What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [7]
And so Satan had quit. He’d just walked right out of Hell.
“I—uh—I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk about. You know, check things out,” he’d said.
The minions looked at each other. Satan hadn’t gone topside in two millennia.
He looked at them, his evil eyebrows raised expectantly. They stared right back, waiting.
“Okay then,” he said. “Be back soon.”
He’d been a little impetuous about it, sure. But how do you tell a legion of angelic bad guys who you’ve led into Hell that you’ve changed your mind? Satan could just see it. “So, you know that the whole End Times, Let’s-go-kick-God’s-ass thing we had planned? Yeah … we’re going to have to go ahead and cancel that. Budget cuts – you know how it is.”
He wrung his new human hands and sighed. Even without the plague of frogs, things hadn’t exactly turned out as he’d expected. He’d known living as a human was going to be different, of course, but he’d expected it to be different in the, “Wow, this is new and cool and exciting!” sense, rather than the, “Holy crap this really sucks a lot!” sense. He just had not anticipated so many things – traffic jams, old, slow people, Muzak – but then, that’s the problem with moving to a place you haven’t been in 2,000 years. Entire continents get discovered, civilizations rise and fall, paradigms shift, indoor plumbing becomes popular – and it was all a little overwhelming.
Of course, there were good things. He had, for example, spent almost an hour flushing things down the toilet in his first apartment. And when he’d run out of stuff to flush – his pet fish, his car keys, a toupee he’d stolen – he’d run out and bought fifteen pet rodents of varying size. He flushed seven of them before number eight – some kind of fidgety thing with odd hair – had got stuck and put an end to the evening’s adventure.
There were other technological marvels that appealed to Satan’s inner twelve-year-old. First among these – after toilets, of course – were exotic sports cars. Italian ones were particularly nice. He recalled, back in the 1960s, when one of his minions had come in to tell him about this new project.
“Sire, I have developed something new. Something that will distract countless minds and separate souls from The Almighty.” It was Azriel. Kind of a boner, but earnest and a hard worker, so, you know, tolerable.
“What? Yeah, okay, swell.” Satan had by this time already become almost completely overwhelmed by the sheer monotony and predictability of it all. He waved Azriel on and tried not to collapse in a fit of boredom.
Azriel had then produced a tedious parade of mind-numbing charts and graphs and other un-fun things that described the super car in glowing terms like, “the ultimate expression of pointless excess” and “a giant penis suit that people can wear.”
“Yeah...” said Satan, exploring just how far he could mash the side of his face with his palm.
“Men will spend their lives lusting after these. They will prioritize acquiring these cars over all else. They will have mid-life crises. They will wear gold chains. And most importantly, they will forget Him.”
“Sounds cool,” he said thinking, Whatever.
But now that he was here and had actually managed to procure one for himself, he finally understood. These things – in his case a Lamborghini – were truly manifestations of the sublime. Just thinking of being behind the wheel sent chills up his human spine – the sound of ten cylinders and forty valves, all working together in absolute harmony; a perfectly-orchestrated symphony that, as you pressed the accelerator,