I never got the chance to say a single word.
I stared at my phone. It was buzzing again. My publicist. Or, I should say, the publicist at my publisher who handled my books in addition to the books of a dozen other authors.
And now Manda calling. I sent her to voicemail. Not because I couldn't talk to her after Gym Girl. But because I couldn't talk, period.
On TV, they kept showing Lacey tucking the book under the blanket, holding it like a totem or a protective amulet. My name scrolled under her. Over and over.
My phone still buzzing in my hand, I turned to look out the window. The devil lounged on the fire escape, occasionally hoisting his beer to his lips, an air of complete self-satisfaction wafting from him like a breeze.
"Did you do this?" I asked. I was too shocked even to be horrified.
He said nothing.
"Did you do this?" I asked again. Louder.
Still nothing. He drank more beer.
I couldn't bring myself to answer the phone. By now my publicist had gone to voicemail, too, but the phone kept buzzing, this time my mother. The voicemail icon showed five messages waiting. I couldn't bring myself to answer. I switched the phone off and put it on the table as though it had tried to bite me.
The video of Lacey shrunk into one corner of the screen and another corner became a bright red "INFOBOX."
FACTS ABOUT LACEY SIMONSON
• Abducted on February 19
• Sophomore theatre major at Rutgers
• Originally from Lincoln, NE
• Missing 153 days
• Single abductor
• Believed tortured and sexually abused
• Escaped captivity when abductor suffered heart attack
There was more, but I couldn't see it, couldn't follow it. I looked from the TV to the devil and back. How much of this was him? Had he arranged for Lacey to be kidnapped months ago? For her to have a copy of Flash/Back at the time? I hadn't even offered to sell my soul until recently ago. How could he have known? Had he known?
Mechanically, I turned to my laptop. My Twitter client had gone insane. Typically, the little badge on its icon showed a number somewhere between one and three. That was the number of mentions I usually had at any random point in time. Clearly, I had not been destined to be trending topic. Sometimes, if I had lucked into the cultural zeitgeist with a serendipitously-timed blog post or tweet, my mention total might get into double digits, but that was rare.
Right now, it was in the hundreds.
I clicked over to Twitter. My screen loaded up with mentions. I scanned them quickly:
You must feel amazing, @RandallBanner! #flashbacksaves
I knew it all along. Love this book! @RandallBanner #flashbacksaves #laceysimonson
So powerful shows the true power of the written word, #flashbacksaves
Now everyone will know what I've always known about this amazing book. #flashbacksaves
And on and on and on. My name. My book. Within an hour, I was a trending topic, as both #flashbacksaves and #goodjobrandall. I collapsed on the sofa and continued staring at the computer screen, then the TV screen, then back again and back again and back again, as though I could do nothing more than rotate between the two screens. I didn't even have the presence of mind to respond to any of the tweets or the flood of e-mails gushing at me through the Internet. I was mute, struck dumb, a shocked automaton incapable of action or reaction.
I have no idea how long I sat there, the Lacey Simonson video playing and re-playing on the TV as my inbox and Twitter timelines filled and clogged. It could have been hours. It probably had been hours. I have no idea. I know only that -- at some point -- I felt a hovering presence over my shoulder, and the devil said, very calmly, "Come on. Let's go to my place."
That shocked me out of my catatonia. I blanched and pulled away. "To Hell?"
"No, you idiot. My place. I have a nice little studio on Congress between Henry and Hicks. There's some noise from the BQE, but it's not too bad."
Of course. The devil lived in Cobble Hill. That made total sense.
There was the sound of someone tittering like a lunatic, and that sound came from me.
"You need a change of scenery," the devil said, almost gently, reaching past me to click the power button on the remote. "Let's go."
I don't remember the walk to the devil's studio apartment. I do remember being struck when I entered, though, by the spartan hipsterism of it all -- the 1980s vintage Atari poster, the weathered and over-burnished furniture, the deliberately cracked mirror on one wall. The devil gestured me to a deceptively uncomfortable-looking chair that was actually quite comfortable, and then rummaged in the kitchen area for a moment, returning with a glass of something tannish and slightly cloudy.
"Drink it," he said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Iced chamomile tea. Very soothing. It relaxes me."
The devil drank chamomile. This, like living in Cobble Hill, suddenly made enormous and inevitable sense. As much sense as Lacey Simonson preserving her sanity by reading and re-reading my book during her captivity.
I drank. It was soothing.
The devil pulled over an ottoman and sat in front of me, craning his neck to gaze into my downturned eyes. "You all right?"
"Did you do this?" I asked again, dully. "Did you have her kidnapped and and and tortured and abused and raped for months on end just so that--"
"Randall." He leaned in. "Randall, dude, look at me. Seriously, look at me. I need you to believe me: I did not do this."
It was as though whatever core element in the human being produces emotions had been -- for me -- swaddled in gauze. All of my emotions were there, intact, but they were at a remove. I experienced them as though watching them, not feeling them. I was angry and sick and horrified by what Lacey Simonson had gone through, but on a more fundamental level, it was like going through the motions. For my own benefit, maybe. To convince myself that I wasn't soulless, even though I knew I was. The devil had lived up to his end of the bargain, in horrifying fashion.
"I did not do this," he said again, and despite the fact that this was the devil speaking, I believed him. I believed him with my whole heart. As best I could tell, he hadn't actually lied to me thus far, and I could see no reason why he would start now. Maybe because I couldn't bear to contemplate the alternative.
"I didn't do this," he went on. "I saw it, but I didn't do it. I was there when he took her. I smelled the guilt on him. He'd been fantasizing about kidnapping someone for a long time. A very, very long time. And the time came that he couldn't live with just fantasizing any more. He had to take action. And I watched him do it."
"You could have stopped it," I choked. "You could have helped her."
"Believe it or not, I couldn't, Randall. Believe it or not, this was her path. Predestination is bullshit, but mostly because it's not precise. If I'd stopped him from kidnapping her, something else horrible would have happened to her."
"I thought you couldn't see the future."
"I can't. I explained this before. I can't see it precisely. I knew something would happen to her, but not what. And it didn't matter if I stopped this guy or if anyone did. Something was going to happen that would transform her from a sort of shallow, dreamy theater kid into a very strong, very impressive woman who's--"
"That's bullshit," I told him. "You're saying this was good for her?" It was so enormous and at the same time so offensive that I couldn't absorb it all at once. The very idea ripped a tiny hole in the gauze and I stood up and threw the glass across the room, shattering it against a wall. The devil didn't even flinch. "You're saying transformation only comes from tragedy?" I asked. "Of course you are; you're the fucking devil!"
He produced a broom and dustpan from near the fridge and started sweeping up the broken glass. "Randall, you can believe me or not, but I'm here to tell you that my interest isn't in turning people 'evil,' whatever that means. Read your Old Testament sometime, before the Kid
's PR people got ahold of the texts. My job is to test humanity. Yeah, I tempt you guys, but it makes no difference to me if you succumb or not. Really." He dumped the glass in the trash. "You pass or fail on your own. I'm just here to make sure you take the damn test. I'm the proctor. End of story."
"And this was her test? Being raped over and over again by a psychopath?"
"Don't blame me -- take it up with the Old Man. He's the one who started the whole 'works in mysterious ways' and 'thou shalt not question the Lord thy God' shit. Me, I think you guys should get an owner's manual at birth that spells it all out nice and neat. But I got voted down on that and spent a few thousand years in a bituminous lake for my troubles."
"Poor Satan," I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster. I was somehow more upset at his attitude than at what had actually happened to Lacey Simonson.
"I don't want your sympathy. But this is your test. And you have to decide how you're going to deal with it."
"But this all started months ago," I said. "You knew it would happen. She was kidnapped with my book and you knew this would happen and the book would be a monster hit and..." I felt sick. Physically ill, even though I'd not eaten in hours. And I knew, in that moment -- I was soulless. Empty. The sickness was for my loss, not Lacey's. The rage of the thrown glass was aimed at myself, not at the devil. "I sold you my soul for nothing. This would have happened anyway. You had nothing to do with it."
The devil stroked his chin and favored me with a wicked grin. "Randall, my man... You are not gonna believe what happens next..."
FOUR MONTHS LATER
Wherein I Get Back to It
Life without a soul and with a hit book, it turns out, was as boring and as annoying as life with the former and without the latter.
Curious, I asked Tayvon early on: "Do I seem different to you?"
"You're a little stressed," he said, "but you're always a little stressed. Dr. Li--"
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Herbs."
So, to Tayvon, I seemed the same. To Manda, I seemed the same. She didn't notice my missing soul. She didn't notice that I'd strayed.
Gym Girl couldn't weigh in. I had seen her once or twice in the area around Body by You since our one-night stand, and she'd said nothing to me. I kept meaning to go to the gym, but things were so hectic since Flash/Back was spotted in Lacey's hands that my free time was suddenly very, very dear. I sort of wanted to stop by at least once, to tell her that I wasn't the sort of guy to fuck and run, that she wasn't just a frivolous fuck to me. But apparently I was that sort of guy. Apparently it came with the soulless territory. Then again, she hadn't tried to contact me, either.
Maybe I had just been a frivolous fuck to her. I suppose it was possible, even if the idea of someone (especially someone as gorgeous and boyfriended as Gym Girl) wanting to use me for sex was ridiculous.
"The world's a ridiculous place," the devil liked telling me.
How else did my life change? Not in many fun ways, to tell the truth.
New phone number, of course, because I was careless with the old one, back when I was a nobody. Too many people had it and it got out there and my phone rang so much that I thought it might vibrate itself to pieces.
No new address yet. I couldn't afford to break my lease and get a new place. Yes, Flash/Back had sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the time since Lacey's escape, with a sales velocity that presaged a million, but the way publishing works, I wouldn't see the royalties on that until the following year, if then. I was the biggest author in the world in that moment, and I was still living off of the bullshit advance money left over from when I signed the contract for Untitled Manuscript, which I'd been working on when Lacey Simonson's attacker conveniently keeled over from a heart attack due to the stress of raping his fantasy lust-object one too many times.
"There will be money soon," Sam promised me. "I'm still negotiating your contract and you're going to get your pile of money. Just be patient."
We met at Sam's office in midtown Manhattan. I had told him I wasn't meeting him for drinks or lunch or dinner in public any more. I was tired of him picking places where he would be seen with me, conveniently "bumping into" executives and big shots so that he could casually introduce me as his "star client."
"It's been four months," I complained. "I can't even stay at my own place half the time -- people are camping out there like fucking Muslims at Mecca." I was exaggerating slightly -- for a couple of weeks, there'd been campers. Now there were occasional tourists coming by to snap pictures, some pathetic paparazzi, and -- every once in a while, seemingly at random -- someone with a sleeping bag who insisted on spending the night on the sidewalk outside my building.
"I know you don't want to hear this," he said, "but the longer this process takes, the better it is for you."
"That's what you said months ago!"
"And I was right, wasn't I? All six of the big publishers were fighting over you like sharks with chum. They kept one-upping each other. Did you want me to step in and shut that down?"
"I guess not."
"It could've been the difference between getting the five mill you got or just a million."
Just a million. Just a million. Every time I thought it -- every time I thought of the five I'd be getting -- my head swam with it. Stick that in the shittiest savings account in the world and you could practically live off the interest. My God. This was my life now.
Or would be my life, if Sam ever finished the goddamn contract negotiations so that I could sign the thing and get some money.
"I don't know why it takes so fucking long," I snapped. I snapped more easily these days. Another side effect of soullessness or just the natural by-product of being famous and broke? I didn't know. Didn't care. Another benefit of not having a soul. "You made the deal, right? Get them to finish up the contract already."
"I'm trying to protect you. You have a whole new set of concerns now that you're a rock star."
"Just don't let this go on even five minutes longer than you absolutely have to," I told him. "My bank account is looking pretty damn anemic."
"I can float you for a couple of months," he said. It made me grateful, but it also made me realize that this nonsense could be going on for that much longer. "Don't worry about money. Seriously. I'll advance you. What do you need? How in the hole are you?"
"I don't know!" I whined. "Because I don't know how much longer it's gonna be until I get the new advance."
"Say it's two more months," he said, and then hastily added, "not that I'm saying it will take that long. But things get a little slow after Thanksgiving. You know that. Even for a deal like this. Everyone's out of the office, contract people go on vacation... Figure you'll get paid right after the first of the year. Nice way to start the new year, right?"
It was a week until Thanksgiving. The idea of waiting that much longer...
"Maybe ten thousand," I told him. The amount seemed incongruously huge and minimal at the same time.
"Fatima will wire it to you first thing in the morning," he said. "I don't want you stressing about something silly like money at a time like this. I want you working on the new book."
The new book. After those initial, wildly prolific couple of days, I had stalled. Understandably, of course. With the chaos my life had become after Lacey Simonson's revelation, I had hardly had time for writing. I was assigned my own, dedicated publicist by my publisher, who was suddenly working very hard to keep me happy. Down/Town's launch party was that very night, and the following morning, I would embark on a ten-city, two week book launch tour -- my first. Plus, there were suddenly foreign offers for my backlist, Hollywood interest in everything I'd ever written... My job had shifted from "write books" to "manage a media career...and write books."
The last time I'd actually tried to write was a month or so after Lacey Day. I'd been foolish enough to think that I could just return to Construct and set up my laptop as usual. But the moment I walked in, it was as though I was a college guy c
oming home to take his underage girlfriend to the prom.
The junior prom.
Stares and whispers. Surprise, leavened with the deadliest of all emotions: Jealousy. I was a pro-baller showing off by sinking dunks on the kids at the local court.
Only Lovely Rita treated me the same. Lovely Rita did not have CNN or Internet access.
"Enjoy this time, Randall," Sam said. "It's all going to work out fine. I'll see you at the party tonight. I might even have some news about the Night/Light movie deal by then."
Night/Light, my debut novel, had not set the world on fire when published six years ago. Now, suddenly, it was the subject of what Sam described with no small measure of glee as a "ball-tearing dog fight" for the movie rights between two different Hollywood studios. How do you like that, clueless, pseudonymous online reviewer?
"OK, that's cool," I told him. I left the office, nodded to Fatima in the outer office, and went out into the chill of late autumn Manhattan.
I was the most famous author on the planet at that moment in time and I had all of a thousand bucks to my name.