Gargoylization, by Sara Congdon
Damn! he thought to himself. Damn that Satan! Everything had happened so fast that it was all over by the time Mark realized he was a gargoyle. He would have said it to himself but he couldn’t because his lips, tongue, jaw, head, neck and entire body were now cold, cold, hard stone. He had once joked about having no soul, being cold on the inside, but these jokes didn’t seem funny to him anymore. Could he even be a he? There was literally no way in a million years that he would ever know.
This is how it happened. He was sitting at Starbucks—An hour ago, he thought, an hour ago!—reading, smoking, trying to impress and intimidate the lowly plebes surrounding him with his self-proclaimed “general air of condescension” when a stranger sauntered up to his black, semi-aesthetically punctured table. This was no ordinary stranger, this chiseled, six-foot-five, terrifyingly handsome specimen of a man. Oh my God, thought human-Mark, is that the cashmere and silk Dolce and Gabana suit I saw in my new Details magazine and was drooling over last night? It was the same. The stranger took out an unopened pack of cigarettes and tapped the bottom a few times. Then, dozing nonchalantly, delicately, between his smooth, recently balmed lips, appeared a perfect, white, tobacco-filled, cylindrical object. He inhaled, and the cigarette was lit. Mark’s cigarette fell out of his mouth and into his lap. As he jumped out of his chair in surprise and distress, his Marlboro Light fell to the ground. It flashed like a million tiny white-hot explosions, and then evaporated. Into thin air. It was gone. Mark slumped down into his chair.
“Hello, Mark,” the stranger purred softly, barely moving his lips. He was holding the cigarette in his hand now, the smoldering butt glowing seductively, and gently emitting a perfect stream of smoke. It wasn’t, however, producing any ash.
“How the hell did you do that? That thing with the cigarette? and just inhaling? and no lighter? and then you were smoking? That was the most bad ass thing I have ever seen!”
“Would you like to learn how?”
“Uh, yeah.”
And then Mark realized something.
“Wait, how did you know my name?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I’ve never met you, and…”
“Oh, but you have,” said the stranger, cutting him off. There was real condescension in this guy. Mark would have to learn how to do that too.
“I have?”
“Yes.”
“Ok.”
“You see, you are the kind of guy that knows me pretty well, or at least you think you do. You throw around my name like it were nothing, you say you want to be me, you say you want to sell your soul to me, you even joke about the different things you would like to get for selling you soul to me. And every time you do your cute little pagan thing or, as you would like to call it, your “neo-hedonistic” thing, you and I become a little bit closer.”
“Oh shit.”
“Really, I am rather put off. I thought you would be more excited to meet the Devil.”
“No. You don’t understand, I am excited, it’s just, well, you know, you’re, like, Satan and stuff. You’re Satan.”
“You don’t need to tell me that twice.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Anyways, Mark, let’s get down to business. You want something from me, and I want to give it to you. I have all the paper work, you just need to make a simple decision.”
“Wai-wai-wait,” Mark was in a habit of repeating this imperative so that it sounded like one word. “What is it that I want from you?”
“I really hope you’re not playing dumb with me here. Are you playing dumb, Mark?”
“No, sir.” While “sir” didn’t quite seem to be the appropriate title for the Devil, Mark could do no better in this particular situation.
“You want a lifetime of pleasure, to experience all the joys that this wonderful life on earth has to offer, to not be weighed down by the nuisance of work and money. And I want to give you all the money and happiness the world can offer. The price is small. But first, what do you think?”
What do I think? Is he seriously asking me what I think? As it turned out, Mark had thought about this a lot. The way he saw it, his life was going nowhere. All he wanted to do was read, but the big bad world would not stop getting in the way of his one simple desire, and so he had decided that his life was no longer worth living and spent his days blogging about his general disillusionment and thinking of things for which he would trade his eternal soul to Satan.
“I think that, on the outside, it sounds—promising.”
“Promising? You’ve got to give me more than that! How about this, you give me your eternal soul, you spend some time as a gargoyle, all of humanity gets to go to your precious heaven for all of eternity, and then you become non-gargoyle and have a grand old debauched time.”
“How long do I have to be a gargoyle?” Deep down inside, the uneasiness of having to make this choice was already beginning to eat away at Mark, but his mind was clouded by the possibilities of this agreement. No longer would he be forced to choose between working at Barnes and Noble or Starbucks, no longer would he care about graduate school, no longer would anything about the world and selling out and not being able to be an artist and scholar bother him because he would have no soul! How freeing!
“Oh, just a million years. But keep in mind that gargoyles have no sense of time, so really it would be like taking a nap or blinking your eyes, even though you wouldn’t be able to blink your eyes, if you were made of stone—ha, ha! that’s funny, I’m funny!—but you get the idea.”
“A million years?”
A Hermes briefcase appeared in Satan’s lap, and out of it he drew some papers and a diamond encrusted writing utensil, to gorgeous and magnificent to be burdened with the classification of “pen”. These implements he set upon the table. Then the Devil reclined in his metal chair, which he seemed to find exceedingly comfortable, and assumed the air of boredom.
Mark began to panic a little. What had he done? He was sure that there were thousands of 23-year-old recent college graduates in America who were selling their souls to the Devil right now without even thinking twice. Why me?
“Because you’re an artist, because you’re in pain, and because you want to do something real and meaningful with your life, but you can’t,” said Satan, as he puffed away at his magical cigarette. “No use beating around the bush here. So do you want the deal or not?”
Mark picked up the glittering pen, and pulled the papers toward him, turning them 180 degrees so he could read them. They were written in French.
“See,” said Satan, “if you could read that French, then you could get into grad school. But you can’t, so just take my word for it and sign. I mean, what better thing can you do with your life than save all of humanity?”
“I guess you’re ri—“ but then a woman walked by, a mother with her infant child, both beings radiant and glowing in the September twilight, and Mark saw hope, saw eternity in the eyes of that baby, decided that life was in fact worth living, even if that meant it would be lived in a strip-mall in suburban Seattle. He would not sign, he would put down the pen and…
“Nooo!!” Just then the baby reeled away from her mother and spit up all over Mark’s back and shoulder. As he turned to see what damage had been incurred on his t-shirt, he reached out to the table to set the pen down. But in all his puke-induced panic he was not careful enough to see how he put the pen down and the second the impossibly sharp point touched paper, his name was signed on that terrible pact, stuck in the Devil’s French file for all of eternity.
As his earthly body evaporated and his soul took off into the stratosphere, he was still somehow able to see and hear Satan as he coolly got up, cackled the most hideous and vapid laugh-like sound Mark had ever heard, and walked to his black, windowless sedan.
That cackle ricocheted in gargoyle-Mark’s head-shaped area for a while. If I don't have a soul, then why am I so sad? he thought. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Satan had screwed him over and now he was a gargoyle. The gargoylization process was not painful, for which Mark was thankful, but he was a gargoyle nonetheless. For a million years. There’s got to be a loop-hole, he thought. I didn’t sign my name in French! That’s it! I didn’t sign my name in French!
