Up Jumps the Devil (23 page)

“Maybe you never
will
feel rich,” he told Fish. “I've heard about that. People who get their money all at once, or in strange ways, always feel like it's about to fall apart.”

They were drinking twelve-year-old Scotch in Fish's Gold Coast apartment, celebrating. That afternoon, a customer named Charlie P. Scott had died at the age of ninety-two. His life insurance policy had paid out ten thousand dollars. Over the thirty years since launching the policy, they had made a quarter of a million off ol' Charlie.

“Here's to Charlie,” said Fish, raising his Scotch, leaning against the kitchen bar.

He wore a gold ring, a thin black turtleneck, and lines on his face that most men didn't have at the age of twenty-six.

“So,” the Devil asked Fish, “are you bored?”

Fish shook his head, sucking an ice cube.

“Not yet. Why? You got your eye on something?”

“I do.”

“Something fun?”

“It's Zachary,” said the Devil. “He's working on a project. Could pay off big. But he needs an investor.”

“Zachary?”

“You're such an asshole,” said the Devil. “Zachary! From the band!”

Fish rolled his eyes.

“The one who was going to change the world.”

“He will, but he needs your help.”

“What about
your
help? He sold his soul to you, dude, not me.”

Sometimes the Devil wanted to end Fish's contract on the spot. Smoke him right there on his eighty-grand natural-fibers designer carpet.

Fish misread the silence.

“Cat got your tongue?”

The Devil vaulted into the kitchen, black-eyed, smashed his Scotch tumbler on the counter, and—
snicker-snack!
—sawed off Fish's left little finger with broken glass.

He did it because it needed doing, not out of anger. The Devil wasn't angry. The coke wouldn't allow it.

Fish opened his mouth as if to scream, but instead stood there, staring and unbelieving until belief and pain took hold.

He still didn't scream. He understood the lesson enough not to get mad.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and meant it.

“Zachary,” said the Devil, pouring himself another Scotch.

“Yes,” said Fish, wrapping his hand in a sixty-dollar dish towel. “Yes, Zachary. Of course. You know, if you give that finger back, they can sew it back on, if it hasn't been too long.”

The Devil chewed the finger, and swallowed.

“Zachary
will
change the world. Just not the way he thinks.”

“Zachary,” said Fish. “All right. Hurts. Okay.”

TWO AFTERNOONS LATER
, the Devil and the CEO of Assurance Mutual stood across from a jumbled workbench.

“Fish has some money to invest,” prompted the Devil.

Zachary looked doubtful.

He also looked like what you'd expect from a twenty-six-year-old Indian still living at home. His hair was longer than ever; he wore a Black Sabbath concert T-shirt and dirty jeans. But his eyes were keen, and he seemed glad to have company. He seemed less likely to taper off into sleep, or to drool on himself.

“I need fourteen thousand BTUs in a fifth of a second,” said Zachary.

“That's a lot of energy,” said Fish. “What for?”

“To freeze something so fast that the freezing doesn't kill it.”

“Something?” asked the Devil.

“A dog.”

The Devil frowned. He liked dogs. “Where the hell do you plan to get—?”

“Leave that to me. It'll be okay.”

Zachary's mother walked in just then, through the utility room door. She set a plate of cookies and orange punch down on a stack of used tires, and left them alone.

“If the dog works out,” said Zachary, “we freeze a person. Then we try again to get people to register and pay for tanks.”

“And we get rich,” said Fish.

“More importantly, we keep people's lives from ending for stupid reasons, when they still ought to have good years left. We create a world where people don't have to be afraid of death, because we can hold death off until we're ready.”

“You want a world of immortals?”

“You wouldn't
get
a world of immortals. You'd get a world where little kids don't die because a cure is a year away, or people don't die because the liver they need is on the other side of the country.”

“Well,” said Fish, “that's good, because it's a small world. We need for people to die, and make room. Besides—”

“Shut up, Fish,” said Zachary and the Devil at the same time.

Fish shut up, and forked over two hundred thousand dollars.

“Give me a week,” said Zachary.

SO FISH AND THE DEVIL
went fishing in the Superstition Mountains, and when they returned, Zachary's mother let them shower and shave, and brought them sandwiches.

Zachary waited in the garage, still poorly groomed, still wearing his Black Sabbath T-shirt. He looked up as they entered the garage, and met their eyes over the top of something like a miniature ice-cream truck married to a jet engine.

“Catch anything?” he asked.

Shaking his head, the Devil pointed at the machine and said, “Well?”

Zachary showed them his mother's punch bowl, filled with ordinary tap water. And, like a magician instructing a crowd, showed them the inside of the ice-cream-truck machine, large enough to contain a massage table.

Nothing in his pockets, nothing up his sleeve.

He placed the punch bowl on the massage table. Then he closed what would have been the big side door of the ice-cream truck, and cranked a knob.

There was something like an explosion inside the machine. Air shot out, here and there—freezing, winter, January air—and tossed their hair back.

And then there was quiet.

Zachary opened the machine. Vapor unfurled in a foggy waterfall and covered the floor. From this artificial weather he gingerly removed the punch bowl and set it down on the stack of used tires. “Voilà.”

The water in the bowl was frozen solid. Not only that, but it had not swollen or bulged or broken the bowl.

“That
was
fast,” admitted Fish, admiring. “Where's the dog?”

THE DOG BELONGED
to Zachary's neighbors, old friends. Zachary had explained his work to the family, and when their dog began to die of old age,
they
had come to
him
.

“Is there room in your experiments for Dooley?” asked Mark, their fifteen-year-old boy, and Zachary had to admit that there was.

“If I can freeze Dooley,” Zachary had explained, “and then thaw him again, I'll refreeze and store him for you for free. Maybe veterinarians can figure out a way to give him a few more years, and when they do, we'll thaw him for good.”

Dooley and his masters had nothing to lose.

After the punch-bowl demonstration, Zachary excused himself and walked next door. He returned an hour later with an arthritic, half-blind Airedale on a leash. Fifteen-year-old Mark came with him, petting the dog and looking red around the eyes.

“I'll bring him back over when we're done,” Zachary told him.

“It won't hurt, will it?” asked Mark.

Zachary forced himself to be truthful.

“I'm eighty-five percent sure it won't.”

Good enough. Mark walked away, and Fish shut the garage door behind him.

IT WENT BEAUTIFULLY
.

Dooley lay down on the massage table without a whimper. Zachary closed the door gently, and turned the knob without hesitation.

The machine BOOMed and blew.

Zachary opened the door and shooed the mist away, and there lay Dooley just as if he were sleeping, solid as a rock.

The Devil wondered for the first time if maybe he was wrong; maybe this
was
how Zachary was meant to make the world better. But he was riding a half dose of Turkish smack, and inclined to have nice feelings about things.

They waited together on lawn chairs. Dooley, defrosting, began to drip. Now and then, Zachary got up to hook the dog up to something, or inject him with things.

“An Airedale,” said Fish, “is a complicated organism.”

“Yeah,” said Zachary, applying electrical current to Dooley's chest.

“I'm just saying. It'll be one hell of an accomplishment. That's all I'm saying.”

Dooley the pioneer dog whimpered and stirred.

“Heads up,” said the Devil.

Zachary lifted the dog down. Dooley staggered a bit—the freezing didn't seem to have helped his arthritis any—then wagged his tail. Once. Blinking, he took one step toward the garage door. Then another.

Zachary could hardly contain himself.

“Mark won't believe it!” he said. “Can you imagine what it's going to be like when, you know, people—”

He was on the verge of opening the door when the dog gave an unearthly shriek.

The Devil's hair rose.

Fish ran and hid among the used tires.

The dog melted.

Not like ice melts, but like flesh that has suffered a billion tiny explosions all over. He slid apart right in front of them; his scream became a low, sick gagging, and then there was too little of him left to suffer.

Outside, running steps, and Mark's voice.

“Hey!” called the boy. “Hey, Dooley?”

“Lie to him!”
advised the Devil.

“Yes,” breathed Zachary, drooling a little.

He opened the garage door just enough to roll outside in his own private cloud bank, and for a while they listened, Fish and the Devil, to raised voices. Then lower voices.

Zachary came back in. His eyes were red.

“I need a million dollars,” he told Fish. “At least.”

Fish stared at him.

The Devil raised his eyebrows.

“On one condition,” said Fish, slowly.

San Francisco, 1975

NO MATTER HOW HARD
she tried, Memory couldn't feel good about the disco album.

It might sell. Nothing wrong with that.

She sighed.

And it might be seen as a desperate last stab by a washed-up, drug-addled former star.

That was it.

Clap, clap!

“Open your eyes,” said a soothing male voice.

Memory opened her eyes. She sat facing a man with eyes like a wounded puppy. All around them, other pairs of strangers sat facing each other.

They were the clients of the beloved Bay Area therapist Raymond Utrecht, aka “the Bay Area Buddha.” Raymond Utrecht loved getting his clients together in large groups. The groups were called “Encounter Sessions.”

Memory had started seeing Dr. Ray because he thought he could help her kick heroin. But she was mostly here because Dr. Ray also thought he might be able to cure her amnesia. She didn't really
want
to kick heroin, but Dr. Ray didn't need to know that. She kind of
did
want her memory back.

“Talk to each other,” urged Raymond Utrecht softly. He walked among them in his socks, sometimes touching them on the head.

He touched Memory on the head.

“It doesn't matter what you say,” said the Buddha. “Just talk. Discover each other.”

“I know,” said the wounded-puppy guy, “Dr. Ray said we were supposed to try and ignore that you're this big celebrity, but I feel it actually adds to the experience. I also feel like it has to be talked about, or at least acknowledged, before we can discover anything new.”

The group was spread out all over some kind of rented minigym.

Dr. Ray made everyone take their shoes off. The minigym smelled like Ben-Gay and sock feet.

“You're probably here because of drugs, right?” said Wounded Puppy.

Memory focused on his eyes. Tried to be mature.

“That's not really fair. Are you making assumptions just because I was in a band? Maybe being famous is a
disadvantage
to me in this situation. Think about it. What are you here for?”

“It's not a prison sentence,” said Wounded Puppy. “We're not being punished. But since you ask, I'm here because my kid frustrates me and I'm afraid I'll beat him.”

“You'd better not!”

Dr. Ray was there, touching their heads.

“Anger is okay,” he said. “Everything's okay. This is a safe place.”

“I'll bet this asshole already beats his kid. ‘
Might
beat my kid,' my ass.”