This is the final part of Follow the Devil/Follow the Light. Read all the previous parts here.
Nora
Joe emerged from the digestive soup of LEVIATHAN’s stomach, a raving, sputtering mess. The burning liquid irritated skin and encouraged both eyes shut. He grasped about for a makeshift buoy, a lifeboat, until his fingers touched a floating pallet. Joe clutched the edge, narrowly missing the exposed point of a nail, and pulled himself topside. It immediately began to sink. A few panicked adjustments, and Joe distributed his weight enough for the pallet to hold, half-sunk in a vile putrescence. This was not the hospitable whale of Jonah, and a sense of doom impressed itself on Joe Muggeridge in the belly of LEVIATHAN.
Forty yards off, an improbable light source came from a floating island of congealed refuse and half-digested meat. It was quite dim, but bright enough for Joe to perceive his surroundings. There were dead fish of every size and description, the remains of bovine and walrus, narwhal and waterfowl. Abandoned fishing line was woven into various states of macramé. Plastic tubs bobbed up and down on the surface like small boats. There was a marble statue of Napoleon on horseback, oil drums from a capsized rig, a Panzer tank, and a fully functional VW Beetle (headlights and dash all aglow) left to rust in this reservoir of gastrologic waste.
Joe saw his own American excess on display as well. There was the garbage he removed each week from his apartment: pizza boxes and aluminum cans, microwave dinner trays and candy wrappers, plastic bags and bottles. There was every cheap labor overseas laptop, console, and smartphone he had ever owned. Every privileged resource and fleeting possession: planned obsolescence in the dark economy that sustained the Violent Against Beauty.
Joe watched as these objects were churned about into a slow mash, indivisible from the floating island up ahead. He contemplated the disquieting mechanics of digestion until his own stomach went sick.
“Ahoy there,” a voice called from the island. Morte Magari. “Quite the chute to get here, no? Paddle this way … that’s right … over to me. The Indwelling Throne, right where they said it would be.”
“Who said?” Joe shouted back.
“Never mind that. Never mind. Get up here! Your corpse awaits. The wheelbarrow survived the trip. Can you believe it!? You, Joe Muggeridge, completed the third sequence of The Weltschmerz. After all of my abductions and failed attempts, you were the first to survive. I’ve never seen anything like it. The stars aligned on this one. Aligned. Fortuna’s dishing out free coupons!” This was the first time Joe had witnessed such enthusiasm from Magari. The demon was genuinely “lit,” coked from a line and ready for the Vegas strip. “That’s the way,” it continued. “Get your sorry ass up here. That’s it.”
The pallet came to rest against the island and Joe climbed out onto the gelatinous rot. There now arose a caustic sucking sound from the esophagus where Joe had been expelled and left to drown. LEVIATHAN’s feeding again, he thought. There were panicked splashes and gasps from whatever had just survived the trip, and then everything went silent save for the burps and gurgles of the great organ itself. Whatever it was, Joe and Magari were no longer alone down here.
Joe climbed the steep embankment to find Magari standing before the Indwelling Throne. The corpse with its tarp was prostrate to the demon’s left, upset by the wheelbarrow tilted on its side. Four lit torches (the same lights that had guided Joe) were staked into the ground, and the throne itself, fashioned from black quartz, was occupied. Joe instinctively knew who it was.
Lucifer, but not Lucifer.
Angelic.
Archfiend.
Dante had spoken with authority on the subject, but the Codex Gigas[1] hadn’t been wrong either. It was the resolute nonbeing of his presence, the equally vicious and vacuous aspect of the devil’s nature that appalled Joe Muggeridge most. Ghosts had more substance. Dreams had more phenomena than the phantom that sat before him. If the world was indeed Satan’s domain, it was a world of shadow and half-truth, frequent illusion and frequent grift.
He wore the regalia of a monarch, the debonair of a duke. His face was handsome, but like all anatomy given over to age-defying creams and plastic surgery, a fiction. It was a face that had cheated death, cheated God, and his doublet was unbuttoned to reveal the wound St. Michael had inflicted upon his insolence.
Magari approached the throne to genuflect before its lord. “Satan’s expulsion was a tragedy for the imagination,”[2] the demon explained from a kneeling height. “Before your unworthy gaze sits a scarecrow, a sad husk of his former glory. His spirit now roams the earth seeking someone to devour.[3] He incarnates this body and twelve others on Indwelling Thrones dispersed throughout the netherworld at will. These he employs for his reelection rallies, frivolous lawsuits, galas with heads of Parliament, illicit trysts, rounds of croquet, and (when necessary) to oust any would-be coup. A pious Gnostic, he has little regard for the corporeal. The bodies are his hollow chameleons, mannequins dressed for murder and tea.”
“Is he dead then?”
“By no means. There is no afterlife, Joe Muggeridge. There is only life and the various half-lives you have encountered on your journey. We either reside in the source of all life or find ourselves diminished in hells of our own making.”
“Where is his spirit now,” Joe asked, worried the corpse might experience sudden animation.
“Breeding pestilence no doubt. Tickling the dim imagination of dictators and sociopaths with brutish variations on the same theme. Letting nature run rough shod over the human psyche. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. That sort of thing. Tipping the Richter scale enough to get them worried about a cruel divinity or a cruel cosmos. Let’s see what he’s plotting now, shall we?”
“You can do that?” Joe asked with interest.
Magari approached the throne, placed a clammy palm directly onto Lucifer’s forehead, and was thrown into glacial animation. The stuttering tremor of stop motion. A film reel at one frame per second rather than the requisite twenty-four. Magari narrated the imagery to Joe as it appeared to the mind’s eye.
“I see a great Corona encircling the globe. Five years from now. A pandemic poised to set homes asunder, board up businesses for good, radicalize politics, inspire vast internet conspiracies, herald the death of expert opinion, and enable global megadeath without firing a single warhead. How glorious. What sport!”
“A pandemic?” Joe asked, alarmed. “Like the swine flu?”[4]
“Better,” Magari said with a grin. The demon removed its hand from Lucifer’s forehead, stepped away from the throne, and trembled in the wake of clairvoyance. “Impressive, no?”
“Is that how I see Nora?” Joe asked.
“I can deliver something far more substantial,” Magari said. “Offer sacrifice before the Master and Nora Muggeridge is yours. Just as I promised.” It gestured to the right of the throne. There was an enormous bronze altar from Solomon’s Temple (a near-perfect replica) set into the ground. Joe had mistaken it for part of the island, its base covered with the same decay as the ground beneath his feet.
“Is that what the corpse and wheelbarrow are for?”
“Yes.”
“How is his life worth Nora’s?”
“It’s not. Sacrifice is an arbitrary transaction down here. A will to power and nothing more.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said.
“You hesitate after all you’ve been through?”
“I don’t think … ”
“We don’t have time for mealy mouth,” Magari sneered. “I’ll lend a hand.” It righted the wheelbarrow, gripped the sack of corpse beneath its shoulders and hauled the body’s heft back into the barrow.
“Heavy fellow. Now, push him to the altar.”
Joe dreaded the prospect, but there were few alternatives. He grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow, pushed the corpse over to the altar, and looked back to await further instructions.
“Go on then. Dump him out if you must. That’s right. That’s the way.”
Joe tipped the wheelbarrow at the altar’s edge and the corpse toppled into the large bronze basin. The demon produced the same scroll it had used back at Joe’s apartment and recited a grisly bit of verse in iambic pentameter until the runes written in Joe’s blood began to glow, detach themselves from the parchment, and drift like autumn leaves until they settled on the corpse’s rigid brow. The altar was now enveloped in an otherworldly light. It was the first time Joe had seen the man’s face.
Casualty of the Great War, The Worm King had said. Who had named him on the day of his birth? Washed his clothes? Folded his socks? Who knew his favorite song? Who had prayed for a safe return when he went off to war? Sent letters to him in the trench? Who had received handwritten replies, edges stained with mud and gun grease? Who had sat on the porch for officers to bring news of his death? Who had chosen to believe them: that he had died honorably, that he had served God and country with valor? And what assurance did Joe have that this was truly the end for such a life? Engrossed in such questions, Joe failed to notice a shaft of white light descend toward the island like a knife stroke as subtle notes sounded from a hidden choir. Miserere mei Deus.[5]
Joe felt warmth on his neck and back. Not the artificial light of electric bulbs or the dry heat of radiators, but warmth. Sun on sandaled feet. Sun through a windowpane. Joe Muggeridge turned from the altar, from Morte Magari, from the Indwelling Throne, to find her there at the edge of the island. Had she been devoured by LEVIATHAN like the rest of them? No. Her radiance was too detached from this place, too distinct in its supremacy. The last time Joe had seen her had been on the steps of the elementary school. Blue sweater. Tan pants. Cheap backpack with the frayed seam. Nora Muggeridge frail. Nora Muggeridge dead.
There was nothing frail in her demeanor now.
Nora sang with a voice like swords and the merriment of wine:
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.[6]
Nora ended her song and looked at Joe with the same eyes he had known as a child. Her face was as he remembered, but there was something to her aspect beyond time and limitation. Something wise. Noble. She hovered in midair as waves of light rose and fell behind her. Her hair gave the appearance of being underwater, swept back and forth like strands of golden seaweed in a gentle current.
“I’m scared for you brave paladin,” she said.
The memory of their childhood games returned. Joe smiled. “Stay together,” he said, “we’ll be just fine.” And he began to walk toward her.
“How do you like my di-a-phan-ous white gown?” she asked with a sly grin.
“Are you officially a water nymph now?”
“Something like that.”
“And how do I get out of this place?”
“You’ve always known.”
“Follow the devil,” Joe said. “Follow the light.”
Nora leaned forward as Joe reached for her at the island’s edge. With her right hand she touched the inverted cross on Joe’s forehead. He experienced the sublime Yeats once knew. Vision of prophets. Swoon of poets. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree … [7]
* * *
He was in a large room. White tile. EVR-LED light from octagonal ceiling fixtures. A row of examination tables received a line of patients who entered single file through two sets of double doors. Columns next to each table held an array of tools: power drills, magnetic screwdrivers, pliers, socket wrenches of every size. Patients were being attended to by workers in white uniforms. Joe looked down to find himself wearing a white gown as well. His hands were seasoned with age, much older than he remembered.
On the wall hung the Rod of Asclepius. Embossed below the seal were the following words:
TELOS: HUMAN
NO UPGRADE NECESSARY
The man’s body was a mishmash of last century hardware, what Joe and his colleagues called a “Retro.” The trend had gained momentum mid-century from the writings of a Berkeley grad who maintained an anonymous avatar presence online. Part steampunk, part nostalgia, the trend was transhumanism “lite.” A counterculture for Romantic aesthetes. The receiver of an antique phone was surgically grafted to his face, the cord artistically stitched into the vocal cords of his neck. The keypad from a late-90s luxury automobile was implanted on the forearm: cheaper than AR kits and the hologram skin displays used by elites. A prosthetic, removable this time, was attached to various organs for on-demand stimulation. Excessive dopamine hits had led to a perpetual twitch about the chin and mouth, more grimace than grin.
In addition to these pedestrian upgrades, the man had an appliance Joe had never seen before: telegraph knobs for Morse code, installed on his thumbs and tapped with the index fingers. His digits moved in perpétua, signaling to anyone who might hear.
“Can you make me as I was?” the man asked. “As my parents knew me? The day of my birth?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Joe said. He reached for the magnetic screwdriver at his station, flipped the red switch to begin the flow of oxygen, set the gyro to maximum velocity, and anticipated various bodily fluids when the smell of ozone hit the air. He would begin with the face and work his way down, removing each appliance to expose the white epidermis. It reminded him of the demon every time. Morte Magari.
A plastic bucket at his feet caught the wiring, metal, screws, and silicon. There was always blood to clean up afterwards. The waiver encouraged patients to change their dressings every four to six hours following the procedure and to expect no less than a month for the bruises to heal. Joe looked up from his work to see if the line had made any progress. Expectant faces stared back. He and his colleagues would be working overtime. Wallace would call in for dinner long before the third shift was over. His gaze went back to the man in front of him.
“Ready then?” he asked. His bedside manner had improved over the years.
“Installation was easy,” the man said. “They didn’t even charge me for the first upgrade.”
“That’s the deal,” Joe said, activating the screwdriver. He needed the man to be calm. Deep breaths. “What made you change your mind?” He wasn’t supposed to inquire, but a little conversation never hurt.
“Keeping pace with progress I guess,” the man replied. “Non-Hybrids can’t get work. Event Horizon changed everything. Forget about education, health care, retirement. Parents told me it was the only way to stay off the street. Counselor said the same. They weren’t wrong, but I don’t care anymore. I read the other day they’re starting implants, genetic mods in utero. Can you believe that? They got technicians and everything in the delivery room with nanobot hypodermics and digital adhesives. Kid’s born into VR. Some parents even opt for prenatal synapse upgrades. Glad I’m getting out before I started CRISPR hacking or some shit. Saw a guy last week. Replaced his left arm with an octopus tentacle. No joke. Cut off his arm and wired his genes to grow it or something. Hey, what’s with the scar on your forehead?”
“Long story,” Joe said.
“Somebody mess you up or something?”
“Something like that. Now try to keep still,” Joe said. “This always hurts.”
* * *
Joe started from the waking dream and stared at Nora in disbelief. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“For you of course,” Nora said with a laugh like water over river stones.
“Then it was a lie. You were never here to begin with. In Hell I mean?”
“Never.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything. I never thought … ”
“Dinner is served,” Magari interrupted.
“Dinner?” Joe asked, confused.
“What did you think all of this was for Joe Muggeridge? Psychoanalysis? Psychedelic self-help? Your life is a doctrine of devils. Precisely what I needed to draw her attention away from the sweet by and by. Now, having served as bait, marooned in LEVIATHAN, you can watch me devour Nora Muggeridge like a succulent.”
“I thought you were my guide,” Joe said.
“A guide to your death. How tedious to dine on the nectar of the damned when I might pick Nora’s paradisal flesh from between my teeth.”
“You lied to me.”
“It’s what I do.”
“But I trusted you. You said I could see Nora.”
“Promise kept. But you did something far worse. Your desire to see Nora was a violation of your creed. You, the staunch materialist, desired the very thing your natural faith abhors. I presided over your entire life for this moment. I bided my time, waited out the teenage angst, insufferable, just to get you to a place where you were down and out enough to give a damn. And now you’re here like a hooked worm for Nora to try and snatch you away from me. Don’t think it will be easy,” Magari said at Nora with contempt.
“You wanted to see her again,” the demon returned its gaze to Joe, “even though the naturalism you affirm rejects such a possibility? Why?
“I don’t know why,” Joe confessed.
“I’ll tell you why. The only compulsion that brought you here, the only impulse that made you enter that portal in your living room in the first place, the only force strong enough to extract your will from that sad excuse for an apartment was love. I was only too willing to exploit the human nature. We demons have never understood why the race of Adam retained this quality after the Fall, when we ourselves, equally expelled from paradise, have no desire to love again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Joe Muggeridge. Love bade me welcome … So I did sit and eat.”[8]
The demon launched itself, bestial, on all fours toward Nora Muggeridge. She could not have reacted even if she had wanted to, transfixed as she was on a lost brother. The demon was within striking distance, claws ready to hew flesh incorruptible when it happened. From out of nowhere, a hulking form collided with Magari midair, knocked the wind from its lungs, and tackled the demon’s body back onto the altar with its corpse. The splashing Joe had heard earlier. LEVIATHAN’s second helping. The Worm King rose full stature to bellow a defiance of bloody profusion over the place where Magari had fallen.
“No!” Magari screamed. “I employ my will. I cultivate my garden.”[9] It pawed at the altar like a dog, whimpered with a cold cheek against the corpse.
“Traitor!” The Worm King said. His eyes were locked on Magari as he took a few broad strides backward. Math buzzed about in his brain. He made a quick estimate of the blast radius to ensure a good view. “Your desire for the girl betrays you. Here you are, still questing after the good, if only for a morsel of her flesh, after all this time. Your Hadean Vows are hereby forfeit six times over. You little flirt. How can we know you aren’t already back in the fold of our loathed Enemy? What treachery is this? Running errands, are we? Fixing a deal with the Almighty? Is that it? Making way for the redemption of Joe Muggeridge Esquire?
“The life you knew of abductions and plots, public insults and private threats is over Morte Magari. I’ve got an affidavit back at the Tours. Tenfold confessional of fellow ex-CODA conspirators. They send their regards. Want you to know they’ll be waiting should you ever decide to reemerge from the Gehenna where you belong.” The Worm King turned his back on Magari for dramatic effect. He had planned variations of this speech for months in front of a mirror. Measured out the blocking. The pregnant pause. He counted to five and then faced Magari again for the coup de grâce. “Morte Magari,” he said. “I’m not your LITTLE CHERUB !”
The Worm King pressed the remote detonator concealed in his pocket and the corpse nuzzled next to Magari exploded in the broad belly of LEVIATHAN.
To this day, no one knows for sure if The Worm King truly understood the catastrophic potential of his home-brew IED. The historic literature of Hell is divided on this point. What is clear is that the corpse had been packed with far more ammonium nitrate than the job demanded. Homicide became suicide in a blast of astonishing dimension. A calibration problem with the Roberval scales, perhaps? Amateur soldering amidst the wires? A tablespoon for a teaspoon? Whatever had caused the mishap, it was grave all around. For all his love of numbers, The Worm King had done his math wrong.
The explosive took both demons with it. The Worm King and Morte Magari, demons of high stature in the pantheon, demons of esteem in the Beau Monde Demonomicon of DIS, were reduced to impotent troglodytes, pods of prosaic matter. The explosion took their hides and LEVIATHAN with them. Flash. Bang. Extinction. The severed halves of the monster sank like rival submarines into the black abyss.
Joe fully expected to join them. The concussive blast sucked oxygen from his lungs, set the fillings of his teeth to a tingle, and raced the terror of his heart up to his tonsils. With a gesture perfectly human and ineffectual, Joe brought both hands up to his face to block the impact.
Game over, he thought.
And with a subtle wave of her hand, Nora encased them in a sphere of protective light. As The Worm King’s plot unleashed kinetic furor all around them, Nora’s glassy globe held them suspended underwater, reunited in a womb they hadn’t known since the time Wendy had carried them to term as twins.
Joe witnessed the devastation around him sink to the bottom of the sea. He never saw the remains of Morte Magari or The Worm King reach the ocean floor. It would take an eon for the demons to reassemble fragments of immutable anatomy, manage a desperate swim, and probe the darkness like cuttlefish in search of carrion.
“I don’t believe it,” Joe said.
“Believe it,” Nora replied. She touched Joe’s hand, the one he had placed into the Mouth of Mammon, and the stigmata-like wound disappeared. “In a world of devils, in a world of light, all shall be well.”[10]
Joe looked down at his hand. In that moment, he believed in the source of the good, the right, and the beautiful enough to rise from a sea of death and surrender to a strength not his own. It carried him up and out into a great expanse: beyond the cave with its cathedral, beyond the valley and marquee, beyond the crooked wood and EMPORIUM, beyond the microcosm of Hell’s gravity. An impossible lightness took hold of Joe Muggeridge. He didn’t know enough to call it freedom, but emancipation had realigned the gravity of his heart.
Joe then looked into Nora’s eyes and found a cosmos. For all his rational cynicism, a lifetime post-religion, Joe saw a place where the body is resuscitated, the twin sister lives, the lost brother is found, and the Nobody online inherits the earth. Over time, he would forget the majority of vistas Nora revealed to him among the empyrean stars, but her face remained fixed in his imagination like an icon, beatific, for the rest of his days. And like Morte Magari standing before the Sea of Pandemonium, Joe Muggeridge was able to name this newfound constellation with a single word.
Home.
Hell is Joe Muggeridge
There it was, repeating itself like a mantra as Joe opened his eyes to the welcome sound of rain. Gray clouds hid the Olympic mountains to the west. Rainier to the south. The tap of rain on glass, the hum of the refrigerator, and the voice of Fred the retired veteran coaxing Ringo the Terrier with a strip of bacon outside the front door of his apartment told Joe he was home. How long had it been? He looked over at the clock. Saturday. Evening. The hour of Vespers, or so his mother would say.
He found himself sprawled out on the couch in his living room, tangled in seaweed, soaked in salt water. A starfish, strangely alive, the size of a coaster, one leg missing, was on the cushion next to his face. Sand was everywhere: in his hair, down his jeans, between his soggy toes. Joe reached behind his left shoulder to remove a conch shell that had dug the golden ratio of Fibonacci’s spiral into his back.[11] His entire body ached. The only real apartment furniture he owned was done for, soiled past the nuisance of trying to sell it on Craigslist. He took a deep breath and rose to a sitting position.
He looked across the room at the kitchen table where Morte Magari had pissed on the linoleum floor. A mop and some bleach from the closet awaited his penance, a bit of menial housework to amend Joe’s consortium with rebel demons. Worth it, he thought to himself as the memory of Nora rose from his heart like a wellspring.
Hell is Joe Muggeridge.
It was the same table where every Wednesday night he hosted a Frazetta-inspired RPG campaign with a few college buddies. They dined on pizza and beer, tracked character attributes with pencils and paper, rolled polyhedral dice, and assessed the probability of two temperamental dwarves and a neurotic elf surviving the war machine of Krugenheim.
Joe had sometimes wondered if life mimicked a similar dice roll of successes and failures. Date with a beautiful woman: Nat 20. Call from a debt collector: Critical Fail. The numerical sum of a person’s life, resigned to luck, chance, the will of a rabbit’s foot. Nothing had felt lucky about his sojourn among the dead. Nothing had felt lucky about Nora’s rescue or his safe return to Seattle, Washington. Planet Earth. The sequence of events that brought him home seemed less arbitrary than mere happenstance. He retrieved a pen from the coffee table to scribble the words on a napkin before he forgot.
TELOS: HUMAN
NO UPGRADE NECESSARY
What future resided in these words? Reading them aloud, he found himself strangely happy for the first time in years. Nora’s vision, five words on a napkin, was hardly a negation of the things he loved. Rather, their fulfillment. There’d be no book burning or inquisition in the apartment of Joe Muggeridge that day, no sudden career move, dietary restriction, or legalistic purge. This required something more subtle, less performative for the neighbors who would question Joe’s mental health if they saw his earthly possessions on a pyre.
It meant finding a better word than “bastard” when Michael walked past his cubicle at work. It meant something had to change between him and Sarah next week. It meant taking off the headphones for five minutes on the bus to answer a few dumbass questions when another “Belching Man” showed up to invade his space. It meant seeing people as people, acknowledging them as something more than a congregation of sentient atoms, a coalition of cells who happened to be in his way. It was morning and midday, twilight and midnight in the budding heart of Joe Muggeridge; each fixed position of the earth’s orbit, each opportunity to choose the good, the right, and the beautiful, an unmerited accommodation of its very own.
Hell is Joe Muggeridge.
Joe wrested his body off the couch and wandered into the bathroom. The mirror assured him that the past twenty-four hours had been no dream or drug-induced hallucination. His hand was still swollen from Mammon’s two score and a dram, but mended, healed by Nora’s hand. The wound on his side was still sore where The Engineer had jabbed the steel point of a blade. The cross on his forehead, the only persistent trouble, remained a visible scar that required concealer for the rest of his life. He brushed his teeth, combed knots from his hair, and used the sink to wash his face. The water was brook cold, a mood changer, a study in contrast from the rain outside the Tours, the nectar Magari had extracted from plants, or the brackish swill that filled the Sea of Pandemonium. Joe watched the water make its whirlpool around the basin. There was more hospitality from this little fount than any region in Hell. Pay the utility bill on time: clean water on demand. Miraculous. It was one of the many graces Joe Muggeridge would have taken for granted had it not been for a demon named Morte Magari and a twin sister presumed dead now living.
Hell is Joe Muggeridge.
His smartphone rang on the kitchen counter, exactly where he had left it. He recovered the device like a lost appendage and unlocked the home screen when he saw the number.
“Mom,” Joe said. The inflection of gratitude was new.
“Where have you been? Did you get my message about dinner tonight?” Wendy asked.
“No. Haven’t been close to the phone for a while.”
“Really? That’s not like you. Everything okay?” Joe could tell she was ready to brew some home remedies if news returned that he had fallen ill.
“I need to tell you something about Nora.”
“What’s this about?” Wendy couldn’t bring herself to say her name.
“Phone’s no good. I’ll tell you in person.” Joe wandered about his apartment, picked up the box of takeout Magari had thrown against the wall, noted the absence of an Apple I in his collection, and was grateful for the life of Catlyn Gruit instead.
“Well, I’m over at Wayfarer. If you hurry, you can still make it. Trivia contest is about to begin. $10.00 pitchers. Thought we could share.”
“I can’t promise trivia,” Joe said. “But I’ll be there.” He paused to examine a rare Demon Spawn action figure sculpted in overpriced designer resin on his bookshelf. Number 3/100. $120. eBay. It now seemed kitsch in its fixed pose, a replica in burlesque of the world he had just survived.
“Just don’t be too late, okay? I’m not the party animal I once was.” Awkward mom laugh.
Joe looked out at the rain through his living room window, past the dreary palette of evening sky, past the gray invitation to complain, until he was overcome by the sheer abundance of water.
“Joe?” Wendy asked with an edge of concern.
He watched the ivy no one bothered to trim against the exterior of his apartment direct the rain along eager green tendrils until gravity pulled the water underground to dark hidden roots.
“Joe?”
“Sorry Mom. I’ll be there,” Joe said. “I’ve been late my entire life.”
Second Space – Czesław Miłosz
How spacious the heavenly halls are!
Approach them on aerial stairs.
Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.
A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
– translated by the author and Robert Hass, 2004.[12]
COMMENTS
6 responses to “Follow the Devil / Follow the Light”
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What an incredible climax to an incredible journey! Thanks to Jeremiah Webster for this thought provoking and entertaining read.
My one regret is that in retiring at the end of this academic year, I get only one chance to assign this to my students.
“We either reside in the source of all life or find ourselves diminished in hells of our own making”.
All I can say is that I’m grateful to have read this. Beyond “good,” this is something I needed. Joe Muggeridge is forever a lifelong companion, and I’ll be looking for him the next time I use King County Metro.
Potentially life changing, in the subtle ways that Joe’s life is forever different. Definitely haunting. Brilliant.
Ingenious, thought-provoking, and inventive; definitely has elicited much personal reflection on the congruence of my worldview and how I treat my neighbor.