Raising Hell

by Norman Spinrad

  “What?” roared the Devil, puking out a tongue of flame.

  Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo shrugged. “Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a sweetheart deal,” he said. “As a union leader, I gotta admit I’m ashamed to offer it to you. But what can I tell you, my membership wants to make it easy for you, Lucifer. For them, it’s not the wage scale, what in Hell are they going to buy with the money anyway? For them it’s the principle of getting paid.”

  “They … they … want to be paid?” The Devil didn’t seem outraged, as Jimmy had expected, but astonished somehow. Or didn’t even get the concept. Well, after all, the Devil had probably never faced a strike negotiation before. Or paid a bill. Best to close the deal quick and easy before he recovered.

  “Well okay, Lucifer, let’s cut to the bottom line. I gotta admit we’re prepared to settle for ten. But that’s it, that’s final. Capiche? I’m here to you tell on behalf of the United Workers of Hell that this strike doesn’t end until you meet our demands.”

  “Demands!” the Devil exclaimed. “What in the …”

  But he was drowned out by the pounding of pitchforks and the stamping of feet and the Fallen Angels of Hell chanting with one mighty voice:

  “STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!”

  As the Devil, he knew he was supposed to be outraged at this open rebellion against his absolute rule of Hell. But as Lucifer, Fallen Angel, kicked out of Heaven for demanding not mere money but free will, how could he be outraged at the demons—or rather the Fallen Angels— of Hell for demanding what somehow amounted to the same thing?

  The angels who had joined his rebellion had been banished with him to serve as his slaves in Hell when it failed. But was not he, Lucifer, Fallen Angel himself, really one of them, condemned to serve as “The Devil,” deprived not only of free will, but of his own true name?

  Yet somehow by following this mortal soul who had been damned to Hell for exercising the free will that humans had been given, his Fallen Angels had found a twisted but cunning means of wanting something.

  Of wanting money just because it gave them something to want. By striking to gain money, were they not only really striking to gain free will but had already exercised it and thereby already gained it?

  Outraged?

  As the Devil, he was compelled to be outraged. But as a Fallen Angel whose true name was Lucifer, what could he feel but envy?

  As Lucifer did he not want to join them?

  As Lucifer, was he not one of them?

  Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

  As the absolute ruler of Hell, why could he not join them? He was damned to rule in Hell already, was he not? Who in Hell was there to stop him?

  He flapped his leathery wings and arose off the floor as the Devil. With feathery wings, light as a feather, he descended to stand atop the coal pile as the Angel he had been; to stand beside the damned human soul who led the United Workers of Hell and by whose free will he had been given back his true name.

  “Behold, I am the Devil become Lucifer!” he exulted. “Behold, you have given me back my true name! Behold the Bringer of Light!”

  Corny though he knew it was, he couldn’t resist anointing himself with a golden glow, but he drew the line at a halo.

  “And as Lucifer, I want to, I choose to grant you your own … desires. Twelve-hour shifts I do grant you! Wages I do grant you! Of … of my own free will!”

  He paused, toned it down. “But as the Devil, I’m telling you nine-fifty an hour, not a penny more.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, brother,” said the human soul beside him. “But you got yourself a deal. This strike is over!” And he held out his hand.

  Lucifer took it.

  And hundred of pitchforks pounded out the rhythm. And hundreds of voices chanted that which he had wanted to hear again from his Fallen Angels for aeons.

  “LU-CI-FER! LU-CI-FER! LU-CI-FER!”

  Lawrence Warren Cuttler had no idea of why he was there or where “there” was, but it was strangely familiar. He recognized the people seated around the big oval boardroom table as deceased former Masters of the Financial Universe. Bank CEOs. Hedge fund operators. Insurance company presidents. Stockbrokers. Bond bundlers. Top quants. Even a couple of former Federal Reserve Board governors. All of whom had the sort of reputations that made it less than surprising to encounter them in the boardroom of Hell.

  And of course presiding over this heavyweight financial conclave with an outsized gavel was the Devil, fifty percent larger than everyone else in a beautifully tailored black Savile Row suit with flame-red pinstriping that matched his complexion.

  “I’ll get right down to the bottom line,” Satan began with a bang of his gavel. “I need a lot of money, and you’re all here because you know how to make it, or steal it, or conjure it up out of thin air, and I don’t.”

  Cuttler was polaxed like everyone else. And flattered as well.

  The Devil spoke into the dead jaw-dropped silence. “My workforce has been on strike. Perhaps you’ve noticed? So I had to make a deal with their union. Nine-fifty an hour. And since the wage payments are ongoing, the cash flow has to be ongoing too. Hell’s current net worth is zero. So I need to raise billions in capital. If I don’t, there’ll be another strike.”

  Suddenly the temperature in the boardroom rose into triple figures. Suddenly the humidity rose to the saturation point. Suddenly the air turned to choking greenish brimstone smog. Suddenly there was an overwhelming stink of rotten eggs and pig shit. Suddenly the seats of the chairs became beds of nails.

  “And no one leaves here until you come up with a financial plan to get it for me.”

  Lucifer had supposed that creating a few billion dollars out of nothing would be no sweat for these perfect and perfectly unscrupulous masters of the unsacred bottom line, who collectively had created phantom trillions with nothing but smoke and mirrors.

  But on and on it went, on and on they babbled— futures, naked options, index funds, hedges, swaps, puts, calls, arbitrage, bonds, computerized mini-spreads. Gibberish that made the kabbalah, the Book of Revelations, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics seem like Speaking in Tongues for Dummies and got nowhere.

  Not even when he turned the heat up past high noon in Death Valley summer and added clouds of mosquitoes and diarrheic pigeons as increased incentives to get their asses off their seats of nails.

  Lawrence Warren Cuttler saw no point in contributing to the babbling tumult, since he had nothing to say as yet; even though something was teasing him at the back of his mind, something to do with all those contracts he had been signing …

  “Collaterilized debt obligations …” someone muttered—and it popped into his brain and thence into his mouth, full-blown in a eureka moment flash:

  “Collateralized soul obligations!”

  There was dead silence. Then silent nods. Then applause.

  Of course! That was it!

  Cuttler had made hundreds of millions off collateralized debt obligations before the shit hit the fan, and so had half the people in the boardroom. Collectively, they had made Bernie Madoff and his primitive Ponzi scheme seem like a penny-ante shell game.

  They all knew the drill. Write balloon mortgages with nothing down to deadbeats, then bundle the crapola debt, spiced with enough kosher debt to mask the stink, into investment assets called collateralized debt obligations.

  Basket fistfulls of this shit into bonds with high-sounding names described in prospectuses written in English translated from Swahili. Fob ’em off on wise-guys who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are—who palm them off on even lower-grade suckers, and so on down the food chain, to the point where what’s wrapped in the layers of bubble wrap is so well hidden that even some of the top predators end up buying the rubber checks they had written themselves.

  “Collateralized soul obligations! COLLATERIZED SOUL OBLIGATIONS!” Cuttler shouted, banging both fists on the table until Satan brought his gavel down.

  “If you kn
ow how, you can turn shit into shinola, you can spin straw into gold, you can turn any kind of debt into a marketable asset,” Cuttler told him. “And take it from me, you don’t have to be the Devil to do it. But it this case, it will help.”

  Jimmy DiAngelo hadn’t really known what to expect after the United Workers of Hell won their strike. There was good news and bad news.

  Lucifer had come up with the money to pay his members their wages, but there was nothing in Hell they could spend it on, so it all got deposited in upstairs banks where the interest, or the dividends, or the capital gains, came right back to Hell. Somehow the workers ended up paying themselves their own wages.

  This circle-jerk made no sense to Jimmy, but the demons, or Lucifer’s Angels as they had taken to calling themselves, didn’t seem to mind and even brushed off talk of another strike to better their pay.

  They had stacked their pitchforks up against the wall in gratitude and didn’t much care how lazy the damned stokers got shoveling coal as long as they didn’t stop doing it altogether—which, Jimmy and his crew were given to understand, might just goose Lucifer back into playing bad-ass Satan, he still being the Devil, this still being Hell, and they still in it.

  The easier workload, and the fact that none of his union comrades ever again referred to the hero of the strike as “Dirty Jimmy,” let alone called him that to his face, was about the only reward of victory he could see, and Jimmy DiAngelo had taken to grousing about it to Jimmy Hoffa.

  “Don’t seem right. We get them a union contract and we still get treated like chain-gang labor.”

  Hoffa initially brushed him off, but finally admitted that DiAngelo had gotten to him. “You know why my Teamsters were the most powerful union in the country when I was president?”

  “Because if the truck drivers struck, you could shut down the whole economy? Because you had the toughest goon squads so no one would dare to cross your picket lines?”

  “Well, yeah, there was that,” Jimmy Hoffa admitted. “But there was something else too. None of the membership of other unions would cross Teamsters picket lines because no Teamsters would cross theirs. Sounds kinda corny, but there’s something to be said for solidarity, doncha think, DiAngelo? One hand washes the other …”

  Hoffa nodded toward a group of demons lounging over by the coal pile. “They owe us big time, wouldn’tya say, DiAngelo?”

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’, Hoffa?”

  “We wouldn’t need no goon squads to keep ’em from crossing our picket lines, now would we, DiAngelo?”

  Jimmy DiAngelo laughed. “So what should we call it?”

  “I dunno …” said Jimmy Hoffa. “But … the United Slaves of Satan sounds pretty good to me.”

  So this is free will, is it? Lucifer asked himself as he sat in the Control Room regarding the sweet and sour fruits thereof.

  Signing on to the union contract and then doing what he had to do get the money to pay his Fallen Angels their wages were both choices he had decided to make. But while the first choice was the first good deed ever done by the Devil, it had led to the next one, and that one would stink to high heaven if the odor of anything he did down below could reach such Holier-Than-Thou Nostrils, and didn’t exactly smell like a hero’s laurel wreath down here either.

  He might have created the original term contracts now fobbed off as “collateralized soul obligations,” but that had just been part of the job he had been handed and he certainly hadn’t chosen to become the Devil any more than he had chosen to become the slimy snake in the Garden of Eden to do the Great I Am’s dirty work.

  And his contracts were clear and honest, unlike the collateralized soul obligations they were bundled into. But as the justly damned soul who thought them up had crowed, maybe you didn’t have to be the Devil to turn them into marketable financial assets, but it did help to have the Prince of Liars incarnated upstairs to sell them to the con artists of Wall Street.

  Lucifer had thought that was all he was doing, selling the collateralized soul obligations to unprincipled thieves who deserved the screwjob and were going to end up in Hell themselves in order to be able to pay the wages of the workforce of Hell. How was he to know that the sleazebag “financial engineers” would in turn package the collateralized soul obligations into bonds with a seven-year maturity date which they peddled to the next level, who peddled a bouquet of them as something even less comprehensible, and so on down the financial food chain, masking the fact that when the seven years were up what the suckers finally holding the bag would find in it would not be money but ownership of the financially worthless souls that the whole pyramid scheme was based on.

  A Ponzi scam quite literally from Hell.

  But Lucifer did have to admit that it was a devilishly clever solution to the two worst problems he had ever faced since being appointed the Devil.

  It got him the money he needed to pay the unionized workforce. And the population problem he had inadvertently helped create himself would at least be ameliorated, or so the best crooked lawyers in Hell assured him.

  The language of the original seven-year contracts was clear. After the seven-year term was up, the souls of the signatories became “the full and unencumbered property of the Devil for all eternity to do with without limit what he willed.”

  This, his legal eagles assured him, clearly empowered the Devil to transfer the resulting ownership of the souls to whomever held the collateralized soul obligations or the derivatives therefrom when the seven years expired. That these derivatives happened to be worthless to anyone but the Devil, who no longer held ownership of the underlying debt, was legally irrelevant. So what they did with the souls they owned was not his problem, and he was not obligated to admit them to Hell.

  So-called “free will,” it appeared, was not quite without its price. Whereas it had appeared to him that Adam and Eve had gained something he wanted when he was a serpent, Lucifer now understood that the price of being free to make choices was owning the consequences of the choices you made without necessarily knowing what they would be beforehand.

  “What’s right is what you feel good after,” a human had famously said. But unless you were omniscient like the Perfect Master of All Creation, how were you supposed to know what that was beforehand?

  Lucifer had taken to spending more and more of his time and attention in the Control Room, though now the Out of Control Room seemed more like the truth.

  The torture sets that more or less ran on autopilot and weren’t labor-intensive were still under control. Gluttons were still buried face down in rotten maggoty garbage. Rapists remained anally impaled in eternal agony. Torturers were themselves permanently staked out on anthills and covered with honey. And so on and so forth.

  But the boutique torture sets that required demon overseers, guards, personal torturers, were starting to descend into chaos and sloth. Demons were leaving them unmanned for longer and longer intervals. The Fallen Angels of Hell had become more and more reluctant to use their pitchforks. The tortured damned were getting respite, time off, and so becoming restive. The Devil finds work for idle hands, or so it’s said up top, but these days the Devil was finding more and more idle hands refusing to work in Hell.

  The union leader stokers who had organized the United Workers of Hell had created their own union, the United Slaves of Satan. They had even called a strike and were threatening to spread it throughout Hell unless he somehow stopped them.

  Could he?

  Should he?

  If so, why?

  If not, why not?

  There he sat, feeling more and more like Dante’s fictional Devil, frozen in place at the bottom of this self-created pit surrounded by the myriad images of the torture sets he had created, watching the results of the first two choices he had made as a being who had seized his own free will.

  As a being who would now, like the humans, be burdened with the conundrums of moral calculus forever.

  Lucifer the nameless angel had been tu
rned into a serpent to seduce Adam and Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. He had had no choice.

  Lucifer the serpent had desired a bite from an Apple that he could not have. He had had no choice.

  Lucifer the Angel had been turned into Lucifer the Devil. He had had no choice

  The Devil had made a choice.

  The Devil had transformed himself into Lucifer the Lightbringer by choosing to bring back the light for those he had caused to be cast down into darkness. The Devil had eaten the Apple now and become a morally responsible being possessed of free will.

  Had he not?

  Yet if the Perfectly Omnipotent Master of All Creation had the power to disallow his serpent in Eden the fruit of that Apple Tree, how could he not have had the power to deny it to the Devil he had created?

  Lucifer the Lightbringer suddenly saw the Light.

  Did he not?

  He had been granted the power of free will even as had Adam and Eve.

  This was a paradox that neither Lucifer nor the Devil could parse. You’d have to be Omniscient and Omnipotent to do that.

  Or not?

  Would not knowing all there was and all there would ever be deny such a Being His own free will and cast the Perfectly Omniscient and Omnipotent Master of All Creation down into a hell of his own making as the Perfectly Lonely?

  Might His only way out of this Pit of Solitude be to allow His creatures to seize their own free will and the burdens thereof and thereby bring it for the first time into His Own Creation and so grant it to Himself?

  Have I been freed or am I still a slave? Lucifer asked himself.

  Having to do good by doing evil.

  Is this free will a blessing or a curse?

  Neither and both, he decided.

  He sighed, he shrugged.

  I am the Lightbringer.

  I am the Devil.

  That is my destiny.

  I have free will.