathered her in his arms, his anguish and frustration and rage boiling though him. But he wasn’t soothed—his tongue uncoiled like a dragon’s. He fought himself, but the engine of want began to churn out the hope that love and need and desire this strong might bring her back, the way it had Arden—and that loneliness fed the engine, too, until it was all he could do to be tender. It almost made him scream, but he curled his fists until his knuckles burst and went slowly—and waited until he felt her loosen around him somewhat, before thrusting, once, twice—and erupted with a roar.
He pulled free, shivering over her like a rag doll propped on its haunches. Head hanging, hair hanging, horns gleaming.
Memory lay still.
The Devil crouched there breathing, simply breathing, for some time, before he admitted to himself that she was not going to wake up. He gently smoothed her hair back into place, tidied her bed, and kissed her goodbye.
He fled the dawn across the sky and shrank at last back into his cell.
He didn’t know what to think. Of what he had done. Of himself. Of people. Of anything.
So he didn’t think at all. He just sat there, smelling like smoke.
TIME PASSED like a long, dry fart.
When fourteen months had gone by, they came and got him and let him out.
Just like any other prisoner, he looked older, and was smaller in some ways, and haunted.
When they gave him back his cell phone, there were nine thousand calls stacked up, mostly from the TV studio.
He dialed.
“Hello?” said the phone.
“John Scratch,” he said.
And the phone got all excited and told him they had decided to pick up Think It Over right where they’d left off, minus the felony programming.
He should say “No,” he knew.
And just like that, right there at the prison bus stop, the Devil understood the thing he’d been trying not to understand.
People were nothing special, after all. They were just animals. Humanity was just a fiction he had created to help himself believe he had a chance to get Arden back. Evolution hadn’t produced humans yet, just a Frankenstein monster that kind of looked human.
Maybe he had known this, even before prison. He had always wanted to think that one day they’d shake off the spell, stand up, and say, “Enough is enough! We’ve become addicted to stupidity! Leapin’ lizards, we’re better than this!”
That’s what humans would do. They would break the addiction.
Except it wasn’t an addiction. Stupidity was their natural state. Their shiny civilizations were nothing more than a cheap coat of paint, the work of a few bright people, stolen and perverted by a world of village idiots.
Egypt. Rome. Smoke.
Camelot. America. Mirrors.
The realization became bright and clear, as if his brain were a sun made of glass.
The Devil threw up down the front of his cheap, complimentary getting-out-of-prison suit, and people at the prison bus stop moved away and pretended nothing was wrong.
“JOHNNY?” SAID HIS CELL PHONE. “We want to restart the show as soon as possible. John?”
Think It Over wasn’t going to jar people awake, the Devil knew. It was animal cruelty, pure and simple, like playing mean tricks on puppies.
So what? Who was he, Mother Teresa? No, he was the fucking Devil, so watch out.
“Soon as possible,” he told the phone, snarling. “Great. I’ll be there.”
Up Jumps the Devil Page 28