Up Jumps the Devil (38 page)

Jenna loved the press. She texted her fan club in the middle of dinner just so they could update her Web site and tell everyone she was having étouffée. And to maybe post a picture of this smoldering older man across the table from her.

The press was waiting for them outside the restaurant. They flashed and mooned over
her
, and were less worshipful with
him
.

“Who are
you
, buddy?” they called.

FLASH.

“I'm the fucking president of France,” he answered.

Jenna, playing along, acted blind and said she was fucking Helen Keller.

She was having fun. She liked him.

He decided not to tell her he was the Devil. Maybe later. Not yet. Maybe not.

MEMORY WAS HAVING
a quiet night at home, watching TV and thinking about getting her belly tucked, when she saw the Devil on TV with Jenna Steele.

Jenna Steele, she thought, sneering. These artificial-sweetener dance bands today wouldn't know an honest rock-'n'-roll feeling if it stabbed them.

Was that jealousy?

What did it mean, she wondered, when you felt sorry for yourself, not to mention surprised, that the Devil had let you down?

They weren't married, after all.

If she could get to sleep before she cried, she decided, it wouldn't count.

New York City, 2001

“
DON'T WORRY
. Breece is a closer.”

“We'll have it wrapped before lunchtime.”

“Guy's a monster. M-O-N-
ster
.”

“Maybe by ten, if we keep 'em on track and skip small talk.”

Memory was having breakfast in lower Manhattan with two tall, thin lawyers. They were helping her buy Dingo Studios, which was going out of business.

Woo-hoo.

It was the kind of law firm the Devil recommended if you went to him and said, “I need lawyers.”

“Guns and cocaine lawyers?” he had asked. “Or—?”

“I want to buy something.”

“Gotteshalk, Hammer, Breece, and Pei,” he told her, and rattled off the phone number. “What do you have in mind?”

She had hung up without answering. It was either that or explain that she couldn't stay on the West Coast and watch him make an ass of himself with Jenna. That she wanted to be as far from him as the U.S. map allowed.

So why had she called him? He wasn't the only jerk who knew about lawyers.

The subconscious is a tricky bastard.

Gotteshalk, Hammer, Breece, and Pei had a catered breakfast brought in for their meeting with Memory. They treated her like a star, which said something about her. These lawyers didn't give their attention to just any old thing.

So when someone said, “Goddamn. Look at that!” in a certain tone of voice, some of them looked and some didn't.

Some looked out the window and saw the commercial jet come diving for them, and some did not. It was like an optical illusion, so fast it grew and filled the window.

THE DEVIL SAW IT
on TV, like everyone else. He was in line at a San Francisco coffee shop when the news broke on three wide screens behind the pickup counter.

On-screen, a tall building was on fire.

An airplane had hit the tower, the TV explained.

Then, right there live on TV, a second airplane ripped through a second building. Millions of people gasped as if gut-punched.

The Devil bared his teeth and cried hot tears in the coffee shop. Like everyone else, he kept watching, frozen.

The two towers burned like smudge sticks against a perfect September sky.

MEMORY FELT HEAT
like the sun.

Then it was all smoke, and the floor tilting crazily under her.

Over here, sparks. Over there, an elevator.

Smoke, rushing across the floor. She pulled her jacket over her head, and started crawling … where?

Then the entire world shook, as if a freight train were cannonballing straight down out of the sky. Closer and louder.

Sparks. Smoke.

Then a sense of being expelled, of being shot through walls into cool air, surrounded by clouds of printer paper and dust, and falling.

FIREMEN BROUGHT HER
on a stretcher into a tent, and paramedics rifled through her clothes, looking for wounds, finding only scratches.

“Some guy said she fell,” said one of the medics. “Like, came down with the building.”

“No.”

“I'm just telling you what the guy said.”

“She won't wake up.”

They sent her way uptown, where she lay in bed and didn't move unless they moved her.

THERE WAS A WAR
, of course.

It had been a while since they'd had a good war.

War, the Devil reminded himself, was like ex-lax for money and new ideas. War cleansed the national pipes.

But something funny happened this time. It turned out people didn't like war so much when they could watch it live on TV or stream it in real time on their computers. Every time an American got killed, they went pale. They grumbled. By the time ten Americans had died, the grumbling had gotten ten times louder. What country could fight a war like that?

The Devil, slouching in a chair at Memory's bedside, stormed quietly to himself.

“Whatever happened,” he seethed, “to the days when you could wipe out five thousand soldiers and people would suck it up and talk about ‘duty'? We'll never get any momentum going, at this rate!”

He called Fish.

“Distract them,” he said.

LIVING WATER MINISTRIES
put seventeen new televangelists on cable, led by Fish.

“Trust Jesus!” cried the televangelists. “God has a plan! God has a
war
plan!”

Every fifteen minutes, flashy commercials offered new and exciting things God had provided for you to buy. There was a sponge-thing on a handle that would finally make it easier to clean the inside of your windshield! There was a chemical you could spray inside your shower, and it would fight mildew without any scrubbing! Many of the commercials were concerned about your health. There was a GPS unit that broadcast a distress signal if it detected that your heart had stopped. There was a pill that made it perfectly okay to have an erection lasting all night long. There was a fast-acting sinus medicine, and a sinus medicine that lasted up to twenty-four hours. It was usually expensive as hell, but now there was a special offer if you called within ten minutes.

Eventually, Living Water Ministries just set up a full-time Pill Channel, and people watched it like a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Good, thought the Devil. As long as they weren't watching the news.

MOST OF A YEAR
went by.

The Devil found himself very busy.

The war was scary and expensive. You had to work hard to keep it going, especially when it obviously wasn't accomplishing anything.

There was television, and Jenna. Three years he had been dating America's favorite bad girl. Three very public years. One time they had even been filmed—badly, at night—making love in a Malibu swimming pool. Jenna's CD sales exploded. John Scratch remained a mystery. He kept claiming to be the president of France. Fans blogged that he probably looked great naked. His popularity grew. So did the popularity of the actual president of France.

WHENEVER POSSIBLE
, the Devil found himself in New York, at Memory's bedside.

At first, he thought she might wake up. When she didn't, he remained at her bedside anyway, and didn't allow himself to wonder why.

Was it guilt? Was it love? He didn't dare think about it. Didn't dare think about her voice, or her eyes. He didn't dare think about the simple satisfaction of holding her on the couch in front of the TV, and the odd human feeling that she was
his
.

He wasn't the only one watching over her.

Right after the towers fell, television had taken a renewed interest. Memory Jones! Faded rock star, TV star, Internet sensation, forever young, forever Woodstock, one of several famous names in the World Trade Center that day. Their interest faded quickly, but now, after a year, they were back.

A celebrity in a coma was one thing.

A celebrity in a coma that went on and on was a story that went on and on.

Purple Airplane CD sales went through the roof. Her picture began to appear on T-shirts, with a dreamy psychedelic halo and
X
s over her eyes. She became a cult icon. Young people with confused lifestyles and nothing better to do traveled to New York and tried to sneak up to her room.

Eventually, both TV and the Internet started a full-time Coma Channel, streaming a live camera feed from Memory's bedside. They kept a running clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, ticking off the months and days and hours and minutes and seconds Memory Jones had been under.

Fine, thought the Devil, half asleep, just off camera. Whatever distracted them.

MONTHS PASSED, AND
a whole new war started.

A war there was no good reason for at all, based on shadows and lies, and nobody even protested very much.

They had a whole new kind of satellite TV by then, with so many channels people could hardly see straight. A war was just one of the choices on television.

Cooking shows were big that year, too.

Los Angeles, Spring 2003

THE ALL-CELEBRITY NEWS CHANNEL
was the Devil's idea.

If the TV people were obsessed with Memory in her coma, he reasoned, they'd be even more obsessed with celebrities who were awake.

“People perk up when the news is about celebrities,” he whispered into a studio exec's ear.

“Yeah?” said the executive.

“They're not threatening, see, because
they don't actually affect people!
Celebrities can get arrested, start charities, beat up paparazzi, get drunk and naked in public, and it won't change your life.”

“Fuck yeah!” cried the executive.

And so the All-Celebrity News Channel was born.

ONE OF THE
first items on the All-Celebrity News Channel turned out to be John Scratch.

“Look!” viewers said. “It's that President-of-France-guy again. Jenna Steele's boy toy.”

“He's not really the president of France,” more alert viewers argued. “That's just some shit he tells people.”

“Who is he, then?”

No one knew.

Viewers were tired of not knowing who, exactly, John Scratch was. They wanted answers.

Jenna's studio people knew that if viewers wanted to know something, you could turn that into
money
. So three executives in shiny, fashionable shirts came to Jenna's condo one night and offered John Scratch his own television show.

The Devil was a little fuzzy-headed. He and Jenna had fallen asleep watching the Foreclosure Channel, and the doorbell awakened them.

“My own TV show about what?” asked the Devil.”

“Doesn't matter,” they told him.

“You'll think of something, baby,” sighed Jenna, still curled up on the white leather couch.

He thought of something.

“
I WANT YOU
to sponsor my show,” said the Devil to Fish.

They were batting a beach ball around in a hot tub at the Never-ending Mexican Party.

Fish was an official preacher now, with a degree straight off the Internet. “What's your show about?” he asked.

“Doesn't matter,” said the Devil. “There's some new miracle pill I keep hearing about. I saw it on your morning show.”

“The White Pill,” said Fish, nodding. “It's like white noise for your neurochemicals. Makes you feel content. Not high or anything. Just content.”

“It's a lobotomy in a prescription bottle,” said the Devil.

“I should get out of here,” said Fish. “Seriously. This is no place for a preacher.” He got up.

“Sit down.”

Fish sat down.

“I want the White Pill to sponsor my show,” said the Devil.

Fish nodded. “
Think It Over
. That's what you're calling your show?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I‘ll have to pray on it,” said Fish. “But it should work fine, I think—”

The Devil tuned Fish out.

He imagined jumping up and down on Fish until Fish came apart. He pretended to listen, with a weird little smile on his face.