"Bad Guy"
by SiD

       "Bill Gates is Satan."
       "Hell-no. Satan isn't that rich."
       "Or ugly..." A roaring guffaw fuelled by alcohol went round the table.
       "Yeah, so how does the devil make his money? I mean God has the church; that must bring in a bundle-tax free mind you..."
       "Yeah and they pay their employees in altar-boys." More hearty laughter and few "ooh"s. Louis had impeccable timing and a surgical wit that sometimes put him at odds with the other guys. Perhaps juxtaposed to his ungainly frame and unfortunate face underlined by crooked teeth, the others felt that they of passing standard ought to be correspondingly more funny.
       "Louis man, are you sure you're not gay?"
       "What! No!" It was truly a rarity to see Louis agitated. "What the hell makes you think I am?".
       "That's, what? The fourth reference to faggery you've made tonight." Rhino had the honesty of Death itself and the tact of carpet-bombing. Of course being a paragon of a man in stature, and blessed by nature in wholly lacking the capacity for embarrassment, he could say such things with relative impunity.
       Beasley gave Rhino a flitting glance, piqued by the word "faggery". Then back to his default activity of intently scanning the room. Beasley didn't really participate in the conversation; he barely existed in the realm of the table. The other three were an outpost from which he would browse the room. When he did speak it was invariably on the subject of computing. It was he who had brought the other three into the discussion of Bill Gates' divinity.
       With the spotlight turned squarely on him, Louis' forte of snide parenthesis was paralyzed.
       "Fuck you! Rhino" was all he could manage-entirely the wrong response given the new topic. Fortunately there was someone to attempt to rescue the conversation from deteriorating into a speculative argument over who's gay.
       "Hey what if Bill Gates is God?" Danny, full of ideas and observations, had a knack for pulling out absurd hypothetical debates from the fabric of idle banter. A black man who wasn't really black, trained by a culture that wasn't really American, and raised by a father who wasn't really there. A catalogue of misfit characters in search of empathy, he had retreated into his own mind and found a world made of holographic plasticine.
       "Then I'd better start developing a taste for fire and brimstone, eh?" Still a little riled, Louis found his mouth unleashed. "Waitress I'll have the blood of a thousand slaughtered infants. Thank you." Understated chuckles this time, in the hiatus that followed Louis burned with uneasiness for an eternity.
       "Well, maybe the devil isn't such a bad guy?" Danny now had the sort of casual intensity about his tone that indicated that he had found a thread.
       "Hey guys we gotta close up" Suddenly there was a stout man with an apron and two hands full of empty glasses standing over them urging them to leave. The man buzzed from group to group stopping briefly at each, then moving on, leaving a blossoming trail of coats thrown over shoulders.
       "Not such a bad guy? I think you misunderstand the elementary definition of the devil. He's the epitome of evil, the apotheosis of vice... he's a very bad guy!"
       "Well look who's telling you that. The church, God's corporation." But Danny's words lost out to the flock of dark-lipstick, permed hair and Ally McBeal skirts noisily filing towards to exit behind them.
       "What're you lookin' at Lou? Your prize is over there." Rhino winked naughtily indicating the tall European-looking guy at the other end of the bar whose peeking tuft of chest hair they had earlier made fun of for a good ten minutes.
       "I'm gonna kick your ass!"
       "What're you gonna do to my ass?"
       "Alright guys I'm outta here. Been fun." Beasley, momentarily dropping his pretension of elegance, downed his Martini in a swift open throated swig and was gone without a word.
       "Hey you driving home, Lou?" Rising to his full height it was hard to lie to Rhino.
       "Yeah."
       "Good, you can give me a ride to Nancy's."
       "And why would I do that?" Louis getting up wasn't quite so emphatic.
       "'Cos you're my buddy and you love me." And what can you say to that? "Danny, congrats again on the award. I only wish I read your column." Danny acknowledges the compliment but he was lost in internal conversation again. "Come on man, Lou's driving."
       "It's the shirt isn't it? Why I'm still being confused with a Taxi service?"
       "That's alright Rhino, I'm gonna walk."

       He pushed through the old heavy door to be greeted by the prickly embrace of winter air. Ducking his head as far into his jacket as it would go he set out on the cold journey home. It had snowed earlier that evening, the pedestrians had crushed and soiled the snow into a dirty slush and the arctic air had hardened it into a treacherous crust just as it had benumbed his skin. But the steady cer-unch-cer-unch of ice under foot-the only sounds in this sensory desert-were eclipsed by the ideas kneaded in his head.

       He had walked about 7 blocks now, but he didn't know it. He was at Dantez' Square. Three streets met and crossed here, but missed slightly, resulting in an awkward triangular block of dead space; too small and irregular for a building and too big for tarmac. The city had put in some benches and planted a few saplings-now skeletized by two months of winter. Danny crossed the junction into this impressionist simulacrum of a park. At this hour one could cross the street as one pleased, and balk at the little red man. He entered the glowing skirt of umber light thrown down by the park's one street lamp in the center of the island.
       The cer-unch-cer-unch had ceased, replaced now by a subtle splish splish. A breeze-almost warm against his face-started him. He stopped.
       Dantez' Square was his second home. He and his friends had hung out here as teenagers. In the summer he would sit on that bench every evening and have fantastic dialogues with kindred spirits and complete strangers, or just watch people. He had even coined a name for this activity: "benching", and such a fixture were they that area residents, local business-owners and the police had dubbed them the Benchers.
       But now there was a creeping unfamiliarity about the place. He surveyed this now somehow alien environment. From inside the light shower the surroundings faded into the shadows. He could still make out the eternal luminescence of the neon signs: La Rosita, Oaktree, Symphonica, The Round Table,... Starbucks (two of them) all still there.
       And of course the bench. His bench. He had done some of his best philosophizing there. He sat as he began to ponder anew.
       "Hell wouldn't be such a bad place to be right now, huh?" Danny was suddenly yanked from his meditative hypnosis. A silhouetted figure sat at the corner of the bench directly under the light. The brim of his midnight-black hat draped a veil of shadow around his head.
       "What?!"
       "Y'know, all that fire and brimstone they tell you about, sounds mighty toasty right about now." The man wore a full-length black trench coat, which masked his form but Danny could tell by the way he pinched it together with his arms, hands in pockets, that he was a slender man with broad shoulders. Danny remembered it was supposed to be deathly cold, but somehow he didn't feel it-perhaps he was numb.
       "Actually it's not as cold as it was a little while ago." He pulled his hands out of his pockets and felt the air looking to the stranger for confirmation. The stranger slouched, legs extended, with his shiny black shoes just catching the light. His hat was tipped forward over his face and his head tilted back as if he had been sleeping.
       "Maybe it's just me." The stranger's voice was a calming baritone, smooth and flowing with no exaggerated inflexions.
       "I would imagine if they wanted you to suffer they'd make it really cold..." Danny was getting over his initial shock now and aided by 11 ounces of Californian Champaign began to exercise his knack for picking up discursive conversations with strangers. "...Hell, I mean."
       "That's if they wanted you to suffer." This made Danny choke mentally and he almost blushed, if that was possible for a man of his hue.
       "Well sure, it's Hell. Isn't it by definition a place of suffering?" He chuckled internally at the irony of him playing Devil's advocate to his own theory, was a little aroused at the coincidence of the situation, and perhaps a tad wary of mysterious man.
       "Unfortunately, yes. But the management is taking steps to change that image." A joke? No famous strangler ever had a sense of humor.
       "You talk as if you know something about Hell." Strange how one can talk to a complete stranger about such intellectual mainstays as the Nature of Hell, but with your buddies-the guys you grew up with-you'll get drunk and unavoidably end up aspersing each other's sexuality.
       "Maybe I do." Somewhere along the way the stranger's voice had lost the joviality that had enticed Danny into this discussion. He turned his head casually, removing his hat slowly and gracefully. Light flooded onto his face revealing a rather handsome man with a thin face, high cheeks and a long angular double chin. His skin seemed dark, but that may have been a trick of the light. His hair, long and black, was tied back. Through the V-opening of the coat Danny could see that the stranger wore a white collared shirt and blood-red tie.
       "Then I have a question." Danny felt he ought to be nervous, but somehow found levity in the bizarreness of the circumstances. "Is the devil a bad guy?"
       "No. I'd say he was pretty reasonable."
       "What, do you know him personally?" There was amused curiosity in his tone. The stranger leaned in,
       "Yes Daniel, you could say that." and smiled a toothy grin exposing perfect brilliant white teeth and bringing out the sinewiness of his face, the deep lines highlighted by the oblique light. Danny's heart exploded into a furious gallop, and his skin began to burn.
       "Who are you?" sitting up uncomfortably and wavering his voice. "How do you know my name?" The stranger sat back and opened out his arms onto the bench-back resting his head on it in a casual satirical crucifix pose. He seemed to laugh without making a sound. A phantom flash across the street caught Danny's eye and spun his head. In a split second of light there, in the reflection in the window of Raymond's Fine Men's Wear, was a creature of demonic form sitting where the stranger was, and as he did. The flash was too quick for Danny to make out details, but he knew what it was he was meant to see.
       "Nobody recognizes the devil as a businessman. They've all been hypnotized and bullied into believing he's a monster. I do so hate to have to pull these parlor tricks."
       "What do you want?" Danny blurted. The stranger lifted his head and looked apprehensively at Danny.
       "You're afraid aren't you?" He drooped his head forward. "Yeah I get that a lot. It's hard to ignore millenia of propaganda and universal indoctrination." There was disappointment in his voice.
       Danny was mute.
       "Not so inviting when it's actually presented to you, is it?" Suddenly Danny felt embarrassed that confronted with the reality of his own thesis he reacted like the closed-minded believer he had defined himself against. The stranger rose to his feet in one swift motion. He began to pace slowly and deliberately towards the far end of the bench. "Since the dawn of Reason, Man has been taught to suspect and fear the devil; even hate him. God makes a convincing case doesn't he? Heaven good, Hell bad. I have to admit it's a killer strategy."
       The stranger glanced at Danny as if responding to the questions he was too paralyzed to ask. "Let me see if I can explain this in human terms." He rounded the bench pacing towards the lamp. His hands were animated as he explained. "What you call Heaven and Hell are spiritual realms. There are others but they're relative unknowns." Nodding his finger at Danny: "I like your idea of rival corporations, it's close, but it's not as simple as that." Danny became visibly disconcerted. "Please Daniel, I am a pluriscient being. Most of the ideas you came up with aren't so far off the mark but I'm afraid your vision is limited by human experience. There's nothing inherently 'evil' about Hell, nor inherently 'good' about Heaven. All this Absolutism is a human myth."
       Danny was still mute, but more overwhelmed than afraid.
       "You want to know why am I here, don't you? I guess you could say I'm recruiting." Danny could feel his heart pounding in his throat now.
       "Am I… damned?"
       "Do you feel damned?"
       "I'm sitting here having a conversation with the… with you aren't I? How do you think I feel?" There was something liberating and empowering about anger.
       "I think you feel confused, overwhelmed, fearful… knowing you, perhaps a little curious and excited." The stranger turned to face him. Now the light fell full on his face. "… but do you feel damned?"
       "No." There was immense solace in that realization. Suddenly Danny was intrigued by the situation.
       "Good. I'm sick and tired of the damned."
       "I thought you just said Hell wasn't a place for the damned." Danny was quickly being turned on by the concept of this conversation.
       "No Daniel, I said it's not an evil place. Hell isn't a punishment, it's a choice..."
       "A choice? How... and why would anyone choose to go to Hell?" the stranger did not answer, allowing Danny to realize the parochial dogma underlying his questions, which didn't take long. "Oh yeah, sorry." He muttered apologetically. "So if what we've been taught is false, what kind of people choose Hell?"
       "The damned mainly, a few of the more shall we say 'enlightened' Satanists, a rare few scientists and free thinkers-like you; but mostly the damned. You see, as it is most of the people who choose Hell are punishing themselves." More pacing... "Usually, when they realize their fate they become the most pathetic, wretched, flagellants. They get to be quite wearisome." Danny turned and faced out into the blackness as his thoughts and ideas solidified from that seed crystal
       "So why me?"
       "Well Daniel, you opened your mind. In one glimmering moment you saw through the paradigm. We need thinkers like you."
       "Don't they need thinkers in heaven?"
       "They already have one, and He really doesn't like competition. You'll find that God has very little tolerance for questioners." the mention of God reawakened Danny's skepticism.
       "Now how do I know this isn't a trick or something?" the pacing stopped.
       "Skepticism is healthy, but if you don't believe yourself... you have nothing." he seemed to mutter under his breath. "Before you met me you didn't believe in any higher power, in God." Danny opened his mouth to object but was pre-empted "Oh you believed there was a concept known as God, but you didn't believe in God... did you?" Danny closed his mouth. "I already had you." The stranger's voice became softer and more deliberate, almost intimate as he approached stealthily from behind. "Daniel. I'm not asking you to 'sell your soul to the devil'. I'm not even asking you to believe. I'm asking you to..." his voice was a whisper now inches from Danny's ear "... understand."
       A long meditative silence followed. It was too quiet. Danny turned his head tenuously. But there were no lips inches from his ear, nor a face attached to them. He turned more. No stranger behind him. He stood abruptly and scanned the area in saccades, then the darkness beyond. No stranger anywhere. Just the lone street lamp and its shower of umber light.

       The air was clean and light. Danny stood motionless for a long while not knowing quite what to do next. As the moments passed and common reality returned, sobering doubts began to creep at the margins of his mind just as the daylight creeps at the margins of the night sky. Had what he just experienced really happened?
       A bakery truck jolted him as it rumbled noisily by, followed by a brusque gust of icy air that abruptly reminded him of the bitter cold again. He plunged his hands back in pockets, ducked his head and set off home hastily. He pored over the conversation, replaying phrases and words over and over. Already doubt and disbelief were diluting the pungence of his memory.
       Chauncey street: the concrete valley ended; on the other side were picket fences and front yards. He began to examine his new knowledge. Did it make sense? Was it real? Did he believe it? Nothing in his experience had or could have prepared him for this situation, and he found assurance from a source from which he had never drawn before: Faith.
       Treno street: turn here. Already he had begun to compose. Words, phrases, sentences were thrown out like Legos from the pile, with no semblance of order or regard for how they were to fit together, just their relevance to the grand concept. Up the path, through the door, into to the study. He jabbed at the computer's power switch, but it was in no hurry. It didn't suffer from the transience of memory. He snatched a pen and the pad off the desk sending glasses, planner and bank statement flying, ripped off the top page of notes-whatever that idea was it was trivial now-and he wrote. Scribbling unfinished sentences with incomplete words, he paced in a tight little circle in the center of the room. Page after page he wrote furiously. The screen blinked at him, it was the computer's turn to wait. Then, without pause, he sat and typed.
       He typed all night, stopping only once between rough draft and final edit to have a can of chick-peas and watch the ice storm outside that had couldn't recall the weather-man forecasting. It was almost light when he sat before an e-mail message to his editor. "Megan. They have to read this." is all it said. The document attached, the connection open, there was a sense of crescendo as the little arrow floated towards the "Send" button. And then a pause before the... click?

       "The damage appears to be localized to one house, but the destruction is total..." she spoke with a sort of theatrical consternation. Carnage always got top billing and Channel 5 had dispatched their hot-dog Stacey Marshall for a live report. Red and yellow spinning lights colored the scene with a sanguine glow. Firemen and police labored pit of fire and blackened rubble while a ring of spectators watched. Amidst the quiet din of firefighters, police and paramedics, and the murmurs of spectators, reporters made their concluding remarks "...One officer explained that bolts usually strike power cables. In their collective experience, he said, they had never seen a direct hit on a house. Fire-fighters are at a loss for and explanation for this freak event, which can only be described as an Act of God."