Satan Loves You

Michael stood across the room from his Maker, the Architect of all Creation. When he had arrived, the Creator was in the form of half a million ergs of radiant energy, but he assumed a humanoid shape so as to better converse with his most favored angel.

“We’re having problems with Satan, O Heavenly Father,” Michael said.

“That’s why he’s there,” God said. “To cause problems.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Is that all? Did I tell you I’ve decided to twist Creation into an infinite loop?”

“No, Lord.”

“Have you ever existed and not existed at the same time? It is quite an experience!”

“No, Lord.” Michael tried another tack. “Heavenly Father, Satan has caused more problems than even you may know.”

“I am the maker of Heaven and Earth. I know everything.”

“Yes, my Lord. So you know about his son?”

“His what?”

“He placed his son inside a nun,” Michael said. “A Poor Clare, I believe.”

“No,” God gasped.

“My Lord, it gets worse. In a sick attempt to mock the sacrifice of your son, Satan sent his only child to the physical plane and then he killed him, as you did your child. Only, you sacrificed your son for the salvation of all mankind. He killed his son merely to taunt you.”

“He wouldn’t...”

“He has.”

God closed his eyes for a moment and when he reopened them they were the eyes of someone who was about to go off, Viking-style.

“I sense that what you say is true. How dare he? How dare he! The sacrifice of my child was a painful and beautiful act. A solitary sacrifice for the people of this fallen world. And he makes a mockery of me? Of my son? Of my compassion? He thinks killing his own child even compares to what I did?”

“From what I understand, he cursed your name and laughed while he did it,” Michael said, relaxing.

“He will suffer for this. You know the sin of Judas was not in betraying me, the sin of Judas was in thinking himself beyond forgiveness. His sin was arrogance. That was Satan’s original sin, and that is his sin now. Arrogance. Outrageous arrogance!”

“My Lord, I have a plan,” Michael said.

“Will it hurt him?”

“Badly, my Lord. The Heavenly Host is unsatisfied with the administration of Hell. We propose to invade it preemptively. We wish to annex it to Heaven and make it part of our realm. Lucifer will be given the choice to rejoin the Host or to be uncreated.”

“There is no choice,” God thundered. “Take his realm from him. Uncreate him. I am the Lord thy God and I have spoken.”

“Thy will be done,” Michael said, and bowed deeply.

In his heart, Michael was smiling. All his pawns were in place. All his plans were in motion. He would carry this victory in his heart and it would make the trip back through The Room that much shorter.



When news of the verdict hit, the crowd outside the courthouse went nuclear. They sent up a roar that shattered every window within a quarter mile. So many people stomped the earth, leaping up and down in joy, that it felt like an earthquake. So many tears of jubilation were shed that the shredded landscaping outside the courthouse turned to mud.

Inside the courtroom, the verdict had caused an instant chaos fiesta and Sheriff Furlough had hustled everyone to their various ready rooms. Judge Cody Gold was double-timed to his waiting chopper by the Segway cavalry. Out in Hollywood there was a reality TV producer who wanted to talk to him about a third season of his hit show, Cody Gold: Justice Touches You, and he had to get there, pronto.

Eric Horton, Ted Hunter and Frita Babbit were taken to what remained of the lawn outside the Sheriff’s Department where they held an impromptu press conference, notable mostly for the fact that Eric Horton was very sulky because Ted Hunter was hogging all the cameras. The only people who weren’t happy were Satan and Nero, and no one really cared about them anymore. No one wants to interview the losers. Sheriff Furlough had them shunted off to their conference room and left them alone. His plan was to wait until nightfall and then load them into a bulletproof Escalade and drive them fast to the airport where they could return to Hell and finally be out of what remained of his hair.

Satan lay on the floor of the conference room like someone with a bad back who has been on a plane for thirty-six straight hours. His eyes were open but they looked as dull and lifeless as old golf balls. His face was slack, his tongue white, his muscles sagged into the floor.

“They’ll have a hard time enforcing that judgment,” Nero said, trying to look on the bright side. “Although, I suppose that this could be the justification Heaven needs to violate our autonomy. That we owe a debt we cannot pay and that we’ve walked the Earth openly, and we’ve created an enormous mess...I mean, they could use that as a rationale to...to take us over.”

Satan died a little inside.

“We’ll make these numbers work, sir,” Nero said. “As soon as we get back down to Hell we’ll go over them and find a way to raise four hundred million dollars. I know we can do it.”

Satan didn’t say anything.

“We can lease out parts of Hell to the oil companies, maybe work out a deal with the United States to serve as a containment facility for terrorists, you know, get them out of Guantanamo and into Hell. Government contracts are big money! And on top of that there are plenty of other ways to make money such as...such as selling some souls? Or maybe starting an AOL call center? We’ve got a captive work force.”

Satan didn’t take the conversational bait.

“We won’t have to sell Hell, sir. I promise you that,” Nero said. “We won’t have to sell.”

Satan moaned, and rolled over so that he was facedown on the carpet. He knew all too well what would happen now. Heaven would offer Hell a buy-out: they would agree to pick up its debts and pay off this judgment in exchange for a controlling interest. The Ultimate Death Match would be a mere formality, if it was even held at all. Hell would belong to Heaven and Heaven had so much money that four hundred million was little more than an accounting error for them. Maybe it would slow down their plans to go green, but that was it. Heaven would quickly earn back its outlay by charging dead souls for reductions in punishment, letting souls have easier torments if they paid big fees, there were all kinds of ways to squeeze money out of the billions of tormented souls languishing in Hell. None of them were fair, but they were all easy.

Nero was hungry. He knew it was nothing more than a stress reaction, but that didn’t change the fact that the hunger weasel was gnawing its way through his guts. He checked on Satan, who was face down on the carpet and unlikely to go anywhere. He cracked the door and poked his head out into the hall. Empty. Everyone was at the press conference. Making sure he had enough change, he sprinted down the hall, toga flying behind him, to the vending machines. He paused as he tried to decide between Donut Stix and Fritos, then decided on salty instead of sweet, punched up some Fritos and ran back to the conference room and popped open the bag.

It took him a minute before he realized that it was empty. Not the bag. The room.

“Satan?” he called. Then, realizing that this was actually an extremely serious problem, he called louder, “Satan? Sir?”

No answer.

He ran out into the hall. Satan wasn’t to the left of him and he wasn’t to the right. Nero tried to put himself inside Satan’s head. Where would he go if he were the absolute ruler of Hell and had just lost his realm? To throw himself off the roof? To binge eat in the snack room? To drown himself in the bathroom? Or would he go home? Nero tried to figure out the quickest route home, and realized that Satan would have gone right, aiming for the courthouse exit. Nero ran, Fritos forgotten, and he reached the double glass doors just in time to see Satan pushing through them and walking out into the crowded parking lot.

“Sir!” Nero hissed, trying to grab his arm. But Satan was already outside. Nero followed and grabbed him from behind. He wrestled with Satan, trying to pull him back into the courthouse. Fortunately, the enormous mob was turned the other way, watching the victory press conference unfold on the other side of the parking lot. If Nero could just get him back inside quickly they might escape notice and the inevitable public lynching that would follow.

“Sir, please, we can’t be out here,” Nero whispered, but Satan ignored him and just forged ahead, trying to reach the airport and home. In front of them, a CNN News crew were shooting b-roll. To their left was a wall of backs. To their right were sheriff’s deputies. All around them was an ocean of people who hated them with every fiber of their beings.

“Don’t do this to me, sir,” Nero practically whimpered as he tried to pull Satan back by one arm. But his fingers slipped and Satan lurched forward, bumping into the CNN sound guy.

The hefty soundman turned to say something surly and then his face lit up.

“It’s Satan!” he said to his cameraman, and they suddenly had him pinned with their lens as they tried to pry a statement out of him.

Nero made a quick calculation and ran away from Satan and towards the deputies.

“Get a car, quick!” he said. “Get us out of here.”

But the deputies seemed disinclined to do anything for Satan. He was the Lord of Evil, after all, and a loser. Nero raced back to Satan who was trying to push past the CNN crew but was getting tangled up in their cables in the process. It was turning into a shoving match, and that was attracting even more attention, and then the cry went out.

“Satan’s over here! He’s over here!”

Fortunately they were in the press area, which meant that they were instantly surrounded by news crews and reporters who wanted a quote, rather than angry citizens who wanted to rip off their heads.

“Cody Gold hates you! How does that feel?” A reporter from the Christian Science Monitor shouted.

“What’s it like to be a loser?” someone from Fox News screamed.

“Will you sell Hell?” A Bloomberg wire service vlogger hollered.

“Why are you so stupid?” from a Huffington Post correspondent who was, inexplicably, holding out his cell phone.

“Please, no questions!” Nero said, trying to push them back, but he might as well have been trying to push back the tide.

“How’d you get to be so evil?”

“Will you become a hobo?”

“Do you have a problem with prescription drugs?”

“What do you think of ObamaCare?”

“Why do you always ruin everything?”

“Ted Hunter wants to turn Hell into a rehab center. Does that make you angry?”

The shouted questions got louder and louder.

“We’ll be releasing a statement later this afternoon,” Nero hollered as the reporters swarmed over him. He went down, lying on the ground, looking up through a forest of legs. They were all surging forward, trampling him, stepping on his face and then, suddenly, they stopped.

Satan was just standing there. Reporters like to push, because if they get too close they figure their quarry will either recoil (which makes for a great shot), lash out (even better) or spin around helplessly, ping-ponging between the desire to recoil and the desire to lash out (not that great, but still good TV). But Satan was disappointing them. Satan was just standing there. After a moment, the reporters all began to feel stupid shouting over each other. Satan clearly wasn’t going to give good camera. Even with the enormous crowd pressed at their backs, the reporters ground to a halt and just stood there looking at Satan, and Satan just stood there looking back at them.

When it had finally reached the point of maximum awkwardness, Satan suddenly spoke. He looked into the nearest camera (MSNBC) and began to talk.

“I see these protesters, and I hear what people are saying about me and I know everyone thinks that I’m evil and the source of all their problems,” he said. “Well, I just wanted to say that I am evil, but I’m not the source of all your problems. I’m just a guy with a job.”

Somewhere in Atlanta, CNN went live. In the NBC Universal Network Origination Center in New Jersey a producer, buzzing on Adderall, cut into Hardball with Chris Matthews. On Sixth Avenue, Fox News picked up the feed. The BBC jumped in with both feet. Al Jazeera cut away from Al Jazeera This Morning and went live to Satan. The whole world was watching.

“I didn’t ask to run Hell,” Satan said. “I just sort of fell into it. I used to love it. I used to get to be creative and every soul was a challenge. Now I dread every minute of it. So many of you are coming to Hell that it’s all I can do to keep the place running. We barely make any money, things are always falling apart, everyone always needs something and more souls have to be processed every day and it never ends. I’m always playing catch up, I’m always running behind. I’m always trying to find the least worst solution.

“I know you’re thinking, ‘Why don’t you just quit?’ I say, why don’t you? You don’t like your jobs either. But one day you look up and suddenly you’ve been doing something for so long that you don’t know how to do anything else.

“I’ve done my best. I’ve given this job everything I had. But it didn’t matter, because now the beings in charge are taking it all away. Maybe some of you know what that feels like. Maybe some of you know what it’s like to give everything to a job and one day someone tells you, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’ I did the best I could, and it wasn’t enough. I guess at the end of the day I was born to lose. Now excuse me. I have to go pack up my office.”

There is nothing louder than a mob of two hundred thousand people being completely silent. So silent you could hear the tiny servo motors in a million camera lenses whirring as they zoomed in for a better shot of Satan’s red-rimmed eyes. So silent that you could hear a plane passing high overhead. So silent that when a CNN cameraman coughed, everyone could hear it. Satan began to push through the crowd and they parted like the Red Sea. Satan wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, but he knew that he needed to get away, to get to the airport and to get back to Hell. Nero followed in his wake. The crowd was silent. It was like being in church.

The first thing to hit Satan was a dirty diaper. A puffy plastic folded square that smacked him right in the shoulder, stuck for a moment and then fell to the ground. Then someone threw an empty Poland Springs bottle. A banana peel arced through the air and landed on Nero’s face. He flung it away in disgust.

Suddenly, the air was full of garbage, like rice at a wedding reception, showering down on Satan and Nero. Then came the jeers and the shouts and the catcalls and the insults. The noise was back and it was louder than before, more dangerous. And as Nero and Satan made for the highway, the sky darkened with the garbage of a thousand, thousand packed lunches, and diaper bags, and stroller pouches, and recycling bins all raining down on their heads.



In Utah, Harry Harlib lay on the floor of the TV room. His mom had let him stay home from school today so that he could see how awful Satan was so that he would do his homework and be good so he wouldn’t go to aich ee double hockey sticks. His dad was in the easy chair and his mom was on the love seat and their usual running commentary – a mixture of prayers and outrage and sarcasm – had died out when Satan started talking.

Harry’s dad was older than his mom. He’d been a cement mason specializing in concrete finishing since his first summer job at sixteen. He’d made so much money that he’d dropped out of high school and focused solely on getting rich. For years, he didn’t even have a bank account, just an empty fifty-pound Quikrete bag in his garage stuffed with cash. When he’d finally dragged it into the bank and dumped it out on the counter it turned out to contain fifty thousand, four hundred and sixteen dollars and eighty-two cents. That was enough to start a new life. Buy a house. Have a kid.

Things had been good until ten years ago when construction started slowing down. Harry’s dad would do anything for work. He’d go anywhere. But the simple fact was that there were too many cement masons and not enough cement mason jobs. He started taking extra work on the side. Odd jobs, handyman work, whatever he could pick up from day to day. Whatever would pay the bills.

Three months ago he woke up one morning and realized that he hadn’t touched a mixer in over a year. What he was now was the guy who cleaned the kennels at the local pound and thought he was still a cement mason. He was stealing twenty-five pound bags of dog chow and selling them cheap on Craigslist for extra cash. He’d tried so hard, but now they had nothing. For Harry’s dad, Satan was speaking to him.

The room was quiet. Linda didn’t read from the Bible or pray, she just put her hand on her broken husband’s back and let him have a moment. He couldn’t stop crying. He wrapped his hands around his graying head and pulled it down onto his knees as silent sobs convulsed his shoulders. Harry sat and watched. Then he looked at the TV and back at his dad. He went into the kitchen and made a big pitcher of lemonade. He took it outside with a bunch of paper cups from the kitchen. He sat on the grass in front of his house with a sign that he wrote himself: