Up Jumps the Devil (25 page)

THE DEVIL GOT
it much worse than Memory.

“It's that shit you've been using,” he rasped from the bathroom, beginning his third battle with diarrhea.

“Shut the door,” she croaked.

“Bad shit is easy to kick. You've probably been shooting sawdust.”

“Shut the door. Jeez. You
stink
.”

“I've been using the b-best.”

“But you're … you're—”

“The Devil. I know. Maybe being the Devil isn't all it used to be.”

Memory coughed up phlegm.

She drank some milk and managed to keep it down.

“Shut the door,” she demanded again.

The Devil shut the door.

THEY SWEATED
their way through two whole sets of bedsheets.

If they took hot showers, they felt too hot afterward. If they took cold showers, they felt too cold.

“I just want to be comfortable,” Memory sobbed.

They both felt like skeletons. Sometimes they lay abed, holding each other. But there was nothing particularly intimate about it. Their bodies and minds were alien, somehow. Their nerves were contradictory signals, telegraphed from the moon. Sometimes the Devil's touch warmed her. Other times it felt like spiders.

Their skin was clammy and goose-bumped all over.

“Like a turkey before you cook it,” said the Devil. “That's where they got the expression ‘Quit Cold Turkey.'”

“Knock-knock.”

“Who's there?”

“Why don't you ever shut up? That's who.”

WHEN THEY RAN OUT
of milk and orange juice, the Devil said it was time to try to eat something. So they dressed up in all the clothes they owned, sunglasses, hats, including the hat with the plastic daisy, and shuffled down the highway to the little general store. They bought chips and hard-boiled eggs.

Feeling brave, they shuffled into the fiberglass sombrero, where their shivers turned to hot flashes at the same time. They stripped down to shorts and T-shirts, and ordered fried ice cream.

The fried ice cream stayed down.

Afterward, they shuffled out from under the sombrero's brim, shuffled back when they realized they'd left the groceries behind, shuffled out again, and looked up into the Arizona sun together.

“Comfortable,” said Memory. “Almost comfortable.”

Then they threw up their fried ice cream together and went back into hiding.

THE DEVIL FELT
at home around Memory. That was how he explained it to himself.

Memory felt more solid, somehow. She had a quality of permanence he didn't understand, and didn't try to, that set her apart from her fellow mortals. Maybe it was the singing they had in common. He'd been a singer, once, after all. Sometimes he almost reached for her in a certain way, but always drew back. She scared him. Partly, she scared him because
he
didn't scare
her
, not that he could see. Mostly, though, she scared him because of what he
couldn't
see, or feel. As if the woman he saw before him, with the dreaming eyes and disappointed mouth, were just the tip of the iceberg, as if the rest of her might be lurking around a corner or caged in a basement somewhere, dangerous and waiting.

They went their own ways, when they felt strong enough. There was a certain awkwardness in it, as if, without the jitters and the sweats, they had lost the means to talk to each other. So certain things didn't get said.

As they hugged and left each other, Memory on a Greyhound bus and the Devil in the death car, she found herself almost wishing they could be sick again.

Funny, the things that hold people together.

DR. RAY WELCOMED
her back with his soft touch, his warm voice.

“You look good,” he told her.

“I'm clean,” she said.

He gave her a suspicious look. Therapists always give you a suspicious look when you tell them you're clean.

He clapped his hands at the rest of his clients, all sitting around in groups of three, telling one another what each thought the others needed to hear.

“Pillow fight!” cried the Bay Area Buddha, spinning away like a child among children in a childish age.

He spun back their way, amid flying pillows.

He touched Memory on the head, then clobbered her with a pillow hard enough to knock her eyes out of focus.

“Symmetrical aardvark!” she rasped.

“That's the spirit!” he said.

Apache Junction, 1976

ZACHARY WAS DOUBLE-CHECKING
his equipment. His equipment? Or Assurance Mutual's equipment?

Fish had loaned him a million bucks, but it came with strings.

Fifty percent of the profit, but that wasn't the big one. Zachary, Fish insisted, had to quit trying to find a way to thaw his customers.

It wasn't about people, obviously, from Fish's point of view.

That was fine. He would work with what he had, and have faith that in the future, there would be others like himself. Those others would have to finish what he had started. If you couldn't trust the future, he told himself, this whole thing was pointless, anyhow.

Zachary had crowded his parents' garage with ten hot-water heaters, each specially modified to hold a kind of cocoon made of aluminum foil, and thirty gallons of liquid nitrogen.

He was testing the thermometer on the first water heater when the side door opened up and the Devil hurried in. He carried something in a cardboard box, and seemed excited.

“Don't touch anything,” Zachary warned. “What's that?”

The Devil cut the box open, and carefully extracted … another box. A more complicated box, made of metal. It had a row of switches on one side, and some lights. It looked like something you'd use to operate electric trains.

“That's a computer,” announced the Devil. He stood proudly beside the workbench in a tan leather jacket with straps around the waist, paisley bell-bottoms, hair and beard like a streetwise TV detective.

“What's it do?”

“It, you know, computes things.”

“We're back to that again, are we?”

Zachary turned his back, and tinkered in silence with the thermometer. The problem, so far, was that liquid nitro destroyed the sensor end of all his thermometers. As the Devil watched, he dipped a foil-wrapped sensor in the nitro, and tapped it against the metal tool rack.

The sensor shattered. Shit.

“I'll have to measure the air temp,” he said, “and calibrate how that relates to the temperature of the nitro itself.”

“Or maybe,” said the Devil, “it's something you could use this computer for.”

“Computers are the size of rooms,” said Zachary.

The Devil turned red and made a funny noise, as if he were putting a lot of effort into not doing or not saying something.

Something buzzed and made noises in Zachary's pocket.

His beeper.

“I have to get to the hospital,” he said.

“Your first customer?”

“First one to actually die,” said Zachary, hurriedly covering the liquid nitro. “Norm Reasoner. Skin cancer. He signed on last week. Paid in full, too, which ought to make Fish happy. If I don't start cooling him down in like ten minutes …”

He was gone.

“I'll wait here,” said the Devil. “Shall I?”

ZACHARY RUSHED IN
as the doctor was signing Norm Reasoner's chart, dragging a plastic tub the size of a coffin filled with twenty-seven bags of party ice behind him.

It took twenty minutes to get Reasoner packed out the front door and into a rented hearse (you can rent hearses!).

“Too slow,” Zachary muttered, running a stop sign.

At home, in the garage, he began the process of getting his client “canned.” Reasoner couldn't go into the flash-freezer or the nitrogen cocoon until there was something in his tissue to stop ice from forming, and Zachary couldn't put the antifreeze in until his blood was out.

“Party ice?” remarked the Devil, appearing at his elbow.

“Either help or get out of the way.”

Dumping blood in the storm gutter was probably not strictly legal, Zachary thought as he rigged up a mortuary needle and a garden hose. Sometimes it was a good thing he had the Devil on his side.

“But really, you're telling me, with a straight face,” said the Devil, moving aside, “you think this is the future?
These
people, living forever?”

“You got a better idea, white man?”

The Devil frowned. “I'm not white. I'm one of those swarthy colors, like Puerto Rican.”

“Puerto Rican isn't a color,” snapped Zachary, “and I'm
not
having this conversation with you.”

FOR TWO HOURS
, Zachary pumped Reasoner's chest like he was performing CPR, squeezing the heart until he forced the final gurgle of blood out down the drain. “Okay,” he said. “He's ready for the antifreeze stuff.”

“This kind of thing presents me with a problem,” said the Devil, handing Zachary a plastic jug. “I mean, is he dead or not? What's the status of his soul?”

“You can't go to Heaven,” said Zachary, “if your soul's on hold, I wouldn't think.”

The Devil grinned. “That's true!” he said.

AFTER A WHILE
, bored, and realizing he wasn't going to get Zachary to look at the computer, the Devil went out for steak and ice cream.

By midnight, Zachary got Reasoner leaning upright inside the first hot-water heater, pulled on a specially treated face mask, and started adding liquid nitrogen.

He kept falling asleep, which frightened him. He imagined splashing liquid nitro on himself. It would be like getting burned. Liquid nitrogen was deep space in a jar.

He awoke one time to discover his father standing in the utility room door, looking out over the phalanx of water heaters in what had once been his garage.

Proud Henry looked baffled. He had looked that way a lot, the last year or so. A stroke had paralyzed half of his face, and his left shoulder slumped, too. His gray plaid bathrobe hung loose, on its way to falling open. He wasn't tying it with both hands, Zachary figured, the way the therapists had taught him. If he got in the habit of being lazy, they'd been warned, Proud Henry would lose coordination all over.

Zachary was too tired, tonight, to lecture his father.

“What happens to your soul,” slurred Proud Henry, “when you … ice … like this?”

His language, like his body, sometimes lost direction.

“We were just wondering that same exact thing,” said Zachary.

“I mean,” said the old man, “what if you get up to Heaven, and you're happy perfectly up there for a hundred years, then all of a sudden you get sent back down to Earth because your body has been … has got … defrosted?”

“I don't know,” was all Zachary could say.

Proud Henry stood and watched for another minute or so. He was a client, too.

Then he said, “Good night.”

“Night, Pop,” answered Zachary.

AND HE DID BURN HIMSELF
with the liquid nitro, before it was all over. But he got Reasoner canned, minus a working thermometer, and went to bed, where he dreamed about trying to stay awake.

Dreams can be cruel.

AS IF NORM REASONER
were some kind of death spark, business picked up. More people signed on, and died off regularly. The fresh income allowed Zachary to start advertising the newly named enterprise “Horizon Cryonics” and to spend money on specially coated thermometer sensors. He was left with the difficulty of having to open the capsules in order to get a reading, which caused the temperature to spike, but he forced himself to stop worrying about things he couldn't yet change. Things were looking up, one solution at a time.

Soon, Zachary found himself struggling to keep up with the demands of canning, freezing, maintaining the water heaters, and continuing his desperate search for better technology.

The Devil offered to lend a hand, but only if Zachary agreed to give the computer a try.

Zachary had no choice; he couldn't afford paid help.

The fact was, Zachary had been afraid of the computer. Being able to crunch numbers in his head wasn't the same as being able to master a machine designed to mimic the human brain. What if it was beyond him?

It wasn't.

Once he sat down and actually looked at the neglected box, it made sense. It worked like an electronic flowchart, and processed information in ways he could grasp. The trouble was, there was no way to tell it what he wanted it to do, and no way for it to tell him what it had done.