I.
Resha brought it. Rimmah did not want to be the one.
“There’s a request.”
“There is always a request. Filter them. That is what you are for.”
“This one has done it properly.”
The Devil looked up.
“How properly?”
“He got the form of it right. I don’t know where he found it — I’ve traced it back three sources and lost it in a book that was reprinted badly in the nineteen-twenties, and whoever compiled that book was working from something older that I would very much like to see. He did it alone. He did it correctly. He did not do it as a performance and there was no one there to perform for.”
“And he asked for me by name.”
“He asked for the one who has it to give.”
There was a quiet. Then the Devil stood, and both of them registered that he was pleased, and that he was making no effort to conceal it, which is rarer.
“Who is he?”
“An artist. Twenty-four. He’s been on my sheet for eleven months. You’ve had his work in your ear and didn’t know it — the thing that was in the club in the east district in the spring, the one that made the room move as a single body. That was him. He’s not rich. He’s not famous. He’s just past the point where anyone with an instrument for it can see the shape of what’s coming.”
“Is he any good?”
“He is extremely good,” Resha said. “That’s why I brought it up rather than filing it. I’ve handled a great many of these and most of them are ambitious men with no gift, and their careers cost me more to prop up than they ever return. This one has the actual thing. He’d have gotten somewhere without any of us. Not this far. But somewhere.”
“Then I’ll go myself.”
“Master —”
“I’ll go myself,” the Devil said. “Do you know how long it has been since one of them called me correctly and meant it? They petition me constantly. They petition me by accident, ninety times a day, every man who wants a thing more than he wants to remain the kind of man who wouldn’t do that for it. I take those without going anywhere.
“But once in a great while one of them says it out loud, in a room, on purpose, knowing what he is doing.
“I go to those in person. It costs me nothing and it is the only part of this work I have ever enjoyed.”
II. THE ROOM
The chronicle will not describe the method. It has been careful about this from the beginning and it will remain careful: there is nothing on that subject in these pages that a curious man could use. What is recorded is that the young man did it in a rented room with the door locked, at an hour when nobody would come, and that he did it soberly.
He was not frightened. That is worth setting down. He had expected to be and he was not.
What was in the room did not present itself as anything. There was no shape. There was a pressure, and a sense of an attention having turned, and the young man understood that he was being looked at with the whole of something’s regard, and that it was interested in him.
“You asked,” it said.
“Yeah.”
“Then ask.”
And here the chronicle wants the reader to understand that a great deal had been prepared. He had written it out. He had a list of the specific things and the order he wanted them in and he had refined it for a month.
He did not use it.
What he said was:
“I want everything.”
That’s all. Three words, and no article of the list survived, and the chronicle records that this is very nearly always what happens in that room. They come with an inventory and the inventory falls away and underneath it is the same sentence that has been underneath every human petition since the garden, which is not a request for any particular thing but a demand for the position — to be at the center of it, to have all of it come toward you, to be the one for whom the world is arranged.
The pressure in the room shifted, and if it had a face it would have done something with it.
“Yes,” it said. “You will find that the ones who ask for a specific thing get a specific thing and are unhappy inside two years. You have asked correctly.”
“So can you do it?”
“It’s yours.”
And it was gone, and the young man sat in that rented room for a while, and then went and got something to eat because he was hungry, and the chronicle records that as well, because it is exactly how these things go and nobody believes it.
III. WHAT HE PAID FOR IT
The offer was made eleven days before it was fulfilled, and the chronicle wants a plain word about the transaction, because the world has told itself a story about this and the story is wrong in a way that gets people killed.
He did not sell his soul.
There is no such instrument. There has never been one. It is not a thing a man owns in the way he owns a car and it is not a thing that can be conveyed by agreement, and the enemy has never once in six thousand years received a soul by purchase.
What happened is smaller and much worse.
A man in a locked room said I want everything, and meant it, and in the saying of it he became — for the first time, deliberately, with full knowledge — a man who would take everything on those terms. He did not transfer anything. He disclosed something. He found out what he was, and agreed with it, and stopped contending.
The enemy did not acquire him that night. The enemy simply stopped having to work.
And then, because it costs him little and because he had reason to, he gave the young man everything he asked for.
IV. THE YEAR
The record deal came on a Thursday. Eleven days after the room, from a direction he had not been working, on terms that were not normal for a man at his level and which two lawyers later described as generous to the point of being strange.
He was a millionaire before the end of the following quarter.
Then the rest of it. The features. The verse on somebody else’s record that broke internationally and that he had written in twenty minutes in a car. The tour, then the bigger tour. The house with the long drive.
He was good. He got better. That is the part the chronicle insists on and will not soften, because there is a version of this story where the man is a fraud and it is a comfortable version and it is a lie: he was genuinely gifted, and success did not corrupt the gift, and some of what he made in that year was the best work anybody made that year.
The subject matter did what it does. Not by instruction — nobody instructed him. He wrote what was in front of him, and what was in front of him was money and women and the chemicals and the being-looked-at, and so that is what the songs were about, and they were about it well, which is what made them travel.
And the Devil listened to all of it.
He is the prince of the power of the air, and the chronicle notes that this is not a title of honor invented by his admirers — it is a description of a jurisdiction, and it means what it says. He is in the room where the sound is. He was in the clubs. He was in eleven thousand cars at once, at midnight, on freeways in every state, where a nineteen-year-old was learning the second verse by heart without deciding to.
He was well pleased.
He said so, out loud, alone, which he does not often do: “That one is worth what he cost me.”
V. WHAT HE THOUGHT OF HIM
And here the chronicle must set down the thing that the man in the house on the long drive did not know, and would not have believed, and which is true of every single one of them:
The Devil despised him.
Not as a rival. Not with the cold specific hatred he keeps for the ones who belong to the Carpenter — that hatred at least concedes something to its object.
He despised him the way a man despises a tool that has worn its handle smooth. Utterly, absently, without any particular feeling, and entirely without regard to how well it works.
He does not love his own. He has never loved anything. He cannot — the equipment is not there, and this is the single most important fact any human being could know about him and it is the one they never believe. Every man who has ever gone into a locked room to ask him for something has gone in believing, at some level beneath argument, that he would be valued by what he found there. That the attention was a kind of regard. That he would be, in some sense, one of his.
There is no his. There is nothing on the other side of it. He is not a dark lord with a court he cherishes. He is an appetite with a strategy, and the young man in the house on the long drive was an aperture — a hole through which he could reach several million people he could not otherwise reach directly.
He valued the aperture precisely as much as it opened. He would have discarded him on a Tuesday for a better one.
And the young man, that whole year, felt chosen.
VI. THE CONFIRMATION
It came about fourteen months in, and it did not come from any calculation of his own.
He was informed.
The chronicle will not pretend to know how, and it will not invent a mechanism, because inventing one would be a lie and this is the closest thing to a hinge in the whole account. What is recorded is that at a certain point the enemy knew — the way he knew about the man in Uz, the way he has always known the boundaries drawn around what he may touch — that the artist’s life was going to be required of him, and that it would be soon, and that it would not be by any hand of his.
Months. Not years.
And he did not celebrate.
That is the strangest entry in this chronicle and the chronicle sets it down without explanation. He was irritated. He had a working instrument at the height of its usefulness, on an upward curve, with the best two years still in front of it, and the instrument was going to be taken out of service.
“Why now,” he said. “He is not finished. He has years of work in him.”
Nobody answered, because there was nobody to answer, and because the answer to that question has never once been given to him about anything.
VII. THE MONTHS
And then the thing that made him furious began.
They started coming.
Not many. Not organized. Nothing that would show up in any account of that year as an event. But they came, and they kept coming, and the enemy watched every one of them arrive and could not account for a single one.
A woman on a hotel loading dock in March who had no business speaking to him and did it anyway and shook the whole time. A man at a gas station at two in the morning who said one sentence about the state of his soul and got back in his truck. A letter from a stranger, hand-written, four pages, that got through three layers of people who are paid to make sure nothing gets through. His mother, twice. His grandmother, once, on the phone, and she did not lecture him — she told him she prayed for him every morning at five and had not missed a day since he was born, and he said I know, Grandma, and changed the subject.
He mocked most of them. Publicly, and then in the work — the songs turned that year, and there is a track on the second record that names the Carpenter and says something about Him that the chronicle will not repeat. It went to number four.
He came from a house where they believed it. He knew every word of it. That is the part the enemy kept returning to in the reports: this was not a man who had never heard. This was a man who had heard it every Sunday until he was seventeen, who could have recited it, who had it in the memory the way a man has the layout of the house he grew up in.
He did not disown his family, and they did not disown him. He flew them out. He paid off the house. His mother sat in a room he had bought her and asked him about his soul and he laughed and kissed the top of her head and said don’t start.
And the Devil watched every one of these encounters, and the chronicle records the state he was in, because it is the same state he has been in since the beginning and he has never named it accurately:
“Why is He still coming.”
He said it more than once that year. It is not a rhetorical question. He genuinely does not know.
“The man has refused Him publicly. He has refused Him in the work. He has taken the thing I gave him and made an instrument of it against Him in front of nine million people and he has done it by name, and He keeps sending them. A woman on a loading dock. He sent someone to stand on a loading dock and shake.
“There is nothing to be gained. There is no case here. I would have written this one off eleven years before he was born.”
And here the chronicle sets down what he could not:
The reason he cannot understand it is not that it is hidden. It is stated plainly in every one of their documents, in the simplest language any of them possess. He cannot understand it because understanding it would require him to hold a true thing about the Carpenter’s disposition long enough to reason from it, and there is no surface in him that a true thing can rest on. He knows the words. He has known them longer than the language they were written in. They mean nothing to him and they never will, and it is not a limitation of intelligence — it is a limitation of material.
So he watched a Father go after a son who was cursing Him from a stage, and called it inefficiency.
VIII. THE INTERCESSION
There is a story in their book about a tree that did not bear.
The owner comes for three years and finds nothing and orders it cut down, because it is taking up ground and there is nothing in it. And the one who tends the ground says: let it alone this year also, until I dig about it, and dung it — and if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then cut it down.
The enemy has thought about that story more than any other and he has never gotten to the bottom of it.
Not the mercy. The mercy he can at least categorize; he files it under weakness and moves on. What he cannot file is the arrangement — that the one who intercedes for the tree is not a third party. That the one asking for the extra year is Himself the one who owns the orchard, and that the whole scene is therefore not a negotiation between two wills but something happening inside one, and that the digging and the dunging is not a metaphor for waiting but for a Man in the dirt around the roots of something that has never given Him anything.
“He is buying it time,” he said. “That is all that is happening. He is buying that man time against His own decree.”
He was right about the mechanism and wrong about everything else, which is his permanent condition.
IX. THE LAST ONE
The last one He sent was the friend.
They had known each other since they were eleven. They had made music in a bedroom on equipment that barely worked, both of them at fourteen, and they had a hundred hours of that on a hard drive somewhere and both of them still had it.
The friend had gotten converted at twenty-two, which had ended the partnership without anyone saying so. He pastored a congregation of about ninety now, in the same city they had grown up in, and he made in a year what the artist made in a night.
He had been asking for two years. He got a yes in October.
And the artist did not mock him. That is the whole of why this encounter is different from the eleven that came before it, and the chronicle wants it stated plainly: he did not mock him because there was no version of himself available in which he could. The friend had been in the room when his father left. The friend knew what he had been like at fifteen. There is no persona that survives contact with a man who knew you before you had one.
They talked for six and a half hours.
The chronicle will not transcribe it. Most of it was not theological. Most of it was two men in their late twenties going back through a bedroom in a house that had since been sold, and the friend did not open the book for the first three hours, and that was not a strategy, it was affection.
Then he opened it.
And he did not soften it. That is the second thing the chronicle wants recorded, because a great many men would have, and the ones who do it out of love do more damage than the ones who do it out of cowardice.
He told him he would be damned. He used the word. He said that the life he was living was set against the One who made him and that the work he was putting into the world was leading people into a place he would not wish on anyone, and that God was not pleased with any of it and had never been pleased with any of it.
And then he said the other half, which is the half that most men leave out: that He loved him. Now. In this. That the door had been standing open the entire time the man had been writing songs against Him, and that nothing in six years had been held against him in the sense of being an obstacle, and that all of it — the room, the request, the record with the track on it — all of it could be gone by morning.
He was crying by then. Around the fifth hour. A grown man in a kitchen in a house he could not afford to visit, weeping over a friend he had lost to something he understood exactly.
And the artist began to cry too.
X. WHAT THE ENEMY SAW
The Devil was in that house. He had been there the whole six hours and had not been able to do anything at all.
And at the fifth hour he lifted his eyes.
The chronicle records this in his own words because it is the only concern he displayed in the entire account:
“He’s moving.
“Look at his hands. Look at the breathing. That is not sentiment — I have watched sentiment for six thousand years and I know its signature to the tenth of a second, and this is the other thing. That is the beginning of the thing that took the man on the road to Damascus. I have seen it perhaps four hundred times and it has never once come to nothing.
“Six hours. He has sat still for six hours and let another man talk. He hasn’t done that in three years — he cannot be in a room for forty minutes without an instrument or a screen or a woman, and he has sat in a kitchen since two in the afternoon and it is now nearly nine and he has not once reached for anything.
“Get someone in that house.”
There was no one in that house. There was nothing to be done and nothing to interrupt with, and he stood in a kitchen he could not touch and watched the whole thing to the end.
At six hours and thirty minutes it stopped.
They stood up. The friend hugged him, and held on longer than men usually do, and said please, once, into his shoulder.
And the artist said: “I’m gonna get right with God. I mean it. Give me a little bit.”
And he meant it — the chronicle says so plainly, because this is the entire tragedy and it does not work if he was lying. He meant it in the front of himself, in the part that had been crying for an hour and a half. He was not managing his friend. He had been genuinely moved and he genuinely intended it.
Give me a little bit.
The Devil, in that kitchen, heard those four words, and his concern went out of him like a light going off.
“Ah,” he said. “Never mind. He’s not coming.”
XI. THE THING HE HEARD
Resha asked him later what he had heard in it. He explained it the way he explains everything, which is accurately.
“He did not say no. If he had said no I would still be worried — the ones who say no are arguing, and a man who is arguing is still in the room.
“He said a little bit. He asked for an interval. And an interval is only ever requested by a man who has understood the offer completely and has decided that he wants one more of something first.
“He does not want to keep the money. Understand me — it isn’t the money. He’d have given up the money that night; it stopped meaning anything eight months ago. It isn’t the women either, not really.
“It’s that he cannot conceive of himself as someone other than the man he became. That is what he was asked to give up and that is the only thing he has ever actually loved. Six years of being the one the room turns toward. He was asked to walk out of a kitchen and be nobody’s answer to anything, and he wanted to say yes, and he could not get his hands off it.
“So he asked for a little bit. Which is not a refusal.
“It is just what a refusal sounds like when the man saying it is sincere.”
XII. THAT NIGHT
He drove home himself. It was late. He had the windows down and he did not put anything on, which was unusual, and at one point on the freeway he said something out loud in the car that the chronicle heard and will not record, because it was addressed to God and it was not for us.
He got in around eleven. The house was empty; he had sent everyone home for the week. He went upstairs and lay down without eating.
He was twenty-five years old and there was nothing wrong with him.
He died between two and four in the morning.
The examination found nothing. Nothing in the blood, nothing in the heart, no structural finding of any kind, and the report that was eventually filed used a phrase that means we do not know, and the family accepted it because families do, and it was reported for about nine days and then something else happened in the world.
XIII. WHAT IS RECORDED OF HIM AFTER
The chronicle records one thing about him and then leaves him, because there is no more account to give and because dwelling would be obscene.
It is not the fire.
There is fire and the book says there is fire and the chronicle does not soften it. But that is not what he is doing.
He is thinking about a kitchen.
He is thinking about a man crying at a table at the fifth hour and about four words he said at half past eight at night — give me a little bit — and about the fact that he meant them, and that he was going to do it, and that he had every intention.
He wanted it. That is the thing. He was not one of the ones who sneered. At the very end he wanted it, sincerely, in a kitchen, with his friend’s arms around him — and he could not get his hands off the other thing, and he asked for an interval, and the interval was not granted, and it had never once been guaranteed to anybody.
He sought to enter. He did not get in. And the door that had stood open for the whole of a year while a woman shook on a loading dock and a grandmother did not miss a morning in twenty-five years — that door was not slammed on him.
He simply arrived after.
XIV. BACK IN THE ROOM
The Devil came back and sat down and the two of them came in, and Rimmah asked what had happened.
“He’s dead. Last night. In the house.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He’s ours, he’s down, and I’ve lost the instrument.
“I want the disposition on the record, because I know what you’re both thinking and you are wrong. I take no satisfaction in it. He was worth two more years to me and I got fourteen months.
“He was not a victory. He was an expense that returned well for a short period and was withdrawn early.”
“He nearly went,” Resha said. “In the kitchen. Fifth hour.”
“He did nearly go. I have never been closer to losing something I had already been given and I do not want a conversation about it.”
Rimmah, who has been in disgrace for a very long time and has therefore stopped being careful, said: “Did he ever know? That you were —”
“He felt chosen,” the Devil said. “They all do. Every one of them, in every room, in every century. It is the only thing I have ever had to give them that costs me absolutely nothing, and I have never once had to say a word to produce it. They arrive with it. They bring it into the room with them and they hand it to themselves.
“Now. What else.”
And Resha, because the work does not stop and has never stopped, opened his ledger to the next page.
“There’s an actress.”
The Devil looked up.
“Go on.”
“Twenty-two. Not a believer, but she is not settled either — she was raised in a house with some of it in the walls and she has never dealt with it and it moves in her about twice a year, usually in the autumn. She’s three months from something very large. The kind of thing that comes once.”
“Has she asked for anything?”
“No. That’s the point. She isn’t a petitioner and she never will be, and I’d advise strongly against treating her like one. This is not an acquisition. This is a prevention.”
“State it properly.”
“We keep her too busy to be found. We put people around her who make the question unaskable. We ensure that every autumn, when it moves in her, there is something in front of her that is louder. We are not trying to make her ours. We are trying to make sure that nobody ever reaches her, and if that holds for forty years the outcome is identical and it costs a third as much.”
“And if she does get reached?”
“Then she is a platform of the first order pointed the wrong way, and I would rather spend eleven years preventing it than eleven months regretting it.”
The Devil considered it.
“Both of you,” he said. “Start now.”
Here ends the account of the artist.
The chronicle sets down four things.
The first: he can give it. That is not superstition and it is not a metaphor. The world is his in the sense the book says it is his, and he showed it all to the Carpenter Himself on a mountain and offered the whole of it, and the Carpenter did not dispute the ownership. He disputed the price. Every man who has taken the offer since has agreed to a price he did not read, and the price is never the money and it is never the fame — it is that you become the kind of man who took it, and you do not get to become someone else afterward at a time of your choosing.
The second: there is no such thing as selling your soul. There is no contract, there is no signature, there is no instrument, and the enemy has never once purchased one. What there is, is a man in a locked room finding out what he is and agreeing with it. Nothing is conveyed. Something is only revealed. And a man can do the identical thing without any room and without any words, by wanting a thing more than he wants God for long enough that it becomes settled — which is the ordinary way it happens and the way it is happening in a hundred thousand houses tonight where nobody has ever heard of a locked room.
The third: he gained the whole world. Not a portion of it. Everything he asked for, exactly as asked, delivered on time and in full — and he did not live to see thirty, and there is no version of that year that was worth the morning of the fifteenth of that month. Such has been the case with more of them than this chronicle will name, and it will not name them, because they have families and because the point does not require it.
And the fourth, which is the only one that matters:
He wanted it at the end. He sat in a kitchen and cried for an hour and a half and he meant every word of what he said, and he asked for a little bit of time, and it is the most common sentence in the human language and it has damned more people than atheism ever has.
God does not delight in the death of the wicked. He said so Himself, twice, in the same book, as though He knew He would not be believed the first time. He sent a woman to shake on a loading dock. He kept a grandmother at five o’clock in the morning for twenty-five years. He dug around the roots of a tree that had never given Him anything.
And He does not owe anybody an interval.
Hope in Madness — hopeinmadness.com
