During her second year in college Nisha Ramprakesh undertook a semester-long affair with Daniel Murrain in exchange for a guaranteed A

“Hey,” Nisha said, as they sat among the metal tables in front of the café, which obstructed most of the cross-street sidewalk.

Daniel looked up from his rye bread. As he stared at the avid face—lashes so black and distinct you could see where they crisscrossed—Daniel was almost positive Nisha was about to ask what he was hoping.

“Yes,” he said.

“We’re not supposed to be seeing each other like this, are we?”

Daniel leaned back from his food, crossing his legs thoughtfully.

“Well,” he said. “There is an argument to be made for the educational value of spending any time in my company, period. In or out of the classroom.”

She laughed. “Right.”

“Also,” Daniel said. “Those kind of prohibitions are directed at people with less integrity than you and I have.”
“Obviously.”

“If, for example, you were the sort of person who would use a few dinners and moments of priceless conversation and so on to blackmail me into giving you something you wanted, then, yes, spending time like this might begin to come close to something we’re not supposed to do.”

“Okay,” Nisha said.

“But there’s also to consider,” Daniel said, in the mounting volume and gestural activity of his rhetorical style—his hands beginning to flutter, his emphases becoming half-shouts—the argument growing a barging quality, “....the fact that if you were not in a class of mine, there would be no prohibition at all. The policy makes no personal claim on us, it does not know us as individuals, it thus does not have commerce with any particular morality, and thereby is not of morality. The fraternizing policy is rather an institutional expediency, a practical measure, and does not begin to name right or wrong, any more than it could presume to supplant our own shared sense of the practical.”

Nisha nodded, huge eyes glassy with fondness. “That’s what I was thinking.”

She smiled and looked down. She fooled with her turkey sandwich.

“So,” Daniel said. “Would you use it against me, given the opportunity?”

Nisha nodded. “Probably.”

“So I would need to give in to whatever demands you wanted to make.”

Nisha looked up.

“Within reason.”

Daniel smiled.

“Is that a problem for you?” Nisha said.

“Not that I can see,” said the philosopher.

“Good,” giggled his protégée.

And they looked at each other for a long time, their wine warming in the mid-October low pressure spell that couched the neighborhood—charmed as cavepeople discovering their likenesses in a pool.

Fate, he thought. This is what fate feels like.

They consummated their arrangement in Daniel’s office, where he had lived off and on since a previous live-in relationship with stunning female bursar Dabne St. Thomas.

“I want—I don’t quite know what it means,” Daniel explained as Nisha and he drew to a fit on his inflatable camping mattress. He caught his breath—“But I have always felt I needed to be....destroyed. I’ve always—”

They gasped, modifying their situation, as the last radiance of evening fell through Daniel’s high, privacy-glass windows, old paint and old gunk on the hardware—windows of a long-ago dormitory.

“Looking back,” he said “I see that I have tried to direct my life to constantly prove—”

Nisha pulled him by the ear and kissed him, and he stopped trying to talk.

“I can’t be destroyed—”

Fate, Daniel thought. This is what that is.

He wasn’t careful about who saw them together, who saw them entering what place together. When they had sex in his office and the high, outward-opening windows were open, he left them. He didn’t bother about it. And when he was finally properly destroyed, Daniel was sorry only for the fact that he could not continue the relationship. Everything else he was prepared to part with and did. But Nisha Daniel missed the way one misses a runaway child or a deceased pet, anything by which one has been ruined. And there wasn’t a romantic affair afterwards that Daniel really allowed himself to become invested in emotionally or mentally.

He often recalled the epigram of Nisha’s final project—the first half of a Tamil couplet from the Thirrukkural—as though etched upon his headstone in advance:

The unloving belong only to themselves.

*

Unfortunately for Daniel, where the home of Caesarea Murrain had stood in Mesa, Arizona, there was currently nothing. Daniel arrived about eleven in the morning, and for a long time after he pulled up and exited, stumbling up onto Caesarea’s lawn, he stood bewildered in the stiff Bermuda grass. Either he’d gone partially blind, or some neurological factor had misfired—altering his depth perception so that he could perceive everything except for the plane of being in which his sister’s home had formerly stood—or he was asleep. That or the object itself had simply been replaced by negative space. Daniel saw the cacti still standing prayer-like in the pebble bed in front, only the dream-blue Arizona sky behind, a quantity of nothing in between.

He approached the area of nothing, carrying with him a green ballotin of Lindt-Sprüngli petits—Caesarea’s favorite. When he reached the center of the non-edifice, he discovered only a small wet depression, a ring of drying sand it, like an enormous tear dropped in a badland. And, amidst the fleeing moisture, Daniel perceived a glittering channel catfish. The animal was flopping incessantly to wet its gills. Tragedy dawned over him.

“Coco?” said Dan as he stood over her. “That you?”

The fish stopped convulsing and he picked it up. Its silver filets shimmered. And there was a terrible wetness in its eyes—and a pain of recognition—a terrible “Yes.”

It raised its spines in despair, gulping at nothing.

Without pause Daniel ran to the first neighbor’s home and found it locked and unlit. As he began toward the next house, Daniel envisioned his attempt to explain his need to submerge a catfish in whatever fresh water this stranger could immediately provide. So instead he went to the side yard of the empty house, scrabbled over the fence and climbed up onto the deck pool deck. Once above the water, Daniel stopped. He could not decide which terrible fate was more terrible: death by asphyxiation, or death by submersion in astringent poison—here hypochlorous acid.

Daniel looked down, gently reopening his hand. She was gone.

An early evening star rose. A new star, huge like a white, nighttime-sun, roiling and amorphous, splaying clarity and fiery pending destruction over every head. It lay about due northwest from where Daniel Murrain was. He had determined to follow it.

At present he was standing over a small hill of sandy dust and displaced grass that contained the corpse of his departed sibling/catfish, Caesarea Murrain. Daniel looked at the mound he had delicately created, the small memorial he etched into a smooth garden rock:



AD NIHILO
Daniel sighed. He was concluding a terse eulogy.

“...And more than that,” he was telling the universe nearby, “she was just a much, much better person than me.”

Daniel set the colorful chocolate box down beside his sister’s resting place. Emotion came all at once, a spasm, crisscrossing his psyche as though multiply ricocheted. He cried.

“That needs to count for something.”

No one heard this. No one. At all. The woundless air. The dead sister, the cat. The star. The earless space and unspace, up-nor-down nor existence nor the lack of it. The universe, the All-Vacuum, out into which mucussy plaints like these break apart in disorganized nullities and lose the name of possible existence—unfetuses jettisoned in untime, noplace.

So Daniel stood a few minutes, holding his head, holding his breath, holding himself, not moving. The sunset roaring overhead like an advertisement.

It was a stopgap, however, for a basic calamity that had struck Satan of late. Even basking in his own brilliance, as was his habit, Satan was depressed.

The Antichrist had disappeared.
On a day like any other Satan woke late. He went into the spacious marble kitchen of his lake home in Kingdom City, Utah, and pulled a small pig from the refrigerator. He removed a stone knife from a drawer beside the sink and immolated the creature on the cool granite counter of the kitchen’s center island. He ate his breakfast slowly, taking his herbal tea of rosehips and sumac, absently unfurling the New York Times. He browsed the funnies with attentiveness. He carried them into the john.

It wasn’t till he’d been sitting about ten minutes that Satan was awake enough to process something he’d just seen. Setting the pages aside, he walked back through the kitchen, to find his bodyguard, Maximilian Austerlitz, sitting in his customary folding chair beside the front door. Max was greedily absorbing the “Celebrity Misbehavior” insert he had removed from the Deceiver’s Times, the pages trembling as Max giggled behind them. Calmly, Satan crossed to where Max sat. With a long, thick forefinger he pushed down the paper and pointed to a note that was pinned to Max’s right shoulder with a long, curved knife.

“Max,” he said.

Max smiled up.

“Sir.”

“What’s this?”

“No idea,” he said.

“You don’t know who put it there?”

Max shook his head. “Not at all,” he said.

“Has anyone been by today?”

“No—” Max said. “Wait. Yes. There was a package earlier.”

“A package.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Wrong address. I worked out some directions for him.”

Satan nodded. “Most deliverymen don’t need a lot of help with directions, Max.”

Max puzzled a moment, tapping his lips. “You may be correct in this.” Max found constructions of this sort pleasing to the mouth, toothsome.

“Excuse me,” said Satan, removing the blade and plucking off the note, a thing of dense yellow parchment.

“Not at all—” Max said.

When Satan left Vegas last, Jim Johns the Antichrist had been laying low in the Imperial, hiding from the press. Since then, Jim had solicited the company of an old friend, the ineffable terror—stop-valve upon moiling Abaddon—Cerberus the hell-dog, and they’d lit out in the dead of night on a commandeered jumbo jet. The Antichrist’s note styled their journey an “Epicurean World Tour,” a kind of millennial sight-seeing jaunt. Reading the note, Satan promptly went and slaughtered a second and third piglet, smearing himself with internal fluids. Then, calmly, Satan contacted his ward by way of a spindly medium called Twila Burdick, who once kept a trailer downtown beside a while-you-wait funeral parlor, and now resided in a large carrier kennel off Satan’s living room.

“Hello?” said the Antichrist.

Satan was quiet a moment. The Antichrist heard cavernous breaths crackling through the unspace that connected them.

“You’re not,” Satan said stolidly, binding his emotion—“You’re not leaving, Jim.”

The Antichrist winked at Cerberus the hell-dog, whose multitudinous forms sprawled in a dinner chair across from him.

“Who’s calling, please?”

Satan sighed.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What are you trying to accomplish? Wherever you go, you’re still you.”

“Profound,” said Jim Johns.

“What I mean is,” Satan said, “you’re still the fucking Antichrist. Your responsibilities don’t change.”

“Yeah, that’s what I don’t get, is why does it matter what I do?” said the Antichrist. “My responsibilities? For what? We conquer the world, establish political control, salt the earth, erase generations of intellectuals, on and on—for what? Like you say, I’m the fucking Antichrist. We’re Biblical characters, for Chrissake. It’s not like what happens next is some surprise.”

Satan laughed.

“What?” he said. “The Return?”

“Yes.”

Jim sighed. “Yes, that.”

“Total fantasy,” said the Angel of Morning, luminous and grim. “Complete misreading.”

“That’s another thing,” Jim said. “You’re Satan, the “Deceiver.” It isn’t like I don’t know when you’re fucking with me. That is all you’re ever doing to anybody.”

Satan paused here briefly.

“...The worst possible grab-bag of oversimplifications,” he continued. “I mean, “literal”? Does the word itself have a literal meaning? Can you eat a literal? Can you poke yourself in the eye with one?”

“Well,” Jim said. “if the return is a misreading, then how come we’re not misreadings?”

Satan coughed. “Theology is like that,” he said.

Jim Johns shook his head. “You’re just totally full of shit. It’s a total given...”

Jim Johns heard Satan slap Twila with a bellow.

Jim Johns looked around him. He and the diversiform netherfiend had been enjoying their meal before the call had come. The interior of the restaurant was old-fashioned and carefully appointed: thick white napkins and heavy utensils, a moose head, a grandfather clock, and a friendly gentleman in the restroom to chat you up while you relieved yourself.

“Where are you?” said Satan.

“Kansas City,” said Jim Johns.

“Why?”

“Barbeque.”

Satan knew he would have to manufacture a feud of some kind in order to weaken and re-conquer these elements, somehow­ without destroying the whole planet in the process. But the idea of doing it without Jim just made him sad.

Idiot, imbecile, cretin, what euphemism you prefer, Maximilian had an incredible flair for philosophy. He had a gift for memorization and for the combination, uncombination, and recombination of technical phrases. Not that he understood any one in particular; he could read well enough to turn words into sound, he knew phonics, but nothing like the idea-commerce it is supposed to facilitate. Max enjoyed saying complicated words aloud, for the buzzing sensation they put in your teeth and your cheeks, and he was endlessly curious how the longer terms always made his hearer’s faces change as they turned his words into their own words in their own heads. The most common response was a temporary frown, followed by Max being called a “retard” or something similar, which always seemed to make the speaker feel better. Today Max was trying to console Satan, his employer, about the Antichrist’s sudden departure.

“I am reminded,” said Maximilian—for he had memorized this opening from discussions on Book TV—“I am reminded of Peter Abelard and his History of My Misfortunes.”

Satan nodded. “What about it?”

“Abelard believes that only through application do the forms become universal. Individual things exist, but they are only ideally real by way of knowledge, by our knowing them, through the application of our consciousness.”

Max took a deep breath at this point, pawing chin slobber. Satan nodded. They were sitting in the Deceiver’s backyard, on comfy lawn chairs of fraying green polyester webbing. Beside them stood a copper firepit mounded high with yellow coals.

“I knew Abelard,” said Satan. “Oversaw his castration.”

“The world—” said Max, with a wet, polyphonic belch. “The world is everything that is the case.”

Satan considered it, shaking his head. He swallowed from a hefty water goblet of amberish Ratzeputz—a North German liqueur of fifty-eight percent alcohol, the remainder of the recipe made up by the essence of an infernally hot ginger, similar to horseradish. It burned off the soft interior of Satan’s mouth.

“I don’t think that applies either,” he said.

Satan thought of Jim Johns, the Antichrist. When Satan had discovered him, centuries earlier, Jim was an ad man. He wrote demonic slogans that could be fed to poets and philosophers, and much later into beer commercials and peer-reviewed material. Jim had the strange, elusive affect of a very successful adman. That is, he did not seem to have any personality of his own at all. His spirit was protean, non-porous material. He was magnetic, non-magnanimous; successful, diffident; rhetorically capable and possessed of approximately zero real beliefs: perfect for the job. Finally too perfect.

Max Austerlitz mourned his inability to lift Satan’s mood. He took a breath for the final attempt.

“What we cannot think, that we cannot think....” he said, shaping the words carefully with lips, cheeks and tongue. “...We cannot therefore say what we cannot think.”

Satan started from his daydream and for a moment he ogled his servant. Jim Johns the would-be Antichrist had concocted the passage just elocuted, centuries before it entered human currency and thereby the vernacular of Maximilian Austerlitz. Max had no way of knowing nor capacity of appreciating the coterminality, and so he waited on a reply, hopeful.

Satan smiled at his minstrel.

“You’re a retard, Max.”

Max made a girlish sound, grinning—surprised by joy.

Satan kissed him on the head.

“Jim,” Satan had said all those decades ago, having run through a number of Endtime scenarios: “Will you do this with me? It is our one chance in eternity, I feel.”

Jim looked at Satan. For a moment the ad man’s face made no move. Finally Jim shrugged.

And Satan laughed.
Devon Kjarri was a short creature in a dull suit. His head, along with the rest of his body, was completely bald, and his skin translucent. He was the color of demon blood, a sort of reddish-green. You could see the outlines of bones and vascular tissue. Devon cleared his throat, the hoary PA cackling out the gesture with a howl over the crowd.

“The owner of labor-power is mortal,” Devon explained tonelessly, almost a croak. “Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer's substitutes,” Devon said, “in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market.”

Devon looked up from his notes. The audience, a sprawling convocation of Scourges and Racketeers huddling within the UNLV fieldhouse, looked to one another in incomprehension and annoyance.

Devon coughed. The noise screeched and fed-back, overlapping itself. He spoke louder.

“I mean,” he said. “You know, I don’t know what all of it means either, but...”

Now the hubbub rose, demons rabbling and pushing in little groups. Devon sighed. His co-chairman, a larger fiend called Zmey Gorynych, was already coming forward from a table at the back of the stage. When he got to the front, Zmey Gorynych took the handles of a 120mm anti-craft gun that waited there, a device that under the proper conditions may reach targets within the stratosphere. Without introduction, Zmey began firing into the crowd. For twenty seconds the incredible noise went on, like a jackhammer, steel on-steel—as bodies, limbs and all manner of shredded meat confettied off the crowd. The giant shells cut a swath through the amphitheater, their depleted-uranium caps uncorking like little thunderclaps, vaporized flesh fuzzing up the stagebeams.

The noise stopped. Zmey Gorynych cleared his throat. With as little formality, just a coworker’s nod to Devon, he returned to his position in rear. Devon smiled, bored, wan. By this time the great mass of laborers were relocating their seats and body parts, a restrained grumble orbiting among them.

“Sorry about that,” said Devon. “Now—Everybody, please.” Devon coughed. “Here’s the point: I have the front-office proposal right here. And I think it’s very good. How it works is—” Devon riffled through sheets. He pushed his glasses up onto to his hairless cranium, squinting. “The unions break up into little twenty-person bodies called “covens”,” he said. “The covens decide local matters. Then there’s a general assembly where each coven gets one elector.”

There was scattered discussion among the dark crowd, hushed, disorganized noise.

Devon went to speak again when a cry rose suddenly.

“Whose idea is this?” it asked.

Devon sighed. He slumped on his podium. Again, his muscular colleague strode up to the gun. He looked around for the noise.

“It is Satan’s proposal,” said Devon from behind the ill-lit rostrum. “If that’s what you mean—”

At the edge of the stage, Zmey Gorynych dragged out a large metal box. Digging through, he began setting one cylindrical aluminum canister on the stage after another, until there were seven. The conversation continued.

“It seems to me,” said the protestant voice out among the crowd—Devon could see him now, a thin gentleman with long hair and glasses that glinted—“that Satan is probably not somebody to deal straight with us. And if you and the other leadership people stand to gain from this deal, then we need to know that.”

Devon coughed, bored.

“Right....” he said.

Zmey Gorynych yanked the pin from the first little aluminum device and in an overhand motion hurled it out into the bleachers, right about the place where the complainer stood. It clinked and rolled around his feet and suddenly everyone in the vicinity was searching for it on the floor like a foul ball. Before the first had device a chance to go off, however, Zmey Gorynych had flung the other six into different quadrants of the audience. As they deployed, each cylinder unfolding into an angry streak of white phosphorous—and as this compound proceeded to poison, blind, asphyxiate, and burn straight through various members of the noisy colloquium—Devon cleared his throat and tried to speak again.

“So, anyway,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other, his tone perfunctory. “Those in favor—”

He craned forward. He listened. A moiling dark infernal unison harrowing back.

“Max,” said the Adversary, sighing as though with exertion. “Give me something about women.”

“Women?” Max said. He looked up from the television, pawing at his shirt, which he found covered in gelatinous slaver.

“Yeah, anything,” Satan said.

The kindly minstrel looked out into open space for just a moment, mouth hanging, no breath entering or exiting. Then for a moment his eyes seemed to be fading back to the television—

“Whereas woman is basically an existent,” Max blurted with a jerk, “who gives Life and does not risk her life, between her and the male there has been no combat.”

Max looked over with his trademark sleepiness, gasping slightly from drink. Satan thought, nodding.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Max coughed. “I agree—” he said.

They fell asleep about first light.

That morning a lady named Judy Parker arrived at Satan’s front door about 9am. Judy lived diagonally across the street. Between her hands she held a famous meatloaf, famous for its flavor and meaty texture and more than that for the unaccountable comfort it delivered upon digestion. The secret was sugar—Judy Parker added palpable doses of white cane sugar throughout preparation. This had a subtle, direct impact on the pleasure centers of the consumer, so subtle no one thought to call it “sweet,” but so that not enjoying the dish was all but chemically impossible. When Satan answered the door he was scratching inside his boxer shorts, beside where his outrageous muscle slept unperturbed. He squinted at the short, Caucasian woman before him, her hair pulled back under a turquoise clip.

“Hello?” he said.

“Good morning,” said Judy Parker. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Satan nodded, yawning. “Thanks.”

“Thought I’d do a little house-warming,” said Judy Parker

Her voice was constant in volume and musicality, genial and stiff: Executive.

Satan looked to his left and his right.

“It’s six in the morning,” he said.

Judy shook her head.

“It’s nine in the morning,” she said. “At any rate I had to have another one of these ready for lunch at First Things today. The mothers cook lunch for the kids on Tuesdays, and I thought I might as well throw one in for you too. You’ll have to have one eventually.”

The nine-foot creature nodded. “What’s that school called?”

“First Things.”

“That’s a Mormon place?”

“Of course,” said Judy Parker.

“So,” Satan said. “Is polygamy a ‘first thing’?”

Judy’s eyes narrowed, her mouth drawing straighter.

“I’m sorry?” Judy said, a phrase she almost never used in the declarative.

“I mean, in a Mormon elementary school, does every second-grade boy get five little girlfriends? Can you take three girls to the prom?”

Judy Parker was pale, her nose slightly upturned, the mouth narrowing till it almost disappeared. Her face was a knife.

“No,” she said. “Do you make your kids rape children and kill prostitutes and burn down churches?”

Satan thought.

“Well,” he said. “I don’t have kids....”

“Well I do have kids,” said Judy Parker. “And I don’t like to be misconstrued.”

Satan nodded.

“You’re right,” he said, almost bowing slightly. “I don’t either.”

Judy skipped on, clearing her throat.

“There’s a prayer meeting tonight,” she said, “at the chapel.” She indicated a direction. “Usually we pray over local matters, a few international things. It’ll last about an hour and a half. There’s pink lemonade and so on afterwards. You’re welcome to come.”

“I....” Satan sputtered, fondness overcoming his urge to laugh in the woman’s face. “Thank you,” he said finally, choking.

“Of course.”

With a nod Judy torqued away. She jolted down his front steps and angled across the street to her own driveway, the thin, ankle-length denim skirt snapping taut over her knees at each step with the sound of a whipping flag. She disappeared into her garage and the door immediately began to close over her.

Satan blinked, standing a moment, shocked.

He was holding a meatloaf.

“I....” he said. “This....In this kind of situation, what seems impossible...” He sighed. “Impossibility is...a name—”

Lucas d’Estime hopped up onto the truck-bed at this time, squatting easily across from Padraig.

“How ‘bout: Can’t means I don’t want to.”

Padraig looked up to find the large and explicit face of the healer-assassin beaming into his own. The sufferer blinked.

“So,” Lucas said. “Going back home?”

Padraig shook his head, and that was all he said for awhile.

“I don’t think so.”

Lucas nodded. “How come?”

“No one’s completely surprised that I failed, I’ll grant you,” Padraig said, as though picking up a preexisting conversation. “Still. To face that woman, the finest most deserving object I’ve ever known of. To tell her I can’t help. I don’t think I have it in me.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Back up, though. At what point did you fail?”

Padraig was looking down. “I don’t know. Maybe a long time ago.”

Lucas laughed. “Padraig. It’s very uncommon not to feel that way. Most people get about five minutes of not feeling that way in any given day.”

Padraig shook his head. He spat upon the idea of himself.

“Not me.”

They sat silently again under the lone cottonwood on Artie’s property. A cool, roof-high wind ran percussion along its bare limbs.

Lucas cleared his throat.

“Did you give your wife a call?”

Padraig shook his head. “We don’t have cell phones.”

“Why not?”

Padraig scooted uncomfortably on the steel enclosement.

“We’re in-between providers.”

“Why?”

Padraig glared. His big face threw sunlight like a road sign.

“So they dropped you?”

“Well,” Padraig said. “I threatened her a little.”

Lucas laughed. “That’ll do it.”

Padraig readjusted on his perch three times. He slid down to the bed. He rested beneath Lucas’ glare.

“Padraig,” Lucas said. “I thought I heard you say you were just about to give your marriage another try.”

Padraig nodded. “That’s right.”

“Well, that’s what I don’t get. Is why don’t you just go home and give it a try?”

Padraig began to respond, and then he stopped. All at once a tension he hadn’t even known was there began to release over him, as though an electrode were touched to every follicle on his body, blanketing him in goose bumps.

“If it feels like you can’t do it, that’s because you can’t do it—until you do do it,” Lucas said. “Nothing is possible in advance.”

Padraig shook. The sensation he didn’t recognize was of being taught something.

“Bullshit,” he said.

Lucas smiled with affection. And they sat in silence awhile longer, while Padraig’s tantrum smoldered quietly.
**
In Kansas City, Nadyenka Czillicz was at the public library. She’d been combing Religious Studies, Judaica, Satanism/Paganism/Wicca. On a table by a window that overlooked a drugstore she amassed a sprawling stack of books comprising the Talmud, the Koran, an anthology of Secret Gospels, and others, most importantly the E. Wolverhampton Encyclopedia of Age-Old Flimflam, where she discovered the “Enochian Keys,” full-text. As Wolverhampton explained, this constructed language apocryphon was the masterwork of a man named John Dee, an alchemist and forger and employee of Elizabeth I, from whose treasury he embezzled.

At any rate, from a plurality of direct and indirect commentary, Nadyenka was able to compile a complex scholarly portrait of Jim Johns, the Man of Sin. She knew chapter and verse New Testament mentions and Old Testament zealous/prophetical mentions. She knew ambiguities—she knew alter egos. The Antichrist, Nadyenka decided, was a complicated, variously misinterpreted character, put-upon by the onuses of doctrine and history.

She lusted.

What did not occur to Nadyenka here was that the reason for her apocalyptically severe bad-boy fixation was plainly in view: the need for need, the need to be needed back. Before Daniel Murrain, Nadyenka had consorted with her employer at Miller Brewing Company, Auldie Stroupe, who with Nadyenka was defiling his third marriage and maligning six biological children. After Daniel, Nadyenka indulged an absurd preoccupation with Lucas d’Estime—man and un-man, repository of countless over-considered, morally irrelevant contradictions—a Hamlet, did Hamlet compose nothing but flimsy and abstruse character flaws: an abuser. Thus, to Nadyenka’s romantic purposes, Lucas was perfect, and her inability to wrangle him, his blithe refusal to need her, had spurred Nadyenka to her wildest romantic ambition yet.

Not Satan—Satan was a bore. Satan was exactly what you thought you’d get, like the perseverance of a tooth ache. No. It was Satan’s apprentice she wanted: the heir-apparent, star-crossed (presumably) with horrible genius, and an ache of destiny. The outlaw. The Man of Sin.

He needed her.

So Nadyenka figured out how to summon him, transcribing the appropriate incantation from Age-old Flimflam, onto a tiny piece of scratch paper with an awkward half-length pencil. In a moment she was reading the words aloud in the downstairs library bathroom—even as a homeless woman stood at the sink, shaving her throat and upper chest....
And make known to Lamech that he is in truth My son, and call his name Noah; for he shall be left to you, and he and his sons shall be saved from destruction...
Etc etc.
Be friendly unto me. Show yourself.
Etc.

Satan, who generally cannot be bothered with prayers, hardly heard the request. He was turning carrots into carrot sticks in Kingdom City, entertaining a few Mormon families, all of them stiff and nauseated-looking in his sun room. They felt obliged by the invitation, this was obviously why they’d come. Except for Judy Parker, who had obliged them. She was in the kitchen with Satan assembling a veggie platter. Every once in a while she called to him over her shoulder, never looking up from her work, but in an offhand fashion pressing him for personal details.

“So,” she said. “Would you say that you’re really, actually happy with your life?”

Satan laughed. He thought of the Unions, of the Mob, of a thousand other miseries. He thought of Jim Johns the Antichrist, the prodigal. He sighed, cleaving.

“I guess I don’t know, Judy—”

“You ever think about making a change?”

Satan piled the platter. He spooned out dill-flavored vegetable dip. He coughed.

“Yes.”

Nadyenka had gotten up on the damp bathroom counter, straining, trying to project the words with as much psychic volume as possible. The homeless woman now sat in a trashcan below with gawping interest.

The Antichrist gauged the trajectory of the summons. He gauged the proximity. He savored the text.

“What the fuck was that?” said Cerberus, examining his friend.

The Antichrist breathed. He grinned.
**
Padraig Mitchell’s Korean flatbed passed the oversized oxcart that still lingered along the shoulder of Artie’s gravel road as they left. Padraig didn’t notice. His concerns were inward.

“So...” he said, kind of a gasp, weak-sounding. “Back to Texas?”

Lucas was looking out the back window. He watched as the hulking surveillance vehicle lurched free of inertia and, pivoting deftly in the ditch, budged up onto the crumbly asphalt road.

“No—” Lucas said. “Vegas.”

Padraig looked over. “Vegas?”

Lucas nodded. “The world’s ending there.”

Padraig thought. “That’s a reason to go?”

“We’re gonna try and stop it.”

Padraig laughed. “You think you can—”

Padraig stopped. Lucas looked over sharply. He smiled.

“You really don’t listen,” he said.

Padraig nodded. “Can’t means I don’t want to.”

“Now,” Lucas said. “I need to get out of the truck. If you’d take my wife along with you, Padraig, I’d appreciate it.”

Padraig eased off the pedal instinctively.

“Are you serious?”

“Don’t slow down,” Lucas said. He was gazing at Jacqueline now, who was gazing back at him, expressionless. She looked a healthy four months pregnant. Her face glowed miracle-proximity.

“Yes, I’m serious,” Lucas said quietly, no longer to Padraig. “I’ll catch up with you.”

At this point the oxcart, which was actually a modified armored-personnel-carrier, speared the rear of Padraig’s rickety pick-up with a long steel ramrod. Padraig shouted. The Samsung sputtered, but did not die. Lucas studied the ominous vehicle as it backed away again.

“I’ll be right along,” Lucas said. He kissed his wife. “Padraig,” he said.

Padraig looked over, driving blind, eyes locked upon the lean muscular face.

“Yes.”

“Whenever the world ends, it’s usually to make a point.”

“Now watch the road,” Lucas said.

He smiled at Jacqueline again, cracked the door, and bailed out.

“Wow,” Padraig said after the door slapped shut again. “Shit...”

And for a minute he kept driving without looking at Jacqueline.

“Sheesh—”

Then he did look at Jacqueline.
Meanwhile, the oxcart ground to a stop where Lucas was crawling from the ditch, brushing himself. A man-long hatch popped down on the near side of the vehicle, and a large gentleman named Derek Perico—a suited officer, with the aspect of a linebacker turned insurance salesman—climbed out and approached. A few agents exited behind him, hanging back.

“Afternoon,” said Officer Derek. He wore an oversized black ballcap. The late morning sun seared off the gold, koanic