Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Satan is a lawyer. His practice covers most areas of the law and he bills at an eminently reasonable rate, and on a fall Thursday morning and against my better judgement I spun the same slow-motion carousel — or time lapse, if you’re cynical — of the main Missouri Synod church, the pay-by-the-hour motel, and the county courthouse as I circled the block until I found a parking spot sheltered enough that I wouldn’t get a ticket if I didn’t feed the meter.

The sky was bright, the sunlight was filigree gold, and most of the “E”s in the decals writing “Oleniczak & Partners, LLC” and its business hours across the office door were missing at least one bar. Inside, the waiting room was small, dead air and four chairs in a dense purple-and-red print with pebbled black plastic armrests and coffee table that had passed through at least two thrift stores, or possibly estate sales, which was slightly too close to my knees for me to be able to sit comfortably. On the tabletop an Audubon bird guide weighed down a stack of back issues of Our Wisconsin, shadowed by a thriving, freshly watered jade plant. The only sound was bubbles popping as water soaked into the soil. Three of the room’s four walls were mostly glass. When I caught myself slackly watching a squad car roll out of the police department’s underground parking garage just because it was moving and nothing else was, I felt like a fish staring into eternity through the dyed-aqua water of a restaurant fish tank.

I checked the time on my phone. 8:58. I’d thought it was later — the office didn’t open until nine — but I doubted Satan cared whether I waited inside or outside. I picked up the bird guide and flipped through it, more for the slick feel of the photo paper than anything, and wondered who “& Partners” were.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said, automatically, and then I remembered.

Satan looked like he was in his late forties. His hair could have been black and could have been brown. He wore a dark blue suit that was marginally too big for him only because he was marginally too thin, with a forest-green-on-black tie that, on paper, should have complemented it. I was certain I’d seen it recessed deep in the reject rack at Macy’s, obscured by the other unwanted ties like a bear staring out from between palm fronds in a Henri Rousseau painting. He would not have stood out at a YMCA board meeting.

Satan held out his hand. For some reason, he wore a wedding ring. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dante.”

I shook it. “You too.”

His smile was smooth, professional, and unforced. “Why don’t you come in.”

His office was about the size of the waiting room, smaller once you accounted for the fortress of filing cabinets lining the walls. A long string of illegible, spidery cursive wrapped around the edges of the label on the drawers. Two chairs, slightly nicer than the ones outside, faced an expanse of deeply polished wood desk frosted with empty wire inboxes and outboxes, a squared stack of law books, heavy pen cases, and no clutter; Google Maps listed the firm in the “20+ Years in Business” category, and the website still displayed an Area’s Best award from 1993, but the desktop could have been a spread from this month’s issue of Architectural Digest. Sun slanted through the yellowing blinds that gently knocked against the windowpane in the updraft from the radiator, laying a ladder of sun across the room and leaving Satan, seated in front of the window, mostly in silhouette. He leaned back in his chair, sweeping a stripe of light across the lenses of his reading glasses and flinging it off their upper rim to the ceiling, and smiled. 

“I read your email,” he said.

I remembered I hadn’t introduced myself. I accepted that I probably didn’t have to.

“I’m very sorry you’ve found yourself in this situation,” he said, without a hint of irony. “Let’s talk about next steps.”

I cleared my throat and fished for the wording I would have used if I was composing an email. “I included a tentative plan at the end of my last email.”

“I remember. It was a good summary. Thank you for taking the time to write it.”

“No problem.”

He nodded. “Of course, the devil’s in the details.”

The joke caught me off guard, so when I laughed, it sounded the way I did when I was alone: too high, half-strangled, pitch dark. It was an unsettling noise. Even after I’d been listening to it for most of a year, I still hated it. I cut myself off fast and hard.

Satan was unperturbed. “So please, tell me,” he said. “What do you want?”

It might have been rude if he hadn’t said it with so much weight. I drew a deep, shaky breath and held it until my muscles felt sollid again, and then I told him.

I spoke quietly but calmly, in the low, level voice I used when something went catastrophically wrong in the warehouse and Doug sent me out to the sales floor so I could ask the customers, insistently, urgently, but soothingly, if they could please make their way to the exits. If I was honest, that, and variations on it, had been my job for most of my life, and I was very good at it; I had a natural gift developed by near-constant practice. A memory almost coalesced. It felt important, but it was swallowed by the haze. I watched it disappear.

I had been talking for a very long time. What I said hardly sounded like words to me anymore. Most of what I heard was a continuous low buzz hovering like an insect at the bottom of my perception, like I’d been out in the cold for too long or the wind had been so loud for so long that I’d tuned it out, but I didn’t lie, even accidentally, which should have required much more attention than I’d thought I was paying to the conversation. No matter how much time passed, Satan didn’t move. His eyes looked smaller through his glasses — he must have been nearsighted, or had chosen to be, for some reason, who knew what. Sitting across from him while he watched me felt like being pinned down by a shaft of sunlight focused to a point under a magnifying glass. He blinked as often as I did: I checked, because somehow I felt like he hadn’t since I’d first seen him in the waiting room. The feeling only got stronger the longer I watched him. It was physically heavy: I could have stood up and I couldn’t have, I could have left the office entirely and gone back outside to the world outside the fish tank and I couldn’t have, I could have stopped talking, maybe, at any time, maybe. But I didn't.

Much later — the office had no clock, my phone, in my inside pocket, felt miles away — I felt myself wrapping up. I tied off my last threads of new information and ran down a short summary of my main points, which was much easier than it should have been given that I couldn’t remember what any of them were, but when Satan repeated each of them back to me, patiently, attentively, I recognized them the same way I recognized the highway exit closest to my old house or I recognized the reflection I cast in a window even when I barely caught it in my peripheral vision and the glass’s tint left it an indistinct smudge. It had always been there, and it had always been mine. Before what he’d said could even fully register I knew he’d understood me perfectly.

“Thank you,” he said.

Something released me. The temperature rose or fell, the atmospheric pressure dropped off or came rushing back, but I felt the air empty itself. The radiator popped. The blinds tapped against the window. The room was silent. I felt the back of my chair through my jacket for the first time since I’d sat down. I took a long breath and almost forgot to take another.

Satan handed me a slim paper packet. “Why don’t you look it over.”

The office contained neither a computer nor a printer and at no point had I seen him write anything down. I took the packet, started to leaf through it, stopped and stared.

“Is everything in order?” he asked.

Six pages of twelve-point Times New Roman, single spaced, meticulously sectioned off by lowercase Roman numerals under Arabic numerals under uppercase Latin letters under uppercase Roman numerals. A flawless dissection of everything I’d said, catalogued and reassembled, given a new, elegantly simple form, leaving nothing out.

Everything I wanted.

“Yes.”

Satan smiled, bright and warm, and I had no idea if he was sincere. “Sign here, please.”

I did.

“Thank you.” Satan stood, buttoned his blazer, and flicked through a filing cabinet. “By the way. Where did you park?”

“Around the corner,” I said. “In the lot behind the parking garage.”

“The Christopher H. Martin Memorial Parking Garage?”

I blinked. “Yes.”

“I miss Chris.” His back was to me, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “Did you pay?”

I hesitated, for no real reason. “I didn’t.”

“Hm. You’ll get a ticket.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t find your customer parking lot.”

“I have none. Nor do I have employee parking,” he added, then waited for me to ask.

“Why?”

“I park in front of the courthouse.”

He said it with the perfect self-assurance of the rare boss who is beyond any need for his subordinates to laugh at his jokes. I half smiled.

“This is your copy.” He handed me a document envelope. “My card’s inside if you have any questions. Let me write you some notes before you go.”

The sheets of carbonless carbon paper he handed me were crisp and weightless, and in the quiet outside the subsonic whisper between them carried all the way across the street. The sun was now bright white. Its light turned the envelope on my dashboard from municipal-printer goldenrod to angelic gold.