“Like scratch my nose with my right index finger?”
“Yeah, you could.”
“No, I could not. Harriet, this is the Devil we’re talking about,” I said. “Not some jealous boyfriend I can hide from down in Miami. He’s the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Hades, and if I fuck up he’ll come and carry me away screaming to Hell. You know, the one we just created?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Whatever.”
A silent moment elapsed.
“But is it a big thing?” she asked playfully. “Or just a detail?”
I shut my eyes, locked both hands over my face. I didn’t want any clues to pass over my visage—agreement or denial, warmer or colder. I tried to think of the latest virus hoax, the closing prices of Falling Man stock over the last week, anything to occlude the fatal knowledge in my mind.
Despite these efforts, I clearly remembered the Secret of Damnation. The simplicity of the idea, the easy charm of it. I could have explained it to Harriet in two minutes.
“Come on, relax,” she said. “I don’t believe any of it anyway.”
“Yes, you do,” I said from behind the curtain of my hands.
She snorted. “It’s obvious what’s going on here. This all just started out as self-indulgent therapy for you. You’re a software über-geek who thought you were king of the world, until you almost died. Mortality wasn’t pretty, and worse, it was way out of control. So you decided to deal with the post-traumatic stress the only way you know how. You decided to domesticate the afterlife into a software project. It’s so predictable and lame. You hire a few coders and artists to put your near-death hallucination—clearly inspired by the Tribulation Alley burn—onto a nice, safe computer screen. There, you can adjust its frame rate and resolution, play with its aspect ratio and palette. Then you burn it onto a disk, and you think you’ve got eternal life now. It’s pathetic. You’ve reduced heaven and hell to pixels, for God’s sake.”
“No,” I insisted. “What we made, it’s really Hell. I swear it is.”
“It’s nothing but a screen-saver!” she shouted. “By definition: some nice graphics that do nothing!”
“Harriet, I instant-messaged you from beyond the grave, remember? And you just said that you met the Devil, for Pete’s sake!”
“You messaged me from a County General Hospital in LA, you fuck. I checked the timing. You’d come out of your coma by the time I got your message.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I called them. You were already ambulatory.”
“They made a mistake. Or maybe it’s a time zone thing. I woke up after I messaged you, I swear.”
“LA’s three hours behind us. Any mistake would have worked the other way around.”
“What about the Devil? You said he appeared to you.”
“The Devil, sure. You hired some cute actor—some very cute actor, I might add—to mess with my head. What, did you think I’d fuck you again for the Secret of Damnation? Was this whole thing a way to get in my pants from the beginning?”
“No, it was a way to get out of Hell.”
She laughed again, but the sound was dry and ragged now. “Listen, I don’t know whether you’re pulling some elaborate hoax on me, or if you really believe all this. Either way, you’re totally out of your mind. But I’ll still take the bait, if that’ll make you happy. Tell me, what’s your idea of salvation?”
“Salvation?”
“Yes. Tell me what you think goodness is. What do you think saves us, redeems us in the end? What’s the Secret?”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that.”
“Fuck off.”
“I told you, I signed an NDA!”
“I’m not buying that shit! There’s no Devil, just you and your ego and your post-traumatic paranoia. Let me help you.”
“I’m not going to damn myself.”
“Listen, I’ve been staring into your personal pit of evil for the last six weeks. I helped you visualize it, went there with you, even fucked you there. Aren’t you cured yet?”
My reply was strangled by a whiff of sulphur.
“Show me the other side of you,” she pleaded. “You saw Hell because when you almost died you realized there’s this hole in your life. A stinking pit, right? So you worked through it onscreen. Good for you. And now this bogus Satan comes to tell me you’ve had a revelation. Fine, I want to hear it. But talk directly to me for once. Please. What’s your Secret of Salvation?”
“I’ll go to Hell if I tell you.”
“You won’t go to Hell just for talking to me, darling.”