Demonology

by Rick Moody

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Suspense

Synopsis

Rick Moody's novels have earned him a reputation as a "breathtaking" writer ( The New York Times) and "a writer of immense gifts" ( The San Francisco Examiner). His remarkable short stories have led both the New Yorker and Harpers to single him out as one of the most original and admired voices in a generation. These stories are abundant proof of Rick Moody's grace as a stylist and a shaper of interior lives. He writes with equal force about the blithe energies of youth ("Boys") and the rueful onset of middle age ("Hawaiian Night"), about Midwestern optimists ("Double Zero") and West coast strategists ("Baggage Carousel"), about visionary exhilaration ("Forecast from the Retail Desk") and delusional catharsis ("Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13.") The astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies, is a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love. Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language, the stories in Demonology offer the deepest pleasures that fiction can afford.

Release date: April 10, 2002

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

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 flirtatious 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 giant 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.


* * *


This was the raw data that Glenda gave me, anyway, Sis. The arrangement of the facts is my own, and in truth, the arrangement
of facts constitutes the job I was engaged to perform at the Mansion on the Hill. Because Glenda Manzini (in 1990 she married
Dave Manzini, a developer from Schenectady) couldn’t really have hated her job any more than she did. Glenda Manzini, whose
marriage (her second) was apparently not the most loving ever in upstate history (although she’s not alone; I estimate an
even thousand divorces resulting from the conjugal rites consummated so far at my place of business), was a cynic, a skeptic,
a woman of little faith when it came to the institution through which she made her living. She occasionally referred to the
wedding party as the cattle; she occasionally referred to the brides as the hookers and to herself, manager of the Mansion on the Hill, as the Madame, as in, The Madame, Andrew, would like it if you would get the hell out of her office so that she can tabulate these receipts, or, Please tell the Hatfields and the McCoys that the Madame cannot untangle their differences for them, although the Madame does
know the names of some first-rate couples counselors. In the absence of an enthusiasm for our product line or for business writing in general, Glenda Manzini hired me to tackle
some of her responsibilities for her. I gave the facts the best possible spin. Glenda, as you probably have guessed, was good
with numbers. With the profits and losses. Glenda was good at additional charges. Glenda was good at doubling the price on
a floral arrangement, for example, because the Vietnamese poppies absolutely had to be on the tables, because they were so…
je ne sais quoi. Glenda was good at double-booking a partic
ular suite and then auctioning the space to the higher bidder. Glenda was good at quoting a figure for a band and then adding
instruments so that the price increased astronomically. One time she padded a quartet with two vocalists, an eight-piece horn
section, an African drumming ensemble, a dijeridoo and a harmonium.


The other thing I should probably be up-front about is that Glenda Manzini was a total knockout. A bombshell. A vision of
celestial loveliness. I hate to go on about it, but there was that single strand of Glenda’s amber hair always falling over
her eyes; there was her near constant attention to her makeup; there was her total command of business issues and her complete
unsentimentality. Or maybe it was her stockings, always in black, with a really provocative seam following the aerodynamically
sleek lines of her calves. Or maybe it was her barely concealed sadness. I’d never met anyone quite as uncomfortable as Glenda,
but this didn’t bother me at first. My life had changed since the Chicken Mask.


Meanwhile, it goes without saying that the Mansion on the Hill wasn’t a mansion at all. It was a homely cinder-block edifice
formerly occupied by the Colonie Athletic Club. A trucking operation used the space before that. And the Mansion wasn’t on
any hill, either, because geologically speaking we’re in a valley here. We’re part of some recent glacial scouring.


On my first day, Glenda made every effort to insure that my work environment would be as unpleasant as possible. I’d barely
set down my extra-large coffee with two half-and-halfs
and five sugars and my assortment of cream-filled donuts (I was hoping these would please my new teammates) when Glenda bodychecked
me, tipped me over into my reclining desk chair, with several huge stacks of file material.


—Andy, listen up. In April we have an Orthodox Jewish ceremony taking place at 3 P.M. in Niagara while at the same time there are going to be some very faithful Islamic-Americans next door in Ticonderoga. I
don’t want these two groups to come in contact with one another at any time, understand? I don’t want any kind of diplomatic
incident. Its your job to figure out how to persuade one of these groups to be first out of the gate, at noon, and its your
job to make them think that they’re really lucky to have the opportunity. And Andy? The el-Mohammed wedding, the Muslim wedding,
needs prayer mats. See if you can get some from the discount stores. Don’t waste a lot of money on this.


This is a good indication of Glenda’s management style. Some other procedural tidbits: she frequently assigned a dozen rewrites
on her correspondence. She had a violent dislike for semicolons. I was to double-space twice underneath the date on her letters,
before typing the salutation, on pain of death. I was never, ever to use one of those cursive word-processing fonts. I was
to bring her coffee first thing in the morning, without speaking to her until she had entirely finished a second cup and also
a pair of ibuprofen tablets, preferably the elongated, easy-to-swallow variety. I was never to ask her about her weekend or
her evening or anything else, including her holidays, unless she asked me first. If her door was closed, I was not to open
it. And if I ever reversed the digits in a phone number when taking
a message for her, I could count on a pink slip that very afternoon.


Right away, that first A.M., after this litany of scares, after Glenda retreated into her chronically underheated lair, there was a swell of sympathetic
mumbles from my coworkers, who numbered, in the front office, about a dozen. They were offering condolences. They had seen
the likes of me come and go. Glenda, however, who keenly appreciated the element of surprise as a way of insuring discipline,
was not quite done. She reappeared suddenly by my desk —as if by secret entrance —with a half-dozen additional commands. I
was to find a new sign for her private parking space, I was to find a new floral wholesaler for the next fiscal quarter, I
was to refill her prescription for birth-control pills. This last request was spooky enough, but it wasn’t the end of the discussion. From there Glenda started getting personal:


—Oh, by the way, Andy? (She liked diminutives.) What’s all the family trouble, anyway? The stuff Alex was talking about when
she called?


She picked up the photo of you, Sis, the one I had brought with me. The bass at the end of your fishing rod was so outsized
that it seemed impossible that you could hold it up. You looked really happy. Glenda picked up the photo as though she hadn’t
already done her research, as if she had left something to chance. Which just didn’t happen during her regime at the Mansion
on the Hill.


—Dead sister, said I. And then, completing my betrayal of you, I filled out the narrative, so that anyone who wished could
hear about it, and then we could move onto other subjects, like Worcester’s really great semipro hockey team.



—Crashed her car. Actually, it was my car. Mercury Sable. Don’t know why I said it was her car. It was mine. She was on her
way to her rehearsal dinner. She had an accident.


Sis, have I mentioned that I have a lot of questions I’ve been meaning to ask? Have I asked, for example, why you were taking
the winding country road along our side of the great river, when the four-lanes along the west side were faster, more direct
and, in heavy rain, less dangerous? Have I asked why you were driving at all? Why I was not driving you to the rehearsal dinner
instead? Have I asked why your car was in the shop for muffler repair on such an important day? Have I asked why you were
late? Have I asked why you were lubricating your nerves before the dinner? Have I asked if four G&T’s, as you called them, before your own rehearsal dinner, were not maybe in excess of
what was needed? Have I asked if there was a reason for you to be so tense on the eve of your wedding? Did you feel you had
to go through with it? That there was no alternative? If so, why? If he was the wrong guy, why were you marrying him? Were
there planning issues that were not properly addressed? Were there things between you two, as between all the betrothed, that
we didn’t know? Were there specific questions you wanted to ask, of which you were afraid? Have I given the text of my toast,
Sis, as I had imagined it, beginning with a plangent evocation of the years before your birth, when I ruled our house like
a tyrant, and how with earsplitting cries I resisted your infancy, until I learned to love the way your baby hair, your flaxen
mop, fell into curls? Have I mentioned that it was especially satisfying to wind your hair around my stubby fingers as you
lay sleeping?
Have I made clear that I wrote out this toast and that it took me several weeks to get it how I wanted it and that I was in
fact going over these words again when the call from Dad came announcing your death? Have I mentioned —and I’m sorry to be
hurtful on this point —that Dad’s drinking has gotten worse since you left this world? Have I mentioned that his allusions
to the costly unfinished business of his life have become more frequent? Have I mentioned that Mom, already overtaxed with
her own body count, with her dead parents and dead siblings, has gotten more and more frail? Have I mentioned that I have
some news about Brice, your intended? That his tune has changed slightly since your memorial service? Have I mentioned that
I was out at the crime scene the next day? The day after you died? Have I mentioned that in my dreams I am often at the crime
scene now? Have I wondered aloud to you about that swerve of blacktop right there, knowing that others may lose their lives
as you did? Can’t we straighten out that road somehow? Isn’t there one road crew that the governor, in his quest for jobs,
jobs, jobs, can send down there to make this sort of thing unlikely? Have I perhaps clued you in about how I go there often
now, to look for signs of further tragedy? Have I mentioned to you that in some countries DWI is punishable by death, and
that when Antonio at Hot Bird first explained this dark irony to me, I imagined taking his throat in my hands and squeezing
the air out of him once and for all? Sis, have I told you of driving aimlessly in the mountains, listening to talk radio,
searching for the one bit of cheap, commercially interrupted persuasion that will let me put these memories of you back in
the canister where you now at least partially reside so that I can live out my
dim, narrow life? Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it,
. . .