Unsoul'd (15 page)

"Maybe ten thousand," I told him. The amount seemed incongruously huge and minimal at the same time.

"Fatima will wire it to you first thing in the morning," he said. "I don't want you stressing about something silly like money at a time like this. I want you working on the new book."

The new book. After those initial, wildly prolific couple of days, I had stalled. Understandably, of course. With the chaos my life had become after Lacey Simonson's revelation, I had hardly had time for writing. I was assigned my own, dedicated publicist by my publisher, who was suddenly working very hard to keep me happy.
Down/Town
's launch party was that very night, and the following morning, I would embark on a ten-city, two week book launch tour -- my first. Plus, there were suddenly foreign offers for my backlist, Hollywood interest in everything I'd ever written... My job had shifted from "write books" to "manage a media career...and write books."

The last time I'd actually tried to write was a month or so after Lacey Day. I'd been foolish enough to think that I could just return to Construct and set up my laptop as usual. But the moment I walked in, it was as though I was a college guy coming home to take his underage girlfriend to the prom.

The
junior
prom.

Stares and whispers. Surprise, leavened with the deadliest of all emotions: Jealousy. I was a pro-baller showing off by sinking dunks on the kids at the local court.

Only Lovely Rita treated me the same. Lovely Rita did not have CNN or Internet access.

"Enjoy this time, Randall," Sam said. "It's all going to work out fine. I'll see you at the party tonight. I might even have some news about the
Night/Light
movie deal by then."

Night/Light
, my debut novel, had not set the world on fire when published six years ago. Now, suddenly, it was the subject of what Sam described with no small measure of glee as a "ball-tearing dog fight" for the movie rights between two different Hollywood studios. How do you like
that
, clueless, pseudonymous online reviewer?

"OK, that's cool," I told him. I left the office, nodded to Fatima in the outer office, and went out into the chill of late autumn Manhattan.

I was the most famous author on the planet at that moment in time and I had all of a thousand bucks to my name.

Wherein I Hang with the Devil

With my apartment only sporadically safe to live in, I found myself spending several nights a week at Manda's. The guilt I felt at cheating on her with Gym Girl hadn't lasted long; it had peeled off like a Band-Aid in the shower.

I still hadn't told Manda I loved her, mainly because I still didn't know if it was true. And even if it were true, didn't she deserve more than the love of a man who'd sold his soul to the devil? (For that matter, could someone soulless even love in the first place?) In the days after Lacey Day, she'd been instrumental in keeping me grounded as I suffered a combination of the dual shocks of sudden fame and the knowledge I had damned myself. I couldn't just repay that by breaking up with her, could I?

Just because I was soulless was no reason to be heartless in the bargain. I swore to myself that I would be as good a boyfriend as possible, that I wouldn't stray again.

Besides, if I couldn't be with Gym Girl, I should be with
someone
, right?

Nights when I wasn't at Manda's, I slept at the devil's Cobble Hill studio. He had the most comfortable futon I'd ever slept on.

I had to admit that when he first offered to let me crash there, I was a bit nervous. Before Lacey's emergence, he had not exhibited much in the way of devilish behavior, coming across more as a genetically recombined offspring of a frat boy and a hipster than the First of the Fallen. But what was he like the rest of the time, I wondered? What was the devil
really
like?

Apparently, I learned, much like the genetically recombined offspring of a frat boy and a hipster.

There was a lot of beer drinking. A lot of "Dude" and "Bro." A lot of TV marathons, usually of shows that had been canceled after -- or during -- a single season. Hanging out with the devil was no more frightening or interesting than just hanging out, period.

He tended to disappear for long stretches, during which time he left me the keys. When I asked where he went on his travels, he would merely shrug, straighten his hat, and say, "To and fro. Patrolling. Wandering. Pick your translation."

One time, I worked up the courage to ask him about my soul. "Where is it now? What's happening to it? I sort of thought selling it meant that you would get it when I die, but I slept with Gym Girl and I didn't feel guilty and--"

"It doesn't quite work the way you think it works," he said, leaning against the kitchen counter with a beer and an expression that told me he wouldn't bother with a straight answer. "Like, this one time, I took this kid's dad. I had a pretty sweet gig as a fisherman back in those days. It was like I decided to take the Kid's 'fisher of men' thing seriously, you know?"

I said nothing.

"So anyway, there I am, off the coast of England, right? And what I do is this: I set up under the water, pretty deep down. And as the ships sail overhead, I cast out my line, up into the air, and yoink them down below. Stick 'em in lobster cages. Not terribly efficient, I grant you, but not a bad way to laze away a few years.

"One day, this kid comes looking for me. Seems I took his dad a few years back and the kid wants him. He's got -- get this, Randall -- he's got a skin of magic wine. Can you believe that shit? I am not making this up. Magic wine. It's like he read the New Testament and took that shit
way
too seriously. He says he made it from the blood of dead sailors and then he challenges me to a drinking contest for the soul of his dad." The devil slapped the counter and chortled. "Can you believe this nonsense? Challenging
me
to a drinking contest? Hell, I
invented
--"

"You invented alcohol," I said, bored.

All of our conversations tended to devolve like that. But he kept his fridge well-stocked with beer and fruit. And I could always scrounge a frozen Snickers bar from somewhere in the hidden depths of the freezer. The devil and comfort food -- go figure.

Which is why, after leaving Sam's office that day, I went back to the devil's apartment. The devil was nowhere to be seen. I flopped onto the futon and eyed my laptop balefully. I knew I should be working on the new book. If I could manage to turn it in before I signed the contract, I would get my signing portion of the advance plus the Delivery and Acceptance portion. Something like two-thirds of the total advance, all in my pocket at once. Swoon.

But I wasn't ready to show anyone what I'd written already. And despite my free time, I just wasn't ready to write.

I thought I knew why: The party.

The launch party for
Down/Town
. To be held that very night. It wasn't the party itself, I guess. It wasn't that pretty much everyone in publishing was going to be there. It wasn't even that it was being held at Deux Livres, the snootiest bookstore on the island of Manhattan, a store that -- I had to admit -- had never even stocked my last three books, but which now suddenly was my biggest fan.

It was that Lacey would be there.

My publicist had had a brainstorm. Shortly after her time in the limelight, Lacey Simonson had quite completely and quite deliberately vanished from sight, to the point that some inelegant and crude person had even joked that maybe she'd been kidnapped again. (Oh, all right, I was the one who made the joke, but I only told it to the devil and he, of course, laughed his ass off.)

Despite offers of frighteningly huge sums of money to tell her story on TV or in books, Lacey had steadfastly refused. For a while, I wondered why, but then I remembered a line from my own book, from
Flash/Back
.
 

"The things we're known for and forgiven for aren't always the things we've actually done."

Henry, the main character of the book, realizes that in a crucial epiphany -- the "flash" of the title. And it sends him "back" to his hometown, even though he's on the cusp of greatness in the big city. Henry's a misunderstood hero -- right place, right time, wrong reason, but no one cares about the reason. No one even knows. He pulls two girls from a burning building, but the only reason he's even in the area is because he's cruising a bad neighborhood looking for drugs and a prostitute he can piss on and maybe -- with a combination of the those two -- a tiny piece of understanding of his own past. And then luck and fortune descend upon him and he's a hero.

Almost, I realized now, the same thing that had happened to me. Except where you see "luck and fortune," read: "the machinations of Satan."

Read: The rape and torture of a young woman.

Henry returns home to a hero's welcome. And the book ends with him in a rented apartment, the detritus of a homecoming celebration all around him, powerless as he flicks through Craigslist looking for a whore.

"The things we're known for and forgiven for aren't always the things we've actually done."

Somehow, most of my massive influx of new readers seemed almost to deliberately misapprehend the whole point of the book. I heard constantly about its "uplifting," "life-affirming" qualities so often that I actually flipped through the book to make sure the ending I'd written had actually seen print. And there it was, just as depressing and brutal as I'd always intended it.

Lacey had spent months reading and re-reading
Flash/Back
. She would understand Henry and his choices. That sometimes we get things we don't deserve. Sometimes we get things we don't even want. And that no matter how something appears from the outside, it's usually much, much better or much, much worse from the inside.

She wouldn't speak to the press again. No one knew why, but I thought I did: Because nothing she said or did would ever change the initial impression people had from that first impromptu "press conference." Just like Henry could go home and be a hero by day and indulge in golden showers at night.

Yet Sherrie, my deviously smart publicist, managed to get in touch with Lacey and -- promising me she'd never used the words "the man who saved your soul" -- convinced Lacey to make one more public appearance: At the launch party. She wouldn't have to speak to the press. She wouldn't have to speak at all, if she didn't want to. She would just need to be seen.

She could even leave early, if she wanted.

The thought of meeting her.... It did things to me that I didn't understand. Turned my mind into a chainsaw juggling routine. In part, I wasn't sure what was expected of me. And in part, I just wanted it to be over. I didn't know this woman. I had written a book that -- through sheer coincidence -- she'd had in her possession when kidnapped, a book her abductor had allowed her to keep and read between torture sessions. What if he hadn't? Or what if she'd had someone else's book? I wasn't quite so arrogant as to believe that only
my
book could have preserved her sanity during her ordeal. Given her torment, it's likely that any book, any lifeline to the reality of her non-abducted life, would have sufficed. If she'd been carrying a copy of
The World Almanac
, it would have done the same.

So what was she going to expect of me? What was the
world
going to expect of me? In the hundreds of interviews I'd done over the past months, people kept asking me about Lacey and her reaction to my book. I eventually settled on, "I respect Ms. Simonson's privacy too much to speculate as to why she may have responded to my novel the way she did." Usually followed up with, "But of course, I'm so humbled and honored that it helped her, and I'm similarly thrilled by the reaction of so many others since then."

The "humbled and honored" bit was suggested by my publicist. She's right out of grad school and she's deviously smart. And cute. It's obvious to me that it would take very little on my part to get her into bed.

But I couldn't do that. Not to Manda. Not again.

As insane as the past few months had been, I knew that it was only going to get crazier. The timing of it all -- Lacey's rescue coming just before a new book of mine hit shelves -- combined with the frenzy over my new book extended what could have been a flash-in-the-pan. And it would get bigger.

The devil had promised that, after all...

"Randall, my man," he'd said that day, "you are not gonna
believe
what happens next..."

And, true enough, I didn't believe it. But then I did. I had no choice.

As big as my career had suddenly become, it was destined only to get bigger.

The one ripple on an otherwise perfectly glassy, bucolic, and smooth lake was Tayvon. He had shocked me two weeks after Lacey's appearance by informing me that he was healed enough that he would be going back on active duty in the Marines and returning to Afghanistan.

"Are you insane?" I asked him. "You were there for two years already. More than two years, really. Twenty-six months."

"People are still dying over there," he said, and no matter how much I pressed him, he never said much more.

"You served your country," I argued. "You put in your time."

"People are still dying over there."

"You could get killed or worse."

"People are still dying over there."