Happy Hour in Hell

one: pillow talk

WE ONLY had one night together, really. And I remember every moment of it.

“So what’s it like, living in Hell?”

“Oh, it’s great. We drink ice cream sodas all day and play pool and smoke cigars and never, ever turn into donkeys.”

“That sounds more like Pleasure Island, from Pinocchio.”

“Shoot. You got me.”

“Come on, woman, it was a serious question.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to answer it, Wings. How’s that for serious?”

We were both naked in Caz’s secret hideaway and had just made love for the first (well, technically first, second, and second-and-a-half) time. Her head was on my chest and her legs were clamped around my thigh like a bivalve mercilessly trying to compel surrender. I stroked her hair, a gold so pale you could only tell it wasn’t white in direct sunlight.

“That bad, huh?”

“Oh, you beautiful, stupid man, you can’t imagine.” She lifted herself on one elbow so she could look me in the face. She was so gorgeous that I promptly forgot what we were talking about and lay there staring like I was brain damaged. By any normal standards I must have been, because otherwise why would a minion of Heaven be making naked squishies with a tool of Satan in the first place? “Not just bad,” she told me. “Worse than you could possibly imagine.”

I kept wondering how anyone, even the lords of Hell, could want to harm that radiant beauty. The official version would be that she had a face like a Renaissance angel, beautiful, delicate, full of lofty thoughts. But the truth was that she looked like the most innocently wicked graduate of a very, very expensive private school. If I hadn’t known for a fact that Caz had been around since before Columbus sailed, I’d have been feeling very, very guilty after all the things we’d just done. I was beginning to believe I was in love with this woman, but of course she wasn’t actually a woman at all, and she came from Hell. Think about that a little and you’ll probably understand why I didn’t want to consider our situation too closely.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything . . .”

“No! No, thank your lucky stars that you don’t know, Bobby. I want you to stay that way. I don’t want you ever to know what that place is like.” And then she suddenly hugged me so tightly that for a moment I thought she was trying to crawl through me somehow and out the other side. Her small, hard body seemed both the most real and the most vulnerable thing in the world.

“I won’t let you go back,” I said.

I thought she laughed. I only realized later that the noise had been something else, something far less simple. Her legs tightened on my thigh; I could feel her wetness pressing against me. “Of course you won’t, Bobby,” she said. “We’ll never go back, either of us. We’ll stay here and drink ice cream sodas forever. So kiss me, you dumbfuck angel.”

Have you ever had somebody you loved die on you? All that stuff you feel, and you’re still feeling it, but they’re just gone? You carry that around with you every moment—all the things you failed to tell them, all the ways you were stupid, all the ways you’re missing them. It feels like holding up a huge, collapsing wall, as if you were some hero in a movie waiting for everyone to get to safety, but you already know you’re not going to get away yourself. That eventually the weight will just crush you.

Ever had somebody leave you and tell you they never really loved you? That you’re a loser, a waste of time they should have known to avoid? You carry that one around too, but instead of an insupportable weight, it’s more like a horrible burn, nerve endings fried and stuck on jangling alert, a pain that occasionally subsides to a bitter, itching ache, but then flares up into agony again without warning.

Here’s one more: Ever had somebody steal the thing that mattered most to you? Then laugh in your face about it? Leave you helpless and seething?

Okay, now imagine that all three things happened at the same time, with the same woman.

Her name was Caz, short for Casimira, also known as the Countess of Cold Hands, a she-demon of high standing and about the most mesmerizing creature I’d ever seen. When we met we were on opposite sides in the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell. We became lovers, which both of us knew was an extremely stupid, supremely dangerous thing to do. But something drew us together, although that’s a pretty damn bland, vanilla way of putting it. We made sparks—no, a raging fire—and it still blazed inside of me, long after she’d gone. Some days it seemed like it was going to burn me to ashes.

Caz belonged to Eligor, one of the Grand Dukes of Hell. After our affair, our fling, whatever you want to call it, she went back to him. She even tried to make me think she’d never cared about me, but, see, I didn’t believe that. I was certain she felt something too because, if not, then I was wrong about everything. I’m talking about up is down, black is white, the world is really flat after all kind of wrong.

Call me stupid if you want, but I wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t. Beside, I had a more practical reason for thinking that she really cared for me. Don’t worry, we’re coming to that soon.

Anyway, now Eligor hated me because I’d messed with his “property” (okay, also because of some other stuff, like shooting his secretary, getting his bodyguard eaten, and generally interfering with his plans). The power imbalance between us was ridiculously skewed in Eligor’s favor: he was infernal royalty, and I was a minor mid-level functionary who already had a bit of a negative reputation with my superiors. So why wasn’t I dead? Because I had the feather—a golden feather from the wing of an important angel that marked an illicit bargain made between Grand Duke Eligor and someone in Heaven whose identity I still didn’t know. Eligor definitely didn’t want that feather going public, and as long as I had it stashed safely away I felt sure he would leave me alone. On the other hand, Eligor had Caz, and he’d taken her back to Hell, far out of my reach. Stalemate. At least that’s what I’d thought when the whole thing started. As it turned out, I had built a house of cards out of the flimsiest set of assumptions possible.

Oops. Getting ahead of myself a little. A lot of things happened before I even heard of the Neronian Bridge, and I should probably tell you about some of them before we return to Hell.

The latest episode of the ongoing craziness that is my afterlife started with what normal folk would call a job review. Except normal folk wouldn’t be reviewed by a group of pissed-off celestials who could literally destroy an immortal soul with a single word. Even the poor bastards who work for Trump don’t have to put up with that.