Chapter 2: The Man Without a Shadow

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."

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