Satan Loves You (8 page)

“Could I get a hand here?” he said to one of Death’s minions as he attempted to extinguish two children at once. The minion ignored him and left the room.

Annoyed, Satan walked out into the hall. In the visitor’s lounge at the end, seven of Death’s minions were lounging around, flipping through old magazines and checking their text messages. They seemed to be totally and completely ignoring the urgent beeping of their pagers that signaled new deaths to be executed. The lounge was full of shrill, electronic beeping and yet there they sat, in their pressed khakis and button down shirts, totally unconcerned, not appreciating the urgency of the situation.

Satan stalked down to the lounge and let them have it.

“There are forty-nine humans down and we’ve got fifty-one to go,” Satan snapped. “Could some of you rouse yourselves and start killing kids?”

The minions kept flipping through their magazines, thumbing their Blackberrys and basically ignoring him. One of them even had the gall to look at Satan, shake his head sadly and then go back to his Sudoku.

“What is going on here?” Satan yelled. “Just because Death is gone that doesn’t mean that no more people are dying. I need you all to pull together and get it in gear. Don’t you hear your pagers?”

But if ignoring people were a sport, then these minions were Olympic gold medalists.

“What is it you all think you’re doing?” Satan shouted.

Finally, a minion deigned to answer.

“Work stoppage,” he drawled, without looking up from his magazine.

“When did this happen?”

The minion shrugged and kept reading last month’s
Golf Digest
.

Satan was about to rip him a new one when his pager beeped again: another death. Satan raced to room eight-oh-four and made a beeline for the bedside of the shivering fourteen-year-old patient. Like many people on death’s door, the boy saw Satan coming and, having been trained by his parents to avoid strangers, he reached deep down inside himself and found the strength to vault out of bed and make a break for it, dripping fore and aft and dragging his IV cart behind him. He shoulder-checked Satan and sent the King of Hell spinning aside as he cleared the door.

Cursing, Satan went after the kid, who was now chugging down the hall, leaving a slimy trail in his wake and banging his IV cart into everything. Nurses came running but the boy ducked and weaved. Satan was unathletic, to put it charitably, and he huffed after the kid, grabbing anything that came to hand and throwing it at the fleeing boy’s head: clipboards, plastic cups, bedpans, latex gloves. As he reached the end of the hall, the boy’s strength left him and he leaned heavily against the wall and then slid to the floor, vomiting feebly. Satan caught up with him just in time.

 “Three
...
two
...
one
...
shut down,” he said, snuffing out the kid’s life. The boy’s consciousness left him with a clotted sigh. Satan signed the invoice on his clipboard, tore off the pink copy, folded it in half and stuck it in his pocket with the other fulfilled invoices, then he stomped back to the visitors lounge. Everyone’s pagers were still beeping their hearts out.

“I don’t care if you’re on a work stoppage,” Satan said. “I’m not running after another kid. You’d all better unstoppage yourselves.”

“What are you going to do if we don’t?” one minion asked. “Fire us?”

“You obviously don’t grasp the point of a work stoppage,” the minion who’d lipped off earlier said. “A work stoppage means we stop work. That’s how it got its name.”

“You don’t get to stop work. You’re Death.”

“No, we’re Death’s minions. There is no more Death. You fired him.”

“I’m interim Death,” Satan said. “And soon we’ll find a permanent Death and you’ll be working for whoever that is. The job doesn’t stay with one being forever. It goes to whoever I say it goes to.”

“Whatever,” the annoying minion said. “We’re still on a work stoppage.”

The beeping pagers were starting to set Satan’s teeth on edge.

“I! Am! Death!” he said.

“The Death we accept has been fired and we’re showing solidarity,” the minion said. “That’s just the way it is.”

The phone at the nurse’s station started ringing. Satan tried to ignore it.

“Listen up – ” he started.

But the ringing, coupled with the pagers going off like a flock of annoying electronic baby chickens, was more than he could handle. All the noise hijacked his train of thought and ran it off a cliff.

“I – you – it’s...” but he couldn’t remember what it was he was going to say next. Leaving the minions he stomped over to the nurse’s station and the ringing phone. None of the humans seemed able to hear it and so Satan picked it up. When Nero needed him he called on a frequency only the Prince of Darkness could hear.

“Sir,” Nero said.

Satan didn’t say anything.

“Hello? Sir? Are you there?”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me what’s gone wrong now.”

“It isn’t always bad news when I call, sir. That’s a very hurtful preconception.”

Satan closed his eyes, waiting for the axe to fall.

“Although in this case it is accurate. Sir, I think you need to turn on the TV.”

“Another Speedway accident?” Satan asked.

“It’s Oprah, sir.”

A new kind of pain lanced through Satan’s skull. Satan took Oprah very seriously. He put down the phone and walked into a patient’s room. The patient was vomiting himself to death, and so Satan figured he wouldn’t mind if he changed the channel. Oprah was staring into the camera with tear-rimmed eyes. A shiver zipped down Satan’s spine. He felt like she was staring directly into his heart.

“Today on
Oprah
,” she said, “can a woman sue the Devil?”

Satan didn’t like the sound of that at all.

In Oprah’s studio, Frita Babbit was crying. People cried a lot on Oprah. It was good to cry because holding in your tears turned them into dangerous toxins that caused unhappiness. Letting the poison out was healthy. Oprah understood this the way she understood so many things.

“The cult made me do
...
unspeakable things
...”
Frita Babbit sobbed.

“What kind of things, Frita?” Oprah empathized.

“They were unspeakable
...”
Frita sobbed.

“You can tell me,” Oprah said.

“The cult
...
I can’t say it.”

Oprah made a concerned face.

“...they made me have intercourse
...
with the Devil
...”
Frita said.

“And how old were you when this happened?”

“Seventeen.”

Oprah looked at her audience.

“Seventeen years old, and forced to have sexual intercourse with the Devil. This,” Oprah said, “This was where I had my Aha Moment. When my producers first met Frita they told me her story and I said,
‘
Nuh-uh, girlfriend. I’m not touching that!’ But they shared a few details of her story with me and that changed my mind forever. I’m going to share those details with you now.

“Frita Babbit says she knows why there are one hundred and thirty-two survivors of the Summerville Speedway tragedy. She knows why we’ve got plane crash survivors who don’t seem to be passing on. She knows why there are people walking away from bus accidents and elephant stampedes and suicide bombings. She knows why death is happening slowly. Frita, would you share your knowledge with us?”

Frita was in that stage of crying Oprah’s producers called,
‘
Flip Freeze.’ Her watery, red-rimmed eyes promised she could speak coherently, but they also hinted that there was still more crying that needed to be done. No one was going to flip the channel on this.

“The Satanic cult told me never to tell anyone what happened ever,” Frita said. “They said it was our little secret. But when so few people were passing on, I had to examine what I knew about Satan for an answer. I had to examine my own spirit and soul, and what I realized was that Satan is in charge of Death.”

“So why is he not doing his job?” Oprah asked.

“Because he’s too busy preying on children like me!” Frita said, and right on cue tears began to fall from her eyes again. “He’s on the internet preying on children and he’s not taking care of the souls who need to pass on.”

“The Devil,” Oprah said to the camera. “An internet predator who could be online right this minute luring your children into pornographic conversations. After the break, we’ll be taking a look at Frita’s controversial new book
‘
The Devil Made Me Do It’ and the even more controversial lawsuit behind it. Plus, an unusual look at aging that might have you seeing red. Stay right there.”

“What is this?” Satan fumed into the phone. “I barely even check my email. And I don’t know who this human is. More importantly, why would I do
‘
it’ with a human? That’s disgusting. And beside the point! A person can’t sue me!”

“You are a legally recognized entity,” Nero said. “And as such she can sue you. She is, in fact, suing you.”

“I’m not responsible for every goofball who claims to be me.”

“She’s stating, quite unequivocally, that it was you. She alleges that you had sexual intercourse with her in the form of a bat, a serpent and a, uh, large poodle with a Continental clip. Her attorneys are pursuing the case under laws regarding crimes against nature.”

“Is the gas back on, at least?”

“We can’t find anyone to clean the lines. Tomorrow, Minos is going to drive by some Home Depots and round up a crew of Mexicans to see if they’ll do it. I’d suggest you finish up your business in Minnesota and return as quickly as possible.”

“Tell him to hire twice as many Mexicans,” Satan said. “Death’s minions are on strike and I need scabs.”

“I don’t think Mexicans will cross Death’s picket line,” Nero said. “They’re scrupulous about worker solidarity. Maybe you should go see Death and straighten this out.”

“I’d rather eat glass,” Satan snapped.

“Is that a productive attitude?” Nero asked.

“All this stuff is happening at once,” Satan said. “Couldn’t it happen throughout the year at well-spaced intervals?”

“It’s especially unfortunate that it all seems to be happening on the eve of the Ultimate Death Match,” Nero said.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Satan said. “If she says I was changing my shape how can she prove it was me who did it?”

“Well, sir, she claims that your penis is
...
very distinctive.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Satan said.

“Like a pitchfork,” Nero said.

“I’ll be home soon,” Satan said. “I’ve just got to go kill this nun.”

Sister Mary felt panic rising in her chest as she wondered for the five hundredth time what was going to happen to her. She had been a nun for fourteen years, being obedient, making lists, doing chores, avoiding overstimulation, being chaste, humble and kind. She had done it all so that she could avoid ending up exactly where she was right now: sitting in a Red Roof Inn out by the airport, pregnant and alone.

“This must be how floozies feel,” she thought to herself.

As soon as Sister Helen’s death had been reported to the archdiocese, the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women had sent an utterly useless grief therapist and the Catholic Finance Corporation had sent a scarily competent assessor to repossess the monastery. Before the day was over, Clergy Services had assigned Sister Barbara to a Nicaraguan school for colorblind children and while she hadn’t been able to find the time to say goodbye to Sister Mary before she left she had managed to find the time to tell the Director of Priestly Life about Sister Mary’s “condition.” The Director arranged for a discrete ultrasound technician to drive out to the monastery and examine Sister Mary. The technician was brusque and businesslike and Sister Mary tried her best to endure the examination. The technician hadn’t spoken, she had merely scanned Sister Mary’s stomach in surly silence. After a few minutes, however, the technician uttered her first and only words:

“Holy fuck.”

Sister Mary had reeled as if slapped: no one had ever said the f-word in front of her before. She was a nun. You didn’t say the f-word in front of a nun. Even worse, the word was being used to describe the contents of her womb. She began to cry. The ultrasound technician was no comfort whatsoever because she immediately ran outside, got on her cellular phone and called the Director of Priestly Life who called the Chancellor for Canonical Affairs who called the Vicar General and told him the bad news: they had a pregnant nun whose hymen was intact and whose baby seemed to be, inexplicably, ten weeks along. It was their worst nightmare. It was
Agnes of God
all over again.

Before Sister Mary had even stopped crying, a van with tinted windows arrived at the monastery and she was bundled inside and taken to a Red Roof Inn out near the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. The Vicar General called her on a secure cellular phone and told her that if she valued the work of the Church and the reputation of the archdiocese then she must not speak to anybody about her condition and she must only leave her room to go to the snack machines down the hall. Sister Mary valued the work of the Church and the reputation of the Archdiocese and so she agreed, but after three days it was becoming harder and harder to stay inside. Since everything she owned belonged to the Church, and since the Church currently didn’t know what to do with her, and since they had taken her out of the monastery without even giving her a chance to pack, she had nothing with her. She was bored and depressed.

Sister Mary did not watch TV, and she did not listen to secular music. She did not read for pleasure, nor did she partake of frivolous activities such as crosswords or Sudoku. So all day, every day, she sat in a chair by the window, dressed in the habit she had been wearing the day of her ultrasound, and she read from the Gideon Bible that she had found in the drawer of the bedside table. And she prayed, very hard, for her ordeal to end.

She had started reading with the curtains open, but so many children had pressed their faces up against he window, pointing and staring, that eventually she pulled them shut. This meant that she had to have the lights on all day in order to read, and she hated wasting electricity. Even more, she hated feeling like some kind of fallen woman, trapped behind glass in a zoo of iniquity, a cautionary exhibit for the saved souls who passed by.