Tim Pratt: Sympathy for the Devil

But Beezle makes everyone nervous. For one thing, he sees everything with those multi-faceted eyes, and for all we know he hears everything too, so you either have to learn to ignore him or resign yourself to quietly getting drunk. Which, to be fair, plenty of the regulars are happy to do. Most of them don’t have anywhere else to be, since the Crisis.

Things were bad even before Heaven went out of business. Most people still refer to it as Heaven, or Heavenly Ventures, even though they changed the name to Heaventure when they spun the angels off into their own corporation. It’s hard to say which was a worse mistake.

Heaventure. What kind of a word is that? The Devil says it sounds like Paradise with a sneeze attached. Heaventure. They claimed to have vetted it up and down, fed it to focus groups all across the mortal realm, but you know how that is. You give people fifty bucks, they tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. And the angels-I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how getting rid of your most visible, most profitable product line is a good idea. The whole time Heaventure was “focusing on the aftercare of exceptional mortal souls,” as they put it, the Seraphim Company was making money hand over wingtip. Angels were big business: porcelain figurines, inspirational posters, bumper stickers, plush toys, recordings of the heavenly chorus, branded school supplies, protection services… that last was a bit controversial. Apparently there was a big shakeup in the boardroom before that went into effect, but that was just a picketer in the path of a juggernaut, if you get my meaning.

Meanwhile by this time the guys upstairs were about to lose their halos. They managed to keep it quiet until Friday came around, but when there were no paychecks every cubicle-dweller in the Eternal City emailed everyone they knew. The Big Guy called a company-wide meeting to ask people to remain calm and not to release confidential company information, but that was like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic. The ship was already sinking.

The twenty-four hour cable channels were on the story all weekend, but most people stayed pretty calm, because no one really understood the implications. Religious services were pretty well attended, but the clergy didn’t have much in the way of answers.

Monday morning three things happened. The first thing most people noticed was that the streets, the cafés and the unemployment offices were clogged with all the blessed who had thought their needs would be taken care of for all eternity. They’d been kicked out of Paradise because of the second thing, which was that Heaventure filed for bankruptcy and announced that it was liquidating assets, beginning with real estate. The third thing was that The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Hell, Inc. was heavily invested in Heaventure, and stood to lose half a billion dollars.

Long story short, things went from bad to worse to the nether regions in a matter of days. Hell, Inc. followed Heaventure into insolvency, and the damned joined the blessed in the bread lines and the shelters. Congress made a lot of speeches about corporate accountability but stopped short of scheduling hearings; I guess none of them wanted to cross the Big Guy. The Dow took daily plunges, often only open for thirty minutes or less before the circuit-breaker safeguards shut it down. Massive layoffs were announced in every sector of the economy. Some wag at NBC, asked if this was a second Great Depression, said it was more like an Existential Crisis, and the name stuck.

After a week in hiding, the Big Guy turned up on-of course-Larry King. He said that Heaventure was conducting an internal investigation into what appeared to be some misreportage of funds. He said he deeply regretted that Heaventure was no longer able to provide services for the blessed, but financial realities necessitated a shutdown of operations. He had no comment on most of the softball questions Larry lobbed at him, and he cut the interview short when he was pressed on the question of the Covenant.

That was the Devil’s first night at Mike’s, and he shook his head at his ex-boss’s performance. “He’s really not good at doing his own talking,” he said, and twisted open another bottle of Bud.

Everybody likes the Devil. He’s unpretentious, he’s funny, and he tells it like it is. It’s a funny thing about life after the Crisis. The damned, in general, are a lot easier to get along with than the blessed. Even the ones who were only suffering eternal torment for a few days are pretty well-behaved, when all is said and done, and they don’t act like they’re entitled to everything. I can’t tell you how many times in the first few days a blessed walked up to me on the street and said “I’m hungry.” As if not only was this the most unbelievable thing in the world, but they expected that once having realized it I would immediately fetch them a glass of sweet nectar or something. Nowadays they don’t so much tell people their problems. Mostly they stand around in their beautiful white clothes, staring at their smooth, lazy hands and sulking.

The damned, on the other hand, are grateful for what they’ve got. There was no beer in hell, the Devil says, unless you were an alcoholic. He says the rule was nobody got anything unless they got too much of it. You’d think the damned who walked into Mike’s would leave as soon as they saw the Devil, but most of them talk to him like an old friend. They steer clear of Beezle, though.

People-living, damned or blessed-come to Mike’s because he lets them run a tab for weeks, sometimes months. The rumor is that Mike got a big severance package from some big company, so he can afford to extend credit to people who might not be able to pay for a while, or at all. Thing is, people do pay when they can. I don’t know that the bar is making any money, but it’s still open, which is more than you can say for a lot of places nowadays.

There’s this couple that comes in to Mike’s all the time-regulars. He’s a Jack Coke and she’s a naked dirty Absolut martini, but that’s not the only difference between them. He was blessed, see, and she was damned. Before that, who knows? Maybe they didn’t meet until the Crisis. It doesn’t seem polite to ask about it.

They were there the night that Christ showed up. It was a Tuesday, and there weren’t a lot of people in the place-the Seraphim Company was having a job fair the next morning. Anyway, Christ came in, announced he was back, and right away everybody had questions.

“Is everyone going to be saved?” asked the blessed man, holding hands with the damned woman.

“It’s in negotiations,” said Christ.

“Is it the Rapture?” asked Ashes, who is a Born Again Christian.

“We’re workshopping the campaign,” Christ said. “We’ll have the nomenclature in a month or two.”

“What about ze Zcripturez?” This from Beezle, who had left his Brandy Alexander at the bar and was flying drunkenly towards Christ. “What about ze way zings were zuppozed to happen?”

“Those were just projections,” said Christ. “Admittedly we’ve fallen a bit short, but we really feel that things are going to keep getting better. We’ve made a lot of positive changes at Heaventure. It’s not just business as usual.”

He kept talking, but by that time we had figured out that it was just a PR stunt. Everyone turned back to their drinks, except for Beezle, who passed out in the hall next to the men’s room. After a while the Devil asked Christ what he was drinking. They chatted until he finished his Cutty and Water, and then Christ left, saying he had a lot of stops to make.

“Asshole,” Little Tony shouted from his corner.

“Hey, none of that,” said the Devil. “We all got to make a living.” He cleared Christ’s glass, set it in the washer, and wiped the counter down with a towel.