Up Jumps the Devil (34 page)

The song made Dennis Hogg cry, and they all hugged. They were like a little family.

The show was called
Random Planet
.

“We're the
Random Planet
family!” Dennis bawled.

THAT NIGHT
, feeling pretty good and looking forward to the next
Random Planet
shoot, Memory left the bathroom with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, and the Devil was sitting on her sofa in the dark.

“Nanna-nunt nunt muumuu nunna na-na!”
sang the Devil.

“Shut up,” she said, sitting down at the other end of the couch, still brushing.

The Devil looked at her without saying anything. His eyes, which could be warm when he wasn't being full of himself, or menacing, or an asshole, were suddenly the oldest safe place she knew.

Before she quite knew it was happening, they had come together in the middle of the couch, and she was kissing him.

HE BRUSHED HER HAIR
back and cupped her head and drew her to him. What she liked best about it was she could tell he had never kissed any other woman (or angel, or cow) in quite this way, because this was how she and she alone needed to be kissed.

She pulled back. Her robe had come undone. Realizing this, she was suddenly self-conscious.

“If we're going to start doing that kind of thing,” she said, “and if I'm going to be famous again, I want to get some work done first.”

THE
RANDOM PLANET
family met seven more times at different public places, finishing up the pilot episode. Then someone took the unedited footage to Universal, where it vanished into a time warp and they didn't hear anything for a long time.

Memory used the time warp to get a face-lift. Afterward, it was as if the doctor had gone in with a scalpel and removed twenty years of smack and wine and resentment and disappointment. She looked her age. That was fine.

She rented a black-and-white movie where everyone in it was either really old or dead, and went home to watch it by herself.

UNIVERSAL BOUGHT
Random Planet
.

Dennis Hogg called everyone and screamed in their ears.

“Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh!” he screamed. “I can't believe it. They're going to pay us to do that shit. Are you excited? I'm peeing my pants. Are you
peeing
? I am.”

SO THEY HAD A BUDGET
now, and could have used a soundstage. But they decided to keep filming out in what Dennis called the quasi-real world.

“You had something done,” said Katie, taking her aside the first time they filmed on the Universal budget. “You had your hair straightened.”

They were setting up in a shopping mall.

“No,” said Memory. “Well, yeah.” She had. “And a face-lift.”

“No way! You look great.”

“Thanks.”

“You look almost like in some of the old pictures.”

Younger people talked about the sixties like they were Roman times.

“It was fourteen years ago,” she told Katie.

“Yeah,” said the girl, and you could tell she was thinking, Roman times.

THE NIGHT THE PILOT AIRED
, Memory came home from the library and found the Devil cooking gumbo in the kitchen.

“You're famous again!” he said, twirling a ladle, splattering sauce everywhere.

Memory shrugged and tried to play it off, but couldn't. She was excited, and it showed.

He'd been cooking for hours.
Everything
went into the Devil's gumbo. All over the counter and floor lay lobster shells and clamshells and oyster shells and signs that sausage had been ground fresh. A murder-scene spray of cocktail sauce coated the wallpaper.

He made her taste some. Like the best cooking, it was a thousand flavors, and it was one mighty flavor alone.

When she opened her eyes, he was holding a tiny green ear of corn over the kettle. It was somehow reflective … Hmm.

It was a marijuana bud so drenched in crystals it might have been a disco ball.

“Don't you dare.”

The Devil dropped it in the gumbo.

And they watched the pilot together, giggling more and more, until they were laughing at the commercials, too. And when it was over—

He pounced like a tiger, flattening her against the wall, driving his jaws against her throat. Nightmare fingers gripped her legs. Clothes shredded like clouds in a hurricane.

She pulled his hair, forcing him closer. Their foreheads met. They glared at each other, point-blank, then thundered to the floor.

San Francisco, 1985

THEY CALLED HIM
Big Zach.

The nine hundred people at Bullhorse Technologies dominated the home-computer market. Had practically
invented
the home-computer market.

Being called “Big Zach” was inevitable, especially now that Zachary had put on some weight. The effect was imposing.

A hush fell over the offices of Bullhorse Technologies when he came towering through, usually accompanied by engineers from senior staff. The hush lasted after he was out of sight, too.

That's what happens when you change the world. People hush when you go by.

THE DEVIL FOLLOWED HIM
to work three days in a row, and wandered around touching things and asking dumb questions until Zachary finally asked, “What do you want?”

The Devil loped over, spun around twice in an ergonomic swivel chair, and said, “Games.”

Zachary tapped his teeth with a pencil.

“We've got games.”

“They're stupid.”

Zachary argued that games had come a long way. That they had started out with games like video tennis and video hockey, where you doinked around a little white square. There were better games, with spaceships and asteroids and racetracks—

“You have to go to an arcade to play them. What if you could play them at home?”

“On your computer?”

“Bingo! This market will eat you, Zach-O, if you don't stay ahead of the curve.”

When had it quit being history and started being a market?

“Games.” Zachary tried the idea out on his tongue, before letting it play in his brain.

HE TRIED TO
think about things that were fun. Things that would make a good game. He couldn't think of any. So he drove to Golden Gate Park, where he sat watching the bay change colors.

It occurred to him that he was lonely.

Being unmarried, very busy, and a little shy about his extra weight, he sometimes passed a year between dates. Women, more and more, felt like a part of his life that was getting away from him. Still, he had always believed that he was destined to fall in love. Since he was a little kid, he'd had a premonition that he would meet a girl, the love of his life, and she would ask him if he rode horses.

He would stammer, and reply, “Sometimes. Not real well or anything,” and when he said that, she would realize who he was, because she'd had the dream, too, and they would rush into each other's arms and be together.

It was like having a psychic heart whose prediction hadn't come true yet.

He was a little old for this kind of fantasy, surely. He was a man of eminent practicality. Wasn't he?

And instead of his heart starting to ache the way another man's would, Zachary's electrocuted brain kicked on.

Being lonely, said his brain, really meant that he wanted to be in love. Right?

Love, suggested his brain, was a game.

Zachary almost stopped breathing.

“That's it!” he whispered to the park and the bay and the setting sun.

He got a speeding ticket on the way back to the lab, and when he got there he put all his single young nerds on a new project.

Two weeks later, City Park Pickup, complete with graphics that barely made it past the censors, generated white-hot sales in the first forty minutes of its release.

“You've got it!” cheered the Devil. “You're like the pimp of technology. This is the kind of thing that will bring people to computers. Not just lots of people. I mean
everybody
, man. You hear me? This is what it's all about.”

And Zachary agreed with him for a while, until the day he fell in love for real.

THE BULLHORSE TECHIES
built something called a “game system.”

It was a bunch of hardware you could use to play different kinds of games, including competitors' games. It was a masterstroke of market domination. Zachary threw a Fourth of July costume party to celebrate, and met his wife right smack in the middle of it.

She worked for him, as a chemical engineer in hardware, designing the parts of computers where something made of plastic had to fit something made of rubber, or where rubber had to be attached to metal. She had a master's from Caltech, her name was Clara, and she came to the party as Abigail Adams.

Zachary was Benjamin Franklin. He stuck himself with the task of roasting the pig, which meant he couldn't wander around much. Clara brought him a beer, asked how the pig was coming along, and three hours later they were still talking (Clara did not experience the Hush in his presence).

She was single. She had always been single. She had no children. She had a dog named Jake who would rip your balls off.

“If what?” asked Zachary.

“If he feels like it. Is it true you used to freeze people? You know, like—”

“I know what you mean. Yes, it's true.”

“Did you ever think it would really work?”

“Yes,” he answered. “It tore me up when they started failing.”

She looked at him long and hard. Then she said, “I was going to get another drink. Come with me?”

“Of course,” he said, and pointed a ladies-first finger at the shipping dock, temporarily serving as a bar.

“Not here,” she said. “I was going somewhere else.”

Oh.

“I can't really leave …”

“You're the boss.”

He
was
the boss.

He left.

They went to his house and played City Park Pickup on his game system, and when their characters kissed on-screen, Zachary leaned over and kissed Clara for real.

In his bedroom, they both undressed completely, and folded their clothes before facing each other, before coming together.

AFTER, HE SAID
, “Ask me if I ride horses.”

“Do you?”

“No, I mean, I want you to say—”

“Why?”

“It doesn't matter.”

And it didn't.

PILLOW TALK
seemed to be where their best selves came out, even if they were just being silly, their postorgasmic brains floating in oxytocin.

“Knock-knock.” Zachary's brain, for some reason, gravitated to jokes.

“Who's there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

“Interrup—”

“MOO!”

Even after Zachary noticed that telling knock-knock jokes in bed seemed to make continued lovemaking statistically unlikely, he still did it. He couldn't help it.

SOMETIMES THEIR PILLOW
talk was more personal.

“How come you waited,” Clara asked, half straddling him, her cheek pressed against his sternum, “until I was, you know, almost forty before you showed up in my life?”

“It's like our hearts waited until we were old enough and wise enough for each other. They waited until practice was over.”

The personal pillow talk was usually pretty cheesy, but it was great, too.

“I wouldn't have been ready for you when I was younger,” he added.

“I would've liked to have gone to Woodstock with you,” she whispered.

“I would've liked to have gone to Caltech with you. Besides, I got electrocuted at Woodstock. I drooled a lot, after that.”

Clara considered.

“Maybe it is best that we came along later. You know, for each other.”

Then she licked his chest.

Zachary noticed that the personal kind of pillow talk was statistically much more likely to lead to further lovemaking.

ONE NIGHT
, the pillow talk started before the lovemaking was over.

It was Zachary's fault. It took them both by surprise.

Clara was on top, slowly grinding in circles with her hips. This always drove him crazy, so when he suddenly bellowed, “Holy
God
!” she didn't think anything of it, at first.

But then his big hands tightened around her buttocks and he said, “What if you could get a computer file on one system to talk directly to a file on another system?”