It was raining that evening. Fine rain, stubborn rain, nothing dramatic. Not the kind of rain that belongs to major life decisions. Just drizzle: a wet collar, heavy hair, and a sock that, after ten minutes, begins to feel like someone else's body.

I was thirty years old, my shoes were wet, and the shopping bag was cutting into my fingers because, of course, I hadn't taken my backpack. I had seen it that morning on the chair. I had even thought: take it, you'll be getting groceries after work. I ignored my own brain, which by then was an old habit.

The baguette stuck out sideways and was already cracked. Not broken beautifully, like in a bakery ad. Just collapsed, crushed under toilet paper and a packet of pasta. I had also bought tomato sauce, cheese, and plain yogurt, because sometimes I was seized by the absurd impulse to behave in a store like someone who took care of himself.

I used to imagine death sometimes, but always on stupid occasions. When I carried a knife from the kitchen to the sink, blade first. When I went down wet stairs and, for half a second, saw myself on the ground floor, more surprised than dead. When a bus braked too late and everyone inside made the same small movement with their bodies, as if they could help the brakes by tensing their necks.

At moments like that, a person thinks: yes, that would be about right for me.

After I paid, a message came from my mother.

Call when you can. Nothing urgent.

That "nothing urgent" always meant two things at once. That it really was nothing urgent. And that if I didn't call, tomorrow it would become a little urgent, because then there would also be the question of why I hadn't called when I could have.

I replied in my head.

In my head, I was a very good son. I called regularly, remembered birthdays, and patiently listened to stories about a neighbor I didn't know and never intended to know. In real life, I stood under the awning outside the shop, saw drops of water on the screen, and decided I would call back when I got home.

When I got home. A nice, calm phrase.

A productivity podcast was playing in my earbuds.

I don't know why I had put it on. Probably out of the same need that makes a person buy a notebook to transform their life, then write two parcel locker codes in it and nothing else. The host was saying it was worth ending the day with a brief summary and choosing three things for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I was going to call my mother back. I was also going to answer my friend and tell him I was alive, because he had asked for the third time and it was starting to be less funny. Besides that: laundry, a bill, something to eat that wasn't made mostly of salt and guilt.

Small things, all postponed.

I wanted to live. I just didn't think about it that way.

If someone had asked me then what, specifically, I wanted to live for, I probably would have been annoyed. I didn't have some grand reason ready. I had pasta, a message from my mother, wet shoes, a show I had started three weeks earlier, and that stupid calm a person mistakes for certainty until someone takes it away. It didn't sound like an argument in a matter of life and death. And yet it was the whole argument I had.

I didn't love every day. I simply didn't agree to have all of them shut at once, without being asked, before I managed to fix even one stupid thing.

I reached the pedestrian crossing with my hood plastered to my forehead. One of the ads on the other side of the street flickered nervously, not quite broken, not quite working. At the bus stop a little farther down, someone smoked under a no-smoking sign. Two cars drove through a puddle and splashed the curb. The city was doing what cities do in the evening: pretending to be alive because of the lights, even though everyone in it looked tired.

There were a few people at the crossing. A woman with a stroller, a guy in a suit, two girls with one phone between them. Me.

That small accidental group that exists only because a red light lasts longer than patience.

I looked at my phone. Not to check anything. It was a reflex. My mother's message was still hanging on the screen as a notification. Under it was a message from my friend: Dude, seriously, are you alive?

That had been a joke too, at least at first. He had written once, then again, then a third time, because for several days I had been putting off an answer that required only two sentences. People can worry in a way that sounds like teasing. It makes it easier to pretend it doesn't matter.

I almost answered.

Really. My thumb was already over the keyboard. I was going to write: Yeah, all good, I'll get back to you tomorrow. Then the little green man on the other side of the street lit up with his artificial urgency, and I put the phone in my pocket.

Tomorrow.

I stepped forward.

Not first. I always waited that fraction of a second, even on green. Supposedly caution, supposedly habit, and partly a plain reluctance to be first at anything. I was closest to the edge on the side of the cars coming from the left. The guy in the suit moved on my right, half a step ahead of me, but slowed at once, adjusting his sleeve. The woman with the stroller stayed on the curb because one wheel caught on an uneven bit of sidewalk. One of the girls laughed in the way people laugh when the world still seems, for a long while yet, mostly something to comment on.

I took maybe three steps.

Three steps is an absurdly small amount of space in which to change a life. The first onto the wet white stripe. The second onto the asphalt between stripes. The third was no longer fully mine.

The asphalt was black and glossy. The white stripes looked gray, worn down by tires and winter. In the puddles lay stretched-out shop lights, red and yellow, torn apart by the rain. From the left I heard an engine. Low, calm, expensive. Not the kind that asks for attention. The kind that takes it.

I turned my head.

A black car entered the intersection.

On its side, the light was red. Short, wet, reflected in the kiosk window, but red.

It wasn't speeding like in a movie. I remembered that later with a kind of sick precision. There was no grand chase, no screaming, no skid across half the street. It was simply going too fast and too confidently. Enough.

Through the windshield, I saw the driver.

An old man. A heavy face, white hair at the temples, the dark clothes of a clergyman under an open coat. On his chest he wore something gold: a sign or an ornament. I saw it too briefly to give it an honest name. He was looking down. Not at the road. In his hand he had a phone, and the screen lit his chin with cold light.

I thought: but I have the green.

That was my last reasonable thought.

I wanted to step back, but my body didn't receive the instruction in time. Or received it and decided I was joking. The guy in the suit froze on my right, as if he had suddenly become a road sign. The woman with the stroller screamed. Maybe at me. Maybe at the child. Maybe at the driver, who hadn't yet seen her.

The car was already too close.

The headlights spilled across the wet asphalt. The grille at the front of the car became enormous, absurdly silver, too clean for weather like that. For a fraction of a second, I saw my own reflection in it, stretched and stupid: hood, open mouth, bag in hand.

Then something hit me.

The sound was worse than it should have been. Not louder. Worse precisely because it wasn't grand. Dull, short, almost blunt. As if someone had thrown a heavy sack onto the floor. Only after a moment did I understand that I was the sack.

The world turned sideways.

I don't remember whether I hit the hood first or went straight to the asphalt. I remember the hand that let go of the bag. I remember paper tearing with a dry crackle, strangely out of place in the rain. Groceries scattered across the crossing. The baguette rolled a little way off and stopped near the curb. The jar of sauce broke under someone's shoe or under a wheel. My left earbud was still working. Someone inside it was calmly explaining how to plan the next day.

For a second I smelled tomatoes and wet paper. It was so out of place that my brain tried to cling to it: groceries, not accident; dinner, not body on asphalt. As if naming things in a domestic way could put everything back on its proper track.

I was lying on my back.

Rain fell straight into my face.

I tried to blink and wasn't sure I managed it. I wanted to move my hand. Nothing. I wanted to take a deeper breath, and then the pain, which had apparently been waiting politely behind a door, came in all at once.

It wasn't sharp. Sharp pain has edges. This one didn't.

It was everywhere.

My chest wasn't working properly. Every breath sounded wet, though maybe I was the only one hearing it that way. My leg lay at a wrong angle. I saw it from the corner of my eye and immediately regretted it. My mouth tasted metallic, like I had bitten my tongue, only much worse. My teeth didn't fit together. It was a small thing, idiotic, but for a moment I mostly thought about how my teeth weren't where they should be.

Someone was screaming. Someone else was telling me not to move.

That was almost funny. In a very small, very mean way.

The woman with the stroller appeared over my face. Without the stroller, so the idiotic question of where she had left the child flashed through my mind. Her mascara was smeared under her eyes, and she kept repeating something I couldn't assemble into a sentence. Her hands hovered over me, uncertain, frightened by their own helplessness. She wanted to help and didn't know where one was allowed to touch a person who looked as if every place was wrong.

Behind her, the child only began to cry after a moment, as if the world needed time to arrive at the right reaction.

On the other side, someone was pulling out a phone. Someone was swearing. Someone else stood with his mouth open, just as helpless and probably just as terrified as I was.

"The ambulance is coming!" someone shouted.

I don't know how he could have known.

The car stood a few meters away.

The door opened slowly.

The clergyman got out carefully, maybe because he was old, maybe because wet asphalt can be treacherous. He still had the phone in his hand. For a moment he looked at me without expression. Not with hatred. Not even with fear.

Rather with something close to irritation.

Like a man whose meeting had just been moved.

It lasted briefly. Very briefly. Maybe I was the only one who saw it, because I was lying exactly where his gaze landed before he managed to lift it toward the witnesses.

Then he saw the people.

And then his face changed.

His brows rose, his mouth opened, his hand went to his chest. He dropped the phone onto the asphalt. The gesture was beautiful. Or well practiced. From my height, it was hard to tell one from the other.

"God have mercy," he said.

I heard it clearly, despite the shouting.

I wanted to answer him. I even had several versions in my head. One was short and unprintable. The second involved God, mercy, and traffic laws. The third was only a wet cough that came out of my mouth together with blood.

The woman beside me moaned.

That was probably the first time I was truly afraid.

Not when I saw the car. Not at the impact. Fear came only on the ground, when I discovered that my body was no longer asking my opinion. I lay in the middle of the city, on a crossing where I had every right to be, and I could do nothing. Not even turn my head away from the man who had killed me.

Yes, killed me.

I was still alive, but some part of me was already using the past tense.

Someone knelt by my leg and immediately recoiled. Someone told everyone to give me space, then stood so close himself that I could see the sole of his shoe. The girl with the phone was crying silently. The other held her by the sleeve and stared at the screen, as if the recording could tell her what to do now.

A siren wailed somewhere far away.

Or maybe it was a tram on a bend. Sounds tore apart and returned, like a radio in a car passing under an overpass. Rain dripped into my eyes. The streetlamp light spread into yellow stains. Someone covered me with a jacket, and I immediately felt short of breath.

"Breathe, please," the woman said.

I wanted to say I was trying.

I really was trying.

Breathing was now physical labor, harder than anything I had done in years. I took each inhale in pieces. The exhale fell out of me on its own with a wet wheeze. For a moment, with absurd anger, I thought that if I had actually gone running, the way I promised myself every other Monday, maybe my body would have handled this better.

That is what panic does. It looks for blame even where there is no point anymore.

I thought of my mother.

Not the way a person ought to think of his mother in a final moment. No beautiful scene, no forgiveness, no whole life flashing past in a second. I only thought that I hadn't called back. That I had read the message outside the shop, composed an answer in my head, and then, as usual, decided the matter was almost handled.

Almost.

The word should come with a warning label.

She probably hadn't written with any reproach. Maybe she had wanted to ask whether I remembered Sunday. Maybe she had wanted to say someone in the family had asked how I was. Maybe she had only wanted to hear my voice and make sure I was still somewhere on the other side of the city, adult in theory, reachable in practice. Nothing urgent. The cruelest things often begin by really not being urgent.

I thought of my apartment. Of the coffee mug in the sink. Of the laundry I was going to hang in the morning. Of the laptop left on the couch, the tabs still open, all the things so small and embarrassing that a person doesn't take them into account when thinking about his own death. Suddenly they were the whole proof that I had truly existed. Mug. Laundry. Computer password. Bill on the table.

Not now, I thought.

Not because of a guy with a phone.

Not on a green light.

The clergyman bent over me. Someone tried to stop him, but he said something in a tone that made people step back. Even here, they made room for him. Even while I lay in the street in my own blood, the order of the world still had time to function.

I smelled his coat. Rain, expensive fabric, something sweet underneath. Incense, or the perfume of a man who wanted to smell like incense even outside the church.

"My son," he said.

I wasn't his son.

He placed his fingers on my forehead. Gently. Publicly. It was a gesture for them, not for me. And in that second, despite the pain, despite the blood in my mouth, I understood with sudden certainty that he was already telling this story again from the beginning.

An unfortunate accident.

Difficult conditions.

The pedestrian appeared suddenly.

The driver in shock.

The light? In rain, things can look different.

I saw that version being born around me. Not in words, not yet. In looks. In the way people looked at the car, then at him, then at me, as if trying to establish the order of things. Who mattered more. Who had a voice people were used to falling silent before. Who lay on the ground and couldn't introduce himself.

There was no need to lie right away. It was enough to leave a few blank spaces in the story. Rain in one. Haste in another. My hood in a third. An empty space finds its own owner if beside it stands a man everyone would rather believe.

The woman with the stroller said:

"He had the green."

She said it quietly, more to herself than to the others. I wanted to thank her. If I could have, I would have grabbed her hand like a witness in court, like the last person in the world who had seen something simple and dared to name it.

Someone beside her answered:

"Maybe."

One word.

That was enough.

Maybe.

Rain fell, lights reflected in the asphalt, and cars in the next lane kept trying for a moment to skirt around the blockage before someone finally began waving his arms and stopping traffic. Maybe. The green might have been yellow. The red might have come on too late. The phone might have been after the fact. I might have stepped out too quickly, darted, rushed in, tripped, done anything that would fit a man lying on the ground better than a man in an expensive coat.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Or maybe I only imagined it. Maybe it was my body shaking, or the asphalt, or my heart, still trying to do its job despite the evident lack of prospects. For a second I was certain it was my mother. That she was calling after all. That on the other side of all this there existed an ordinary room, an ordinary woman, and the question of why I wasn't picking up.

I tried to catch his eye. I wanted him to see that I had seen. The phone. The red light. His first face.

He looked at me.

For one brief moment, he stopped pretending.

There was no remorse there.

That was how it seemed to me then: quick, cold calculation. Maybe the pain filled in the rest. Maybe not.

Then everything began to recede.

First the noise. The shouting flattened, as if it were coming from behind a wall. The siren was very close or very far away; I couldn't tell the difference. I couldn't hear the rain at all, though I could see the drops hanging in the light.

Then the body.

The pain didn't vanish. It only stopped being mine. It lay beside me, huge and unnecessary, and I drifted away from it with each shallow breath. There was something insulting in that. A person lives thirty years in one body, feeds it, washes it, is ashamed of it, takes it to the doctor too late, and at the end it slips away as if it had never truly belonged to him.

I didn't see my whole life.

I saw things.

My mother putting a period at the end of every message, as if a text were an official document.

Someone's voice from childhood: first left, then right, then left again, because people must not be trusted just because they have brakes.

My first phone, so ugly that today it would look like a museum prop.

The face of someone I hadn't seen in years, but still remembered the way she wrinkled her nose when she lied.

The smell of the stairwell in an apartment building where I hadn't wanted to live forever and had already lived too long.

Single things.

Not meaning.

Not a summary.

Mother.

Tomorrow.

Green light.

The pedestrian signal was still lit on the other side. The little green man kept walking calmly in place, as if nothing had happened. As if the rules still applied.

No one was crossing anymore.

Then the silence came.

Not the absence of sound. Something thicker. Rain stopped in the air. The woman's mouth froze halfway through a scream. The clergyman hung over me with his fingers at my forehead, perfectly still, like a man posed for someone else's photograph. A drop of blood, mine probably, hung above the white stripe and didn't fall.

Everything stopped.

Except one man.

He stood on the other side of the crossing, exactly where I had been trying to go. I hadn't seen where he came from. He wore a dark coat and had a face so calm it didn't belong with the intersection, the blood, or the suspended rain.

Water didn't settle on his shoulders.

He looked straight at me.

Not at the clergyman. Not at the car.

At me.

As if he had been waiting there from the beginning.

Then he smiled.

The last thing I saw was not the ambulance lights.

It was the smile of a man I had never met before.

The first thing after that silence was the smell of linoleum.

Not a light at the end of a tunnel. Not a choir. Not the faces of loved ones who had come to collect me from the other side, rested and forgiving, as if death were only a delayed train arrival.

Linoleum.

Gray, polished by thousands of strangers' shoes, with the dull shine floors have in clinics, offices, and places where a person knows in advance he will be waiting too long. It smelled of dust, plastic, and something sharp and disinfectant. Unpleasantly familiar.

I opened my eyes.

I was sitting in a chair.

That was the first problem.

Last time I checked, I had been lying on wet asphalt with a car in the background and a body that had stopped accepting my suggestions. I remembered rain on my face. Blood in my mouth. The clergyman leaning over me with his fingers against my forehead, as if a blessing could function as an alibi.

Now I was sitting upright, both feet on the floor.

The second problem was that nothing hurt.

Not a little. Not less. Not at all.

I took a sharp breath and immediately expected my ribs to protest. They did not. My chest expanded obediently, as if it had not just been trying to cave in. I moved the fingers of my left hand. I moved my right leg. Then the left, very carefully, because I remembered its angle on the asphalt and my brain decided memory was evidence enough.

The leg worked.

I lifted both hands to my face. There was no blood. My teeth fit together. My tongue tasted ordinary, a little dry, a little frightened, but without metal. My clothes were whole too. My jacket was not wet. My shoes did not squelch.

That should have calmed me down.

It did not.

I looked around.

The waiting room was small and windowless. A row of plastic chairs stood along one wall, evenly spaced, in a color someone must once have called beige to avoid writing "disappointment" on the order form. On the opposite wall hung a screen with numbers. It was on, but instead of the next patient it showed only a horizontal dash.

Above the door, a sign glowed: PLEASE WAIT.

Underneath, in smaller letters: YOUR CASE IS IMPORTANT TO US.

That was the third problem.

No one ever writes things like that in places where your case is important.

To my left stood a table with magazines. On it lay old interior design issues, a pamphlet about heart attack prevention, and a single crossword booklet where someone had filled in the answers with a ballpoint pen so hard it had gone through the paper. In the corner stood a coffee machine. It looked functional, which at that moment felt almost offensive.

There was a clock on the wall.

It had no hands.

I stood up.

I did it too fast. The chair scraped back with a squeal that cut through the silence and died exactly where an echo should have been. The waiting room did not answer. It was not large, but it sounded as if there was nothing beyond the walls.

I went to the door.

The handle was ordinary. Metal, cold. I pressed it down.

The door opened inward.

Beyond it was the same waiting room.

Not a similar one. The same one.

The same row of chairs. The same screen with the dash. The same table with the magazines. Even my chair stood pulled back at the same angle, as if someone had copied the room along with my panic and pasted it on the other side.

I closed the door.

I stood for a moment with my hand on the handle.

Then I opened it again.

The same waiting room.

"No," I said.

My voice sounded normal. Hoarse, wet with fear, but normal. That was worse than if it had sounded like the voice of a ghost.

"No, no, no."

I opened the door a third time, harder, as if geometry might give way under irritation. On the other side waited the same room, just as polite and just as insolent.

I closed the door.

The fourth time, I did not open it.

I turned around and saw I was not alone.

A man was sitting two chairs away from the spot where I had woken up a moment earlier. I had not heard him enter. I had not noticed him before. That should have been impossible, because the waiting room was the size of a large hallway and did not give anyone many chances for dramatic concealment.

And yet he was sitting there, as if he had been waiting a long time.

He wore a dark coat, neatly buttoned, although the room was not cold. Underneath, a suit, or something very much like a suit. He was neither young nor old. He might have been forty or seventy, depending on the angle from which you looked at him and how much courage you had to admit you did not know how to look.

His face was calm. Not gentle. Calm.

That is an important difference.

Gentleness promises nothing bad will happen. Calm says only that if it does, someone will have time to examine it.

The man held a newspaper on his lap. He read without hurry, though the newspaper had no title. On the front page I could see columns of text, but when I tried to focus on them, the letters shifted into something foreign, as if they were only pretending to be language from a distance.

I lifted my eyes from the newspaper to him.

"Who are you?"

He folded the newspaper in half. Evenly, carefully, without a rustle.

"Good morning," he said.

He had a pleasant voice. That, too, was unsettling.

"Who are you?" I repeated.

"That depends on how much you care about precision."

"Very much."

"Then the answer will be long."

"I'm not in the mood for jokes."

He glanced at the clock without hands.

"You have plenty of time."

I almost laughed. It would have been the laugh of a man about to start throwing chairs.

"Where am I?"

"In a waiting room."

"I can see that."

"Then we are moving faster than I expected."

"I am asking what this place is."

The man looked around the room as if assessing the decor with the detachment of someone who had not chosen the wallpaper but did not intend to take responsibility for it.

"The simplest version? A place between."

"Between what?"

"Between what was and what is about to be accepted as fact."

I did not like that sentence. It was too smooth. Sentences that sound good in the mouth of a stranger after a car accident rarely lead anywhere healthy.

"Am I in a hospital?"

"No."

"In a coma?"

"Not exactly."

"Then where?"

"Your body is still on the pedestrian crossing. Partly on the stripes, partly beside them. The ambulance has arrived. The doctors are doing what they can. A beautiful phrase, used most often when they cannot do enough."

Cold entered me without asking.

"Am I alive?"

"Technically."

"What does technically mean?"

"That there are still impulses, pressure, a little oxygen in places where oxygen is still trying to be useful. Life, like many human institutions, continues for a while on momentum."

I leaned against the wall.

Under my fingers I felt paint. Rough. Real. That made me angry. I do not know why that, exactly. Maybe because a nightmare should at least have the decency to be a little less solid.

"The doctors will save me."

I did not say it like a question.

The man looked at me for a moment. Not with pity. Not with satisfaction. Like a doctor who has already seen the test result but lets the patient live for one second inside a sentence that will not help him.

"They will not be in time."

The waiting room became very quiet.

Which was strange, because it had already been quiet. But there are different kinds of silence. This one was like a door being locked from the outside.

"How do you know?"

"Because time is still moving over there."

"And here?"

"Here, time behaves more politely."

"That is not an answer."

"It is exactly an answer. Just not the one you wanted."

I swallowed. My throat was dry, as if my whole body had decided that since death was coming anyway, it might as well conserve moisture.

"I want to go back."

"I believe you."

"No. Not 'I believe you.' I want to go back. Now."

"At the moment, you would mainly be going back to your injuries."

"Stop talking as if this is funny."

"I do not find it funny."

He said it very calmly.

And that was when I noticed the shadow.

My shadow lay under my feet, crooked, spilled across the linoleum by a light whose source I could not find. The chairs had shadows. The table had a shadow. The coffee machine had two, which seemed excessive.

The man had none.

He sat under the same light as everything else, and beneath him there was nothing. Only clean gray floor.

He looked at me as if he knew exactly what I had seen.

"A matter of lighting," he said.

"You're lying."

"Yes. But in a small matter, so let us not count it as a pattern just yet."

I moved away from the wall.

"Are you death?"

"No."

"God?"

"In your place, I would not begin this conversation by offending every possible side."

"An angel?"

The man grimaced slightly, for the first time since the beginning.

"Please."

"The Devil?"

He was silent for a moment.

There was no thunder. No smell of sulfur. The floor did not open, the walls did not run with blood, I did not hear the laughter of the damned or any other piece of equipment culture had promised me in the package.

There was only a neat man in a neat waiting room, with an untitled newspaper on his lap and no shadow under his feet.

"That is one of the simpler words," he said at last.

I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my knees.

"Oh God."

"Do make up your mind. A moment ago you were trying to determine whether I was Him."

"Shut up."

"As you wish."

And he really did fall silent.

That was worse too.

I had no idea what to do with a Devil who obeyed requests. It would have been easier if he hissed, threatened, or looked like an illustration from a book parents should not leave near children. Then I would have had some role. Victim, tempted man, soul in danger. Something familiar.

But he sat across from me and looked like someone who had come to handle a matter on behalf of a very old firm.

"Am I dead?" I asked more quietly.

"Not yet."

"But I will be."

"Yes."

One word.

No decoration.

I thought I should feel something grand. Grief, rage, despair in a size appropriate to the moment. Instead I thought of the baguette on the asphalt.

Really.

Of that stupid cracked baguette that had fallen out of the bag and rolled to the curb. Of the tomato sauce spilled across the crossing. Of the yogurt that had probably broken or not broken, which was now of absolutely no importance, and yet my brain held on to it like a railing.

Then of my mother.

That came later and struck harder.

The phone.

I put my hand into my jacket pocket.

It was lying there.

Of course it was. In a place where doors led to the same waiting room and the Devil read a newspaper without letters, my phone was lying in my pocket, dry and whole. The screen lit at my touch.

The notification still hung at the top.

Call when you can. Nothing urgent.

Under it, the message from my friend.

Dude, seriously, are you alive?

I do not know what sound came out of me. Something between a laugh and a cough. The phone blurred in front of my eyes.

I tried to unlock the screen.

The code worked.

It was so absurd that for one second I almost believed everything could still be repaired. If the code worked, the world had to work. If the phone recognized my finger, then I was still a person who could call, apologize, go back to the apartment, and throw the pasta out of the bag because the packaging had gotten wet.

I opened calls.

No signal.

One bar appeared for a fraction of a second, then vanished, as if the phone were trying to be kind and did not have the strength.

I dialed my mother's number anyway.

For a moment, the screen showed calling.

Then:

Call failed.

I tried again.

Call failed.

Again.

"That will not work," the Devil said.

I had forgotten he was supposed to be silent. Or maybe he had been silent only for as long as he considered appropriate. That fit.

"Shut up."

"We have done that one."

"Shut up again."

He nodded with the courtesy of a man receiving a complaint he had no intention of accepting.

I wrote a message.

Mom, I'm sorry.

I looked at those three words and hated them at once. They were too small. They fit nothing. They did not explain the car, the red light, the blood, the fear, or thirty years of being a person who always assumed he would still have time.

I added:

I love you.

That sounded wrong too. True, but wrong, because when truth is written at the very end it looks like late paperwork.

I pressed send.

The little circle beside the message spun for a long time.

Too long.

Then a red exclamation mark appeared.

Not delivered.

I sat down on the nearest chair, because my legs suddenly remembered that, in principle, they were only a courtesy.

I did not cry at once.

First I got angry.

At the phone. At the network. At the waiting room. At the man with the car. At the woman who had said "he had the green" too quietly, though that was unfair and I knew it even then. At myself for not answering outside the shop. At my mother for writing "nothing urgent," as if the world ever honored arrangements like that.

Only then did the tears come, without any grand scene. They simply started spilling out, hot and shameful, down a face that, technically speaking, should no longer have been my greatest problem.

The Devil said nothing.

That was probably the first thing for which I was almost grateful to him.

Almost.

When I finally managed to breathe more normally, I wiped my face with my sleeve. The sleeve was dry. Of course.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Now?"

"No, next Thursday. Yes, now."

"A conversation."

"With people after accidents?"

"Sometimes."

"Often?"

"Depends on the era."

I looked at him.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"That in some eras people die far more talkatively."

I did not know whether to hit him or ask whether that was a joke. I chose a third possibility: I squeezed the phone so hard its case cracked.

"Go to hell."

He smiled faintly.

"Awkward."

A laugh almost tore out of my throat. It stopped somewhere on the way and turned into something uglier.

"So this is hell?"

"No."

"Purgatory?"

"I dislike other people's administrative terminology."

"Heaven?"

"Please."

He said it in the tone of someone asking whether I truly considered this waiting room a place with ambitions.

"Then what?"

"A stop."

"To where?"

"Usually? The end."

I closed my eyes.

Behind my eyelids I saw the street. Not as I remembered it, but like an image from a camera: wet stripes, people leaning over me, the black car with its door ajar. The clergyman standing a little to the side, surrounded by people who were already starting to ask if he was all right.

They were probably asking me too. I simply had fewer useful answers.

"He had the red," I said.

"Yes."

I opened my eyes.

"You saw?"

"Yes."

"Then tell someone."

The Devil tilted his head.

"Whom?"

"I don't know. The police. The doctors. Anyone."

"The police do not take statements from persons of my kind."

"Then do something."

"I am."

"You're sitting."

"Often the best beginning."

"He killed me."

"Yes."

"And he'll pretend he didn't."

"Probably."

"And what? That's it?"

The Devil rested his hands on the newspaper. He had long fingers, well-kept nails. No claws. No fire under the skin. It was almost indecent how ordinary he was.

"People very rarely need a lie in its entirety," he said. "Usually they only need a place where they do not have to look."

I remembered the word from the street.

Probably.

One small word, and already I could feel history taking a step sideways.

"I hate him," I said.

"Reasonable."

"I want him to pay."

"Also reasonable."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're grading whether I solved the problem correctly."

"I apologize. Habit."

"From what?"

"Watching people try to arrange death into an order of arguments."

That calm again.

I wanted to tell him he had no right. That he could not sit there in this stupid waiting room and talk about my death like a document to be signed. But what right did I have? Ten minutes earlier I had been thinking about pasta and laundry. I had not prepared any philosophy for a conversation with the Devil.

"Why me?" I asked.

"Because you are dying."

"People die all the time."

"Yes."

"So why me?"

For the first time, he did not answer at once.

That was more frightening than all his quick answers.

He looked at me more closely, as if checking something. Not in my face. Deeper. I had the sudden, revolting impression that I was a sheet of paper held up to the light.

"Because you want to live," he said.

"Everyone does."

"No."

He said it without cruelty. That was exactly why it sounded crueler.

"Not everyone?"

"Not in the same moment. Not with the same force. Not for such unlofty reasons."

"Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

"A description."

"My reasons are unlofty?"

"You have an undelivered message to your mother in your pocket, and you are angrier about that than about most of the things that should occupy a dying man."

I clenched my teeth.

"Don't talk about her."

"Very well."

"You don't know her."

"No."

"You don't know me."

"I know a few things."

"That's not enough."

"For compassion? Perhaps. For a conversation? Sufficient."

I wanted to stand, but I had nowhere to go. The door led to the same waiting room. The coffee machine was silent with dignity. The clock without hands did not even give me the satisfaction of watching something end.

I sat back down harder than I meant to.

"I don't want to die," I said.

The sentence came out quietly.

Too quietly, for its weight.

There was no defiance in it. Not even courage. Only the naked fact, pathetic and true. I do not want to die. I do not want my apartment to become a place someone enters with trash bags and gloves. I do not want my mother to listen to a stranger's voice from a police officer's phone. I do not want the last version of me to be the version lying on a wet street while someone more important corrects his own story.

I do not want tomorrow to arrive without me.

The Devil looked at me for a long time.

"That is the oldest prayer," he said at last.

"I'm not praying."

"Most people think that too."

"I'm not religious."

"That rarely gets in the way. Especially at the end."

I looked at my hands. They were mine. Ordinary. With the thumbnail chewed at one side, with a small scar near the knuckle from something I no longer remembered. Everything the same. Everything still recoverable, at least in this false second between one world and another.

"Can you save me?"

The Devil did not smile.

That frightened me more than the smile.

"I can make it so that you do not end here."

"That isn't the same thing."

"No."

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes."

"All of it?"

This time he smiled.

Not broadly. Not ominously. Almost politely.

"Do not demand miracles in the first five minutes of our acquaintance."

"That means there's a catch."

"Everything with value has a catch. People call it rules when the catch belongs to them."

He stood.

He did not do it dramatically. He simply rose from the chair, and suddenly the waiting room became smaller. Not because he was tall. He might have been a little taller than me, or not. But the space around him behaved the way people around the clergyman had behaved in the street: it made room for him before he had to ask.

His coat cast no shadow on the floor.

He folded the newspaper once more, though it was already folded, and laid it on the chair. When he moved his hand away, for one second I saw a photograph on the front page: a wet pedestrian crossing.

My body in it was small.

Too small.

Then the paper became a set of unreadable columns again.

The Devil stood in front of me.

"You want to live," he said.

He did not ask.

I tried to find a wiser answer. Something with dignity. Something a person could say to a being without a shadow and then not be ashamed of it for all eternity, if eternity turned out to be one of the items on the agenda.

I found nothing.

"Yes," I said.

The Devil nodded, as if he had just heard not a confession, but confirmation of an appointment.

"In that case, this is convenient."

He took a step toward the door that had led nowhere until now. The sign above it flickered. PLEASE WAIT went dark. For a moment there was nothing.

Then new words lit up:

CALLED.

The Devil placed his hand on the handle.

"I have a job for you."

A job.

The word was so ordinary that, for a moment, it sounded worse than every possible threat.

He did not say: I have a sentence for you. He did not say: I have eternity for you. He did not say: give me your soul, sign in blood, kneel, renounce God, whom you had treated for most of your adult life as someone else's private business anyway.

He said: a job.

As if we were standing not on the border between life and death, but outside an office where someone was about to offer me flexible hours, free fruit Thursdays, and a salary depending on experience.

I stared at him.

The Devil had his hand on the handle. Above the door, the sign glowed CALLED, calm and bureaucratic, as if the entire afterlife had a customer service department and someone had just decided my case had moved on to the next window.

"A job," I repeated.

For a moment, he had said "for you." Now he had gone back to politeness, as if that single touch of familiarity had been only a hook driven into the conversation.

"Yes."

"I'm dying."

"I noticed."

"I'm lying in the street."

"Still."

"The doctors won't make it in time."

"Unfortunately not."

"And in your opinion, this is a good moment for a job interview?"

The Devil considered that for a second.

"If I were you, I would not insist too strongly on bad moments. You have very few left."

I wanted to answer with something sharp, but I did not have the strength. Not physical strength. In this place, my body was still pretending to be whole, dry, and relatively obedient. I was missing the inner momentum that lets a person be offended consistently.

I was tired.

It came suddenly. Not like sleepiness, but like the awareness that everything holding me upright was a temporary loan. Fear. Anger. An undelivered message to my mother. Wet asphalt that I still had somewhere under my skin, even though I was standing on dry linoleum.

"What kind of job?" I asked.

The Devil let go of the handle.

The door stayed closed.

For a moment I thought he would answer at once. Instead, he returned to the chairs, picked up the untitled newspaper, and moved it to the magazine table, exactly between the heart attack prevention pamphlet and the crossword booklet. He did it with such care that the order of wastepaper seemed to matter more than my death.

Perhaps, to him, it did.

"Please sit."

"I don't want to sit."

"Understandable."

He did not sit first. He waited.

And so, out of pure spite, I stayed on my feet.

The Devil accepted this without comment. For a moment he looked at me the way one looks at a person refusing an umbrella in the rain to prove something to the sky. Then he nodded.

"I want you to build a religion."

The waiting room said nothing.

In the corner, the coffee machine clicked softly, as if even it needed a moment.

"What?"

"A religion."

"I heard you."

"In that case, we are moving faster."

"We are not moving at all. You said 'a religion.'"

"Yes."

"Religion. The thing with gods, holidays, prohibitions against eating something on particular days, and people who claim to know what the universe thinks."

"In simplified terms."

"I hope simplified, because otherwise this sounds like the worst job offer in history."

"There have been worse."

"I do not want to know."

"A sensible boundary. Rarely encountered."

I laughed shortly. Not because it was funny. The body sometimes does that when it has no good reactions left in stock.

"I don't know how to found a religion."

"Few people who found them do."

"Is that supposed to reassure me?"

"Rather to discourage excessive humility."

I wiped my face with my hand. My skin was dry. So were my eyes. There was nothing left of the tears, as if the waiting room considered despair temporary and unworthy of archiving.

"I'm not a clergyman."

"I know."

"I'm not a theologian."

"All the better."

"I'm not a prophet."

"That is usually determined afterward."

"I'm not even religious."

"Religious people are rarely necessary at the beginning."

I looked at him.

"Then who is?"

The Devil went to the coffee machine and pressed a button I had not noticed before. The machine murmured with the effort of a person getting out of bed after an illness. Something dark began to drip into a plastic cup.

"Someone who knows how to tell a story," he said.

"Is that all?"

"And someone who wants to live strongly enough not to take offense at the terms merely because they are distasteful."

"The terms are distasteful?"

"Terms almost always are. People like to frost them over. That is why they invented social contracts, wedding ceremonies, and promotional terms and conditions."

He took the cup from the machine. He did not offer it to me. He simply held it in his hand, though the coffee steamed so faintly it looked more like a memory of temperature.

"You want me to make you a cult," I said.

"I would not use that word."

"Because it sounds bad?"

"Because it is too small."

That was one of those sentences after which a person should withdraw. Shame I had nowhere to go.

"So this is about souls after all."

"No."

He answered too quickly.

"No?"

"Not in the way you imagine."

"Not in the way I imagine, or not at all?"

The Devil looked at the cup.

"In the language you use, it is very difficult to speak of such things without grammar committing the lie for you."

"Try."

"Every believer will feed me."

He said it calmly.

He did not step closer. He did not change his tone. The light did not dim. And yet, for a moment, the waiting room seemed larger, darker, as if there really might be something beyond the walls. Heaven. Hell. An endless office of final affairs with poor ventilation.

"Feed you," I repeated.

"Yes."

"With what?"

"Faith, if you want the simplest word."

"And if I don't want the simplest?"

"Attention. Fear. Gratitude. The need for meaning. Everything people produce when they tell themselves the world is not merely a collection of accidents, wet streets, and cars running red lights."

I felt cold along my back.

"That sounds like parasitism."

"So does farming, from the wheat's perspective."

"Don't compare people to wheat."

"I did not. Wheat does not build temples."

"Very funny."

"In small doses."

I turned away and took a few steps around the waiting room. There was not much room for dramatic pacing, so I performed a rather poor version of it. Three steps to the table. Three back. The linoleum squeaked beneath my shoes exactly as it should have. An ordinary sound. An honest one. I was beginning to hate the honest details of this place.

Religion.

Every believer will feed me.

I had been dying a few minutes ago. Perhaps I was dying right then. Perhaps, out on the street, a paramedic was pressing down on my chest, perhaps someone was cutting open my jacket, perhaps the clergyman was standing under an umbrella someone had provided, because important people rarely get wet without assistance. And I was here, discussing metaphysical nutrition with the Devil.

"Why don't you do it yourself?" I asked.

"I am."

"Through me."

"Among other ways."

"So there have been more conversations like this."

The Devil stirred the coffee with a plastic spoon. I do not know where he got it. The machine had not given him one. Perhaps the Devil had pockets full of small, disappointing miracles.

"There have been many conversations," he said.

"Many offers?"

"Fewer."

"And what, others refused?"

"Some."

"And the rest?"

"That depends on the definition of success."

"I hate it when you answer like that."

"We have only just begun."

He smiled faintly.

It was not the smile of a monster. It was the smile of someone who knew he had time. All the time I did not have.

"Why me?" I asked for the second time, though I already knew his first answer.

"Because you want to live."

"That isn't enough."

"No."

"There are plenty of people who want to live."

"Of course."

"Better than me."

"Probably."

"Smarter."

"Without question."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

For a moment we looked at each other in silence.

There was an absurd rhythm to it. I tried to find a hole in his logic; he left me holes exactly where he wanted them. Every answer sounded like a fact. Every fact had a locked door behind it.

"I'm no one important," I said.

"That, in fact, is an advantage."

"To whom?"

"To religion."

I snorted.

"Religions seem to like important people."

"Religions like dead people, to whom one can later ascribe more coherence than they possessed in life."

That sentence should not have landed so close, and yet it did.

I saw the clergyman leaning over me again. Fingers on my forehead. The word "son." The version of the story being born faster than the blood could cool on the stripes. A tragic accident. Difficult weather. An elderly clergyman in shock. A man whose name might appear in the news once, if at all, between the weather forecast and something more important.

A dead man is raw material.

The living tell him onward.

"Is this supposed to be punishment for him?" I asked.

"For whom?"

"For that clergyman. The driver. Whatever you want to call him."

"No."

"But you can do something to him."

"This is not a conversation about him."

"Then make it one."

"This is not an offer concerning his life."

"Pity."

"Revenge tends to be very satisfying for the first few minutes. After that, one is left with an inconvenient amount of time."

"You sound like someone who tried."

"I sound like someone who has seen the invoices."

I did not want to grant him the point. Not about revenge, not about anything. But the thought of the clergyman no longer gave me the same strength. It was sharp, yes. True. Bitter. But beneath it lay something larger.

I do not want to die.

The sentence did not disappear. It sat inside me quietly, patiently, more primal than anger.

"What exactly do I get?" I asked.

"Life."

"What kind?"

The Devil raised his eyebrows.

"That is rarely the first question."

"I feel like it should be."

"Many things should be. Humanity is still catching up."

"What kind of life? Do I go back to mine?"

"You will live."

"That isn't what I'm asking."

"I know."

"Then answer."

"I have."

I clenched my hands.

"So this is the part where you tell the truth, but not the whole truth?"

He smiled, this time almost approvingly.

"You learn very quickly."

"I don't want to learn. I want to know whether I go back to my apartment, my work, my mother, the people I didn't answer, all the stupid things I was supposed to do tomorrow."

The Devil looked at me for a long time.

He did not have to speak.

That, too, was an answer.

I felt something in me sink.

"I don't go back," I said.

"I did not say that."

"You didn't have to."

"Careful. A person very easily mistakes intuition for despair."

"Am I?"

"Not entirely."

That word was worse than "no."

I leaned against the wall. Rough paint under my fingers. Waiting room. Machine. Chairs. A door that led to the same waiting room or to something worse, depending on the mood of the place. A phone in my pocket with a message that would never arrive.

"Will my mother find out what happened?"

"Yes."

"The truth?"

The Devil did not answer at once.

And again I knew.

"A certain quantity of it," he said.

I laughed without sound.

"Truth in a certain quantity."

"The most common form."

"I hate you."

"For now, you mostly hate the situation."

"Don't correct me."

"Very well."

He corrected me even when he promised to stop. That was probably an old trick too.

I took out my phone. The screen lit obediently.

Mom, I'm sorry. I love you.

The red exclamation point beside the message looked grotesquely small. My whole life, all my pathetic late tenderness, reduced to an icon informing me that the system had failed to perform the command.

"Can you send it?" I asked.

The Devil looked at the screen.

"No."

My heart sank heavily, as if gravity still applied even here.

"You can't?"

"I won't."

For a second I really wanted to hit him.

Not symbolically. Not literarily. I wanted to close my hand into a fist and see whether a being without a shadow had teeth in the ordinary place.

"Why?"

"Because that would be a different offer."

"It's one message."

"No."

"Maybe not to you. To me it's one message."

"To you, it is the last message. That is precisely why it is not one."

He was right.

I hated that he was right in a way that did not help.

"So what?" I asked. "I'm supposed to build a religion, and you won't even send a text?"

"I will not."

"Because?"

"Because if the first thing I gave you were the softening of a loss, you would decide this contract was meant to repair the world."

"And it isn't?"

"No."

"Then what is it for?"

The Devil set the untouched coffee on the table. The plastic cup stood beside the papers and did not tip over, although the tabletop was slightly crooked. Of course.

"Endurance."

One word.

Not great power. Not salvation. Not justice.

Endurance.

It sounded poor.

It sounded honest.

"Mine?" I asked.

"Among other things."

"Yours?"

That faint smile again.

"At last, the right question."

"And?"

"And this is not yet the right time for the answer."

"Convenient."

"Very."

I paced the waiting room for a while longer. Three steps. Turn. Three steps. Turn. At some point I noticed my shadow moving across the linoleum with me, faithful and useless. The Devil's shadow still did not exist.

"How does one found a religion?" I asked at last.

"Start with people."

"Brilliant."

"Thank you."

"I'm asking seriously."

"So am I. A religion without people is only a private metaphysical habit."

"I don't have people."

"You will."

"Where?"

"Where I send you."

"So not here."

"It would be difficult to begin here. The coffee machine has limited spiritual capacity."

"Where will you send me?"

"Somewhere you will be needed."

"That means nothing."

"It means a great deal. It simply does not include an address."

"When?"

"After you sign."

"I'm not asking about sequence."

"I know."

"Then answer."

"In due time."

"Really?"

"Yes. It is one of those phrases that sounds like an evasion because it is one."

I closed my eyes.

I wanted to scream. But screaming in this place seemed like something the waiting room would absorb without a trace, like everything else. Besides, I was beginning to understand the rule of this conversation: the Devil did not have to persuade me. It was enough that he did not let me forget the alternative.

The alternative lay in the street.

Partly on the stripes, partly beside them.

"If I refuse?" I asked.

"You will return."

"To life?"

"To the body."

"For how long?"

The Devil looked at the clock without hands.

"You will not have time to grow bored."

I felt sick.

That was strange too, because the stomach here functioned more like a memory than an organ. And yet I felt exactly that old physical squeeze. A body that remembers it can die, even when death is waiting in another room.

"That's blackmail."

"No."

"No?"

"Blackmail assumes I have taken something from you that you could otherwise have kept."

"And you haven't?"

"I was not driving the car."

The silence after those words was awful.

I wanted to say that was cheap. That responsibility does not work that simply. That if someone appears before a dying man with an offer, he cannot hide behind the fact that he is only taking advantage of the opportunity.

But that was the entire problem.

He was taking advantage.

Of the opportunity. Of fear. Of my I do not want to die, which stood inside me, defenseless as a child on a crossing.

"What happens if I try to cheat?" I asked.

"In the matter of religion?"

"Yes."

"That is likely."

"Likely that I'll cheat?"

"Likely that you will try to call cheating something people will be doing without your permission anyway."

"Meaning?"

"They will believe not what you say, but what they are able to bear."

I did not fully understand that sentence then.

Later, I would understand it far too well.

At that moment it sounded like another devilish ornament, a sentence placed in the room so I would trip over it only after dark.

"I don't want to hurt people," I said.

The sentence came out of me by reflex.

The Devil looked at me more closely.

"Good."

"Good?"

"Yes. People who want to hurt others are dull. They do not need tempting. It is enough to give them a uniform, a title, or a crowd."

I saw the clergyman again.

Title.

Crowd.

Fingers on my forehead.

"And if religion hurts someone?" I asked.

"It will."

He said it without hesitation.

As if he were saying water would be wet.

"Then why should I agree?"

"Because it will also do things no one will do without it."

"What things?"

"Give people a language for fear. A reason to share food. A pretext not to abandon the weak. A story by which someone survives a night when everything else tells them it is not worth it."

"And it feeds you."

"Yes."

"At least you say that outright."

"Outright is often the most economical kind of lie."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning a person can receive a true sentence and still not know what it means."

I was tired of his voice.

Not because it was unpleasant. Precisely because it was not. It was easy to listen to. Too easy. Like a man on the radio saying sensible things about the world ending somewhere far away, until you discover that far away was your own address.

"Will I have to lie?" I asked.

"Yes."

"No."

"In that case, no."

"You can't answer both ways."

"I can. You are asking about the future as if it were a form. It is more like an infectious disease. It spreads by contact."

"Will I have to lie?" I repeated, more slowly.

The Devil sighed. For the first time, he sounded almost human.

"You will tell the truth. People will hear what they are able to bear. They will supply the rest for you."

"Sounds like a nightmare."

"Religions often begin with nightmares. People simply add holidays later."

I sat down.

Not because I conceded. My legs simply reminded me again that my real legs, somewhere else, might no longer exist in any sensible shape.

The plastic chair gave a soft creak beneath me.

The Devil sat opposite.

Between us stood the table with magazines, coffee, the untitled newspaper, and my phone, which I had set there without noticing. The screen was dark. The red exclamation point had hidden along with the rest of the world.

"You said I would live," I said.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Longer than what you have now."

"Meaning?"

"Long enough that the word rescue will stop being simple."

The cold went under my skin again.

"That sounds like a threat."

"Most gifts sound like threats if you describe them honestly."

"Will I be able to quit?"

The Devil looked at me for a moment.

Too long.

"Ask again when you see the document," he said.

"That sounds like no."

"It sounds like not now."

I closed my eyes.

I did not know then how much could fit inside the word onward. I thought of it the way any person with thirty years behind him and a body lying on the asphalt would think of it: as one more tomorrow. A chance to call back. Time to repair at least a little of what had been left open.

I did not think about the price, because I could not.

A drowning man does not contemplate the geology of the ocean.

"What am I signing?" I asked.

The Devil looked at the door.

"Nothing yet."

"But there will be a contract."

"Of course."

"A pact?"

"If you like words with the proper amount of dust on them."

"And if I don't?"

"A document."

"Document sounds worse."

"I know."

"What's in it?"

"Terms."

"What terms?"

"Work. Payment. Consequences."

"Those aren't terms. Those are categories."

"Excellent."

"Stop being pleased."

"I will try to look depressed. It sometimes helps in formal matters."

I did not smile.

At least I did not want to.

Maybe the corner of my mouth twitched from exhaustion. The Devil noticed, of course. He did not comment. That was irritating too.

"What if I can't do it?" I asked.

"You will."

"You don't know that."

"Not completely."

"So you're guessing?"

"Predicting."

"Difference?"

"Guessing is less elegant."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. I do not know everything. I know enough to consider the risk worthwhile."

"Worthwhile for you."

"Yes."

"And for me?"

The Devil leaned slightly forward.

The light did not change, and yet for a moment his face became harder to remember. As if the features did not vanish, only stopped acknowledging my right to describe them.

"You are already taking a risk," he said. "Every second here is a risk. Every second there is a loss. The difference is that, with me, you may lose things you do not yet have."

"Is that supposed to comfort me?"

"No. To be precise."

He was right.

Again.

And again, nothing good came of it.

The phone on the table suddenly vibrated.

I jumped.

The sound was short, dry, almost shy. The screen lit. For one second I truly thought the message had gone through. That somewhere, in the ordinary world, in an ordinary apartment, my mother had just seen my late I love you and perhaps that would change something. Not everything. Something.

There was no signal on the screen.

There was no message.

Only the time.

The same as before the accident.

"That is cruel," I said.

"Yes."

"Did you do that?"

"No."

"Are you lying?"

"Not about this."

"How am I supposed to know?"

"You are not."

The worst part was that he said it without triumph. He did not enjoy my helplessness. He did not have to. It was part of the room, like the linoleum and the handless clock.

"Do people sign things like this?" I asked.

"People sign loans, app terms, statements they have not read, and letters to children they later regret sending. Please do not pretend your species has a particularly high threshold of sanctity when it comes to signatures."

"That's different."

"Of course."

"You can't compare a pact to an app agreement."

"I can, though I admit a pact is sometimes more honest."

This time I really laughed.

Shortly. Ugly. Almost against myself.

The laugh bounced off the walls and died. For a moment, what remained after it was worse than silence: the awareness that I could still react like a person. That something in me had not managed to die yet, although the rest of the world was already making the proper preparations.

The Devil watched me calmly.

"I hate that you're funny," I said.

"A common complaint."

"From whom?"

"From people who prefer to imagine evil as something without manners."

"Are you evil?"

"I am a conversational partner."

"That isn't an answer."

"It is the answer you need more for now."

I wanted to ask whether God existed. Whether hell existed. Whether the soul was a thing one could lose like a wallet or sell like a grandmother's apartment. I wanted to ask everything people ask when they suddenly discover metaphysics was not merely a section in a bookstore.

But every one of those questions led too far.

And I had closer ones in front of me.

"Will I be myself?" I asked.

The Devil turned his eyes to the clock without hands.

"For a while, everyone is."

"That is the worst answer you could have given."

"No. The worst would be: that depends on the definition."

"Does it?"

"Of course."

I buried my face in my hands.

For several seconds I sat that way, breathing. In. Out. The dry smell of the waiting room. Plastic. Coffee. Paint. Something disinfectant. None of it was real in a way that could save me, but all of it was real enough to hold me there.

I wondered whether a good decision existed.

I did not find one.

There was only death, which had already happened, though the formalities were still underway, and life, which came with terms written in the language of someone who did not consider the whole truth an obligation.

"You said religion would feed you," I said, not uncovering my face.

"Yes."

"If I do this, you become stronger."

"In a sense."

"You don't want to say in what sense."

"No."

"Will it hurt people?"

"People hurt each other excellently without my help."

I lowered my hands.

"That isn't an answer."

"It is context."

"Will it hurt people?"

The Devil was silent for a moment.

"Some," he said.

It was the first answer that sounded truly honest.

Perhaps that was why it hurt the most.

"And will it help?"

"Some."

"You can't give anything clean?"

"I am not a waterworks."

I looked at him with such hatred that he raised a hand.

"Forgive me. Old reflex."

"Jokes?"

"Disappointing people who expect purity."

I rested my elbows on my knees.

If this were an ordinary story, this would be where I should say no. I should preserve my soul, dignity, the right to be a man who dies but does not yield. In a film, the camera would close in on my face. Music would tell the audience that a poor, ordinary human being can defeat the Devil by refusing.

In a real place between life and death, there was no music.

There was a plastic cup of coffee and a phone with an undelivered message.

There was a mother who did not know yet.

There was pain, to which I would return if I preserved my dignity.

There was tomorrow.

Not grand. Not beautiful. Not deserved.

Simply tomorrow.

"If I agree," I said slowly, "that doesn't mean I trust you."

"Of course not."

"And it doesn't mean I'll do everything you want."

"That would be disturbingly dull."

"And if I find a way to trick you..."

"I will be disappointed if you do not try."

I lifted my eyes.

"You really want a person who will argue with you."

"I want a person who will not mistake obedience for conviction."

"Why?"

The Devil looked at me as if, for a moment, he had forgotten he was speaking to someone who could disappear in a few minutes.

There was something old in that look.

Not evil. Not good.

Old in a way my fear had no measure for.

"Because obedience is fragile," he said quietly. "All it takes is for the overseer to look away."

For a moment I said nothing.

The sentence sounded like the truth.

Not the whole truth.

Never the whole truth.

"You don't just want me to lie," I said.

The Devil smiled.

"Careful."

"Of what?"

"The right questions, asked too early."

I felt I was close again to something I should not touch. As if the whole conversation were a table on which someone had laid surgical instruments under a napkin and expected me not to ask what they were for.

I leaned back in the chair.

"And if I build this religion badly?"

"You will build it badly."

"Thanks."

"Every religion is badly built from the perspective of its first sentence. People live in ruins of meaning and call them home. That is not an insult. It is one of the more moving things they do."

"You sound almost as if you like them."

"Almost."

"And me?"

"I do not know you yet."

"You chose me."

"That is not the same thing."

That answer was strangely soothing.

It should not have reassured me that the Devil was not pretending affection. And yet after the clergyman, after gestures performed for witnesses, after a world in which even death could be rewritten into someone else's story, the absence of counterfeit tenderness seemed almost courteous.

Almost.

"May I read the contract?" I asked.

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"If you manage to understand it in time."

"Time again."

"Mostly time."

"How much do I have?"

The Devil did not look at the clock. He looked at the door.

The sign CALLED began to flicker.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Beyond the door, something sounded. Not a bell. Not a knock. More like a very distant strike of metal against metal. Like a stretcher being slid into an ambulance. Like a car door closing. Like the world reminding us that no conversation cancels physics forever.

The Devil stood.

"Little enough for the decision to be honest."

I stood too.

I did not want to.

I did it because if a person is going to be deceived, it is best at least to stand on one's own legs. Even borrowed ones. Even in a waiting room that should not exist.

"Show me the document," I said.

"In a moment."

"I'm not signing anything I haven't read."

"Naturally."

He said it in a tone that made me disbelieve him immediately.

The door opened by itself.

Beyond it was not the same waiting room.

On the other side stood a table.

Not a desk. Not an altar. A table. Long, dark, plain. On it lay a single sheet of paper, so white it hurt my eyes. Beside it lay either a fountain pen or a ballpoint; I could not decide, because the object looked different every time I tried to focus on it.

Beyond the table there was no room.

There was darkness.

Not empty. Patient.

I took a step to the threshold and stopped.

"One last question," I said.

"I doubt it."

"Last one before the document."

"More likely."

My heart was beating fast. I know that makes no sense. My real heart might have been in a paramedic's hands, under electrodes, under someone's shout. But here, in this version of me, it beat as if it still had the right to object.

"And the fine print?" I asked.

The Devil smiled wider.

"People always ask about the fine print only after they've signed."