Chapter 4: The Pact

For several seconds after his words, I stood in the doorway and looked at the sheet of paper.

Not at the Devil.

At the paper.

It was humiliating, how ordinary it looked.

All your life you hear about pacts as if they had to arrive with the right scenery. Old parchment. Candles. A drop of blood falling slowly, preferably to the accompaniment of a choir of people with too much free time and access to Latin. Something should smell of sulfur. Something should be screaming in the distance. At the very least, the floor might have made an effort and been stone.

And in front of me lay a single white sheet on a dark table.

Smooth. Even. Unsealed.

The kind of sheet you put in a printer when you still believe office equipment is on humanity's side.

Behind the table was darkness. Not a black wall, not night, not empty space, but darkness in a more decisive sense. It waited there patiently, like a person who does not need to introduce herself because sooner or later everyone ends up with her anyway.

Beside the paper lay a pen.

Not a quill. Not a knife for cutting open a palm. A pen.

Transparent, plastic, with blue ink and a little ball at the tip. It looked like something you might accidentally take from a bank and then find for three years in the drawer with the bills.

"Really?" I asked.

The Devil looked at the pen.

"Is something wrong?"

"This is supposed to be a pact."

"Yes."

"And I'm supposed to sign it with that?"

"Yes."

"Not in blood?"

"Blood is theatrical."

"You're the Devil."

"That is why I allow myself economy of means."

I stepped closer.

I did not want to step closer. My body did it for me, as if it already knew that if I stayed in the doorway, I would stand there until the end of the conversation, the end of the paramedics, the end of everything. One step. Then another. The linoleum of the waiting room ended without any clear border, and under my feet there was now something smooth, cold, and dark. Not marble. Not glass. A material that looked expensive in the way expensive things look when they cannot be bought.

The sheet lay exactly in the center of the table.

At the top, there was no name.

Only a title:

CONTRACT FOR CONTINUED EXISTENCE

I laughed once, shortly.

"This is a joke."

"No."

"It sounds like a government document that lost the tender for a name."

"Government offices learned a great deal from me."

"I thought you learned from them."

"The relationship was mutual."

I did not answer.

I stared at the title. The letters were black, simple, sharp. They did not change, did not flow across the paper, did not arrange themselves into any dead languages. That was exactly the worst thing about them. They could be read. I could not pretend the pact was incomprehensible magic and I was merely the victim of a grand symbol. This was a document. Someone had phrased it. Someone had anticipated headings.

Someone thought continued existence fit into a field.

"May I pick it up?" I asked.

"You may read it where it lies."

"Because?"

"Because people running away with documents look foolish."

"Has that happened?"

"Once."

"And?"

"He reached the same door he had entered through. He discovered it was not a strategy."

I moved my fingers along the edge of the table, but did not touch the paper. I did not want to leave fingerprints on it yet. That was stupid too. As if paper needed my fingerprints to have power over me.

I leaned in.

The first sentence read:

The Parties confirm that the Contractor is in a boundary state in which refusal to enter into this contract shall result in a return to the biological consequences of the preceding event.

"'Biological consequences,'" I said.

"It is precise."

"It is disgusting."

"Precision often is."

I read on.

The Principal undertakes to provide the Contractor with continued existence in a form capable of performing the Task.

I stopped.

"What form?"

The Devil did not answer.

I looked at him.

"What form?"

"A form capable of performing the task."

"Meaning what?"

"A suitable one."

"I am not signing the word 'suitable' in a contract with the Devil."

"Sensible."

"Then add something specific."

"No."

"This is not a negotiation."

"It is. You are simply discovering its limits."

I wanted to say something that sounded strong. Something about fairness, consent, the right to information. But each of those words lost weight in a room that existed outside the world and had my body lying in the street behind its wall. Rights are wonderful as long as someone is answering the phones.

"A form capable of performing the task," I repeated.

"Yes."

"Will I be human?"

The Devil tilted his head.

"That is a beautiful question."

"I don't want a beautiful question. I want an ugly answer."

"Yes."

He said it simply.

Too quickly.

"I'll be human?"

"Yes."

"The same?"

"No."

The word fell between us without ornament.

I felt the skin at the back of my neck go cold.

"What does that mean?"

"That 'the same' is a luxury for which there is no longer time."

"I have a body."

"You have a body in very poor condition."

"My body."

"That does not make it more useful."

"Don't talk about me like a car after an accident."

"I apologize."

He did not sound as though he was apologizing for the content. Rather for an unfortunate choice of tone. That fit too.

I returned to the text, because if I kept looking at him I would do something stupid. Maybe hit him. Maybe walk away from the table. Maybe say "no" only so I could feel free for three seconds.

The Task consists in causing the creation, consolidation, and spread of a structure of faith, memory, and ritual in which the Principal shall be subject to sustained attention from human beings.

"Religion," I said.

"Yes."

"You wrote it so it would sound less like religion."

"I wrote it so it would sound less like a lie."

"And did that work?"

"No."

There was something so dry in that answer that I almost liked him.

Almost.

I read on.

The Contractor is not bound to any specific doctrine, language, symbol, place of worship, or title of the Principal, provided the final effect satisfies the requirement of sustained attention.

"You don't care what they believe?"

"I care."

"But you don't put it in writing."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because if religions worked according to their first draft, your species would be much less interesting."

"So I can tell them the truth."

"You can."

"I can tell them you are the Devil."

"You can."

"I can tell them they should not trust you."

"You can."

"And that will still feed you."

The Devil smiled faintly.

"In some cuisines, bitterness is valued."

I stopped reading.

Behind the table, the darkness was silent so carefully that it seemed to be listening.

I did not know whether my panic was merely adding attention to it, or whether something really was there. With the Devil, it was hard to distinguish scenery from witness. Perhaps that too was part of his economy of means.

"I don't want people to love you," I said.

"You may find that difficult to enforce."

"I don't want them to pray to you."

"Then please give them something else to speak to when they are desperate."

"That sounds like a trap."

"Of course."

"You admit it?"

"Refusing to call a trap a trap does not make it tighten less around the leg."

For a while I said nothing.

There was nowhere in any of this where one could stand honestly. If I agreed to build a religion, I would feed a being who did not want to say what he was. If I refused, I would return to the blood on the crossing and to a mother who would learn from a stranger's phone call or a police message that her son had no more tomorrows.

Son.

The word appeared by itself.

It caught me by the throat harder than "man," "believer," "immortality," or "task."

Son.

Who would I be if I did not come back as him?

"Will I keep my memory?" I asked.

The Devil looked at me carefully.

More carefully than before, I mean.

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"Enough at first."

"What does that mean?"

"That memory is not a warehouse where you can put new millennia without moving the old boxes."

I did not understand.

I understood too little, but enough to be afraid.

"Millennia?"

The Devil did not answer.

"You said 'millennia.'"

"I did."

"Is that a metaphor?"

"I rarely use metaphors by accident."

My heart hit harder.

Someone, somewhere, might have been pressing on my chest just then. Someone might have been shouting "again." Someone might have been staring at a monitor, waiting for the line to stop arguing with death. And I was standing over a sheet of paper, discovering that "life" was a word with far more capacity than I had assumed.

"How long?" I asked.

"Long."

"No."

"No?"

"Don't answer me with that word. Not now."

The Devil folded his hands behind his back.

"Longer than your language."

I did not know at once what that meant.

Then I knew.

Not longer than a job. Not longer than my mother's life. Not longer than an entire generation of people who might remember my face. Longer than the language I used to swear, write messages, buy groceries, say "tomorrow."

I felt faint.

"Immortality," I said.

The word sounded stupid in my mouth.

Too large, too theatrical. A prop from the wrong scene. It should have glowed, rung, or at least been spoken with better posture. Instead, I stood by a table, with the wet memory of asphalt under my skin and an undelivered message in my pocket.

"One variety of it," the Devil replied.

"One variety."

"People tend to treat immortality as a single product. In fact, there are many forms. Some are of very low quality."

"You talk about it like a mattress."

"Mattresses can also be sources of suffering for years."

"Stop."

"Very well."

He fell silent.

This time the silence was almost merciful.

I rested my hands on the table. The paper did not even tremble, though its edge should have reacted to the movement of air. The pen lay still, cheap and innocent, like a thing with no idea how much it could change.

"I don't want to live forever," I said.

"Few people do, when they are told the truth early enough."

"But you didn't tell me early enough."

"I told you before you signed."

I looked at him.

"I hate that answer."

"It is one of the more honest ones I have."

"That's sad."

"Yes."

I had not expected agreement.

It stopped me.

The Devil stood on the other side of the table, dark coat, calm face, no shadow. Behind him waited darkness. He did not look like a victor. He did not even look particularly pleased. If anything, he looked like a clerk who had known for a very long time that the procedure worked, but did not consider it pretty.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"Because if you sign, I don't want stupidity to be the first foundation."

"But fear can be."

"Fear is sturdier."

"And the will to live."

"The oldest building material."

I closed my eyes.

The will to live.

It sounded beautiful when spoken of from a distance. In books, in speeches, in moments when someone defeats an illness or comes out of ruins covered in dust and dignity. In practice, it was less elegant. It sat inside me, dirty, stubborn, inconsistent. It did not ask whether it was worth it. It did not ask who I would be on the other side. It did not understand that eternity might be worse than death, because eternity was an abstraction to it, and death tasted like blood in my mouth.

I don't want to die.

I don't.

I don't.

No philosophy was faster than that sentence.

I opened my eyes and returned to the document.

The Contractor accepts that continued existence does not constitute restoration of the previous life, but rather the beginning of performance of the Task under conditions determined by the Principal.

"I'm not going back," I said.

"Not to that life."

This time he said it plainly.

Late.

But plainly.

"My apartment?"

"No."

"My job?"

"No."

"My mother?"

The Devil did not answer at once.

And I already knew.

Knowledge came like cold water under a door. It did not have to enter all the way for a person to understand the house was flooding.

"No," I said for him.

"Not in the way you want."

"Will she bury me?"

"Yes."

The word was small, but it went deep.

Mother.

Funeral.

My body, real or whatever would be left of it, in a world that would still have bills, bus stops, wet sidewalks, and people who say "probably" when the truth becomes inconvenient. My mother would stand somewhere in that world and listen to someone else's version of events. She would have to accept condolences from people who did not know how I drank coffee, how I forgot to call. Maybe the clergyman would come. Maybe he would even speak about mercy.

I wanted to vomit.

I had nothing to vomit with.

"This isn't life," I said.

"That depends on the definition."

"If you say 'that depends on the definition' one more time, I will try to kill you."

"I understand."

"You don't."

"Not as you do."

He surprised me again.

With an answer that was not a joke.

For a moment I stood over the pact and hated him a little less for not pretending compassion. It was not comfort. It was only a pause in the irritating of a wound.

"Why can't you just save me?" I asked more quietly.

"I can."

"You know what I'm asking."

"Yes."

"Why can't you save me in a way that lets me go back?"

The Devil looked at the paper, then at me.

"Because that man already belongs to history."

The sentence was calm.

And cruel.

"I'm still alive."

"Yes."

"Then I am not history."

"You are becoming one of its versions."

I tightened my fingers on the edge of the table.

"Versions."

"People will speak of you for a while. Your mother differently than the driver. The witnesses differently than the newspapers. The police differently than people in the comments. Each version will feed on you a little and preserve you a little."

"I don't want to be a story."

"No sensible person does."

"And you want me to create them."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because they will be created anyway."

Behind the table, the darkness seemed closer.

Maybe the light had dimmed.

Maybe my time really was running out.

The sign on the door behind me, that bureaucratic CALLED which I should not have been able to see from here, flickered red in the reflection on the table. Once. Twice. Three times. Then it went out for longer.

The Devil looked that way.

"You should keep reading."

"Do I have time?"

"For all of it? No."

"Wonderful."

"It is not my fault people leave documents until the last moment."

"You came to me at the last moment."

"The most honest place for a decision."

"The most vulnerable."

"One does not exclude the other."

I wanted to overturn the table.

Instead, I read.

The Principal does not guarantee the Contractor comfort, happiness, justice, return to previous relationships, understanding by third parties, or correct interpretation of the Contractor's actions by human communities.

"At least you put that in."

"I learned from mistakes."

"Your own?"

"Other people's mistakes are cheaper."

The Principal guarantees that the Contractor shall not be permanently deprived of the ability to continue moving, leave places of confinement, and continue the Task.

I frowned.

"What does that mean?"

"That it is not in my interest for someone to lock you in a chest for five hundred years."

The image came too quickly.

Darkness. Wood. No air, which does not kill you anyway. A body that cannot die. Fingernails scraped down to nothing. A hundred years. Two hundred. Five hundred. The world above the chest changes language, and the person underneath is left with only his own screaming.

I stepped back from the table.

"What?"

"That is precisely why this provision is beneficial."

"Beneficial?"

"Very."

"Why is that even possible?"

"Everything that lasts long enough gets buried by someone sooner or later."

"Stop talking."

"Very well."

He did not stop existing.

That was the worst of it.

Not his words. The fact that after the words he was still standing there, calm, shadowless, with a document that tried to describe horror in the language of guarantees. Immortality without end. Religion without control. Memory that might one day give way under the weight of years. The possibility of being sealed away so terrible that even the Devil considered it a risk requiring a paragraph.

"I don't want this," I said.

"I know."

"I don't want it."

"I know."

"Then why am I still standing here?"

The Devil did not smile.

"Because you want to go back there even less."

There.

The street.

Rain.

The woman with the stroller.

The clergyman already arranging his face for someone else's camera.

Blood in my mouth.

The mother I had not called.

Nothing urgent.

I closed my eyes so hard I saw colored spots.

For a moment I tried to imagine myself refusing.

I really tried.

I saw myself straightening my back, pushing the pen away, telling the Devil "no" with the kind of dignity a person would like to have at the end. I may even have seen a flash of respect in his eyes. Then the door. Then asphalt. One breath. Perhaps not a second. Pain coming back for what belonged to it. Darkness, this time without a table, without a conversation, without any chance to do anything differently.

There was no music in that vision.

Only my mother, who would probably spend years returning to the last message: "Call when you can. Nothing urgent."

I couldn't.

I couldn't be that noble.

"What if I sign only because I'm afraid?" I asked.

"Then you will sign for the most common reason."

"That isn't consent."

"It is very human consent."

"That sounds worse."

"Because it is truer."

I opened my eyes.

The Devil stood motionless.

He did not hurry me. That was clever. If he hurried me, I could dig in. If he showed impatience, I could call him an executioner and return to easier anger. He only stood there, as if he knew time would do all the dirty work for him.

Because it was.

Time was on his side.

No.

Worse.

Time was his tool even when he pretended merely to be passing by.

"I hate you," I said.

"Very consistently so far."

"I will not be your worshipper."

"I did not ask."

"I will not be your prophet."

"That is usually established after the fact."

"I will not tell people that you are good."

"Please do not lie unnecessarily."

"And if I find a way to destroy this contract..."

"You will have an interesting century."

Century.

The word opened the floor inside me.

Not a decade. Not a second chance. A century as a small unit of argument.

"People who want to live," the Devil said quietly, "usually endure immortality worst."

I looked at him.

"Is that supposed to discourage me?"

"It is supposed to ensure that later you cannot say no one warned you."

"I will be able to say you warned me too little."

"Of course."

"And too late."

"That too."

"And in such a way that you still got the signature."

"Most likely."

I should have walked away.

I should have.

Instead, I took the pen.

It was light.

Scandalously light.

The whole pact, all of continued existence, religion, immortality, memory stretched longer than language, all of it ended in my fingers as an object that might fall out of a pocket at a supermarket checkout and not even deserve bending down for.

I clicked the end.

The sound was small.

The blue ball slid out obediently.

"I haven't signed yet," I said.

"I know."

"I want one condition."

"Please speak."

"I will not kill on your orders."

The Devil accepted this without blinking.

"Very well."

"Very well?"

"Yes."

"Just like that?"

"I have never needed your consent for people to die."

For a while I could not breathe.

"You are disgusting."

"In this matter, yes."

"Put it in writing."

"What?"

"That I will not kill on your orders."

"I will issue no such order."

"Put it in writing."

The Devil looked at the paper.

He did not touch it.

One line of text appeared at the bottom of the document. It did not flow out of ink, did not flare with fire. It was simply there, as if it had always been waiting for me to notice it.

The Principal shall not require the Contractor to commit murder as a direct condition of continued existence.

I read the sentence three times.

"'Direct,'" I said.

"Yes."

"That word is suspicious."

"Very."

"Remove it."

"No."

I almost laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because the boundary had been drawn so clearly it was almost honest. I could negotiate. I could get a sentence. I could even improve the world by the width of one paragraph. But I could not make it clean. I could not make my future hands innocent simply because today's were shaking over a pen.

"And if I have to kill to survive?" I asked.

"Then you will be a human being in history."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer that does not pretend your choices can be put in a footnote."

He was right.

I hated him for it almost calmly now.

"Second condition," I said.

"Please."

"I will not have to worship you."

"You will not."

"Put it in writing."

This time the sentence appeared more quickly.

The Contractor is not obligated to personal worship of the Principal.

"'Personal,'" I said.

"Yes."

"So others can."

"That would be difficult to prohibit."

"Of course."

"You have a talent for noticing painful adjectives."

"Life taught me."

"It is only just beginning."

That sentence hung between us.

Only just beginning.

Life as a thing that had yet to show its teeth.

I was so tired that, for a moment, everything became distant. The table. The paper. The Devil. The pen in my hand. Even fear grew tired of itself and sat somewhere off to the side, panting.

"Do I sign with my name?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Full name?"

"If you wish."

"You know it?"

"Yes."

"Of course you know it."

"It was not difficult. You had documents."

I looked at him.

The Devil raised his eyebrows slightly.

"What? Did you expect me to confess knowledge of your true name carved into the metaphysical structure of the world?"

"A little."

"An ID card is much more practical."

This time I smiled for real.

And immediately felt worse for it.

Because that smile was mine.

Still mine.

I had the face I had known for thirty years. I had the hands with which I had signed an internet contract, picked up parcels, replied too late, failed to call my mother. I had a voice with which I could still say my own name and recognize it as something obvious.

I did not know how much of that would remain.

The Devil knew more.

He did not say.

"I want to read the end," I said.

"Please."

I looked at the last paragraph.

For a moment the letters were blurred. I blinked. They settled again.

The Contractor's signature constitutes conscious acceptance of continued existence, the Task, and the consequences arising from the Contractor's limited understanding of this contract at the time of its conclusion.

"That is shameless."

"Yes."

"You wrote that I don't understand the contract."

"Because you do not."

"And that is supposed to be legally enforceable?"

"This is not law."

"Then what is it?"

The Devil looked at me from the other side of the table.

"Consent."

The word was quiet.

Not bureaucratic. Not diabolical.

Human, almost.

Consent.

Not clean. Not complete. Not fair. But mine, to the extent that anything was still mine.

I could scream that this was manipulation. And I would be right.

I could say I had no choice. And I would be right too.

I could sign.

And that would be a third sentence, able to exist beside the previous two, though none of them canceled out the others.

I moved the pen over the place for the signature.

The line was empty.

Ordinary.

Waiting.

"If I sign," I said, "it is not because you won."

"Of course."

"Not because I believe you."

"I know."

"Not because I want to be part of your diseased metaphysics."

"That is a rather specialized desire. Rarely present at the beginning."

"I am signing because I want to live."

The Devil nodded.

Not triumphantly.

Not gently.

He simply accepted the fact.

"Yes," he said.

My hand was trembling.

For a second I thought I would not be able to write my own name. That this was how the whole scene would end: not with a grand refusal, not with heroic consent, but with the failure of fine motor skills. A person can stand before the Devil, consider immortality, and still discover that his fingers do not obey him on a simple line.

I pressed the tip to the paper.

Ink flowed blue.

Not red.

Not black.

Blue, cheap, a little uneven.

The first letter came out too large.

The second shook.

At the third, I remembered signing for a delivery the week before, standing in the stairwell in slippers and pretending the courier could not see the mess behind my back. The memory hit me so suddenly I almost stopped.

Normal life does not end with a grand symbol.

It ends with a person remembering slippers.

I finished my surname.

The dot was unnecessary, but my hand made it by itself, as if the signature were a sentence.

For a moment nothing happened.

It was the worst possible kind of nothing.

There was no boom. I did not burst into flame. I did not hear the laughter of the damned or any music to tell me I had just crossed a line. The paper lay on the table. The pen was in my hand. The Devil stood opposite me.

Only somewhere far away, very far away, something stopped fighting.

I did not hear it with my ears.

I felt it.

As if the thin thread connecting me to the wet asphalt, to the chest under the paramedic's hands, to the face of the woman who had spoken the truth too quietly, had been cut not with a knife, but with a decision.

I swayed.

The Devil did not move to hold me up.

Good.

If he had touched me, I think I really would have tried to kill him.

"What happened?" I asked.

My voice was dry.

"You signed."

"I know."

"Then the first lesson: not every question after the fact still has a useful answer."

"Don't start."

"Very well."

The paper changed.

It did not burn. The text simply began to disappear from it, line by line, as if the document were displayed on a screen someone was slowly turning off. First the title. Then the paragraphs. Then my name.

Only the dot after the signature remained.

Small and blue.

The last trace of my old handwriting.

The Devil placed two fingers on the sheet, as if holding down something that could not escape.

"Is that all?" I asked.

"As far as formalities go? Yes."

"As far as my life goes?"

The Devil looked at me.

"Which one?"

I did not answer.

Not because I had no words. Because I had too many, and all of them were too small.

The table began to move away from me.

Or I from the table.

Hard to say. Space lost the courtesy of geometry. The darkness behind the Devil spread wider, though not like liquid. More like meaning that suddenly stops fitting inside a sentence. The waiting room behind my back was only a rectangle of light with a flickering sign above the door. CALLED went out entirely.

"Wait," I said.

"No."

One word.

Not cruel.

Final.

I felt fear so pure that for a moment it was not even an emotion, only a physical fact. The pen was still in my hand. I gripped it tighter.

"What about this?" I asked stupidly.

The Devil looked at the pen.

"You may keep it."

"What for?"

"People like souvenirs from disasters."

I wanted to curse him, but my tongue had grown heavy.

The pen fell from my hand.

I did not hear it hit the floor.

My fingers began to lose shape.

Not literally. Not yet. Rather, I stopped being sure where they were. My hand was the memory of a hand. My arm was something that used to begin at the shoulder and end at the wrist, and now was receding like a platform outside a train window. My face was the first thing to disappear from my idea of myself. I could not see it from the inside. I never could. But suddenly I no longer knew what it was supposed to be.

"What is happening to me?" I asked.

"Transfer."

"Where?"

"To the beginning."

"What beginning?"

The Devil adjusted the cuff of his coat.

The gesture was so calm, so inadequate, that it almost soothed me. Almost, because I was already too far from everything for calm to attach itself to anything.

"You said I would be human," I threw at him.

"Yes."

"You said I would keep my memory."

"Enough at first."

"You said..."

"I said many things."

"Not the whole truth."

"No."

He admitted it without shame.

Because of course.

Suddenly I understood that in a moment I would lose even the ability to be angry with him in the same shape. That thought was worse than the darkness. Anger was the last piece of me standing firmly on its feet. If he took that too, what would I be left as?

"Will I remember you?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Pity."

"I sometimes think so too."

I did not know whether he meant me.

Or himself.

Or everyone who had signed before.

I wanted to ask.

I did not have time.

The waiting room went out.

The table went out.

The darkness did not go out, because it had nothing to lose.

For a moment, only the Devil's eyes remained. They did not shine. They were simply the last thing I could name. They looked at me from the distance of one table and several thousand of something I did not yet understand.

"And now what?" I asked.

The Devil took the document.

"Now you begin at the beginning."

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