Sympathy for the Devil

For Anne R.

1

Velma Fish awoke to a curious smell, familiar yet strange.

She opened her eyes to the same old bedroom-nothing out of place. The sun streamed through the window. She’d slept like a baby: none of that fitful drifting.

But there was a certain sharp odor, one she knew from a lifetime ago, when, as a little girl, she’d visit her grandma’s house. A mustiness that tells you the people who live there can’t smell anymore.

That was the thing about getting on in years, of course: your youthful memories were clear as a bell. The trouble was the past ten minutes.

That, and the joints. Normally the morning was worst, of course. As Mrs. Knowles across the hall liked to say: “Oh, I have a wild life. I go to bed with Ben Gay and get up with Arthur Itis.”

Yet right now Velma’s whole bony frame was oddly, pleasantly numb, like her bad hip after Dr. Whitlow injected it. Slick and clean inside. Even the fingers felt fine, like someone else’s.

She wiggled them experimentally. She saw smooth, soft hands and arms-not her own-and leapt from bed, terrified. Something was wrong, as wrong as things get.

She heard her blood pounding.

She looked at the legs beneath her, the mirror in front of her, where staring wide-eyed was a frightened child, a dark-haired girl of sinuous limb, hiking the hem of her nightie-Velma’s own.

“I’m dreaming,” she said calmly, and the girl’s lips moved with hers. “Wake up, Velma.”

But it was no dream.

2

– Now next please.

– Motion for disjunction A.D. 1998 one Velma Alice Fish behest of Bertillon, Throne, FAAC. Duration fifty-three years.

– Fifty-three years.

– Years, Excellency.

– Counselor Bertillon: approach and hearken.

Bertillon came forward, wings respectfully folded.

– Your Excellency, if I-

– Since Yahweh fell silent, how many disjunctions have been entertained here, for all the billions of lives on Earth?

– Just twenty, Excellency.

– And how many granted?

– Three, Excellency.

– And none over thirty seconds.

– I’m aware of that, Excellency.

– We’re ready to hear just how special this is.

– Not special at all, Excellency. That is the point.

– Counselor, you are the last we would hope to castigate for frivolity. Having done so before. Having almost confiscated your imprimatur.

– And yet your Excellencies ultimately saw merit-

– Not all of us, Counselor. I remain unconvinced that Fermat’s Last Theorem, or its local proof, is the linchpin for Mother Church’s existence on Earth. As to Velma Fish: make your case.

– Very well, Excellency. Disjunction, of course, being a purely physical levorotation through the dense manifold, devoid of noetic efficacy at-

– Spare us. I’ll recite a brief list of things we have not disjoined for. The Mesozoic catastrophe. The Holocaust. The New Manila meme-plague. So who is Velma Fish?

– Insignificant in the scheme, Excellency. To be candid, she is randomly chosen.

– This is not illuminating, Counselor. Why insignificant? And why-I choke on it-fifty-three years?

– Because we have never tried it, Excellency. Our God-given powers are largely untested. An innocuous experiment here and there might promote man’s spiritual betterment in ways we never contemplated.

– If we dictated the actions of man, Counselor, we would have a more direct interest in his betterment. But that interest must remain, primarily, his. We merely set the stage for him, through Nature, through physical law and, perhaps, its judicious abrogation.

– Really, Excellency, one needn’t-

– Enough. Denied, with prejudice. Next and last please.

And His Excellency made a peremptory reach for the cool suit, which, when donned, would slow his lepton-based metabolism even further, allowing him to access without disruption the highly-if-precariously-ordered lattice of Yahweh Himself, to Whom he would convey this docket.

– Presentation Teresa of Calcutta, Excellency.

– Ah, welcome, Saint Teresa. Oh, it’s official up here, dear-your postmortem miracles coded and booked. A sunset eclipse over Ahmadabad that knocks, their, socks, off.

3

She looked in the mirror a hundred times. The girl kept looking back. The girl looked just like Velma had, once upon a time.

Seventy-year-old Velma was inside her seventeen-year-old self, and there was no other way to put it.

She was hungry-couldn’t remember such an appetite. A three-egg omelet would be just the thing. But the refrigerator was empty. She pulled herself together and set out for the corner grocery.

“Good morning,” she said to the clerk, and jumped at her own piping voice, no longer lax with age.

She got the eggs, and then, as though from habit, found herself in the feminine hygiene section. She selected a box of tampons and some sanitary napkins-who knew; she might be needing them.

As she let herself back into her apartment, nosy Mrs. Knowles popped her head out across the hall. Their eyes met. Mrs. Knowles raised her eyebrows and started to say something. Velma just gave a little wave and went on in, as though she were, say, a long-lost grand-niece-she’d need a story of some sort. She couldn’t be a grandchild, because Mrs. Knowles knew full well Velma was childless, never married.

Never even a boyfriend, unless you counted a fling with a girl-crazy GI, home from the war after V-J Day. A boy named Charlie.

Charlie Riggs-that was the boy’s name. She’d completely forgotten.

She ate every bite of the omelet. Then she picked up and opened the box of tampons, fiddling with one of the new-fangled things, chuckling to herself: maybe she’d forgotten how. But then some things, as they say, were like riding a bike.

4

– Well met, Brother Bertillon. We don’t see many of you.

Bertillon mopped his angelic brow. He’d just arrived; the heat was already too much.

– Complaining, Your Eminence, or boasting?

– Hm. Touché. To what do we owe this honor?

– If you would have a look at this. And don’t tell me you can’t do it.

– Hm. Hm. Fifty-three years. Not one for the usual channels. Not even us, historically-this would be a first. Might I ask why fifty-three? Why not sixty? Or all seventy-six?

Bertillon summoned a nonchalant earnestness, the kind most often invoked on Earth by the recipients of speeding citations.

– Age seventeen seems a suitable time to begin reapplying the lessons of life, does it not, Your Eminence?

His Eminence’s practiced gaze searched Bertillon’s for ambiguities, and found none.

– It might be arranged. Provided we have some… context.

– Come, Your Eminence. You merely require a pretext. And I am here to provide it.

– You would place your imprimatur on this?

– I would.

– I love it. The court is dense with intrigue, then?

– Alas, Your Eminence, the intriguing place is here. As even I concede.

– Do you. Your genius in certain prior matters has not gone unremarked here, Brother Bertillon. This place could be interesting indeed for a sympathetic Throne of your caliber.

– Thank you, but I lay claim only to empathy. My sympathies are not enlisted by this-chaos. Just look at this. How do you bear it, I wonder.

– Simple thermodynamics, Brother. And surely we’d find a niche to suit you: something on the… temperate side. But no matter. We are happy to help you lift the hem of Nature’s garment, or rend it. And what’s in it for you?

– My convictions. Between the hidebound heavens and these anarchic precincts, we lack a middle ground, a place for serendipity. In this, I answer to my conscience.

– Bravo, Brother. If there is one thing your colleagues fail to grasp, it is that we are all of us everywhere acting in good faith, are we not? We do have our differences. But they are strictly a function of…

– Temperature?

– Precisely. Let’s see what we can do.

5

Velma waited for the bus uptown. She felt funny about withdrawing her Social Security from the usual branch, even just the ATM.

Besides, she felt like exploring.

Next to her on the bench sat another young girl. Her hair was black, like Velma’s, but the whole front half of it was dyed a deep ultraviolet, as though her brain were glowing. She had an earring in her eyebrow.

When the girl returned her gaze, Velma realized she’d been staring.

“I was admiring your blouse,” said Velma.

“This?” the girl said. It was a simple black cotton shirt.

“Yes,” said Velma. “Where’s it from?”

“Hell, I dunno,” the girl said. “Clothestime, I think.” She studied Velma openly, taking in the tacky floral-print top, the hot green and pink and yellow of it; the ancient housewife slacks of nubbly mutant rayon; the Dr. Scholl’s sandals. “For God’s sake, there’s nothing special about my shirt,” the girl said.

“Except the person wearing it,” said Velma. “Never forget that, dear.”

Two hours later, Velma emerged from Clothestime with a couple of bulging bags. She didn’t normally frequent the big malls, but now she strode past the Body Shop and the Jamba Juice, keeping pace with the ubiquitous kids, from whom she was indistinguishable.

The wind dropped a flyer at her feet. She picked it up:

COOLHOUSE

Thursday nights at Emerald City

… after hours…

DJ Spin Gen-F

99 Buzz Dr. Skill

Odd. She kept it, and headed home to model her new look.

“I want you to locate this man,” Velma said. She gave the detective, a Mr. Dietz, a piece of paper with the name “Charlie Riggs” and some sketchy biographical information-dates in the 1940s.

She was seventeen again-with the craziest itch to connect.

“Place of birth?” said Dietz.

“Well, he had a New England accent,” said Velma.

“What’s he to you?” said Dietz. “Grandpa?”

“An old boyfriend.”

Dietz reassessed her up and down, his mouth an inverted U of impressed surmise. “Good for you, Charlie. Wherever you are,” he finally said.

“Strangers in the night,” Velma said. “My only romance, I’m afraid.”

“Try somebody from your own millennium, kid,” said Dietz. “He might be more appreciative. So where might Mr. Riggs be?”

“I have no idea. Somewhere out West.”

Dietz studied the paper. “This kind of lead, we’ve got about a snowball’s chance, you should pardon the expression. But it’s your money, Miss Fish. I’ll take two-fifty up front, the other half on completion.”

Velma signed the check. She dotted the “i” with a cute little heart.

A few days later, Dietz called her in.

“Would that be Charles Gideon Riggs, born March 30, 1924, at Hingham, Massachusetts?”

“Hingham! Yes, that’s Charlie!”

“He’s in Arizona.”

“You found him?”

“And he’s not going anywhere. Spent the last four years in a Phoenix cemetery. Prostate cancer.”

“Charlie dead,” Velma said, and then blurted: “He got me pregnant.”

And she really hadn’t thought about it up until right then, as if suddenly permitted to think the miscarriage back into being: back into her own being, so long ago.

She looked back at Dietz, who registered frank disbelief. “And then what happened?” he said.

“I’m afraid I lost it,” Velma said. “Well. I owe you two hundred fifty dollars.”

“Right. And by the way, Miss Fish. That check you wrote? ‘Valued customer since 1957’…?”

“It didn’t clear the bank?”

“Sure, but-”

“Well, then,” said teenaged Velma Fish, “don’t sweat it, sonny.”

A few weeks later, well past midnight, she found herself in the warehouse district, standing outside a club where the music was a form of headache, pounding and booming and twittering-but sort of catchy, really.

She stood in line for half an hour, the only Earthling in the bunch, but Velma wasn’t bothered. She was comfortable in her own skin. That was one thing she’d learned in this life.

When she got to the door, she smiled at the big black man, who said: “Need some ID.”

Velma kept smiling. “There’s an age requirement?”

“Twenty-one,” he said. “Next.”

She put her hand in her bag. Then she thought better of it. “Well, now what?” she said, half to herself.

“Step aside now,” said the black man. “Figger it out, Slim.” He was rather rude, to tell the truth.

A boy stuck his head out the door. Then he came out and stood, resplendent in a suit whose cut and color Velma had never seen. Like most of them he wore an earring, and his sunglasses made him look like an insect. “Hey, Rock,” he shouted to the black man. “Rockster. She’s with me.”

“Oh, she’s with you.”

“I’ve been waiting for her all evening! Hurry up and let her in.”

“Whatever,” said Rock, and motioned. “Go, girl.”

Velma went past. The boy held the door for her and took her hand. The thumping got louder.

“Well,” Velma shouted over the music, “chivalry is not dead.”

“I lied to him,” he shouted back. “I’ve actually been waiting for you all my life.”

“Quite the playboy,” Velma said. “Aren’t you. Neat trick for meeting underage girls.”

“You have to own the club,” the boy said. “And you don’t look that underage. Mainly you look beautiful.”

She seemed remarkably serene, self-possessed, which always turned him on-was she tripping on something? Yet she did not conceal her wonder at the churning scene inside, the lasers and smoke and strobes.

They crossed the crowded floor. “What’s your name?” the boy said.

“Velma. V – E – L -”

“Spinster!” he shouted.

She froze.

“Got someone I’d like you to meet,” he said. “DJ Spin, this is Velma. Velma, this here’s the Spinster: my man at the controls.”

“Velma, cool name,” said the Spinster, and kissed her hand. “She’s in the Jetsons, right?”

“Scooby Doo, fool,” the playboy said.

She didn’t know how to dance. Neither did he, he said, and off they went into the blaring noise. It was even more fun than she expected.

“Call me weird,” he said. “But I like to get stuff out in the open, up front.”

This is it, Velma thought. She was not exactly prepared for whatever she was setting in motion.

For decades, she might have walked off into the wilderness without anyone noticing. A narrowed-down life, getting narrower. And no one there to care.

But that was then. She let her breath out and said brightly, “Well, honesty’s the best policy.”

He held up a foil-wrapped condom. “I always carry one of these.”

“Of course you do,” Velma said. “You’re a gentleman.”

“But if it breaks or something-I’m not getting involved with somebody’s pregnancy.”

“You needn’t concern yourself,” said Velma. “I’ve always been regular. Like clockwork. And it’s been at least three weeks.” Three weeks in her new body. Had everything been restored to her? She might not even have periods.

“It’s not just that,” he said. “Nothing personal, but these days nobody knows who’s carrying what.”

“I don’t have venereal disease, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” said Velma. “The very idea.”

“Of course not, baby,” he said. “I guess I’m just extra careful.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Cool,” he said. “Anything to ask me?”

And here, on the verge of intimacy with this stranger from another time, she had occasion to realize that her sex relations with Charlie, the few they’d had, were not all they were cracked up to be. She’d built it up over the years, while the truth had been something different.

“Why, yes,” she said, “I do want to ask you something. You wouldn’t be one of those fellows who gets his business over with early, and leaves the girl hanging out to dry?”

He just looked at her. “Where are you from?” he said.

It’s like riding a bike, as they say. You don’t forget.

She was aroused, and looked forward now to taking real pleasure with a man, for the first time ever. Making no effort to be someone she wasn’t. Which was something she’d learned.

But he was finished almost immediately.

“I’m like really sorry,” he said afterwards. “You were just so powerful. You’ve got this incredibly powerful aura.”

“You boys,” Velma said, “if only you saw yourselves.”

In her mind it was already fertilized, catalyzed, fully dragged up from the depths: the awful sex, the pregnancy, the hasty wedding, followed within days, providentially you might say, by the miscarriage, the horrible, endless bleeding. It was all so very unpleasant, she’d been soured on sex and men for the rest of-

Well. For quite a while there.

And she and Charlie had looked at each other, and known: there was no need for a marriage after all; they would undo it as easily as they did it, submerge it, put a continent between them and each start over.

Which is just what happened. Or at least Charlie thought it was a miscarriage. Instead of what it was. She knew for a fact now: he’d gone to his grave believing it.

6

– And now, first of all. Because unprecedented. For reckless procedural disregard and collusion with an agent of chaos: Summary expulsion of a Throne-

– Excuse me, Excellency, but there is a more pressing matter. Likewise unprecedented.

– Really. It had better be.

– A checksum error in Purgatory, Excellency. Consistent with a… spontaneous reactivation.

– Reactivation? A false alarm, in other words.

– It looks real, Excellency. We’re investigating, of course.

– I would remind you that the Hindu cosmos is three doors down. Souls don’t reactivate; they commit irrevocably to their bodies, once elementary brain structures are in place…

– Yes, of course, the nucleus accumbens, Excellency. But this was in the fetal sector. A nine-weeker.

His Excellency thought for a moment, then said:

– Even so. Yahweh Himself would have had to consecrate it. And that would have gone through me. Now. Summary expulsion of-

– Bertillon is already gone, Excellency. And the sacristy’s missing a cool suit.

His Excellency’s momentum visibly slowed at this.

– Bertillon is an eccentric. But he would not be so brash as to access Yahweh directly.

– Excellency, there are other uses for a cool suit, theoretically. If you take my meaning.

– I do not. Pray enlighten me.

– Air-conditioning, Excellency.

7

At eighteen weeks Velma felt the quickening. She smiled, laid a hand on her belly, fingered the navel ring there.

No need to trouble the boy in the fancy suit. It wasn’t his. By ultrasound, she’d already been twelve weeks along that night-no wonder the period hadn’t come. Or nine weeks when she got her new body. As though it were part of the package.

It was high time she had a child. Right? She’d make it through just fine by herself, as always.

It was like old Mrs. Knowles across the hall liked to say. The older you get, the more you become yourself. And that was true. And that was why, this time around, Velma Fish would be living by her conscience for a change. This time, life would be unforgettable.