Demonology
Authors: Rick Moody
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 © 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
Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set
Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal
Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13
T
he 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:
I
was 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.