Satan Loves You (20 page)

“Couldn’t get Daniel Webster, eh?” a reporter said from behind him.

“Huh?” Satan replied, inelegantly.

“I thought you’d have plenty of lawyers to choose from in Hell,” the reporter said as everyone else in the press pool watched to see how this joshing would go with Satan. They were throwing out a test balloon here: would Satan be their funny buddy, or a stiff? Satan couldn’t think of anything sharp and witty to say back, and he considered smiling, but then he realized that smiling could lead to an interview and the last thing he wanted was to do an interview with someone he assumed was a serious journalist and then watch it appear in the
Village Voice
. Satan’s first interview would be cheapened by appearing in a free paper. Without Nero here, he had no idea which of these reporters were important and which worked for giveaways that mostly existed to advertise adult massage services. He decided to play it safe and give everyone the cold shoulder. The reporters nodded to themselves as Satan turned his back on them. As expected, he was going to be a stiff.

“Perfect,” the religion correspondent for
USA Today
said to the stringer from Reuters. “My readers don’t want a sympathetic Satan, anyway.”

Where was Nero? Satan wanted to look around for him, but he could feel everyone’s eyes boring into his back and it made him too self-conscious to do anything but sit perfectly still. He wished he’ d brought a legal pad, or a pencil, or anything, really.

At the front of the room the bailiff stood up and shouted, “All rise for the Nevada First District Court of Carson City, Judge Cooooooodddddyyyyy Goooooold presiding!”

All around him Satan could feel people resist their natural inclination to burst into applause when Judge Cody Gold made his grand entrance, throwing out his billowing robes behind him and taking his seat on the bench.

“Welcome to the Nevada First District Court of Carson City. Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today in the great state of Nevada to rule on the case of
Babbit vs. The Devil
, but before we begin, a quick show of hands. Who has my photo book?”

Almost every hand in the courtroom shot up.

“Righteous. How about my DVD?”

A few hands went down, but most stayed up.

“Anyone have an unauthorized copy of my new single,
‘
Come Correct For Justice’?”

Three people kept their hands up.

“Those are unauthorized!” Judge Cody Gold roared. “Get them out of here. Torture them! Just kidding. No, wait. Is torture legal in Nevada?”

“It’s not
il
legal,” the clerk of court said.

“Then I’m not kidding. Torture the hell out of them.”

Deputies dragged the three protesting spectators out of the courtroom.

“That’s going to be on iTunes in two weeks. Can’t people wait for anything these days? Whatever happened to patience? Okay, first thing on the agenda: who is representing the plaintiff, Frita Babbit?”

“I am, your honor,” a slick young man in a nice suit said. “Eddie Horton of Bluestein, Krell, Capers and Cox.”

“Nice to meet you counselor,” Judge Cody Gold said. “I trust I don’t have to impress upon you that these proceedings need to be treated with the utmost seriousness, do I?”

“No, your honor,” Horton said.

“And who’s representing the defendant,” Judge Gold asked.

Satan hadn’t anticipated this part. He’d thought this would be a simple “He said/She said.” It was becoming clear that he hadn’t really thought any of this through.

“I am?” he said, rising.

“Who’re you? And why is your suit all torn up.”

“I was attacked outside the courthouse this morning,” Satan said.

“Why did people attack you?” Judge Gold asked. “Did you say something racist? Or sexist? Because there’s nothing the good people of Nevada hate more than racism and sexism.”

“I have no idea why I was attacked.”

“I didn’t hear a
‘
your honor’ on the end of that.”

“Sorry?”

“When you address me you are addressing the whole body of American jurisprudence, and so I expect a little bit of respect. Gimme a
‘
your honor’ on the end of your sentences or I’m gonna make you drop and give me fifty.”

“Fifty?”

“Push-ups!”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, your honor?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s your name?”

“Satan, your honor.”

“That’s the name of the defendant.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“You’ve both got the same name? That’s going to get confusing. I’m going to call you Mike during the trial, all right?”

“Your honor, I am the defendant.”

“You’re representing yourself?”

“Yes, your honor. I guess I am.”

“The man who represents himself has a fool for a client,” Judge Gold said.

“Yes, your honor.”

“That means I think you’re a dick,” Judge Gold said.

“Oh,” Satan said.

“I’ll represent Satan,” a voice said from the back of the courtroom. “Your honor.”

All heads turned. There, standing in the double doors of the courtroom was Nero, resplendent in Roman finery. At four feet seven inches he didn’t cut the most impressive figure, but his brilliant white toga glowed. It was draped dramatically over one arm and a bold purple stripe ran along its edge.  If he had not been standing in a dismal little room with laminated wooden walls it would have looked quite dramatic. A fresh laurel wreath nestled in his clipped gray hair and if the lights had been flickering torches instead of fluorescent energy saver bulbs it would have been very imposing. He wore shining leather calceuses on his feet, secured with four thongs that glistened like fresh black licorice. They would have appeared even more elegant if he had not been standing on a stained linoleum floor.

“Who’re you?” Judge Gold demanded.

“I am Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, and I am representing Satan, Prince of Darkness, in the trial of
Babbit vs. the Devil
.”

“Is that your lawyer?” a disbelieving Judge Gold asked Satan.

“Yes, your honor,” Satan said. “Yes, it is.”

“You need to show up on time, counselor,” Judge Gold said as Nero walked up the aisle and sat down next to Satan. He had two large, rolling litigation cases with him and he opened them to reveal an impressive number of files, legal pads and pencils, which he began distributing around the defendant’s table. Satan instantly felt much better.

“Yes, your honor. My apologies, your honor. It won’t happen again, your honor.”

“Thank you,” Satan whispered to Nero. Nero nodded regally.

 “All right, then. Let’s get this show on the road,” Judge Gold said. “What’s first? Oh, boy. Jury selection. Well that promises to be a bore. We got a jury pool?”

“Yes, your honor,” the bailiff said.

“Then get
‘
em in here,” Judge Gold said. “We’ll shuffle through and find the least retarded and then let’s see some action. They aren’t paying us to sit around and drink Gatorade, fellas! They’re paying us to see JUSTICE!”

Jury selection was gruesome. Nero had watched enough
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
while secretly preparing for the trial to know that they were now in the midst of
voir dire
, the time when he could eliminate potential members of the jury who seemed grossly unfit to serve. The problem was that they all seemed grossly unfit to serve as far as Nero was concerned, and he would have rejected every single one of them based on their extremely ugly clothes alone. To him, they all looked like someone had stapled stonewashed denim scraps and performance fleece to them at random as they ran out of the door that morning.

Frita Babbit’s team had hired Lefty Ricketts, the greatest jury whisperer in the continental United States, to coach them through
voir dire
. Lefty had already studied the jury pool for three weeks. He had read their files, analyzed their credit reports, sent his field agents to follow them to Wal-Marts and strike up conversations with them in bars, and now he was conveying last minute decisions to Horton using subtle hand gestures.

One elderly jury member was wearing a Med Alert bracelet. A slight stroking of his moustache and she was rejected. If she was going to die soon she might try to feather her afterlife by going soft on Satan. A young, female jurist was eliminated when Lefty tweaked his right earlobe: she’d recently had an abortion. She’d be less inclined to judge someone in a tough spot. The prosecution needed a jury who were moral prigs, people who were up on their high horses, jurists who wanted everything to be a capital offense.

Nero faced a different problem. He couldn’t find a single unprejudiced jury member.

“He the fella responsible for killing my Jeremy in that fifteen-car pile-up out on Route one-oh-five back in
‘
91?” an angry nurse’s aide asked.

“Yes,” Nero said.

“Well, I hate his guts,” she said, and then spat on Satan.

Nero rejected her.

“Before I answer your question, Mr. Defense Lawyer,” a flinty old man said. “I want to know one thing. My gramma used to drink to excess and she never got baptized. Is she burning in Hell right now, being tortured eternally by that son of a bitch?”

There was a whispered consultation between Satan and Nero. And then Nero turned to face him again.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I hope he fries in the electric chair.”

“This isn’t a capital case,” Nero said.

“Don’t matter none. I’ll pull the switch myself.”

And so it went. Is he tormenting my wife who killed herself? Yes. Then I hope he dies. Is my daddy burning in that sumbitch’s eternal flames? Yes? Then I’ll beat his butt right here and now. And that’s how it went right up until the end of the day.

“This is ridiculous,” Judge Gold said.“Not a single jurist has been impaneled and to be honest I’ve got a European tour coming up that cannot be delayed.”

“Your honor,” Nero said. “As you can see, it is difficult to find an impartial jury to try Satan who is, after all, widely considered to be the source of all evil.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Judge Gold snapped. “Get some aliens from another planet? A bunch of atheists? Atheists aren’t even American. The only way we’re going to get a jury on this case is if we send out to San Francisco for a bunch of Montessori kids with liberal parents who listen to
This American Life
instead of going to church on Sundays and who have no idea that organized religion even exists.”

And, ultimately, that’s what they did.

It was hot in the event room. It had always been hot. Michael couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been hot. He couldn't remember a time before the heat cooked his brains. A time before the carpet burned his feet and the air smelled like singed wool. His wings were sacks full of lead strapped to his back. His feathers drooped. His body streamed with sweat. His legs were made of stone. His shoulders and scalp were burned raw and red by the relentless heat pressing down on him from above.

Angels hate the heat. They prefer the cool reaches of Heaven, and even our Earth is a few degrees warmer than they find comfortable. When the angels who sided with Satan were cast out of Heaven they fell from its chill comfort into Hell’s lake of fire and it seared them, cooked them, broiled them alive. The shock drove them mad. They screamed for decades as their skin roasted and their wings fried and burned. The fallen angels burned in Hell for hundreds of years. After the first year they were no longer begging for water to cool their blistered tongues. After the first decade their flesh had baked off, peeled away and regenerated so many times that they were nothing more than masses of scar tissue. And still they burned.

After the first century, most of them had been driven insane from the pain. Another century passed and Satan began his project to organize Hell. He started to search for the angels amongst the lava flows and in the caverns where the air boiled. He found them where they cowered in the burning darkness, he coaxed them out from molten caves and pitch-black crevasses and he saw what had been done to them. They had fallen as angels but Hell’s fires were a crucible that had warped them until they were twisted, deformed and unrecognizable. Their minds had burned away along with their bodies and what remained were demons – deformed, monstrous reflections of the beautiful creatures they had once been.

Michael knew of this and he was scared that it was happening to him now. He was scared that he was burning to death, that the heat was making him insane. It pressed him down. It cooked him. The nylon wall-to-wall carpet smoldered and was sticky, on the verge of bursting into flame. Michael’s body felt like it would catch on fire at any moment. But still he kept walking. Lifting one leaden foot after the other. He was getting closer to the exit door all the time. Now he was almost two-thirds of the way there. He wondered if he’d be able to make it all the way before he lost his mind.

Sheriff Furlough had assigned Satan and Nero an empty conference room as a staging area. The conference table was so big that it left them almost no room to walk around, and so Nero was trying to pace back and forth as best he could but he kept bumping into chairs.

“What happens now?” Satan asked.

It was the day the trial was set to open and Nero was terrified. But he knew that as lost as he was, at least he had once been human. He understood the way laws and trials worked. Satan was totally in the dark.

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders,” he said.

“But I thought this was a civil trial?” Satan asked.

“It is,” Nero said, quickly. “I was just trying to banter.”

“Banter?”

“To put you at ease.”

“It didn’t work,” Satan said.

Nero was petrified. He knew that he was the only one who could defend Satan, but the law he felt most comfortable with was Classical Roman law, which hadn’t really been practiced in one thousand eight hundred years. He had watched three seasons of
Law & Order
, he had seen
A Few Good Men
and
The Pelican Brief
, and he had read all the John Grisham he could get his hands on, but now he would have to stand up in a real courtroom, in front of a real judge, next to a real lawyer who knew all the tricks, and pretend that he knew what he was doing. It was like a nightmare. Nero would have wet his pants if he’d been wearing any. Wetting one’s toga always led to disaster.