rules, principles, the sort of things that make for an unbending syllogism that, once you’re locked into it, you can’t fight your way out.
“But you’ll find out more about me as we get to know one another,” the devil continued. “Let’s talk about you. A rich, fairly good looking if a little pudgy, considerate fellow like you sitting here all alone. Pretty bright, if not brilliant. You want more; you don’t have it. A self-described hack.”
Then the devil came closer, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s not just a word that describes what you do, my dear Timothy,” he explained. “It’s who you are. Bit by bit, tedious gift book after another, you’re hacking away at your essence. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left.”
Then that tenor voice started up again, the third time.
Zwangvolle Plage!
Müh’ ohne Zweck!
A flash of light (the devil is such a show-off at times), and the devil stood before me in a doctoral gown, hood and cap included. A blackboard had appeared beside him, and the words of his song had been written there.
“Timothy,” he said, in a voice that eerily matched that of my dissertation advisor. “Translate, please.” He rapped the board hard with an old-time wooden pointer.
“Er . . . ” I started.
“F!” he cried. “Timothy,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment, “how can you have read the great Germanic literature on Augustine? This is easy stuff, and you hesitate?”
He had caught me there. Though my Latin finally, after years, had become passable, I never really learned German. I had to take the German exam three times before passing it. Everyone in the divinity school had to pass French and German. The third try constituted a miracle; I have no clue how I passed.
“Timothy,” he said in a sing-song voice, “I know your secret.”
I immediately turned red.
“Shame, shame, shame, shame on you!” he sang, a disco beat in the background.
“Too much to do, not enough time to learn,” I said, grabbing the first excuse that came to mind.
I knew he knew. I had to pepper my aborted dissertation with occasional notes to the German scholarship on Augustine. I tried my best to find English translations of the German and then painstakingly look up each word in a German-English dictionary to make sure I wasn’t making any huge mistakes. Then I’d paraphrase, occasionally making the translation so clumsy that my committee could draw no other conclusion but that I had translated the lines myself. Those few books and articles they drew my attention to that had not been translated into English I paid a PhD candidate in the German department to translate for me. Thankfully, not much of that, or it would have broken my very small piggy bank.
I sighed. “A few words, a phrase here and there, an idiom that got stuck in my head for some reason,” I admitted, “that’s all the German I know.”
“No wonder you don’t like opera, then,” the devil said. “You don’t get it. Of course, Italian would be nice, but, by and large, give me Germanic opera, Wagnerian opera, that’s a vision of the world for you!”
He used his pointer, this time more delicately pointing to the words he had written on the board and translating:
Wearisome torment!
Aimless effort!
So we sat there while the devil gave me a mini-lecture on Wagner’s Ring tetralogy. I knew of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, and I even had a slight notion of what it was about. But I didn’t really know the details.
So he talked, I listened. He actually made it interesting; more than that, the verses he kept singing at me made sense, both in the context of the opera and in the framework of my life.
The words, turns out, open the third drama of the tetralogy, Siegfried. Mime, a dwarf, is singing, slaving away at a sword he is forging, knowing all along that the sword will do no good. Yet, Siegfried requires it, so Mime makes it. But against the great dragon Fafnir, it will fail. And Mime knows it. What a useless waste of time and talent, creating, making, forging an instrument that you know will break when called upon.
How like my life, I thought, and the devil was kind enough to point it out as well. Wearisome torment! Aimless effort! Indeed. God, I hated writing those stupid gift books. I knew more was in me, but what exactly that more was, I didn’t know. But I did know that the day had come when sitting down at the computer to work felt like entering the first level of hell. I remember reading Kierkegaard, and he said that despair made every waking moment seem like three o’clock in the morning—that time when you want to sleep, but can’t. Every minute, every second, passing in slow motion, time running like molasses, daybreak an eternity away. Wearisome torment, that was it. I guess opera was good for something, if just to help me see the true state of my life.
And talk about aimless effort. I always hoped that, even if the books themselves were so much rubbish, maybe I could do something good, something noble, with the money that came from them. But I hadn’t. Didn’t even really invest it, like a billion people had advised me to do—while offering to do it for me, for a fee. Millions, just sitting in a bank, drawing minimal interest. Like me, Jill had said. Just like me.
Well, after those fights we had about how we might spend the money, the desire just slipped out of me, like a teenager out his bedroom window, the parents still sitting cheerily in front of the TV thinking all is well.
I’d woven no web of meaning with my hackneyed gains. And so that’s why the devil and I talked about Jill, how she’d left. After all, the brutal things she had said about my stunted growth came after a huge fight about money—about me not wanting to give her parents any, about me at least thinking about giving my parents a bit. I should have never played favorites like that, even though at the time I didn’t think I was. I really didn’t try to see it from her point of view. Maybe that was the trouble—not only didn’t I try to see anything from her point of view, I discovered that, by and large, I lived a blinded existence, with no real, committed point of view of my own.
The devil promised to help me fix that, and if I worked at it, he said, I’d discover within myself a true writer. But more of that later. First, Jill.
3
We sat and talked. Believe it or not, the devil is very easy to talk to. When he wanted something out of you, he never interrupted much, just the occasional “I see” to grease along the flow of memories. As I began to open up, he immediately grew a little goatee that he could stroke as I talked, muttering “Ah ha” every now and then. I knew he was dying for me to say he looked just like Sigmund Freud, but I didn’t. Already I recognized his angle—he’d take credit for creating psychoanalysis. He stood behind every big event, every creative genius, if you believed him. Sometimes I did. Like falling into a river, going with the flow—easier than swimming upstream.
Well, about Jill. My little Christmas book made a bundle. As far as Jill’s parents were concerned, I went from being the bastard who kept their little girl from being married in the Church to the bastard who kept their little girl from being married in the Church who was better off than them now.
So, as you see, things didn’t really change all that much.
Still, they knew I’d been at the divinity school at Chicago, studying theology (at least he had the good sense to study a Catholic, I once heard Jill’s dad say to her). I had thoughts of being a minister at one time, but I could never really see myself doing the sorts of things a pastor has to do. Jill had filled them in on this aborted bit of career-day mulling, so her parents had decided that, in whatever bizarre or cultish way, I was supposed to be somehow religious.
Jill’s mother shook with excitement as she laid out her plan for some of my money.
Shrineland. They wanted to create Shrineland. She rushed through a prepared speech. There would be rides for the kids