“I don’t have the file,” Billy says.
“Why not?” Anil says.
“Why not isn’t important. What’s important is that I need a story. I need a story in the next thirty seconds.”
“I’d like to thank everyone for coming — can you all hear me?” Laurent is saying.
“Tell the one about the Devil,” Anil says.
“I thought of that,” Billy says.
“It’s a good story,” Anil says.
“It needs a third act.”
“It needs a second act. But it’s interesting, at least.”
“Wait,” Denver says. “Which story?”
“The one about the Devil,” Billy says. At the periphery of his attention he can hear his biographical details being declaimed on stage by Laurent.
“What devil?” Denver says.
“The Judeo-Christian Devil,” Billy says.
“You met the Devil?”
“It’s a long story. But you’ll hear it in a second. And then after this we’ll work everything out. I promise.”
And then, fuck it, he goes for the Hail Mary. He looks straight into Denver’s eyes and says, “I love you.”
Denver responds with a tired smile, a smile that expresses a sense of bitter confirmation rather than actual pleasure. Billy’s heart sinks. Laurent, on stage, says, “Please welcome our first reader, Billy Ridgeway.”
Light applause. Billy is up, out of his chair, and he walks toward the stage, still kind of half contemplating bolting across the room and punching Anton Cirrus in the face as a way to get out of having to do this. He turns and he looks back at the table: Denver, Anil, the Ghoul. They look so happy there, without him. It occurs to him just how easily he could be replaced.
He takes the stage, and the room falls into a dull murmur.
It’s okay, Billy thinks, you can do this. And he speaks: “Hi there,” he says. He coughs. “Thanks for coming out. Really. Thank you. Everybody.”
He shades his eyes and peers into the bar, trying to cast a pointed look at Anton Cirrus. When he can finally pull Cirrus out of the gloam, though, he sees that Cirrus is not paying any attention whatsoever to the weak taunt embedded in Billy’s intro, but rather is looking at his phone, texting something.
Texting something! Goddamn him!
White rage begins to throttle Billy’s mind, and his mouth begins to wind down as he watches Anton Cirrus type away. “I’m glad you’re all here tonight because I wanted to tell you a story,” he says. “A story about … some things.”
The murmuring audience shifts into hush, but not a good hush, the kind of fixed, uncomfortable hush that people get when they begin to suspect that they’re watching someone who may be about to have a public meltdown. Anton Cirrus is still texting. Billy wrenches his gaze away, lets it fall on the table that’s closest to the stage.
And who should be sitting there but Lucifer, his eyes meeting Billy’s, enacting an emotionless imitation of pleasured recognition. Billy’s entire body breaks into a cold sweat. It’s one thing to talk about the Prince of Darkness behind his back, but it’s another thing entirely to do so when he’s sitting three feet from you, staring into your face, prepared, at least potentially, to pitchfork you in the guts or something the second you make a joke at his expense. Billy needs a new idea.
“Yeah,” he says. “Some … things.” The hush redoubles, grows more acute, progresses ever closer to perfect silence. Billy begins to pat at his pockets, in the hope that one of them will yield some fiction. He finds a folded-up napkin in his back pocket, and he pulls it out, and unfolds it, and reads the slashed words he wrote to himself at lunch:
COWARD
FUCK-UP
He looks at this for a long moment.
“So there’s this guy,” he says, finally, his voice ringing hollowly in the room. “And the guy, he’s lived a good life, okay, a mostly good life. He’s made some bad decisions here and there. Nothing like — he hasn’t killed anybody or anything like that, he’s just — he’s just fucked up here and there. Like — like you do.
“And it turns out that’s okay. When the guy dies, at the end of his long life as a sometimes fuck-up, he doesn’t go to Hell. He goes to Heaven. He meets St. Peter there, at the gates, the whole deal.
“And St. Peter says Welcome, guy, let me show you around. And he takes the guy on a quick tour around Heaven. The guy gets to meet Aquinas; it’s great. But after a couple of hours the guy is feeling pretty bushed, and he says to St. Peter, I’d kind of like to, you know, unwind.
“And St. Peter says, Oh, sure, we have your quarters all ready, and they go to this room which is like, it’s like this lavish hotel suite. And the guy is really impressed. He’s checking everything out. And he opens the closet and he’s stunned! ’Cause in there is every pair of shoes the guy has ever owned. All there like waiting for him. From, like, his tiny baby shoes, to the shoes he was buried in at his funeral, all there in a row. So many memories! But the guy turns to St. Peter and says, you know, like What’s the deal? I get to heaven and all my shoes are here?
“And St. Peter is like, Yeah, didn’t you know? Shoes have souls.”
He can hear Lucifer give a single great haw, but other than that, the room is silent.
I suck, Billy thinks. Everyone knows that I suck. Denver, Anton Cirrus, Elisa, Laurent, the fucking bartender, everyone. He tries to come up with something else to say. He can only think of one other joke, about two people who get frozen to death outside of a whorehouse, and he’s not telling that one.
Okay, he thinks. You may be a fuck-up, but you don’t have to be a coward. You can tell the story. Don’t be scared of the Devil. He can’t hurt you.
He has no idea how he reaches that conclusion, but he’s surprised to find that it feels true.
“But seriously,” he says. “I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you the one about the Devil. It just started yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write it down. In fact, it’s still going on, right now.”
He takes a step toward the edge of the stage and points down at Lucifer. Lucifer regards him. His face still holds a laugh formation, left over from the joke, but his eyes are mirthless, flat.
“You see this guy?” Billy says. “Yesterday morning, I woke up, and this guy was in my apartment.”
“Adversarial Manifestation!” someone in the audience shouts. Billy and Lucifer turn toward the source. A bearded dude, somebody Billy’s never seen before, a few tables away. “Adversarial Manifestation!” dude shouts again, rising from his chair, pointing.
Billy’s a little dismayed to be interrupted by what appears to be a crazy person, but at least some of the room’s attention is off of him. There’s a commotion back at the bar, and someone — a heavyset guy in a tight black T-shirt, probably the bouncer — begins parting the crowd and moving toward the front. Billy assumes the plan is to eject the crazy guy, who is now shouting “Adversarial Manifestation” a third time, practically frothing, but the bouncer moves past that guy and instead stands across from Lucifer, staring him down.
“What?” Lucifer says. He raises his stout. “I’m just here to have a drink and to catch some contemporary fiction and poetry.”