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     I checked my watch. Jill was never especially punctual, but it was nearly six, and Philadelphia air has the quality of nose-running, knuckle-cracking cold that makes me run indoors. That was something I always had in common with Jill – she always hated the cold, always dressed too warmly.
I got up as she pushed the door open, sublimely unruffled, her fresh cold strawberry hair perfectly in place. Despite what I had recently learned about her, I was bedazzled – re-dazzled, I suppose – by her perfect beauty. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, with teardrop green eyes that crackled with emerald flame when she said, “Hey.”
        “Hey,” I smiled, kissed her on her cheek. She smelled of peaches and jasmine – that was something new. “You look wonderful”. Abruptly, I heard twin THWACKS! from the store restaurant window. I raised my eyebrow when I realized that the sound was two pigeons hurtling directly into the large blue letters spelling MARY’S COFFE SHOP. She didn’t even seem to notice.

        She sat down. I followed.

        “How are things?” I opened, reading her face.
        “Things are great.”
        “Business is good.”
        “I’m getting by.” She runs a madly successful ad agency out of her new apartment. One of her car ads played silently on a TV by the counter.
        “Seeing anybody” I asked, amused by the menu.
        “Are you?”
        “No.” She batted away my question easily, like a luminescent mite in a bright beam. Her mouth pursed as she began to study the menu and I understood the issue was not to be forced. A perfectly played misdirection, accentuated by the way she gently bit her lush lower lip. We ate here every Friday for almost a year. She knows the menu by heart.
        I was pausing too long. “Steve, why am I here? I mean, you haven’t called me in nearly a month.” The green eyes stared into mine.
        “When you left”, I started tentatively, “you left something behind.” I waited. Nothing. “A book.”
  Her eyes widened for a microsecond. Most people wouldn’t have been able to catch it.
         “The big black book.” She waited. “But you don’t speak Latin.”
        “A friend of mine does.”
        “Okay, so are you here to return it to me, or what? I’ve read it a million times, you can keep it.”
        “Jill, that is one hell of a book. Like, there’s some fucked-up shit in there. Maybe the entire world should know about this book, and what’s in it.”
        “It was written in the second century, for shit’s sake. Certainly it’s no more bizarre than anything you’ve written. Are you trying to say something?” God, she was beautiful. Against my will, my eyes traveled down her tanned neck, to the maddeningly voluptuous swell of her sweater.
        “Hi”, the short black waitress said. “Ready to order?” She was staring at Jill.
        “Two coffees”, I said quickly. The waitress remained fixated on Jill until smiled and waved her hand to show that was all. She twitched as if suddenly waking up, then collected the menus and left.
        “Jill.” I said this sharply. “I know.”
She was cool. “You know what?”
        “I know about everything. I’ve done research, and, I’m sorry, I had you followed, and I know about you. The real you.”
        “You did what?”
        “What?”
        “You had me followed? You have real boundary issues, Steve.”
        “You really thought you could hide this from me? How long have you been doing this to different men? A hundred years? Probably a thousand. Do you even remember?”
        “Steve, what are you saying here? Have you started up some old, bad habits? You’re high right now, aren’t you?”
        “Jill, listen to me right now. I know.”
        “Will you cut it out with the fucking riddles? What do you know? Or really, what do you think you know?”
        “That you’re the devil.”
        “Because we broke up? Steve, I loved you – really, I did – but these things happen, I mean you have to” –
        “No. I’m not being metaphorical. You are Satan. You were an angel, your sin was Pride, you fell from heaven, now you’re the Prince of Lies.” To my surprise, a shadow of hurt flashed across her perfect face.
        “Well - “, she began, but another pigeon went THWACK! into the window.
        “First, tell me it’s true. I have you on video, I have witnesses, everything.” She just looked at me. “Jill, listen to me. I don’t want to put you in jail – as if anybody could – I don’t want to write a book about you, I just want to know. Please, just tell me. Look, there are like a hundred pigeons outside, you keep really weird hours, you made half a million dollars last month and I didn’t see you do any work or go to a single meeting. I should have noticed, I guess, but who suspects that kind of thing from a real person?”
        “This is what you’re basing it on?”
        “No, there’s one other thing. You just look too good to be real. I’ve seen you at six in the morning, and you’re still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Every man you meet falls in love with you. Every woman you meet is in awe of you. And the lesbians –well, especially them.”
This was not news. “Well, thank you.” The coffee arrived. The waitress set them down, then hurried off as if feeling unworthy in her stained white apron and nursery shoes. “Thank you!”, Jill chirped after her. “So this is what you have?”
        “One other thing”, I said, bringing out the trump card. “You do an almost perfect job of seeming human. But there’s no connection, no real understanding. You don’t know how to listen. You don’t have natural empathic instincts. You do an outstanding job of faking them, but I can tell, and don’t tell me I’m wrong, or that I’m an asshole, just tell me I’m right and answer a few questions. Then I’ll let you get back to trying to bring about the Apocalypse, or whatever it is you do.”
        “Okay – but I don’t believe you had me followed”, she said, slowly sipping her coffee. She made a face – the steaming java was too hot. The eyes locked into mine, and she leaned forward, her chin on her exquisite white wrist. “What do you want to know?”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

        I took out my pen and notebook. Clearing my throat, I said, “number one – is there a god?”
THWACK! What the fuck is going on with these pigeons?
        “Yes and no. He exists, but he’s in no position to help mankind, if that’s what you’re getting at.” She sipped her coffee gingerly. Full of cream and shit. I drank mine, quickly – black – and it was none too tasty.
        “What did you do to him?”
She rolled her huge green eyes. “You know this all took place five thousand years ago, don’t you?”
        “Tell me anyways.”
        “Well, his angels and my demons are always visiting Earth in human form, of course, and are always trying to trick each other.”
Scribbling furiously, I said, “Why? I assumed they’d be trying to destroy each other instead”.
“Well, no. We both need to exist, but not necessarily on opposite sides. My domain and His don’t exactly have a boundary, in the common sense of the word. People are constantly changing sides.”
“Why are you here?  Shouldn't you be, you know, in hell?  Plotting against the big man upstairs?”
“First of all, he’s not that big – maybe five-eight, tops. And, you know, he's far from perfect.  I mean, look at the shit he “lets happen”. But his P.R. is incredible."
“Hmmm.... a lot of people have asserted that heaven and hell aren’t ideological opposites, they’re more like competing teams.”
“Or corporations, if you like.  But you're very close.  But as I was saying, there are even rare occasions when I lead an angel into temptation – say, I slip something in his drink, he gets wasted, gets horny, lies, maybe shoplifts – If I can succeed in luring him into sin, then I hit him with a Saab, I get to keep his ass forever.”
I was about to try to remind her to answer my question about why she's on earth instead of in hell when I realized she just had. “Holy shit. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I dunno, dahling. What exactly do you think I’m saying?”
“How did you lead God into temptation?”
She fixed me with those impossible eyes, and flipped her long, smooth red hair across her shoulder, and then smiled infinitesimally. “Guess”, she purred.
“Not too bad.” I had to ask. “Do you two ever still…”
“Oh, I fucked his brains out. I had that little man doing every kinky thing you can imagine. Then I gave him an nitroglycerin cigarette.” She giggled.
“So now that you have him, what are you going to do? I mean, how come you haven’t enslaved all of humanity or killed everything good?”
Another pained look. “Steve, please! You of all people should know not to believe everything you read. I’m not really that evil. I just realized that I should be running the show instead of that stupid featherweight Gonzalves.”
“God’s name is Gonzalves?”
“Steve, honey, listen. My point is, just look at our track records. You know what his looks like? Fucking up in the Garden of Eden, booting out Adam and Eve, fucking up at the tower of Babel, fucking up with the flood – need I go on? But look at my track record –socialized medicine, electricity, paved roads, the pill, toppling Communism – “
“Two world wars, a dozen genocides, nuclear proliferation, AIDS…”
“Shit, Steve, bad things happen. And by the way, most of the things you mentioned were caused by “angel” saboteurs trying to get me overthrown by my own people. It almost worked. The only thing I did on purpose was sinking the Titanic, and I had to do that to keep the Dodo extinct.”
“What are you fucking talking about?”
She looked away wistfully. “It was a tragic waste”.
This was a bit much. I put my pen down.
“Don’t worry too much about the small stuff.” She eyed me, sipping her coffee as she made up her mind.
“Listen, Steve,I feel great being able to tell you all this. I hated lying to you – you put such a high value on honesty.”
“Yeah, well, this is all a lot to deal with.”
“Well, the ability to cut through bullshit is just one of the differences between me and Axel.”
“Axel – oh, right, God’s name is Axel.” This I wrote down.
“He’s an idiot. He surrounds himself with celebrities and politicians. The administrator in charge of North America is Rex Harrison - and he’s totally fucking incompetent. Do you know who’s running France right now? I bet you can guess.”  I thought for a long moment.

THWACK!

 “Elvis?”, I ventured tentatively.
I was rewarded with that incredible smile; it seemed like she wanted to kiss me. “Bingo. That’s why I need you, Steve. Because you just have this understanding. It's natural for you.  Do you know who you’ll be working with? Bach, Pascal, Napoleon, Socrates, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson – that’s just one floor.”
“Will I be sharing office space with Hitler?”, I asked snidely.
“Oh, spare me the dramatics. The world has changed. I have him doing very low-level demagoguery right now.”

THWACK!

“If I agreed to work for you, would I have to, uh…”
“Yes, I’d have to kill you first.” She tightly bit her lower lip apologetically.
I looked outside and saw a sparse, colorless and cold day. My hands were dry and chapped. I thought about the best way to phrase what I was about to say. I made up my mind and cleared cleared my throat.
“You know how I wanna go out, right?”
She leaned close in to me, rested her hand lightly on my thigh, whispered in my ear, “Yes, Steve, I hope I do.” I felt my machinery jump alive with a painful jolt as I smelled peaches and jasmine on her cheek.
“Alright”, I said, my mind racing furiously.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

We made love for hours and hours. Any previous pleasure I had experienced in my life I promptly forgot. It’s a good thing people won’t ever know about hours like that –the knowledge of what was possible would drive them out of their minds for the rest of their shallow, pointless life. The only one who could show them was Jill, in her elemental, truest (least hidden) self.
As we lay on the bed, her hair so soft on my arm as to be almost weightles. On the tousled sheets, I leaned over, kissed her. She murmured as I pulled her out onto the balcony, the bedsheet wrapped around the both of us like a kind of tandem toga.
I studied her for the last time, the swanlike curve of her neck, her long black lashes, her perfect features, the dizzying grand prix of her curves hiding under the sheet, the long, delicate fingers, the perfect wrists, tiny, delicate ankles, the cute strawberry patch between her legs, the long, red hair, the electric emerald eyes. Taken together, they lashed at my heart.
I asked her, “Did you really love me when we were together?”
She studied me for a long while. “Yes”, she finally said.

THWACK! As a pigeon slammed into my bedroom window.

“Then I’m sorry”, I said quickly. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her over the edge. My movement was so quick and precise, she never managed to grab hold of anything as she plummeted eight stories, bounced twice, and lay still. Her beauty was finally broken. Our sheet flapped in the wind like a flag of surrender.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It’s been almost two days now, so I can assume one of three things: either
1) She loved me, and therefore went  straight to heaven when I killed her, and is imprisoned there eternally, and that’s why she hasn’t made me blind and given me kidney stones, or
2) She was lying about how she loved me, and is back on Earth without missing a beat, waiting to get her revenge, or
3) She loved me, but she somehow sidestepped the rules and will be eagerly awaiting my arrival at the gates of Hell (I don’t think I’ll be going to Heaven after the life I’ve had, especially all those times I had sex with the Devil)..

I went back out to the balcony, puffed languidly on a cigarette and realized with a frown that the cops might soon be looking for me. I took one last look as I headed inside to pull on my pants and shirt. I felt a strong déjà vu as I stepped into my shoes, and then I closed the door.  I gave one last look on the balcony, where a few pigeons had landed on the rail and were looking at me accusingly.

TO BE CONTINUED....


c Billy White 2002