Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Gabriel made an elaborate, sort of swishy gesture which I took to mean he was finished. Michael was stroking June’s hair and sniffing behind her neck. He had big fluffy white wings and tiny little white fangs, which I said I thought was odd but Gabriel said all angels have them. In the far corner of my living room, Satan the One They Call Deceiver had appeared. He had his red arms folded over his red chest, and commented that if the union had been so powerful in his day he might have never left the industry. Then they killed June with their angel powers and her soul poured like holy smoke from out the top of her head and some underling whipped out this contraption like a wet/dry vac and sucked her soul into the holding tank, where it would wait until they got back to Heaven where June would be one with God. The wailing of her spirit grew faint as they passed through the ceiling of the apartment and then the roof of the apartment building. They left her corpse behind and I didn’t know what to make of that or what to do with it. I put on the TV.

Satan asked would I mind if he stuck around and watched the news.

A baby had been miraculously saved after falling five stories, when the back doors of a pillow truck burst open at just the right time.

An old Hassidic widow about to lose her home to the bank had discovered, beneath a floorboard, seven hundred thousand dollars in Nazi gold.

The angels, it seemed, were already back on the clock.

The news went to commercial. “Big business, big unions,” Satan said, “it doesn’t matter. They just want to keep the wheels turning. Screw whoever. What about the guy who invested in all those pillows? Or the descendants of those Nazis? Don’t they get theirs?”

“Or me,” I said, “and June! Don’t we get ours?”

“You can fill out a complaint form,” Satan said. “It’ll take ’em a while to process it, always does. And it’s a pain in the ass. They really put you through…” He kind of trailed off.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve got enough trouble showing up for work on time.”

“That’s always how it is,” Satan said. “They keep your days filled with the piddling shit so you don’t have the time or the heart to go after the big stuff.”

“I’m trying to watch TV,” I said. “You want a beer?”

And he said okay, and we watched TV, and that was it. God signed a big contract, the angels stole my girlfriend. You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. Me and Satan split a six-pack of Harp. You’d think the whole business at least made me glad to know Heaven was real and that I would see June again there in that city of gold where the roses never fade. But honestly, knowing the truth was no comfort at all. Narrow gate and all that. Like I said, the angels in their fervor had left me to deal with June’s body. You think a guy like me knows how to make that sort of problem go away? Who do you think stuck around and offered to help?

David adjusts his stance so that the distance between his feet equals the span of his shoulders. That’s the way. He cranes his neck to one side, then the other, really stretching his muscles, loving the tiny pops of the vertebrae. He’s imagining: blue helmet, scuffed plastic, padding on the inside worn thin; weird thereness of the cup in his underwear; the itchy uniform. He’s holding a mop handle. He has the music turned way, way up. He’s taking practice swings.

Roger is a good-looking guy, and everyone says that’s the worst part. David sort of thinks that’s funny, that it says something about how people are, but what he really means is that he thinks he’s as good-looking as Roger is, though Roger is a runner, strong, toned, rides his bicycle to work and for pleasure.

Sometimes, when Roger thinks nobody is around, he hobbles out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and have a sob. But David, mop handle on his shoulder while the changer is between discs, can hear him.

A week and a half ago, Roger ate a few doses of acid too many and decided to find out if God existed by climbing onto the roof and asking the moon. After a few hours up there he began to yell. Estrella was pretty sure that some wine would level him out. She stood in the dark yard and cooed. (She was putting herself out, being sweet like this; it was not her nature.) She tried to lure him down with a jug of the bitter merlot they always seem to have on hand. Roger called down that yeah, he probably could use something, but he was scared to try and negotiate the ladder, which kept going staticky like bad TV reception whenever he tried to focus on it. So she brought the bottle up, they sat, and he told her secrets about the moon that were really about a secret love for her, and she touched his hand and turned him down, and they talked about God for a while.

The moon had told him God was real, and that He had selected Roger for a particular mission, but then it had gone silent, and Roger didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. The last thing the moon had told him was that he would need a helpmeet (it had used that particular word, he said) and when he saw her head appear over the edge of the roof he had taken her for a sign, which, he said, he still wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t. She told him that she thought God was endless, beyond all finite and ultimately illusory constructions such as identity. Estrella is the kind of girl you listen to and want to believe. Roger agreed that God was above all things mortal and physical, but when she told him that this meant that God — who does not play war games — could not have selected him for a mission, he became agitated. She had meant to liberate him from the burden of the impossible, but seemed instead to have driven him into despair.

Had the moon lied? Perhaps the devil was afoot. He eyed her.

She climbed back down the ladder, left him with the wine. Another hour went by. Then the words I WILL clarioned in the night, followed by a raucous hosanna that devolved into a scream. David and Estrella pulled out of a kiss, sat up on the couch. David reached over and flipped a light on.

“What the fuck?” Estrella said.

How long has it been since David actually played a game of baseball? The city leagues, the Optimist league. His dad coached teams comprised of his best friends and select hangers-on. He thinks of things his dad would say: Eye on the ball or, if he was being too choosy, Dad would say, Swing! Don’t go down looking. If your swing wasn’t even, if it angled down too far, coach would call out, Hey quit chopping wood out there , or, if it was angled too far up, it would be This isn’t golf, son!

He had not loved it, and when he got just old enough for it to become clear who was and wasn’t any good, he gave it up, nearly without regret. Had hardly thought about it, in fact, when his father decided to keep on coaching even after he quit. (The old man, in his prime, could have made the minors or maybe gone further, but for whatever reason never tried out.) David realized, looking back, how much it must have meant to his dad to scream at scrawny kids under the bright lights of the city field, his tee shirt (“COACH”) tucked into his blue jeans, the brim of his cap crisp; he wasn’t a folder. He took all his teams to the playoffs and some to the championship. Well, his dad had never been cruel, at least, as disappointed fathers could be.

Sometimes, David even went and watched the games. He remembers being happy that his father was happy, and thinks, now, with some pride, that this was a pretty grownup feeling for a kid to have.

Roger never did say what he agreed to on the roof, but he’d obviously failed to do it. Now drunk, but still hopelessly high on acid, he crawled across the front yard. He dug his fingers into the ground. He dragged himself forward like a maimed zombie in a horror film.