Unsoul'd Read online

  Contents

  About this Book

  Title Page

  Wherein I Meet the Devil

  Wherein the Devil Comes Over

  Wherein My Ex Stops By and Does Not Have Sex with Me

  Wherein I Make My Way Back to Construct

  Wherein I Desperately Need an Erection and Have None to Offer

  Wherein I Consult Tayvon for Advice

  Wherein the Devil Returns at an Inopportune Moment

  Wherein I Have a Smoothie

  Wherein I Double-Check My Contract

  Wherein My Agent Takes Me to Lunch

  Wherein I Look at Pregnant, Tattooed Women

  Wherein I Lay Awake All Night

  Wherein I Try to Write

  Wherein I tell Gym Girl a Secret

  Wherein the Devil Calls Me a Sap

  Wherein I Write. For Real.

  Wherein I Speak to My Father

  Wherein I Make the Devil Happy

  Wherein I Finally Do It

  Wherein I Get an Assist from the Devil

  Wherein I Wake Up

  Wherein Fi Visits One Last Time Before the World Changes

  Wherein the World Changes

  Wherein I Am Famous

  FOUR MONTHS LATER

  Wherein I Get Back to It

  Wherein I Hang with the Devil

  Wherein My Book Launches

  Wherein I Mingle

  Wherein I Meet Lacey

  Wherein I Sign Books

  Wherein I Fuck

  Wherein I Attempt to Return

  Wherein I Lie My Ass Off

  Wherein I Tour

  Wherein I Talk to My Dad Again

  Wherein I Swear Not To

  Wherein I Eat Part of a Bag of Peanuts

  Wherein I Hollywood

  Wherein I Do it by Text

  Wherein I Go to a Hollywood Party

  Wherein I... Oh, Hell -- Take a Wild Guess

  Wherein I Piss

  Wherein I Wake

  Wherein I Invite

  Wherein I Confess

  Wherein I Go to a Hell of My Own Making

  Wherein I Make the Move

  Wherein I Hollywood. Again.

  Wherein I See Lacey Again

  Wherein I Blow Off the Book

  Wherein Kiki Finds Out

  Wherein Kiki and I Cope

  Wherein I Waken to a Surprise

  Wherein I Look for Evidence

  Wherein I Have a Threesome with Kiki and Fi

  Wherein I Go Through the Motions

  Wherein I Fuck over Del

  Wherein It Doesn't Happen. (Nor Does the Other Thing)

  Wherein My Evil Backstabbing Pays Off

  Wherein the Devil Explains

  Wherein I Explain

  Wherein I Make the Call

  Wherein I Win

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About this Book

  Unsoul'd

  a dirty little fable

  by Barry Lyga

  "That day, I had a bagel for breakfast and sold my soul to the devil. In retrospect, the bagel was probably a mistake."

  Randall Banner is thirty-five years old, a middling mid-list author who yearns for more of everything: More attention. More fame. More money. More fans.

  Then, one quiet morning, he meets the devil while pounding away at his laptop at his usual coffee shop. Soon, a deal is made, a contract is signed, and Randall is on his way to fame and fortune unlike any he ever imagined.

  What follows is a bawdy, hilarious, yet harrowing tale of one man, one devil, and a deal that could change the world.

  UNSOUL'D

  a dirty little fable

  by Barry Lyga

  Wherein I Meet the Devil

  That day, I had a bagel for breakfast and sold my soul to the devil. In retrospect, the bagel was probably a mistake.

  I met both the bagel and the devil at Construct Coffee on Bond Street. "We don't make coffee," their motto proclaimed. "We build it!"

  They knew me there. I was one of the small legion of people pounding away at a laptop while drinking overpriced coffee by the quart, usually eating breakfast and lunch (and sometimes an early dinner). I had sampled everything on the menu at least twice. (I recommend the cilantro grilled chicken sandwich, by the way. To. Die. For.) As far as I could tell, though, of the Legion of Keyboard Pounders, I was the only one successful enough to make a full-time living at it. I based this on comments overheard between my fellow Keyboard Pounders, eavesdropping on the occasional cellphone call, and the fact that they spent most of their time dicking around on e-mail while I actually worked.

  I know that sounds smug, but it comes with the territory. Brooklyn + coffee shop + authorial bent + Apple laptop + four books published in six years = Smug.

  The bagel tasted a little off that morning. Not enough for me to stop eating it, but just enough for me to notice. I thought maybe some coffee had dripped into the cream cheese, accounting for the slight bitter taste. But, no -- nothing so vague or boring. It had instead gone bad, leading later to what could only be described as several epic bathroom encounters that each lasted the length of a sitcom.

  "Would you really?" a voice asked.

  I looked up from my laptop screen. Sitting across from me (in flagrant violation of unwritten coffee-shop-writing etiquette) was a guy in his mid-to-late twenties. Skull shaved sheen-smooth under a backwards-turned ball cap. A lazy grin over a scruffy chin beard. Weathered Hawaiian shirt over khaki shorts. Your basic look from the Summer Hipster Collection.

  "I'm sorry?" I said.

  "Why do people say that?" he asked with a complete lack of curiosity. "Why are you sorry? I'm the one who sat down and interrupted you. Know what I mean?"

  "Right. Can I help you?"

  He shrugged and flicked a hand in the general direction of my laptop, as though he could barely summon the energy to move even that much. "Would you?" he asked. "Would you really?"

  I looked down at my screen. There, in the middle of the page, I had typed:

  I WOULD SELL MY SOUL TO THE DEVIL FOR A HIT BOOK

  Digression time: Yes, I was the most successful of the regular members of the Legion of Keyboard Pounders who frequented Construct Coffee while the rest of the world worked its soul-deadening nine-to-fives, but "most successful" is, by definition, relative. Four books in six years was nothing to dismiss out of hand, but those four books had not exactly skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists. Indeed, those books had not exactly skyrocketed to the bottom of the bestseller lists. The books had skyrocketed exactly nowhere, and the bestseller lists didn't invite my books to their parties.

  I am most charitably described as having a "cult following," which sounds vaguely sexy and intriguing until you realize that it means no one except for about five thousand hardcore fans knows my name. Just enough people to keep my publisher buying books, but not enough to "break out" and get the movie deals, the fat advance checks, the stuff you see in movies about writers. I'm the middle class, suburban cul-de-sac of authors.

  It's not a bad life. Certainly better than most. But, yes, I wanted -- just once -- to experience the rush of capital-S-Success. I wanted to see a book of mine on a shelf with the words "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR" above my name. It wasn't ego -- not entirely, at least -- but rather that it would be nice to achieve the top honor in my field. Every player on a baseball diamond dreams of winning the World Series. Every newspaper reporter dreams of the Pulitzer.

  I dreamed of actually selling enough books that my father could stop calling to tell me he couldn't find my books on the shelves at his local Barnes & Noble.

  "I'm trying to work," I said to the guy, gently. I'm not sure why I said it gently. He was interrupting me, again in flag
rant flouting of sacred unwritten coffee shop rules, which state that people safely ensconced behind their laptops are Serious Artists, Hard at Work, and Not to be Bothered.

  He smirked as though he knew better. And the truth of the matter is that I'd spent the better part of the last hour skimming through what I'd written yesterday, noodling around with the wording in an e-mail to one of my publisher's publicists (wanting to sound insistent without coming across as needy or pushy), and filling in an online crossword puzzle. And at some point in all of that, thinking about my new book, slated for publication in mere months, I'd typed the bit about my soul.

  "I'm just curious," he went on, again without the slightest hint of curiosity. "Would you really sell your soul?"

  "Sure," I said testily. "Why not?"

  "Dude!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms out wide, as if to hug me, but still leaning back in his chair. "It's your lucky day! Let's make it happen."

  I glanced around to see if anyone was disturbed or even paying attention. But everyone else was engrossed in their laptops, most of them plugged into their earbuds and ignoring the world around them in favor of the worlds of their individual screens.

  "You're going to buy my soul?"

  He nodded, his eyes green and clear, like lily pads on water. "If you're selling, I'm buying."

  I laughed. "So, what, are you the devil or something?"

  "Uh huh. Do we have a deal? Your soul in exchange for a hit book. Not a bad deal, I have to say. I've made worse in my day."

  I shook my head and pointedly returned my attention to my laptop, hoping the lunatic would get the point and absquatulate. (That's an Old West word for "run away." Don't you love stuff like that? I do.)

  Before I could get my fingers on the keys, though, the following appeared on my screen:

  COME ON, MAN. LET'S MAKE A DEAL!

  Over the lid of my laptop, the slacker dude still grinned lazily at me.

  "How did you do that?" I asked.

  He said nothing.

  "Are you hacking in or something?"

  He held up his empty hands and waggled his fingers. At the same time, this showed up on my screen:

  NOTHING IN MY HANDS...

  I looked around. "Is there someone else in here with you? Is this some kind of--"

  JOKE? NO. I'M ALONE. WELL, SORT OF. AFTER ALL, "WE ARE LEGION" AND ALL THAT. BUT YOU GET MY POINT, RIGHT?

  "You really are the devil," I whispered.

  His head bobbed. "Yep. Let's go ahead and do this, OK?" Before I knew what was happening, he'd pushed my laptop to one side and slid a sheet of paper over to me.

  CONTRACT

  I, Randall Banner, do hereby sell my soul to the devil in exchange for a hit book.

  It had a blank for me to sign my name, as well as a spot where the devil had already scrawled something indecipherable.

  "You're kidding, right? That's all there is to it?"

  He shrugged. "I don't like to mess around with all the niggling little details. Just because I invented lawyers doesn't mean I have to use them. There are some things even I won't do."

  "But... What's the definition of a 'hit book?' How do I know you won't--"

  He sighed largely, expansively. "Come on, Randy. You've seen this movie before. You know how it goes. I'm going to give you what you want and try to screw you somehow. You're going to try to figure out a way around it. Do you really think if this contract was thirty pages longer and had all kinds of details that that would change anything? This isn't one of those stories."

  He had a point.

  "I want a big hit," I told him. "Like Stephen King big. J. K. Rowling big."

  He chuckled and leaned in. "I know what I'm doing, Randy. How do you think Stevie and JoJo got where they are today?"

  "You could be lying to me. You're the devil."

  "I have no reason to lie. If you don't want to sell me your soul, someone else will. Hey!" He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, "Anyone here want to sell their soul for a hit book?"

  Five hands shot up.

  "See?"

  "Fine. Fine." I straightened the contract in front of me. "Do I sign it in blood?"

  The devil recoiled in disgust. "Dude! Gross! What would that accomplish?"

  "I don't know."

  He tossed a cheap Bic pen in my direction. "Just sign it. Then the good stuff happens."

  I wish I could say that I hesitated, that I took a moment to contemplate what I was about to do to my immortal soul. But I didn't. I thought only of finally doing more than just getting by, of finally being able to say, "Definitely" when people at parties asked, "Have you written anything I might have heard of?"

  I signed my name.

  The devil grinned his lazy hipster/surfer grin. I half-expected him to vanish, but instead, he just gave me a thumb's up from across the table and then ordered a half-caf macchiato.

  Wherein the Devil Comes Over

  The next day, the devil rang my doorbell.

  I was surly and out-of-sorts, having eaten nothing but plain rice cakes and drunk nothing but ginger ale and Pepto-Bismoll since the previous day's Olympic-level bathroom breaks. Needless to say, with my stomach still churning and clenching, I did not greet the devil with bonhomie or open arms when he showed up at the door of my cramped little Brooklyn apartment. Rather, I snapped, "What are you doing here? You did this to me, didn't you?" gesturing vaguely in the direction of my rebellious intestines.

  He arched an eyebrow. He was dressed almost identically to the first time I'd seen him. Maybe the shirt was a different color. "I didn't do anything to you. A barista who forgot to wash his hands and a little escherichia coli 'did this' to you."

  I regarded him suspiciously, which, I believe, is the best possible way to regard the devil. "What are you doing here?"

  "Can I come in?"

  "I guess."

  He glanced around my abode as though it and everything within was exactly as he had anticipated. "You weren't at the coffee shop today. Not pounding the keys. Thought maybe you were having second thoughts."

  "No, I just didn't get any sleep last night because my guts were trying to prove their strength by squeezing out of me everything I've eaten since 1999."

  "Ah, 1999. Good year." He gazed wistfully in the general direction of my kitchen, perhaps appropriate since I believe the stove dates from 1999, possibly earlier.

  "I thought maybe this is what it felt like when you lost your soul," I told him.

  "No, this is what it feels like when you lose your lunch and a significant percentage of sphincter control."

  At this point, I began to wonder: Had I really sold my soul to the devil? Was this guy really the devil at all or just a freeloading slacker?

  "I know what you're wondering," he said with a grin. "They all wonder at some point. Got anything to drink around here?"

  I waved him in the general direction of the fridge and shuffled off to the sofa, where I lay my groaning self down. My stomach gurgled, trying to convince me that I was hungry, but I was wise to its tricks now. It just wanted more fuel to shoot out of my nether port at top velocity.

  "You're a tremendous host," the devil deadpanned, joining me with a beer in one hand and a glass of fizzy, ginger-ale-y delight in the other. "I mean, I feel like I'm family."

  I sipped the ginger ale gratefully as the devil settled into a seat opposite the sofa. In my apartment, "opposite the sofa" meant "almost on top of the sofa," so we weren't far apart.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "Hanging out."

  "You don't have anywhere better to be?"

  "This whole planet is one big eyesore to me. Makes no difference."

  "But why my apartment?"

  "Where else should I be?"

  "I don't know. Out in the world. Causing misery among people."

  The devil shrugged. "You people do a fine job making yourselves miserable. You do have cable, right?"

  I threw the remote at him and closed my eyes, sipping more b
lissful ginger ale. "As I was trapped in the bathroom last night, I really thought this was how my soul was being taken from me," I told him as he clicked on the TV. "Or maybe God was punishing me for selling it."

  "You flatter yourself that of the billions of souls on the planet, the Old Man would be paying attention to yours. Oh! Real Housewives. I love this shit."

  "So are you here for it now? Are you going to take my soul now, while I'm in agony?" The thought wasn't as disturbing as you might think. Perhaps having my immortal soul ripped from my body would distract me from the contractions in my gut.

  The devil made a pfft sound and flapped the notion away with his hand, staring at middle-aged, silicone-enhanced cleavage on the TV screen. "Dude, chillax. You still have your soul. I haven't lived up to my end of the bargain, after all."

  "But--"

  "Trust me," he said in a voice that was disconcertingly soothing. "I work in mysterious ways."

  "I thought that was the other guy."

  "Who do you think he copied it from?"

  On that note, I laid my woozy head down on a pillow and drifted off to sleep.

  When I woke up, hours had passed -- the light in my living room/kitchen/dining room/office's sole window had gone slightly gray, and the devil was now idly flipping channels. Law & Order zipped by, replaced by Law & Order: Criminal Intent, then Law & Order: LA, then Law & Order: SVU.

  "How long have I been--"

  "Hush!" the devil admonished, finally coming to a halt on an episode of Law & Order: Trial by Jury. "No one ever reruns these. Wait for the commercial."

  I felt better. The nap had been the final tonic needed. My stomach clenched a bit, but in genuine hunger this time. I enjoyed the sensation of lying on the sofa without the fear that I would unexpectedly test the Scotchgarding of the cushions.

  At a commercial break, the devil glanced at the nonexistent watch on his wrist and said, "You've been out for four hours, twenty-seven minutes, and nineteen seconds. Long enough for me to finish the Real Housewives marathon, which -- and hear me on this one -- is the Old Man's real gift to humanity."