Satan Loves You (17 page)

Nero was a great believer in self-improvement. After all, a few hundred years of torture had changed him for the better so he didn’t see why it wouldn’t work for everyone else. He came to visit Satan ready to listen, to offer advice, to recite a few choice quotes he’d copied from
Tuesdays with Morrie
. He was prepared for emotions. Instead, it was an anticlimax. Satan just sat there. Sister Mary’s corpse just moldered. No one asked Nero to share his own experiences with grief. Nero tried to start the conversation a few times but he felt awkward talking to himself and his words trailed off into silence. There was no indication that Satan even heard him. After a while, Nero felt silly for trying and he stopped talking. Satan didn’t even notice when he left.

A swarm of black flies hovered over Sister Mary’s body, just out of Satan’s reach. Eventually, it began to rain warm blood.

All was quiet on the Seventh Circle of Hell.

It was snowing in the event room. Michael had been walking for eons, and at some point it had started snowing. Cold wind stabbed his face like knives, frozen blades slashed his chest and stomach, his wings were encrusted with ice. Freezing water ran down his back. He plodded on.

One did not make the decision to enter the Empyrean lightly. It had been hundreds of thousands of years since anyone except Michael and Phanuel had even tried. Before the Creation, the angels had all dwelt in the timeless, formless, perfect Empyrean, but after God made the Heavens and the Earth he moved his Host to Heaven and he had remained in the Empyrean alone.

What The Creator was doing in there was anyone’s guess. Phanuel seemed to know, but no one ever quite understood exactly what he was talking about. Metatron had come up with the theory that there were other Creations, each with its own Heaven and Hell and the Empyrean was where they all overlapped and the place from which God watched over them all. Michael thought this sounded vaguely blasphemous, but Metatron often talked like an idiot. Whatever God was up to in the Empyrean, he clearly did not want to be disturbed, and so he had made The Room.

The Room looked as neutral and bland as every other room in Heaven, but it was crammed with folded time. Just as the human intestines were really thirty feet long but folded into a space only two feet long, the path through The Room was much longer than it appeared. Hundreds of years had been folded and pushed into this event room that looked like it could seat maybe two hundred people for dinner. It would take Michael centuries of subjective time to cross it, and yet when he reached the other side he would have just spent a few days of objective time. He had done it before and it had harrowed him, but crossing The Room was essential to his plans.

He put one foot in front of the other. He kept walking. He had been doing this for what felt like years. He was three feet closer to the exit sign. He was making good progress.

“What I want to know – what America wants to know – is when will we get our day in court?” Nancy Grace said. “With me now, a woman who fights for all of us. Frita Babbit. Victim. Survivor. Fighter. Plaintiff. Thank you for being with us, honey.”

In the postage-stamp-sized video insert was not Frita Babbit, but Ted Hunter.

“Hello, Nancy,” he said.

“For our viewers,” Nancy Grace said, “The horrible, disgusting things that Satan did to Frita Babbit have left her too emotionally traumatized to speak in public. Ted Hunter has been authorized to speak on her behalf.”

“Nancy, I want your viewers to know that when I speak, it is actually a brave young woman speaking,” Ted Hunter said.

“Did Satan sodomize you?” Nancy Grace asked.

“He did, Nancy,” Ted Hunter said. “He sodomized me. And when I say
‘
me’ I mean Frita Babbit.”

“I imagine that Satan would do something against nature like that,” Nancy Grace said.

“But I want to remind your viewers that he was in the form of a serpent when he did it,” Ted Hunter said.

“That is disgusting. I mean, right there, you’ve got a crime against nature. Woman and snake. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s hard for her to talk about,” Ted Hunter said, “When I make her talk about it she looks so brave and troubled.”

“And it is so brave of her to come out and fight evil in public like this. Your case seems open-and-shut, but what I’m wondering is if the Devil is even going to show up in court.”

“Well, I – ” Ted Hunter started.

“We’ll get back to you, Frita/Ted. Right we’re going to hear from Marcus Whitman, an award-winning journalist and our own special correspondent for the trial. Marcus?”

Marcus Whitman’s puffy, pink face popped into view above Ted Hunter’s.

“Nancy, good to be here, thanks for having me.”

“Cut the chit chat, Whitman. We’re talking about Satan. Is he a no-show at his own trial?”

“At this point it’s hard to speculate on what he will do.”

“One question: why?”

“Because he is the manifestation of all evil in the universe. It’s hard to know what someone that evil is even thinking. He’s not like you or I.”

“What’s his problem?”

“Like I said: evil.”

“To comment, we have Reverend Creflo Dollar here to speak about Satan’s absolute evil. Reverend?”

“Nancy, it’s good to be on your show,” Creflo Dollar said, his face appearing onscreen. “I have something to say that your listeners will want to hear. Satan wants to hold you back. Satan wants you to be poor. Why? Because poor people are unhappy people and Satan feasts on the misery that grows in the human heart. And that misery is caused by a lack of prosperity. God wants you to be prosperous. He wants you to enjoy life.”

“Reverend, on topic,” Nancy snapped. “Satan: showing up for his trial or not?”

“He’s showing up. Think about it. He is the most evil man in all of Creation. He will want to have the soapbox and the attention of the world to convince people to turn away from prosperity.”

“On the other hand, Reverend,” Marcus said. “Maybe it’s more evil for him not to show up? After all, Satan’s greatest feat was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”

“Who says?” Creflo Dollar asked.

“C.S. Lewis.”

“Do not listen to the writings of wizards,” Creflo Dollar said. “Listen to the word of the Lord. He is certain that the Devil exists and is loose in this world right now! Making people poor, making people get on welfare, making people low class!”

Ted decided that he had been ignored for long enough. He needed to remind everyone that they were here because of him. And also because of Frita Babbit’s bravery. But mostly because of him. As Creflo Dollar and Marcus Whitman bickered, he knew the best way to get the attention of the American people.

“Nancy,” he said. “I think Frita would feel remiss if I didn’t tell you about the oral intercourse that was forced on her. Also, the anal.”

And the whole world paid attention.

On the Seventh Circle of Hell, over by Mary’s body, nothing was happening. Geryon’s shadow slid over the ground as he circled overhead and eventually he flew back to his rock and cleaned his butt with his tail. Later that afternoon, one of the giants came stomping up from the Malebolge and tried to eat Mary’s corpse. Satan threw rocks at him until he went away.

Nero had stopped visiting. Hell had ground to a halt. Most of the demons were already talking about what they were going to do with their sudden surplus of free time once they finished processing the last souls in the dwindling line. Ultimate Frisbee was high on their list. They’d heard a lot about it in recent decades. As for Satan, he just sat by Mary’s corpse and pickled in his own despair. Then, for some reason, he started to talk. He didn’t know why, it was as if the words had built up inside of him for a long time and suddenly they began to fall from his lips. And they told the oldest story in the world: the story of the Creation, and of the Fall.

“It all started when God started talking about getting a hobby,” Satan said.

His voice was rusty with disuse. He’d never been a big talker, but after three days of silence his throat felt like it was packed full of gravel. He tried to lick his cracked lips but his tongue was sandpaper. His dehydrated brain rattled in his skull like a dried pea. It hurt, but after breaking the seal on his silence he figured he might as well keep going.

“He was bored and wanted a pastime. He said he was going to make little retarded versions of himself and breed them. He was going to make something called a Universe to put them in, sort of like a big terrarium. All of us would have to stop being infinite and bind ourselves to the finite and take care of the Universe for him because it had all kinds of problems. To be honest, it sounded like an enormous pain in the ass.

“Most of the Host thought he was kidding, but I had a feeling he was serious and so I kept asking him why. At first he said it was because there should be something instead of nothing, but eventually he broke down and admitted that he was creating this Universe because he wanted people to glorify him and proclaim his greatness. He was bored of our praise. He said it felt like we were just going through the motions. I mean, what do you even say to that?

“But there was no stopping him. First, he made his giant container, the Universe. Then he made time, and gravity and came up with the idea of things beginning and things ending. He came up with order, with self-organizing systems, with Brownian motion and all kinds of stuff, but he seemed to find it lacking somehow. It ate at him. Later I realized that the problem was his limited imagination. He couldn’t imagine any of his creations not loving him. He’d come up with a system to organize and operate his Universe, but it wasn’t balanced. He had a status quo, but no revolution. He had order, but no chaos.

“He was creating all kinds of particles and energy, neutrinos that simultaneously flowed backwards and forwards in time, cosmic rays, gamma radiation, but all along he was talking about how he was going to make people. I couldn’t see the point. They sounded really complicated and annoying but he had his heart set on making billions of them. I decided to see what they would be like and so I stole a little bit of his essence and created a series of micro-universes, like cosmic ant farms. I seeded each one with a drop of my own blood, which gave them life, and I watched them evolve.

“Each micro-universe was placed in a trough of liquid time and I pumped it around them quickly, watching them evolve in fast forward. Every possible Creation played out before my eyes, one million times faster than normal. A lobster empire spawned from a billion-year-old Atlantis that never sank. A race of super-intelligent dinosaur kings who prevented their own extinction when kamikaze pterodactyls shattered that asteroid before it hit Earth. Silicon ghost robots rising from primordial petrochemical pools. Virtual universes populated entirely by living ideas. Reverse universes that turned the laws of physics inside out. But at some point or another they all fell apart. Because at a certain point, humans appeared.

“The human animal was a contaminant. Wherever they evolved into existence they heightened tensions, sparked conflicts and seeded violence. An opportunistic outbreak of humanity ripped a totally silent universe in half, and the smallest exposure to humanity resulted in a 5
^th
Dimensional universe tearing itself to shreds when a cold war turned hot after humans invented the 8
^th
Dimensional bomb. Wherever there were humans there was war, torture, fanaticism and death. They were terrible. They were diseased. They were flawed. And these were the creatures the Creator wanted to breed?

“I begged him not to do it. It was cruel, it was callous, it was vain. My argument was so convincing that all the other archangels took my side, but he wouldn’t be swayed. He was unleashing these monsters because they would sing his name. These beasts who built cosmic-sized weapons, who loved digital watches and worshipped pornography, who would one day broadcast every one of their waking moments to each other until their entire existence was nothing more than a hall of mirrors where they watched each other watching each other watching each other. These creatures were polluted. They were profane.

“But he wouldn’t listen. He ordered us to begin our work on Creation and the other angels followed orders because that was what they were created to do. They didn’t know how to do otherwise, but something inside of me was twisted. Maybe I was sick from exposure to all of those micro-universes, maybe I was contaminated by what I had seen my experimental humans do to each other, but deep inside of me there was a new idea: No. None of us even knew it was possible to say
‘
No’ to God. But I wanted to say No. It made me feel light-headed and dizzy. I had a hard time staying moored in time. The only part of me that felt solid was this pressure in my chest, this No that was building and building, becoming more and more painful every day, becoming desperate to get out.

“One day, God was talking to us, instructing us on how to bring life to this Universe. I was his bright star, his best pupil, the one he had invested with the most of his being. He wanted me to light the suns and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t able to say
‘
No’ but I could refuse to do as he asked. He became angrier and angrier. I just stood there, unable to move, unable to offer an explanation for my resistance. The pressure inside my chest kept building, and I just wanted him to shut up and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. So I punched him in the face.”

Satan paused for effect, but Sister Mary didn’t react. She was still dead.

 “None of us even knew how to process this. We were shocked. I was shocked. I had punched God. It was a big deal.

“It didn’t go well after that. I had violated all the rules of my existence, I had fractured Creation. Until that moment there was only the will of God, but now I had opposed it. I had made something that was Not-God. He threw me down, literally and metaphorically. It was my Fall. I fell so far, so fast that gravity bent around me and the angels who had supported my cause were sucked down in my wake. We had wanted to stop the cruelty of Creation and we had lost. I had punched God. I had invented resistance. I had invented rebellion. I had invented exile. I had invented punching.