Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Satan also, occasionally, works the front desk at the Mount Calvary YMCA, as I discovered a week later when I tried to check in for zumba.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“How are you?”

“I’m all right. How are you?”

“I’m doing fine. What’s the point?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Life. What’s the point?”

I thought he would have known, having written my contract.

“I have my own ideas, Dante, but I want to hear it from you.”

“You asked me something similar at your office.”

“I asked you what you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“What I’m asking you now,” he said, and I was viscerally reminded of one of my high school social studies teachers, “is, what’s the point?”

He already had my soul. Why not ask. “Is there a difference?”

“Is that what you think?” he asked evenly.

He had my soul, and therefore I needed to watch my tone. “I”m sorry. I wanted to know what you thought.”

Satan leaned back in his chair, the same stupid blue plastic kind as every other chair in every other room in the building, and looked thoughtfully at a brown stain on the ceiling.

“Did you go through the interchange on the way here?” he asked.

“The main one, or the other one?”

“The Wilhelm Richard Wagner Memorial Highway Interchange.”

The main one. “No. I took the county highway.”

“It’s a shame,” he said reflectively.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as contritely as I could.

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all.”

He was still looking at the ceiling, silent. I didn’t think he was waiting for me to say something. Then listening to the second hand scrape across the clock face above him, I thought I’d been wrong, but before I could think of anything to say, he nodded to himself.

“That’s the difference.”

I thought about telling him I understood and decided not to.

“I do carry out my agreements personally, when I can. I visited the state transit secretary myself to suggest the name while he was writing the proposal for the interchange. The assembly committee didn’t know what a diverging diamond was — the plan might not have passed if he hadn’t taken my advice. Not because I intervened, of course. I could have asked anyone to name anything after him, but I knew the committee members very well.”

He paused again. The silence was physical. No one else had entered the lobby since I’d come in. Every hall or window that I could see from where I was standing was deserted, and if I shifted m y feet the sound of squeaking rubber rebounded as thunderously from the white vinyl and cinderblocks as it would have been in a cathedral. I was sixteen minutes late for zumba.

“I'm grateful to do what I do,” Satan said. “Writing and executing contracts, especially. It’s a privilege to be able to sit down and talk to so many people about what they want from their lives, and an even rarer privilege to work with someone who knows what they want as clearly as Richard did. You’re also exceptional in that regard.”

“Thank you.”

He smiled. “But back to my original point. Do you see what I mean?”

Class had started and Blaire had decided I wasn’t coming. Since she preferred it that way, I could do her a favor and give her another one or two minutes of class without me. I thought hard about Satan’s question before I answered. 

“Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

The force of his resemblance to Mr. Vande Walle was enough to induce vertigo. I reached for my Y membership card.

“Now that you understand,” Satan said.

I did not wince, narrowly, but I suspected he already knew that I’d been hoping he’d forgotten.

“I’ll ask you again. What’s the point?”

I sighed. “How many of us know?”

Satan stood. His right hand, wearing the wedding ring again, almost knocked the barcode scanner off its stand. I suppressed the reflex to catch it. 

“Both of us know what you want,” he said. “I know what you want it for. Do you?”

I scanned my card and went to zumba.