“Hi,” Billy says, when he’s through.
“It is good to see you again, Billy Ridgeway,” Lucifer says. “How are you?”
“Kinda shitty, actually,” Billy says.
“Oh?” Lucifer says, although he sounds bored, and his gaze flicks away to something else. “What is the trouble?”
“Well, let me see,” Billy says. “Oh, yeah, I was Tased last night, for starters,” he says, although as this complaint leaves his mouth he recalls that Lucifer was Tased last night, too, and doesn’t seem inclined to whine about it. He wonders, briefly and unhappily, whether the Devil is a better man than he.
“Ah, yes, that,” Lucifer says. “The Right-Hand Path does enjoy its little toys, it is true. A nasty assortment of people. You know what they did to me last night, after they had me down?”
“No?” Billy says.
“They burned me alive. In the basement. A classic Manifestation Disruption maneuver, really, right out of their manual, but I would have liked to have pointed out to them that there’s a way to do it without savoring the ghoulish aspects with such evident relish.”
Billy blinks. “You seem to have recovered well.”
“We must not dwell on the past,” says Lucifer. “Let us look forward instead. You’ll recall that you pledged to have developed a response to my proposition by this morning.”
“Oh, yeah,” Billy says, frowning. He always forgets that his stalling mechanisms have a finite life span.
“I think,” Lucifer says, and then he pauses, composing the utterance. “I think that we have reached a rather specific point, Billy Ridgeway, a juncture, if you will. At this point, you must look within yourself, deeply, and ask yourself which future you want. A future in which—”
Billy doesn’t need to hear the rest. He has an answer. He hasn’t looked within himself all that deeply, not deeply at all, really, but he can find this answer in the shallows, and he feels certain that he won’t get a better answer at the end of a more careful and sustained reflection.
“I just want my life back,” Billy answers. “Future? Shit, at this point I’d be happiest if I just got to go back to what my life was three days ago. Where I don’t have to deal with Timothy Ollard, or the Right-Hand Path, or, well, or you. Where I have a job, and some friends, and my wallet, and my keys, and maybe a girlfriend if I play my cards right, and don’t have to worry about everyone in the world being burned alive. So if there’s some funky satanic thing you can do with time, I’m going to ask you to do it, cause I just want to go back.”
Lucifer gives him a long look. “No you don’t,” he finally says.
“I beg your pardon?” Billy says. For all Lucifer’s odd misrecognition of certain social graces, this is the first thing he’s said that Billy’s actually taken some level of offense to.
“You think you want to go back to that life,” Lucifer says. “It seems safe and familiar. But Billy.” He leans down a little, gets his face closer to Billy’s, and begins to speak more softly. “I want you to really think for a minute, about what you really wanted for yourself, once upon a time, before you told yourself that it wasn’t possible, before you tamed your hope and your ambition.”
“Okay?” Billy says, and his mind goes completely blank.
“You’re not doing it,” Lucifer says. “I can tell, just from looking at you.”
“Sorry?”
“Billy. I want you to think. I want you to think back. Not back to three days ago, but back to when you were sixteen. In Ohio. I want you to remember your first job. What was your first job. Tell me.”
“My first job,” Billy says. “I worked at the driving range.”
“You worked at the driving range,” Lucifer says. “What were your job duties?”
“My — job duties? Uh. I drove a golf cart back and forth, collecting balls. For like hours at a time. It was a pretty shitty job.”
“That’s right, Billy,” Lucifer says. “It was a shitty job. You didn’t even like golf.”
“No. I hated golf. And I hated golfers. I used permanent marker to make a T-shirt that said DESTROY ALL GOLFERS. And they didn’t like me either. They used to aim for my cart while I was driving around out there.”
“Of course they did,” Lucifer says. “My point here, Billy, is not to ask you to relive whatever you suffered at the slings and arrows of the ignorant, but rather to remind you of the reward that awaited you at the end of that summer. Your girlfriend of the time was saving up to take a trip to Zurich and your best friend was saving up to buy his first used car. You were also saving your money, Billy. Do you remember? Do you remember what those long hours on the golf course bought you?”
“Yes,” Billy says, quietly, after a minute of looking down at his battered canvas sneakers.
“What was it?” Lucifer says, his voice almost a whisper now.
“It was an Olivetti Valentine S,” Billy says.
“An Olivetti Valentine S,” Lucifer repeats. “A typewriter. You didn’t need a typewriter. Your family had a computer. So why did you buy an Olivetti?”
“It was—” Billy says, his mood sullen, complexly tangled. “It was a beautiful machine.”
“That’s not why,” Lucifer says. “If you wanted a beautiful machine you could have saved for a Harley-Davidson. You could have saved for a Braun stereo. But instead you saved for an Olivetti typewriter. Tell me why, Billy.”
“Because it’s—”
“Tell me.”
“Because,” Billy says, “because real writers used typewriters.”
“That’s right,” says Lucifer.
Billy remembers the draft of an early first novel that he wrote on that typewriter, his senior year of high school and first year of college, this thing about the murder of a young man in a quiet rural town. He still has it in a box somewhere, terrible, probably, but he finished it, three hundred pages hammered out on that Olivetti, and he remembers the feeling of confidence and authority that came from using that machine to make marks on paper. It’s been a long time since he’s been able to produce those feelings so sustainably.
“You envisioned a future for yourself, then, didn’t you?” Lucifer says.
Billy had. That senior year of high school was when he first started drinking coffee, and he remembers hooking up a Mr. Coffee in his room at home, up on the third floor, and he would wake on cold mornings before the sun was up, before he’d need to trudge to where the school bus would pick him up, and he would sit at his desk, in a ratty plum-colored bathrobe, drinking coffee and smoking his first-ever cigarettes and clacking out pages, and he would feel certain that, in some important way, he was making a template for the rest of his life.
He also remembers selling that typewriter, five years ago, on eBay, a hard month, between jobs, remembers the good feeling of an extra hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, even though it disappeared quickly into a few overdue bills, a new shirt for a job interview, groceries, beer, condoms, smokes, a couple of books.
Lucifer goes on: “You aren’t allowing yourself to feel that hope again, that ambition, Billy. I promise you the kind of future you really want and you throw it away in favor of take me back to three days ago? What did you have three days ago that you won’t have in the future that I’m offering you? A job? Another shitty job? Your wallet? Your keys? These things are all replaceable: a few days’ hassle, nothing more. Your friends? You’re thirty years old, Billy Ridgeway, you don’t get to be thirty years old without passing through times when your friends are mad at you. It’s passed before and it’ll pass now. A girlfriend? Denver? You think she won’t come back to you when your novel gets published?”