The Big Reap

25.

It’s not often one has occasion to meet the Devil.

Mine came some hours after I’d left Lilith at the apartment, as I stood upon the well-trodden apartment courtyard, grass patchy and shiny from bikes and balls and countless feet, that sat above the spot Hitler’s Führerbunker once occupied.

I’d been there a while. Pondering right and wrong, punishment and absolution, trying to get my head right regarding all I’d seen and done.

The voice of the child-God’s conduit had guided me back at the flat, I thought — guided me in a direction I’d not considered until that moment, though in retrospect seemed the only thing I ever could have done. I suppose as an implement of judgment, I was well chosen, if double-edged, for if I could forgive Lilith her trespasses against me, it was a reflection on us both. Now, though, as I stood upon this once unhallowed ground that had somehow given way to normalcy, it was Thomed’s voice that rang in my ears.

“If our souls are, in fact, immortal, why would our Maker confine Her judgment to the first twenty or fifty or one hundred years of life? Why would a loving parent punish their child for any longer than it took for that child to learn their lesson? My conclusion, long coming, is that She would not. That absolution lies not beyond our reach, no matter how far gone we seem — at least, so long as we stretch forever toward it.”

“That presumes our Maker is a loving parent,” came a voice from behind me, echoing the very words that I’d used when I replied to Thomed.

I turned to find beside me a handsome, blond-haired man of maybe seventeen, with sharp-angled, almost pretty features, blue eyes, and smile-bared teeth of gleaming white. He wore an age-creased leather jacket open over a vintage Judas Priest T-shirt, and a pair of whiskered blue jeans. Well-worn black Chuck Taylors graced his feet.

“How did you –” I began to ask, but he waved me off with a laugh.

“Your mind — and, hell, your very soul — are an open book to me, Sam Thornton. I own the latter, after all. Although at the moment, you’re wondering if perhaps I’m only leasing it. After all, if Lilith can get a reprieve, then why not you?”

I didn’t argue the point. I couldn’t. He was right; I was.

“The question you need to ask yourself is, a reprieve from what? A wise man who lived and died not far from here once said the only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life — your memories, your attachments. That by burning them away, hell is not punishing you, it’s freeing your soul. So perhaps, Sam, all you need to do for your reprieve is to let go.”

“That’s a nice speech,” I told him, “but I think I’ll take my chances with the high road.”

“You could,” he said lightly. “You surely could. But think on this: Lilith was the first woman in all Creation, the first of your precious Maker’s pets to fall from grace. If it took Him this long to get around to redeeming her, how long do you figure it’ll be before you get your turn?”

“I’m okay with waiting,” I replied.

“Really?” he asked, smiling brightly. “I’ve never thought of patience as one of your strongest suits. Nor do I consider it a virtue. If you ask me, patience is a sign of weakness, an unwillingness to pursue that which you desire.”

“Maybe,” I said, “or maybe that which I desire is best obtained by not pursuing it.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “Fuck — five minutes with that damn-fool monk Thomed, and already you’re spouting nonsense Zen koans. You know he’s crazier than a shithouse rat, don’t you?” I opened my mouth to object, but he placated me with raised palms. “Okay, okay, say for the sake of argument you’re right. That your Maker has a plan for you after all. Maybe what you should ask yourself is why should you assume His plan is worth a damn?”

“Come again?”

“Think about it. If all you’ve experienced to this point has been your Maker’s preposterous Rube Goldberg plan to redeem His very first lost soul, doesn’t that make you nothing more than a patsy? A bit player? A hapless pawn in a rigged game that placed heaven and hell at odds with one another and resulted in no shortage of suffering for you and those you love? If your Maker has a plan, then every awful aspect of your life was ordained before you were even born, dictated by the petty whims of a power-mad deity bent on forever pushing the limits of his poor, pathetic subjects just to see what makes them break — like some fucking hard-hearted toddler standing above an anthill with a magnifying glass. If your Maker has a plan, then it was His plan, and not simply those strikebreakers, who shattered your knee and rendered you unemployable. It was His plan, not random chance, that caused your beloved Elizabeth to contract tuberculosis. It was His plan that you take Dumas’s deal and give your soul over to the likes of me. His plan that drove your wife from you, and resulted in her granddaughter and her family getting slaughtered at the hands of a rogue angel. Hell, that resulted in the Flood that so pissed off Lilith in the first place. And if your Maker truly is both omniscient and omnipotent, how do you square the horrors that brought you to this very patch of ground so many years ago? Why would a loving God allow Hitler to live at all? Allow millions to suffer and die at his hands?”

“Seems to me free will’s to blame for most of the horrors in this world. Free will, and maybe you.”

“Sam, that hurts, particularly because you show such promise, such verve. I don’t deign to visit all my charges, you know — just the ones in whose future I see great things. I’d hate to see you squander such potential sitting around, waiting for the phone to ring. Perhaps your Maker will finally get around to redeeming you a million years from now; perhaps not. But what I offer you is concrete. It’s here-and-now. And it’s there for you whenever you decide.”

“What exactly are you offering me?”

“I’m offering you a seat at the table. A chance to make a difference — to serve as trusted council for yours truly, and as a guide to those like you who’ve suffered the misfortune of somehow offending their mercurial Maker. Perhaps under your tutelage, they need not find their path so rocky.”

“And if I say no — what then?”

The boy smiled. “You mean how will you be punished? You misunderstand my offer, Sam. If you say no, I’ll simply ask again. And again. And again. A million years is a long time to keep on asking, and affords countless chances for you to tell me yes.”

Just then, a woman’s voice called from a balcony above. “Sven? Sven, wo bist du?”

The boy’s smile faded, replaced by sudden confusion. He shook his head in puzzlement, and muttered something that sounded like a sneeze, which I assumed was German for “excuse me”. Then he turned and trotted across the square toward the building from which he called, the boy a boy once more, the Devil inside him gone.

I was alone.