Satan Loves You (3 page)

Hell is half-assed. Demons flog screaming souls but they swing from their elbows, never getting their shoulders into the blows. Flesh is indifferently flayed with dull knives. Once, lining the road between the Sixth and Seventh Bolgias, there had stood an impressive arcade of crucifixes. Over time their crossbeams cracked and their arms broke, leaving them lopsided and, rather than actually taking the trouble to repair them, the demons just made do. The result was an avenue of the crucified who had one hand waving free and, occasionally, a foot, too. It looked very stupid, but no one cared. It was Hell.

Hell was the Broken Windows Theory in reverse: as more and more small things were ignored and the minor aspects of the realm fell into disrepair, it caused a ripple effect across the realm. A feeling of despair infected every corner of Hell, and not just the normal Hellish despair of souls bound in eternal torment, but a more Earthly “Why Bother?” shrug. Fifteen-minute coffee breaks became hour-long naps. Where once Centaurs had scourged, violated and destroyed souls now they just scourged and violated them and their violations were by-the-numbers at best. Gluttons had once been drowned in hot lead, but now the lead was microwaved until it was merely lukewarm. The gluttons suffered, but mostly from boredom and lead poisoning.

The budget cuts didn’t help. A demon who lost his trident or whip knew that it was unlikely he’d be issued a replacement. The Malebranche’s famous lake of pitch was now more of a pond and well on its way to becoming a wide puddle. The flatterers of the Second Bolgia had once been buried in human excrement, but now there was only enough excrement to bury them up to their necks and as a consequence they wouldn’t shut up. It drove the demons appointed to stomp on their faces crazy.

With so few physical resources at its disposal, the important thing about Hell was keeping morale up, which is why self-starters like Minos, who took genuine pride in their work, were so important. And that was why it was even more disturbing that he and his crew were now on strike.

Satan and Nero arrived at The Gates of Hell where a mob of demons were walking a picket line. A small clot of souls were sitting nearby, suddenly seized by a deep commitment to social justice which required that they never cross a picket line. They hoped that their newfound solidarity with labor would spare them from the fires of Hell for a little while longer. Standing on a rock by the Gate was Minos, chanting on his bullhorn. Seeing Satan and Nero approach, he redoubled his efforts.

“Four, six, eight, ten, we won’t be burned for Satan!” 

“Hey hey, ho ho, toxic fumes have got to go!”

“One, three, five, seven, give us benefits like they’ve got in Heaven!”

“I’m going home,” Satan said to Nero.

“You must take decisive action, sir.”

“I don’t want to be decisive,” Satan whined. “I’ve got a killer headache.”

“Excuse me?” Nero shouted at Minos. “Excuse me?”

“Whaddaya want?” Minos yelled back.

“I’ve got his attention, sir,” Nero said. “Now talk to him.”

“Hi, Minos,” Satan said.

All the demons were suddenly staring at him. Satan figured he needed to do better than “Hi.”

“So, what’s going on?”

Instantly, Satan regretted saying this because a) he didn’t actually want to know and, b) it sounded weak.

“We’re on strike,” Minos roared from his barrel chest. “And if you don’t meet our demands we’re gonna get you put on the lista Unfair Metaphysical Employers.”

“This is Hell,” Satan said. “It’s supposed to be unfair.”

“Didn’t you read our signs?” Minos asked.

He pointed his long, scaly tail at a placard held by a minor demon that read, “UNfair doesn’t mean UNsafe.”

“Do you know what it’s like ta live the life of a demon?” Minos asked, rhetorically.

The mob murmured.

“We work around open flames all day long with no protection,” Minos bellowed, playing to the crowd. “We may be fireproof, but our hair ain’t! I useta be a hairy guy, now look at me! Bald as a bat! All day long we inhale offensive and hazardous odors. I may be a demon from Hell, but does that mean I don’t like nice things? Why can’t we have some potpourri in da break room? Why can’t we spray down with Febreeze at da end of the day?”

“Yeah!” the demons yelled. “ Potpourri! Febreeze!”

“We deal with all the souls who come in here,” Minos ranted, really getting on a roll. “All day and all night. And they’ve all got complaints:
‘
I didn’t do it,’
‘
I led a righteous life,’
‘
I was President of the United States.’ And we haveta figure out an appropriate punishment for eacha dem. And you know what? These torments haven’t been updated in centuries. They’re outta date! Did ya know that some fetishists are coming here because they wanna be buried in excrement? Andrew Johnson loves it! And what about online bullies? Where do they go? Why ain’t there a setta guidelines for these chumps? How come every time I get someone who was born after 200 AD I haveta start from scratch?”

“We want better rules and regulations!” the mob of demons shouted.

“I get a new demon, and I gotta train him from nuthin’,” Minos said. “You know how much time dat takes? Last week I hadta transfer some giants from the Ninth Circle up to the Fifth and all they wanted ta do was hit people in the head with rocks. It took me two days to gettem ta stop and no one paid me anything for my overtime. If you don’t start addressing these problems then we’re all gonna quit and we’ll see how you like that.”

“But
...
but if you quit, where will you go.” Nero asked, unable to contain himself.

“Heaven!” Minos shouted, and the cavern suddenly got quiet. “They already said they’d take us back.”

“They did?” Nero asked.

“Yeah, because we’re sick and tired of being treated like dis.”

Nero noticed that Satan’s face was slowly turning red.

“Sir?” Nero said. He was alarmed at how red Satan was turning. “Sir?”

“Well, GO!” Satan exploded.

“Sir!” Nero gasped.

“Ever since we restructured and moved you guys up here from the second circle you’ve done nothing but piss and moan. You didn’t like being down there with the wanton and all that dust from the infernal hurricane, so I listened and relocated you up here and now you’re complaining again. What’s it going to take to make you happy? You know what I just did? I fired Death! And now I’ve got to find a replacement. What are you doing tonight? Going home, to eat your little snack cakes and your ham? I’m going to be on a plane to Los Angeles – LOS ANGELES – to deal with this Death situation. Have you ever been to Los Angeles? It’s a giant moron carnival!”

“You really fired Death?” Minos asked in his indoors voice.

“Yes! I really fired him!”

There was a long silence. No one ever got fired in Hell. This was new.

“You’re not gonna fire us, are ya, boss?” Minos asked. “Because we were all jus’ blowin’ off some steam here.”

“Yeah,” a few demons muttered. “Blowing off steam.”

“I haven’t decided yet!”

“Well, you know me. I’ve always been a team player,” Minos said. “We’ve all been team players up here at The Gates. And, um, obviously this is, um, a very bad time for you, and so why doan you go do whatever it is you need to do and doan worry about us, because we all know you’re doing your best, Mr. Boss, and we’ll all jus’ go back ta work and talk about this later?”

“Booo! No negotiating with management,” a minor Demon shouted. Minos gave a quick nod and the dissenter was decapitated.

“Braaaap!” his neck hole blarted, as a pair of demons dragged him away.

“Come on everybody,” Minos shouted. “Back ta work. Look fierce. Balial, brandish that trident like you mean it. These souls ain’t gonna damn themselves!”

“Nicely done, sir,” Nero said as he and Satan walked away. “But I fear that if more demons find out Death has been fired and there is no replacement this unrest will spread. And you know how demons gossip.”

“I’m getting a replacement,” Satan said.

“As soon as possible, right?”

“Would you stop pressuring me? I’m on it. Book me a ticket for Los Angeles.”

Sister Mary Renfro finished adjusting the idle on the carburetor and slammed the hood of the old Chevy. She slid her screwdriver back into her tool kit, and latched its cover. She removed her work gloves, folded them in half, and tucked them into one pocket, then she picked up her tool kit and took it over to the porch and carefully put it down. Returning to the Chevy, she shook out her work mat and then folded it into precise quarters. Then she checked to make sure that each of the doors of the Chevrolet were locked. Way out here in the suburbs of Minnetonka, Minnesota there was no one to steal it, but it was the proper thing to do. When she was certain the vehicle was secure, she went into the garage.

On Saturdays, Sister Mary Renfro took an envelope recycled from the week’s junk mail and on the back of it she wrote a list of the chores that needed to be done at the monastery. She picked up today’s list and carefully drew a line through “Adjust idle on carb.” The next item was, “Check connection on DirecTV dish.” That would require the ladder. Sister Mary smiled to herself. She loved the ladder.

Sister Mary also loved chores, and she loved lists, but most of all she loved routines. At thirty-four she was already an old lady in her heart, and the only passion in her life was her passionate embrace of repetition, routine and habit. Especially now, after that terrible experience at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She had been on her way home from the wonderfully boring
God is Green: Environmental Efficiency in Religious Communities Conference
and suddenly, while changing planes at the airport, the world had stopped making sense. She had seen people murdered by their own carry-on items. She had seen those same people restored to life twenty minutes later. She had seen a man who was referred to as Satan (very disappointing looking, to be honest). She had seen beautiful, glowing creatures who must have been angels. She had seen a TSA Employee strip naked and attempt to copulate with a Rosetta Stone vending machine. She didn’t know how drugs worked but she suspected they worked a lot like this. The whole experience had left her shaken.

There are two types of nun. One was the type who braved hails of sniper fire to minister to the sick in the Sudan. These nuns risked their lives to smuggle human rights workers out of North Korea. They held hands with convicted serial killers as they were executed. They were God’s warriors of mercy. Mary Renfro was not that kind of nun. Mary Renfro was a hiding-from-the-world, please-don’t-bother-me kind of nun. She was in it for God, of course, but she was mostly in it for the stability. Nuns couldn’t be fired. Nuns couldn’t be laid off. When you joined the Church you were in it for life.

Sister Mary’s father had been killed in a freak cosplay accident when she was young. He had loved
Star Wars
but something had gone tragically awry with his reproduction light saber at a convention and suddenly he’d been engulfed in flames on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, Hall B. It was random, it was bizarre, it was unexpected and after that Mary Renfro had yearned for predictability. She had spent months asking grown ups what jobs were the safest and which careers were the most orderly. Finally, she drew up a list, reviewed it and made the only possible decision.

And so, when she was twelve years old, she had marched up to her mother and informed her that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had smiled, opened another bottle of Scotch and assumed that her daughter would forget all about it once she discovered boys or drugs or masturbation or all of the above. But twelve-year-old Mary Renfro walked to the local library (safest mode of transportation) and made a list of all the things she needed to do to become a nun and then, on her nineteen birthday, she did them. There was no college, no backpacking around Europe, no hitchhiking adventures in Northern California. Within six months of her high school graduation, Mary Renfro became a nun. Two weeks later her mother killed herself, but Sister Mary told herself that the two events were probably unrelated. Probably.

Being a nun was a good way to live. A precise way to live. And after the horrors of the airport, Sister Mary embraced her familiar routines like a drowning swimmer grabbing a life preserver. Every boring chore, every mundane task, every tiny ritual was a wall that she was building to protect herself from the chaos she had seen on Concourse C. But no matter how strong her wall was, there was still The Other Problem. The one that nagged at her. The one that whispered to her from the back of her mind, telling her that maybe it was already Too Late. The one that filled her every quiet moment – the one that ate at her before she fell asleep, while she sat on the toilet, while she untangled extension cords. The one that suggested she might be beyond salvation.

Sister Mary fetched the ladder from the garage and leaned it against the roof. She shook it once to make sure it was secure and then she climbed up and stepped onto the shingles. Carefully, she made her way to the short brick chimney where the DirecTV dish was attached and began looking for the problem. And there it was. Three of the brackets securing the coaxial cable had been torn out and downward pressure had caused the connector to become unseated in its receptacle.