Sympathy for the Devil (24 page)

And Harriet wept, filthy and condemned, all the way back to Manhattan.

Despite ourselves, we'd gotten the footage we needed. Frame-by-frame analysis revealed how the pigflesh charred while the greedy napalm burned, the pigs' innards curling out to embrace the flame, providing fuel from within. My programmers refined the process to a simple algorithmic dance, which writhed in perpetuity like a blazing Jacob's ladder, an infinite meal encountered by a ceaseless appetite. Soon we had hellfire on tap.

It gave us all nightmares--even the programmers, who didn't know our client's business model. But it looked very good on TV.

A few weeks of tweaking later, we were done.

The day we delivered, Harriet and I went out for a celebratory drink.

"Did the client pay you?" she asked.

I nodded. True to our contract's terms, I'd received a FedEx that afternoon, the Secret of Damnation printed out in a one-page summation no longer than a pitch for an action movie. The whole thing would have fit easily on one of those big-sized post-its. I had read it twice, then folded it up and carefully placed it in my breast pocket. I would burn it that night, after one more read. It seemed simple enough, but I didn't want any loopholes or trick language screwing up my trip to heaven.

"Yeah," I said. "The project's all done."

I'd already paid Harriet off with cash out of my own pocket, just like everyone else on the job. And a healthy bonus for not squealing to my partners that I was working on the side. But from the look in her eye, she wanted more now.

"Was it a lot of money?" she asked.

"Well, not money, really."

"I didn't think so."

I coughed into my beer. "You know I'm strictly non-disclosure on this."

"Of course."

We drank for a while. We were still lovers, but barely so. Nothing had ever come close to those minutes in New Jersey, enveloped by the grime of a new abyss.

"I think," she said, "that I'm finally going to take that vacation I keep talking about."

"Africa?" I said weakly, careful not to inflect my voice with any enthusiasm.

"Yeah," she said. "Africa. Just me, some paint and a few brushes. I'm going strictly analog for a year, maybe two. Like going native. No computers for a while."

"I see." I couldn't believe she was saying this, so soon after I'd read the Secret.

"No Photoshop, no modeling software. Just real objects to look at and to paint. Pigment and white canvas. Sky and landscapes."

"Sounds... nice," I said flatly.

"So," she asked, "is it simple?"

"Is what simple?"

"The Secret of Damnation."

My hand went to my breast pocket, a sinking feeling hitting me like the NASDAQ in freefall. "How the hell did you know about that?"

"He told me. He came to me and told me what he paid you."

"That fucker."

"So I want a percentage. Tell me the Secret."

"I can't."

"Just part of it. Give me a clue."

"I signed an NDA, Harriet. I can't even give you a hint. If I tell, I go to Hell."

She shrugged, laughed as if she'd only been kidding.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to put you in breach of contract." A pause, a wicked smile. "But it's pretty straightforward, right?"

"Harriet! Stop."

"But--"

"No hints, no adjectives, no information. Nada." I put my hands over my mouth.

"Okay," she said slowly, swirling one finger around the lip of her glass flirtatiously. "But if I was doing something, something bad? Bad enough to get me sent to Hell, for instance. Could you give me a sign?"

"Like scratch my nose with my right index finger?"

"Yeah, you could."

"No, I could not. Harriet, this is the Devil we're talking about," I said. "Not some jealous boyfriend I can hide from down in Miami. He's the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Hades, and if I fuck up he'll come and carry me away screaming to Hell. You know, the one we just created?"

"Yeah, sure," she said. "Whatever."

A silent moment elapsed.

"But is it a big thing?" she asked playfully. "Or just a detail?"

I shut my eyes, locked both hands over my face. I didn't want any clues to pass over my visage--agreement or denial, warmer or colder. I tried to think of the latest virus hoax, the closing prices of Falling Man stock over the last week, anything to occlude the fatal knowledge in my mind.

Despite these efforts, I clearly remembered the Secret of Damnation. The simplicity of the idea, the easy charm of it. I could have explained it to Harriet in two minutes.

"Come on, relax," she said. "I don't believe any of it anyway."

"Yes, you do," I said from behind the curtain of my hands.

She snorted. "It's obvious what's going on here. This all just started out as self-indulgent therapy for you. You're a software uber-geek who thought you were king of the world, until you almost died. Mortality wasn't pretty, and worse, it was way out of control. So you decided to deal with the post-traumatic stress the only way you know how. You decided to domesticate the afterlife into a software project. It's so predictable and lame. You hire a few coders and artists to put your near-death hallucination--clearly inspired by the
Tribulation Alley
burn--onto a nice, safe computer screen. There, you can adjust its frame rate and resolution, play with its aspect ratio and palette. Then you burn it onto a disk, and you think you've got eternal life now. It's pathetic. You've reduced heaven and hell to pixels, for God's sake."

"No," I insisted. "What we made, it's really Hell. I swear it is."

"It's nothing but a screen-saver!" she shouted. "By definition: some nice graphics that do nothing!"

"Harriet, I instant-messaged you from beyond the grave, remember? And you just said that you met the Devil, for Pete's sake!"

"You messaged me from a County General Hospital in LA, you fuck. I checked the timing. You'd come out of your coma by the time I got your message."

"That's impossible."

"I called them. You were already ambulatory."

"They made a mistake. Or maybe it's a time zone thing. I woke up after I messaged you, I swear."

"LA's three hours behind us. Any mistake would have worked the other way around."

"What about the Devil? You said he appeared to you."

"The Devil, sure. You hired some cute actor--some very cute actor, I might add--to mess with my head. What, did you think I'd fuck you again for the Secret of Damnation? Was this whole thing a way to get in my pants from the beginning?"

"No, it was a way to get out of Hell."

She laughed again, but the sound was dry and ragged now. "Listen, I don't know whether you're pulling some elaborate hoax on me, or if you really believe all this. Either way, you're totally out of your mind. But I'll still take the bait, if that'll make you happy. Tell me, what's your idea of salvation?"

"Salvation?"

"Yes. Tell me what you think goodness is. What do you think saves us, redeems us in the end? What's the Secret?"

"I'm not at liberty to disclose that."

"Fuck off."

"I told you, I signed an NDA!"

"I'm not buying that shit! There's no Devil, just you and your ego and your post-traumatic paranoia. Let me help you."

"I'm not going to damn myself."

"Listen, I've been staring into your personal pit of evil for the last six weeks. I helped you visualize it, went there with you, even fucked you there. Aren't you cured yet?"

My reply was strangled by a whiff of sulphur.

"Show me the other side of you," she pleaded. "You saw Hell because when you almost died you realized there's this hole in your life. A stinking pit, right? So you worked through it onscreen. Good for you. And now this bogus Satan comes to tell me you've had a revelation. Fine, I want to hear it. But talk directly to me for once. Please. What's your Secret of Salvation?"

"I'll go to Hell if I tell you."

"You won't go to Hell just for talking to me, darling."

I covered my mouth again.

"Just talk to me!" a sob breaking her voice.

For the first time since we'd napalmed our sad little pigs, true anguish showed on Harriet's face. Like me, she had seen Hell, even if only on a screen. The brave new Hades 2.0, red in tooth and claw, every searing pixel of it. She had shaped and morphed it, tweeked and tweened it, wrangling every RGB value to its optimum. She had even felt it for a moment, out in our Jersey swamp, the heat and stench of that chemical fire as it consumed the offal we'd brought with us, body doubles for the damned.

Despite her words, I knew she now believed in Hell.

But unlike me, Harriet didn't know how to escape. She lacked my trick, my Secret, my certainty of heaven. And she must have known that she was damned as I had been.

She rose from her chair angrily, slammed a twenty on the table, and stood.

At last I realized the horror of the Devil's NDA. For the rest of my life, I would be trapped by my knowledge of the Secret, stuck in contractual amber as I watched friends and lovers walk blithely toward an eternity of pain, unable to stop them. Unable even to hint at the grim future I foresaw. Decade after decade of powerlessness. How many souls would I damn through my inaction?

The devil had snared me, not in his domain, but in my own private little hell of non-disclosure.

"Wait," I said.

Harriet stood there, her eyes burning.

I almost said it, almost told her. I almost went to hell.

"Nothing."

She turned and fled.

It is, of course, only a matter of time.

No one can bear the weight of this knowledge forever. At some point, I'll slip, and reveal the Secret to save someone. After all, the damned are all around me. My friends, co-workers, and lovers are all stained with the soot of the burning. I still read the NDA every day, more carefully than when I foolishly signed it. It's a very well-written contract. An expression or a gesture leading to the truth could damn me. Any hint at all.

Sooner or later, I will fuck up.

I've thought of suicide, the quick and dirty way to lock in my special knowledge, my insider's price, but I'm too much of a wimp to pull the trigger.

At this writing, I live in Africa. Less than one percent of the population of this city speak English, an added layer of protection. But my old software buddies still visit, and I'm too lonely to turn them away, though I can see how damned they are. A few of them seem to know that I have a secret. They question and prod me about my new life, about why I left their world. Perhaps the Devil appears to them as he did to Harriet, just to tempt me with their salvation.

He wants my soul badly.

But I haven't completely despaired. Old Scratch showed his weakness to me, back when I was dead. He doesn't have good software help. He doesn't understand the new paradigms of information distribution.

So I've finally implemented that dead-man switch, the threat that I once held over my partners' heads.

Every month, I send a message, the correct codeword from a non-patterned series of my own devising. The FallingMan.com server waits for this missive impatiently. Should I die (to be trundled safely up to heaven), or finally screw up and spill the beans to someone (to be carted off screaming to hell), my monthly codeword will be missed, and the server will leap into action.

Indeed, if you are reading this, that is exactly what has happened.

So please forgive the breadth and intensity of this spam. I'm sure someone's had to delete this story from about ten thousand mailing lists, and my recording of it should occupy about half the Napster and Gnutella indexes, listed as everything from the Beatles to Britney Spears. Part of my job at Falling Man was viral marketing. The whole world is reading with you.

So this, my friend, is no secret:

Forget the backups. Screw the pixels. Lose the smartcards. Avoid the minibars. Overthrow the rule-governed systems. Break the commandments. Exceed the algorithms. Ignore the special effects. Don't undo.

Disclose everything. Paint the landscape.

Go analog.

Save your soul.

Like Riding A Bike

Jan Wildt

For Anne R.

1

Velma Fish awoke to a curious smell, familiar yet strange.

She opened her eyes to the same old bedroom--nothing out of place. The sun streamed through the window. She'd slept like a baby: none of that fitful drifting.

But there was a certain sharp odor, one she knew from a lifetime ago, when, as a little girl, she'd visit her grandma's house. A mustiness that tells you the people who live there can't smell anymore.

That was the thing about getting on in years, of course: your youthful memories were clear as a bell. The trouble was the past ten minutes.

That, and the joints. Normally the morning was worst, of course. As Mrs. Knowles across the hall liked to say: "Oh, I have a wild life. I go to bed with Ben Gay and get up with Arthur Itis."

Yet right now Velma's whole bony frame was oddly, pleasantly numb, like her bad hip after Dr. Whitlow injected it. Slick and clean inside. Even the fingers felt fine, like someone else's.

She wiggled them experimentally. She saw smooth, soft hands and arms--
not her own
--and leapt from bed, terrified. Something was wrong, as wrong as things get.

She heard her blood pounding.

She looked at the legs beneath her, the mirror in front of her, where staring wide-eyed was a frightened child, a dark-haired girl of sinuous limb, hiking the hem of her nightie--Velma's own.

"I'm dreaming," she said calmly, and the girl's lips moved with hers. "Wake up, Velma."

But it was no dream.

2

--Now
next
please.

--Motion for disjunction A.D. 1998 one Velma Alice Fish behest of Bertillon, Throne, FAAC. Duration fifty-three years.

--Fifty-three
years
.

--Years, Excellency.

--Counselor Bertillon: approach and hearken.

Bertillon came forward, wings respectfully folded.

--Your Excellency, if I--

--Since Yahweh fell silent, how many disjunctions have been entertained here, for all the billions of lives on Earth?

--Just twenty, Excellency.

--And how many granted?

--Three, Excellency.

--And none over thirty
seconds
.

--I'm aware of that, Excellency.

--We're ready to hear just how special this is.

--Not special at all, Excellency. That is the point.

--Counselor, you are the last we would hope to castigate for frivolity. Having done so before. Having almost confiscated your imprimatur.

--And yet your Excellencies ultimately saw merit--

--Not all of us, Counselor. I remain unconvinced that Fermat's Last Theorem, or its local proof, is the linchpin for Mother Church's existence on Earth. As to Velma Fish: make your case.

--Very well, Excellency. Disjunction, of course, being a purely physical levorotation through the dense manifold, devoid of noetic efficacy at--

--Spare us. I'll recite a brief list of things we have
not
disjoined for. The Mesozoic catastrophe. The Holocaust. The New Manila meme-plague. So
who is Velma Fish
?

--Insignificant in the scheme, Excellency. To be candid, she is randomly chosen.

--This is not illuminating, Counselor. Why insignificant? And why--I choke on it--fifty-three years?

--Because we have never tried it, Excellency. Our God-given powers are largely untested. An innocuous experiment here and there might promote man's spiritual betterment in ways we never contemplated.

--If we dictated the actions of man, Counselor, we would have a more direct interest in his betterment. But that interest must remain, primarily, his. We merely set the stage for him, through Nature, through physical law and, perhaps, its
judicious
abrogation.

--Really, Excellency, one needn't--

--Enough.
Denied, with prejudice
. Next and last please.

And His Excellency made a peremptory reach for the cool suit, which, when donned, would slow his lepton-based metabolism even further, allowing him to access without disruption the highly-if-precariously-ordered lattice of Yahweh Himself, to Whom he would convey this docket.

--Presentation Teresa of Calcutta, Excellency.

--Ah, welcome, Saint Teresa. Oh, it's official up here, dear--your postmortem miracles coded and booked. A sunset eclipse over Ahmadabad that knocks, their, socks,
off
.

3

She looked in the mirror a hundred times. The girl kept looking back. The girl looked just like Velma had, once upon a time.

Seventy-year-old Velma was inside her seventeen-year-old self, and there was no other way to put it.

She was hungry--couldn't remember such an appetite. A three-egg omelet would be just the thing. But the refrigerator was empty. She pulled herself together and set out for the corner grocery.

"Good morning," she said to the clerk, and jumped at her own piping voice, no longer lax with age.

She got the eggs, and then, as though from habit, found herself in the feminine hygiene section. She selected a box of tampons and some sanitary napkins--who knew; she might be needing them.

As she let herself back into her apartment, nosy Mrs. Knowles popped her head out across the hall. Their eyes met. Mrs. Knowles raised her eyebrows and started to say something. Velma just gave a little wave and went on in, as though she were, say, a long-lost grand-niece--she'd need a story of some sort. She couldn't be a grandchild, because Mrs. Knowles knew full well Velma was childless, never married.

Never even a boyfriend, unless you counted a fling with a girl-crazy GI, home from the war after V-J Day. A boy named Charlie.

Charlie Riggs--that was the boy's name. She'd completely forgotten.

She ate every bite of the omelet. Then she picked up and opened the box of tampons, fiddling with one of the new-fangled things, chuckling to herself: maybe she'd forgotten how. But then some things, as they say, were like riding a bike.

4

--Well met, Brother Bertillon. We don't see many of
you
.

Bertillon mopped his angelic brow. He'd just arrived; the heat was already too much.

--Complaining, Your Eminence, or boasting?

--Hm.
Touche
. To what do we owe this honor?

--If you would have a look at this. And don't tell me you can't do it.

--Hm. Hm. Fifty-three
years
. Not one for the usual channels. Not even us, historically--this would be a first. Might I ask why fifty-three? Why not sixty? Or all seventy-six?

Bertillon summoned a nonchalant earnestness, the kind most often invoked on Earth by the recipients of speeding citations.

--Age seventeen seems a suitable time to begin reapplying the lessons of life, does it not, Your Eminence?

His Eminence's practiced gaze searched Bertillon's for ambiguities, and found none.

--It might be arranged. Provided we have some... context.

--Come, Your Eminence. You merely require a pretext. And I am here to provide it.

--You would place your imprimatur on this?

--I would.

--I love it. The court is dense with intrigue, then?

--Alas, Your Eminence, the intriguing place is here. As even I concede.

--
Do
you. Your genius in certain prior matters has not gone unremarked here, Brother Bertillon. This place could be interesting indeed for a sympathetic Throne of your caliber.

--Thank you, but I lay claim only to empathy. My sympathies are not enlisted by this--chaos. Just look at this. How do you bear it, I wonder.

--Simple thermodynamics, Brother. And surely we'd find a niche to suit you: something on the... temperate side. But no matter. We are happy to help you lift the hem of Nature's garment, or rend it. And what's in it for you?

--My convictions. Between the hidebound heavens and these anarchic precincts, we lack a middle ground, a place for serendipity. In this, I answer to my conscience.

--Bravo, Brother. If there is one thing your colleagues fail to grasp, it is that we are all of us everywhere acting in good faith, are we not? We do have our differences. But they are strictly a function of...

--Temperature?

--Precisely. Let's see what we can do.

5

Velma waited for the bus uptown. She felt funny about withdrawing her Social Security from the usual branch, even just the ATM.

Besides, she felt like exploring.

Next to her on the bench sat another young girl. Her hair was black, like Velma's, but the whole front half of it was dyed a deep ultraviolet, as though her brain were glowing. She had an earring in her eyebrow.

When the girl returned her gaze, Velma realized she'd been staring.

"I was admiring your blouse," said Velma.

"This?" the girl said. It was a simple black cotton shirt.

"Yes," said Velma. "Where's it from?"

"Hell, I dunno," the girl said. "Clothestime, I think." She studied Velma openly, taking in the tacky floral-print top, the hot green and pink and yellow of it; the ancient housewife slacks of nubbly mutant rayon; the Dr. Scholl's sandals. "For God's sake, there's nothing special about my shirt," the girl said.

"Except the person wearing it," said Velma. "Never forget that, dear."

Two hours later, Velma emerged from Clothestime with a couple of bulging bags. She didn't normally frequent the big malls, but now she strode past the Body Shop and the Jamba Juice, keeping pace with the ubiquitous kids, from whom she was indistinguishable.

The wind dropped a flyer at her feet. She picked it up:

COOLHOUSE

Thursday nights at Emerald City

... after hours ...

DJ Spin Gen-F

99 Buzz Dr. Skill

Odd. She kept it, and headed home to model her new look.

"I want you to locate this man," Velma said. She gave the detective, a Mr. Dietz, a piece of paper with the name "Charlie Riggs" and some sketchy biographical information--dates in the 1940s.

She was seventeen again--with the craziest itch to connect.

"Place of birth?" said Dietz.

"Well, he had a New England accent," said Velma.

"What's he to you?" said Dietz. "Grandpa?"

"An old boyfriend."

Dietz reassessed her up and down, his mouth an inverted U of impressed surmise. "Good for you, Charlie. Wherever you are," he finally said.

"Strangers in the night," Velma said. "My only romance, I'm afraid."

"Try somebody from your own millennium, kid," said Dietz. "He might be more appreciative. So where
might
Mr. Riggs be?"

"I have no idea. Somewhere out West."

Dietz studied the paper. "This kind of lead, we've got about a snowball's chance, you should pardon the expression. But it's your money, Miss Fish. I'll take two-fifty up front, the other half on completion."

Velma signed the check. She dotted the "i" with a cute little heart.

A few days later, Dietz called her in.

"Would that be Charles Gideon Riggs, born March 30, 1924, at Hingham, Massachusetts?"

"Hingham! Yes, that's Charlie!"

"He's in Arizona."

"You found him?"

"And he's not going anywhere. Spent the last four years in a Phoenix cemetery. Prostate cancer."

"Charlie dead," Velma said, and then blurted: "He got me pregnant."

And she really hadn't thought about it up until right then, as if suddenly permitted to think the miscarriage back into being: back into her own being, so long ago.

She looked back at Dietz, who registered frank disbelief. "And then what happened?" he said.

"I'm afraid I lost it," Velma said. "Well. I owe you two hundred fifty dollars."

"Right. And by the way, Miss Fish. That check you wrote? 'Valued customer since 1957'... ?"

"It didn't clear the bank?"

"Sure, but--"

"Well, then," said teenaged Velma Fish, "don't
sweat
it, sonny."

A few weeks later, well past midnight, she found herself in the warehouse district, standing outside a club where the music was a form of headache, pounding and booming and twittering--but sort of catchy, really.

She stood in line for half an hour, the only Earthling in the bunch, but Velma wasn't bothered. She was comfortable in her own skin. That was one thing she'd learned in this life.

When she got to the door, she smiled at the big black man, who said: "Need some ID."

Velma kept smiling. "There's an age requirement?"

"Twenty-one," he said. "Next."

She put her hand in her bag. Then she thought better of it. "Well, now what?" she said, half to herself.

"Step aside now," said the black man. "Figger it out, Slim." He was rather rude, to tell the truth.

A boy stuck his head out the door. Then he came out and stood, resplendent in a suit whose cut and color Velma had never seen. Like most of them he wore an earring, and his sunglasses made him look like an insect. "Hey, Rock," he shouted to the black man. "Rockster. She's with me."

"Oh, she's with
you
."

"I've been waiting for her all evening! Hurry up and let her in."

"Whatever," said Rock, and motioned. "Go, girl."

Velma went past. The boy held the door for her and took her hand. The thumping got louder.

"Well," Velma shouted over the music, "chivalry is not dead."

"I lied to him," he shouted back. "I've actually been waiting for you all my life."

"Quite the playboy," Velma said. "Aren't you. Neat trick for meeting underage girls."

"You have to own the club," the boy said. "And you don't look
that
underage. Mainly you look beautiful."

She seemed remarkably serene, self-possessed, which always turned him on--was she tripping on something? Yet she did not conceal her wonder at the churning scene inside, the lasers and smoke and strobes.

They crossed the crowded floor. "What's your name?" the boy said.

"Velma. V - E - L -"

"Spinster!" he shouted.