Demonology Read online

  Praise for Rick Moody’s

  Demonology

  “Bold and thrilling… . Accomplished, fearless short stories that examine the exchange of energy between language and loss… . Moody does nothing in half measures. He places us under arrest before he reads us our rights… . Demonology rants and raves and roars.”

  —Walter Kirn, New York Times Book Review

  “Demonology mesmerizes the reader… . Moody is among the best in contemporary fiction.… He himself seems to be reaching new heights of inventiveness, writing convincingly and poignantly about the bizarre and the mundane, often combined in a single character.”

  —Benjamin E. Lytal, Harvard Crimson

  “A self-styled avenging angel of highbrow literary cool… . With fictionalizing father figures like Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon and cohorts like David Foster Wallace, Donald Antrim, and Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody is one of a small phalanx of sardonic post-post-modernists to have advanced boldly out of the early 1990s with pens drawn… . The much lauded title story is exceptional, heartbreaking… . The stories in Demonology range from hilarious to bitterly charming to quietly clever.” —Lydia Millet, Village Voice

  “Impressive… . Demonology is a howling visitation of various psychic hells with a derisive laugh track… . The real pleasure is in the satiric audacity of the short-story form.”

  —Peter Bricklebank, Chicago Tribune

  “Moody’s best work is in Demonology,… It is well worth reading.”

  —Daniel Handler, Newsday

  “This fine collection confirms Rick Moody’s status as one of the stars of contemporary American fiction… . Each story shares a remorseless eye for detail, a comic turn of phrase, and a vision in which tragedy and banality are closely intertwined… . He’s a formidable talent, and Demonology finds him at his wicked, wonderful best.”

  —John Tague, Independent on Sunday

  “Moody writes eloquently and perceptively… . The prose breaks through the personal-loss cliche, reaching toward, and grasping, the unflinchingly and the painfully beautiful.”

  —Michael Pelusi, Philadelphia City Paper

  “Rick Moody has grown in stature due to his ability to portray inner life.… He is in the big leagues of modern fiction writers… . Like David Foster Wallace, Moody’s technical knowledge and command of the craft of writing is unquestioned.”

  —Tim C. Davis, Creative Loafing

  “In Demonology Rick Moody portrays the human condition as a disturbing, hilarious carnival of voices.”

  —Michael Gross, Talk

  ALSO BY RICK MOODY

  Fiction

  Garden State

  The Ice Storm

  The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven

  Purple America

  Autobiography

  The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

  Essays

  Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited

  (co-edited, with Darcey Steinke)

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2001 by Rick Moody

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09221-0

  A.L.O.

  A.M.S.

  R.H.S.

  Contents

  Praise for Rick Moody’s

  Copyright

  The Mansion on the Hill

  On the Carouse

  The Double Zero

  Forecast from the Retail Desk

  Hawaiian Night

  Drawer

  Pan’s Fair Throng

  The Carnival Tradition

  Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set

  Boys

  Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal

  Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13

  Demonology

  The Mansion on the Hill

  The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis. The Chicken Mask was supposed to hustle business. It was supposed to invite the customer to gorge him or herself within our establishment. It was supposed to be endearing and funny. It was supposed to be an accurate representation of the featured item on our menu. But, Sis, in a practical setting, in test markets —like right out in front of the restaurant —the Chicken Mask had a plaintive aspect, a blue quality (it was stifling, too, even in cold weather), so that I’d be walking down Main, by the waterfront, after you were gone, back and forth in front of Hot Bird (Bucket of Drumsticks, $2.99), wearing out my imitation basketball sneakers from Wal-Mart, pudgy in my black jogging suit, lurching along in the sandwich board, and the kids would hustle up to me, tugging on the wrists of their harried, underfinanced moms. The kids would get bored with me almost immediately. They knew the routine. Their eyes would narrow, and all at once there were no secrets here in our town of service-economy franchising: Iwas the guy working nine to five in a Chicken Mask, even though I’d had a pretty good education in business administration, even though I was more or less presentable and well-spoken, even though I came from a good family. I made light of it, Sis, I extemporized about Hot Bird, in remarks designed by virtue of my studies in business tactics to drive whole families in for the new low-fat roasters, a meal option that was steeper, in terms of price, but tasty nonetheless. (And I ought to have known, because I ate from the menu every day. Even the coleslaw.)

  Here’s what I’d say, in my Chicken Mask. Here was my pitch: Feeling a little peckish? Try Hot Bird! Or Don’t be chicken, try Hot Bird! The mothers would laugh their nervous adding-machine laughs (those laughs that are next door over from a sob), and they would lead the kids off. Twenty yards away, though, the boys and girls would still be staring disdainfully at me, gaping backward while I rubbed my hands raw in the cold, while I breathed the synthetic rubber interior of the Chicken Mask —that fragrance of rubber balls from gym classes past, that bouquet of the gloves Mom used for the dishes —while I looked for my next shill. I lost almost ninety days to the demoralization of the Chicken Mask, to its grim, existential emptiness, until I couldn’t take it anymore. Which happened to be the day when Alexandra McKinnon (remember her? from Sunday school?) turned the corner with her boy Zack —he has to be seven or eight now —oblivious while upon her daily rounds, oblivious and fresh from a Hallmark store. It was nearly Valentine’s Day. They didn’t know it was me in there, of course, inside the Chicken Mask. They didn’t know I was the chicken from the basement, the chicken of darkest nightmares, or, more truthfully, they didn’t know I was a guy with some pretty conflicted attitudes about things. That’s how I managed to apprehend Zack, leaping out from the in-door of Cohen’s Pharmacy, laying ahold of him a little too roughly, by the hem of his pillowy, orange ski jacket. Little Zack was laughing, at first, until, in a voice wracked by loss, I worked my hard sell on him, declaiming stentoriously that Death Comes to All. That’s exactly what I said, just as persuasively as I had once hawked White meat breasts, eight pieces, just $4.59! Loud enough that he’d be sure to know what I meant. His look was interrogative, quizzical. So I repeated myself. Death Comes to Everybody, Zachary. My voice was urgent now. My eyes bulged from the eyeholes of my standard-issue Chicken Mask. I was even crying a little bit. Saline rivulets tracked down my neck. Zack was terrified.

  What I got next certainly wasn’t the kind of fli
rtatious attention I had always hoped for from his mom. Alex began drumming on me with balled fists. I guess she’d been standing off to the side of the action previously, believing that I was a reliable paid employee of Hot Bird. But now she was all over me, bruising me with wild swings, cursing, until she’d pulled the Chicken Mask from my head —half expecting, I’m sure, to find me scarred or hydrocephalic or otherwise disabled. Her denunciations let up a little once she was in possession of the facts. It was me, her old Sunday school pal, Andrew Wakefield. Not at the top of my game.

  I don’t really want to include here the kind of scene I made, once unmasked. Alex was exasperated with me, but gentle anyhow. I think she probably knew I was in the middle of a rough patch. People knew. The people leaning out of the storefronts probably knew. But, if things weren’t already bad enough, I remembered right then —God, this is horrible —that Alex’s mom had driven into Lake Sacan-daga about five years before. Jumped the guardrail and plunged right off that bridge there. In December. In heavy snow. In a Ford Explorer. That was the end of her. Listen, Alex, I said, I’m confused, I have problems and I don’t know what’s come over me and I hope you can understand, and I hope you’ll let me make it up to you. I can’t lose this job. Honest to God. Fortunately, just then, Zack became interested in the Chicken Mask. He swiped the mask from his mom —she’d been holding it at arm’s length, like a soiled rag —and he pulled it down over his head and started making simulated automatic-weapons noises in the directions of local passersby. This took the heat off. We had a laugh, Alex and I, and soon the three of us had repaired to Hot Bird itself (it closed four months later, like most of the businesses on that block) for coffee and biscuits and the chefs special spicy wings, which, because of my position, were on the house.

  Alex was actually waving a spicy wing when she offered her life-altering opinion that I was too smart to be working for Hot Bird, especially if I was going to brutalize little kids with the creepy facts of the hereafter. What I should do, Alex said, was get into something positive instead. She happened to know a girl —it was her cousin, Glenda —who managed a business over in Albany, the Mansion on the Hill, a big area employer, and why didn’t I call Glenda and use Alex’s name, and maybe they would have something in accounting or valet parking or flower delivery, you know, some job that had as little public contact as possible, something that paid better than minimum wage, because minimum wage, Alex said, wasn’t enough for a guy of twenty-nine. After these remonstrances she actually hauled me over to the pay phone at Hot Bird (people are so generous sometimes), while my barely alert boss Antonio slumbered at the register with no idea what was going on, without a clue that he was about to lose his most conscientious chicken impersonator. All because I couldn’t stop myself from talking about death.

  Alex dialed up the Mansion on the Hill (while Zack, at the table, donned my mask all over again), penetrating deep into the switchboard by virtue of her relation to a Mansion on the Hill management-level employee, and was soon actually talking to her cousin: Glenda, I got a friend here who’s going through some rough stuff in his family, if you know what I mean, yeah, down on his luck in the job department too, but he’s a nice bright guy anyhow. I pretty much wanted to smooch him throughout confirmation classes, and he went to… Hey, where did you go to school again? Went to SUNY and has a degree in business administration, knows a lot about product positioning or whatever, I don’t know, new housing starts, yada yada yada, and I think you really ought to…

  Glenda’s sigh was audible from several feet away, I swear, through the perfect medium of digital telecommunications, but you can’t blame Glenda for that. People protect themselves from bad luck, right? Still, Alex wouldn’t let her cousin refuse, wouldn’t hear of it, You absolutely gotta meet him, Glenda, he’s a doll, he’s a dream boat, and Glenda gave in, and that’s the end of this part of the story, about how I happened to end up working out on Wolf Road at the capital region’s finest wedding- and party-planning business. Except that before the Hot Bird recedes into the mists of time, I should report to you that I swiped the Chicken Mask, Sis. They had three or four of them. You’d be surprised how easy it is to come by a Chicken Mask.

  Politically, here’s what was happening in the front office of my new employer: Denise Gulch, the Mansion on the Hill staff writer, had left her husband and her kids and her steady job, because of a wedding, because of the language of the vows —that souffle of exaggerated language —vows which, for quality-control purposes, were being broadcast over a discreet speaker in the executive suite. Denise was so moved by a recitation of Paul Stookey’s “Wedding Song”taking place during the course of the Neuhaus ceremony (“Whenever two or more of you / Are gathered in His name, / There is love, / There is love… “) that she slipped into the Rip Van Winkle Room disguised as a latecomer. Immediately, in the electrifying atmosphere of matrimony, she began trying to seduce one of the ushers (Nicky Weir, a part-time Mansion employee who was acquainted with the groom). I figure this flirtation had been taking place for some time, but that’s not what everyone told me. What I heard was that seconds after meeting one another —the bride hadn’t even recessed yet —Denise and Nicky were secreted in a nearby broom closet, while the office phones bounced to voice mail, and were peeling back the layers of our Mansion dress code, until, at day’s end, scantily clad and intoxicated by rhetoric and desire, they stole a limousine and left town without collecting severance. Denise was even fully vested in the pension plan.

  All this could only happen at a place called the Mansion on the Hill, a place of fluffy endings: the right candidate for the job walks through the door at the eleventh hour, the check clears that didn’t exist minutes before, government agencies agree to waive mountains of red tape, the sky clears, the snow ends, and stony women like Denise Gulch succumb to torrents of generosity, throwing half-dollars to children as they embark on new lives.

  The real reason I got the job is that they were short-handed, and because Alex’s cousin, my new boss, was a little difficult. But things were starting to look up anyway. If Glenda’s personal demeanor at the interview wasn’t exactly warm (she took a personal call in the middle that lasted twenty-eight minutes, and later she asked me, while reapplying lip liner, if I wore cologne) at least she was willing to hire me —as long as I agreed to renounce any personal grooming habits that inclined in the direction of Old Spice, Hai Karate or CK1. I would have spit-polished her pumps just to have my own desk (on which I put a yellowed picture of you when you were a kid, holding up the bass that you caught fly-fishing and also a picture of the four of us: Mom and Dad and you and me) and a Rolodex and unlimited access to stamps, mailing bags and paper clips.

  Let me take a moment to describe our core business at the Mansion on the Hill. We were in the business of helping people celebrate the best days of their lives. We were in the business of spreading joy, by any means necessary. We were in the business of paring away the calluses of woe and grief to reveal the bright light of commitment. We were in the business of producing flawless memories. We had seven auditoriums, or marriage suites, as we liked to call them, each with a slightly different flavor and decorating vocabulary. For example, there was the Chestnut Suite, the least expensive of our rental suites, which had lightweight aluminum folding chairs (with polyurethane padding) and a very basic altar table, which had the unfortunate pink and lavender floral wallpaper and which seated about 125 comfortably; then there was the Hudson Suite, which had some teak in it and a lot of paneling and a classic iron altar table and some rather large standing tables at the rear, and the dining stations in Hudson were clothed all in vinyl, instead of the paper coverings that they used in Chestnut (the basic decorating scheme there in the Hudson Suite was meant to suggest the sea vessels that once sailed through our municipal port); then there was the Rip Van Winkle Room, with its abundance of draperies, its silk curtains, its matching maroon settings of inexpensive linen, and the Adirondack Suite, the Ticonderoga Room, the Valentine Room(a sort of gi
ant powder puff), and of course the Niagara Hall, which was grand and reserved, with its separate kitchen and its enormous fireplace and white-gloved staff, for the sons and daughters of those Victorians of Saratoga County who came upstate for the summer during the racing season, the children of contemporary robber barons, the children whose noses were always straight and whose luck was always good.

  We had our own on-site boutique for wedding gowns and tuxedo rentals and fittings —hell, we’d even clean and store your garments for you while you were away on your honeymoon —and we had a travel agency who subcontracted for us, as we also had wedding consultants, jewelers, videogra phers, still photographers (both the arty ones who specialized in photos of your toenail polish on the day of the wedding and the conventional photographers who barked directions at the assembled family far into the night), nannies, priests, ministers, shamans, polarity therapists, a really maniacal florist called Bruce, a wide array of deejays —guys and gals equipped to spin Christian-only selections, Tex-Mex, music from Hindi films and the occasional death-metal wedding medley —and we could get actual musicians, if you preferred. We’d even had Dick Roseman’s combo, The Sons of Liberty, do a medley of “My Funny Valentine,”“In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,”“I Will Always Love You”and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,”without a rest between selections. (It was gratifying for me to watch the old folks shake it up to contemporary numbers.) We had a three-story, fifteen-hundred-slip parking facility on site, convenient access to I-87, I-90 and the Taconic, and a staff of 175 full- and part-time employees on twenty-four-hour call. We had everything from publicists to dicers of crudites to public orators (need a brush-up for that toast?) —all for the purpose of making your wedding the high watermark of your American life. We had done up to fifteen weddings in a single day (it was a Saturday in February, 1991, during the Gulf War) and, since the Mansion on the Hill first threw open its door for a gala double wedding (the Gifford twins, from Balston Spa, who married Shaun and Maurice Wick-ett) in June of 1987, we had performed, up to the time of my first day there, 1,963 weddings, many of them memorable, life-affirming, even spectacular ceremonies. We had never had an incidence of serious violence.