They shot her (4): in which I’m given proof Satan exists

Half an hour later, we were in the 66th Street Barnes and Noble.  Michele was nowhere to be seen (his type is known to disappear without notice) and Frank was off on his own, sitting cross-legged by a table of new hardcovers, reading Why Do Men Have Nipples? May stood before where I was parked in Winston Penelope, my wheelchair (Frank had named him/her).

“I find you so inspiring, Yulia.  How do you manage?”

“Um, it’s nothing, really.”

“You see, that’s what amazes me, how you cope so well.  I want to pick your brain, understand how you think, learn from you.  I love understanding how people think, picking their brains.”

“I imagine you have a bookcase of brains.”

“I do, I really do.  Tell me, how did you respond when you got your diagnosis?”

“I don’t know, I never really stopped to think about it.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, I had the symptoms already, now I had a name for it.  What could I do but read about MS and deal with what I had?  That was all.”  I looked over at Frank, making sure that he couldn’t hear me.

“You know, I really do admire you.  I have asthma, and sometimes I get so tired, I get so lazy.  Michele knows.  A few years back I became depressed, it was awful, but you know, antidepressants made me feel worse.  They made me a zombie.  I couldn’t emote at all.  Do you still take something for your depression?”

“For years now.  I’ll be taking them for the rest of my life.  But they never bothered me.”

“Hmm . . .”  She straightened herself.  “Tell me, how did you do all that work?”

What work?  “In college?”

May waited for me to continue.

“Well, my mom took the bus to Boston each weekend to help me with my reading, because of my vision.  And she went to the library to photocopy articles I needed, which was great.  All the college staff knew her after a while.”  I found myself growing more animated despite my fatigue, explaining to her how I did my assignments when they were announced just in case later I wasn’t well, how, with essays, I had a special system of symbols and numbers that helped me arrange my scattered thoughts once they were all written out, to string them into an argument.  I confided in her how taxing the process was, truly draining, but how rewarding ultimately.  I suddenly felt proud of myself again for these little tasks I’d accomplished.  It was wonderful to remember.

“You see, I find that fascinating, how you do that.  I was awful with my assignments.”

“But people excel at different things.”

“Yes, they do.  I’m good at leading people.”  Was I being led?  She confessed her own defining moments, how she’d had an office job but found herself, promotion after promotion, getting paid way too much for what she was doing, one day she knew she needed a change and what happened was, she looked out the window at that moment and saw a plane pass and she knew, that’s where she was going next, and a week later she was working for Boeing and when that got old, when she got really depressed for a few months and started and stopped the meds, she knew something was meant to happen to her, and soon after she met Michele on line outside Mamma Mia! and it was like, “Mamma mia!”  She put on her fake Italian accent, which was as much Italian as she knew.  “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

It occurred to me, as I listened to May, how she could actually be regarded as pretty if seen as the person she projected, confident of admiration and of her right to it.  Perhaps this was how Michele had found himself drawn to her.  Had he too been caught up in her performance?

“I’ve come to know a lot of people over the years, and I see so clearly what they excel in, how their skills can be put together with others’ and great things can be made to happen.  I thrive on that, organizing people.  And the great thing about meeting people is that you can learn from their individual experiences.  You can’t imagine the people I’ve met.  I know this guy who went to Harvard as an undergrad and he actually made a deal with the Devil.  He told the Devil, ‘If I graduate in the top three of my class, I’ll give you whatever you want.’”

Couldn’t he have asked for something more ambitious, like eternal well-being or the promise of fulfillment?  But then, maybe you couldn’t ask the Devil for just anything you wanted, as with genies in bottles.  Maybe you could only ask the Devil for “evil” things. . . .

“And he ended up second in his class, but everything went downhill from there and he lost everything.  He finally went home, which is where I met him and he was just then beginning to put his life back together.”

She didn’t explain how a soul could be redeemed, but I doubted praying to the Devil accomplished anything.  Had God retrieved it by force?  Cunning?  Or were He and the Devil on friendly terms?  Did they exchange souls like playing cards?

“But anyway, that’s how I know Satan exists.”  May went on to tell me of another man she knew who had died twice (and, I gathered, was alive today to share his experience and would one day die a third time even).  The facts of the miracle escape me, but from what I can recall, the first time he died, it lasted for about half an hour and he had been welcomed into Heaven (a wet dream perhaps?) and the next time he died, he had wet himself for certain: he was white-water rafting, which May made a point of explaining was very dangerous (morally?) and he was knocked out of the raft by a wave and there was a search party out looking for him for two hours and when they finally found him he was actually in a still portion of the river.

“The water was completely motionless, and he was seen rising from the water, vertical and fully-conscious, but you see, he’d been dead for two hours,” May beamed, not going so far as to explain how she knew he’d been dead all that time he’d been missing.  “But this time he was terrified, you understand, because he’d actually experienced Hell, he’d been in it.  He saw both options, you see, and that was how he knew he needed to go to Heaven.”

She looked down at me, smiling encouragingly, as if expecting me to nod yes, Heaven, yes.  But I was out of breath listening to her speak and my neck hurt: that was all I could think.

“I’m sorry, I’m just so thirsty.  Do you think we can go upstairs to the café?  Frank,” I called over to him.  “Shall we get something to drink?”  I managed to steady my voice, but as he approached us, I reached out both my arms to him.

[Continued here]

Tags: anti-depressants, antidepressants, asthma, Boeing, bookstore, college, coping, deal with devil, deaven, depression, devil, diagnosis, drowning, essays, evil, fatigue, Faust, Harvard, hell, Mamma Mia!, miracle, mom, MS, multiple sclerosis, notes, outlines, paid too much, promotions, reading, rebirth, redemption, satan, wet dream, white-water rafting, Why do men have nipples?