243 - Two Hundred Forty Three

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[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters, Birdie? 

We’re stopped off the highway for some lunch—Harry has set up a little fire so we can have something hot, I don’t know why. She knows I’m not fussy about what I eat, especially on the road, but maybe she just wanted to stretch her legs. 

It is…a lot harder to be stuck in a car with her than a house. I’m happy to sit there and focus on driving, let the static of the radio fill the silence between us, but Harry has never been one for awkward silence. Angry silence, judgmental silence, cold silence, comfortable silence even…sure. But if she feels like she’s not the one controlling the silence…well. 

Anyway, she was telling me about The Screwtape Letters. It’s a C.S. Lewis book. When she started in on explaining it to me, I really had no idea what she was talking about—I thought she was just trying to cut the tension between us. But it ended up being sort of relevant. Relevant to you specifically. 

It sounds nothing like the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe stuff he wrote, though I guess those were meant for kids and this one was not. It’s about these two devils—demons? Servants of hell, I guess, I don’t know exactly what they’re called in the book. Harry says it was supposed to be a satire, but nothing about it sounded that funny. 

The older demon, Screwtape, is writing all these, yeah you guessed it, letters to this younger demon Wormwood. And he’s telling Wormwood how to corrupt the soul of this one human. Which, to me, seems a little ridiculous. In my experience, human beings are pretty corruptible, I can’t imagine that you’d ever need two demons on the job. I don’t know, maybe this one guy was particularly upstanding. 

I don’t know if you’re picking up on the resemblance yet, but Harry thinks that you and Fox are a bit like Screwtape and Wormwood, with me caught in the middle. I told her I’m hardly a pure of heart person that needs to be tempted into surrendering my soul to Satan or whatever, and besides, aren’t we already in hell? She didn’t take that very well. 

Between this and the Asimov, you’ve got to wonder if some of these authors knew something the rest of us didn’t. Did they get punted into their own timeline offshoots only to somehow find their way back?

The long and short of it was that Harry does not think I should trust you. Because for all we know, you and Fox are playing a twisted game over the ownership of my immortal soul. 

But I do trust you. Maybe I shouldn’t. Actually, I probably shouldn’t. But I do. I just wish you could explain it all to me. Even just one thing. 

[click, static]

[beeps]

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Want to explain