The Devil and Amanda Ogilvie

by Eric Robert Nolan

Amanda envied the weak.

That was what her father called them—the middle and working-class pedestrian commuters who rushed along Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue sidewalk, instead of being coursed, as she was, by a private driver through the ephemeral and hazardous, shifting-iron river that was New York City traffic.

“Weak.” Her father stated it flatly. He’d always had a habit of expressing what he imagined as his profundity in one-word sentences. It was his parsimonious nature, perhaps—the same parsimony and unsympathetic character that had allowed him to grow Platinum Circle like a fierce new empire into the largest publishing house in New York. She remembered him as a stern and self-congratulating Buddha – bald head and all – occupying the vast brown leather chair in his study like a dull despot, eyes fixed on some indeterminate point in some high corner in the long, ornately oaked room.

“Weak.” He was the paragon of classism, and he was unabashed. And he indeed regarded average people as weak. A man’s success, he’d told her when she was only 11, was the sum of his efforts in life. That was why he had succeeded where others had not. (“Effort.” “Distinction.”) That was why the life he had provided for her had been that of a veritable modern princess.

She’d never wanted a fairy tale existence. On this brisk and busy November morning, her gaze beyond her limousine window gave her pause to resent the visions of castles in her head.

Tasks. That was the word that defined her this morning, as it did every morning. It was a recurring and urgent, omnipresent directive in her mind. She returned her gaze to the great pearl-colored purse on her lap. Being a Manhattan resident (and being the “Princess” of the Platinum Circle empire) had long since conditioned her into an existence that was quick and ordered at all times. Goals and objectives, tasks in endless sequences. She performed them all, one by one, indifferently and quickly. She was the paradigmatic hurried New Yorker, and she hated herself for it.

Tasks. Goals. Objectives. As Platinum Circle’s Princess (or Queen perhaps, with her father’s passing three years ago), her throne was the head of its editorial board, among other things. She was late for her weekday reign at the head of its long oak table, her various department heads arranged along its length like humble and aspirational knights. They all always looked so young to her. She was 40 now, and the table’s assorted bright faces were mostly between 22 and 30 – eager, fecund minds out of Vassar, Brown and Amherst. Her father had believed in hiring young, the better to exploit the same energetic ambition that had once driven him as a nascent emperor. (“Resources,” he’d called his people. That or, in one of his more derisive tones, “literati.”)

The river churned; cars wove. Her driver was an expert, though, and wove right along with them. Anatoliy was a staid-looking, stocky, square-faced Russian with a few qualities that seemed invaluable to her—not the least of which was his taciturn nature. One of the few characteristics she had shared with her father was her abhorrence of small talk.

Tasks. Order. Sequences. Parsimony with words—was this another unwanted inheritance from her father, like a white elephant gift?

She thumbed through the great, pearl-colored purse; its items were boxes to be neatly checked off in her mind. Makeup, with which to make herself regal. Cell phone, for overseeing vassals. Shopping list, scribbled in bright blue ink and her own high, hurried, yet still-pretty cursive. Reading glasses, which she wore reluctantly at the daily oak table. (Had approaching midlife recently made those more necessary?) An overly ornamental silver watch she’d needed to return to an overly ornamental former husband. (And hadn’t that thrown her kingdom into scandal when she’d divorced—Amanda Stockton, daughter of the great and renowned Leonard Ogilvie, had wanted to be Amanda Ogilvie again? How the indolent society earls had gossiped and privately balked at that.)

She was busy, she was rich. She was powerful, within the sporadically warring feudal framework of the publishing economy. She had it all.

And she hated it. Amanda had hated her father, too, privately—this despite loving him, as all daughters do. Did that make sense? Ambivalence. The pearl-colored purse in her lap was like an oversized bauble. Was it Steinbeck’s pearl—arousing others’ envy, but nonetheless a curse?

Her eyes returned to the pedestrians in the gathering coolness of their hectic autumn morning, hastening along in their colorful jackets.

Amanda wanted to be “weak.” For her father’s pejorative monosyllable described the life she secretly envied—watching the passersby on the sidewalk, she imagined their hearts holding things that hers did not: friendships (genuine friendships), meaning beyond boardrooms, depth instead of corporate politics and a purpose beyond annual reports. She was a victim of circumstance; she’d grown up under an overwhelming influence that was never intentionally adverse, yet still it stunted her in ways that were both subtle and immutable. It wasn’t the wealth—she firmly understood that people of great means could have lives full of happiness and meaning. It was something else.

It was difficult for her to articulate her father’s influence—even to herself. All the long years of her childhood—indeed, her very life—had been a kind of tutelage under that sparsely worded guru. He was “spiritual” person, whether he knew it or not (he’d have hated the term), but his spiritualism was blunt and venal—worshipping the great Golden Calf of commerce.

His was the spirit of feudalism—of slavish adherence to class, the stratified social structure that, to her, seemed to be America’s veiled but pervasive ghost of the Old World. Propriety dictated that she rule above the serfs, and not lead among them. As her father had, she maintained a discreet distance from her administrators, directors, employees and—most certainly—writers. She was at her subculture’s apex—not just professionally, but personally as well. Amanda grew up with the abiding, restrictive, tacit lesson that she would always be judged by the company she kept.

This made for a homogenous life. With her peers determined by class, she was surrounded exclusively by people who were very much like she was—wealthy, bourgeois … and removed. Her closest confidant (if she could be called that) was Mia Turner, whose own Cardinalis Publishing was a distant rival of Platinum Circle. Mia’s primary avocation in life seemed to be hiring and firing “the help,” about whom she spoke as a disposable and perpetually frustrating resource. “It is so hard,” she said, unknowingly invoking the patent cliché, “to find good help nowadays.”

Amanda had once tried to engage Mia in a conversation about the newest book of poetry that Cardinalis had produced—one by an engaging Somaliimmigrant whose command of English was comparable to that of Walt Whitman in Amanda’s estimation. It had been a poolside chat at Mia’s resplendent home in Glen Cove, Long Island.

“Oh,” Mia had responded in tones both dry and sardonic, “I don’t read the poetry books.”

Amanda regarded her advancing midlife with her own particular apprehension. After four decades, would a lifelong influence of feudalism finally become a truly indelible part of her character? Would she one day look inward and find the ghost of her father’s narrowness, with the same horror with which she might discover a lump in her breast?

Amanda wanted ... the disparate America. The pedestrians in their colorful jackets seemed ethereal, in a way, seen from her limousine window. They bustled brightly along in bundled shades of red, orange and blue. They included members of seemingly every race, religion, background and income level. She wondered what sort of circles they traveled in. She wondered whether they read poetry.

She contemplated leaving the car. Why not emerge from her gilded dhow upon the iron river, if only for this morning, and join the people on the sidewalk? Why not simply walk to work on this fine autumn day? Was there the chance, even, that she might even make a new acquaintance? Perhaps not—this was still New York, after all. But what if she simply exchanged a few friendly words with the proprietor of a newsstand, after purchasing her black coffee, instead of having it handed to her at her office? Might it feel refreshing only to leave the insulated finery of her limo?

Or, even better yet, might she simply take the day off?

Then, within the shifting river, another car pulled alongside hers.

The limousine next to hers was an oblong green bullet. Its color was …. Indescribably different. The hue of it was drab green—dark olive, like the plainer, deeper shades of worn dollar bills. And yet its sheen was nearly blinding—a bright, metallic iridescence. It was like some emerald ethereal metal forged by the frost giants of Norse myth. It almost hurt to look at, due to some preternatural quality to its luster. Amanda shielded her eyes from what first appeared as the harsh glint of directly reflected sunlight. And then she remembered that the day was gray.

The window descended before the car’s back seat. And a round, snowy white face appeared there, its sparkling, impossible all-white eyes engaging her directly. Without even realizing what she was doing, Amanda opened her own back seat window, as though some spell compelled her to greet the owner of those startling eyes.

“AMANDA.”

The voice was rich and deep. Its smile was slim and quivering.

A murmur then met her ears – this time from the front seat of her own vehicle. “Hffffff …” The inarticulate sigh issued from Anatoliy’s thick lips and square jawline – angled upward now as his head tilted back, like drunk passing out. Amanda could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. Their characteristic clear gray-blue seemed clouded now, as his eyelids drooped. There, across his typically stern gaze, an eldritch fog had eclipsed the bright winter midday.

And then the ivory face in the neighboring vehicle leaned forward to address her further. In a somehow horrible fashion, he seemed immeasurably handsome. High white cheeks firmed up his countenance like ramparts of a fairy tale fortress—sharp. A square white chin, also sharply lined, anchored it above his massive frame.

His sparkling white eyes were impossible to describe. They simultaneously held both an endlessly refined intelligence and the dour, dull zeal of the wolf. And they held a further contradiction—they at once seemed both bored and yet icily, hatefully ravenous.

”You must reign at Platinum Circle.”

Then the face changed. His jaws opened into an unnatural ellipse—and then a perfect circle, like the mouth of wide, opal well. His eyes became crackling round sparks that strobed between electric green and painful, blinding white.

The immense mouth gaped—a perfect symmetrical ring. It was as round as a clock. It was a platinum circle. Then the very shape of the stranger’s face quivered and then rounded. From the white flesh sprang ringed legions of teeth in phalanxes of long needles. His shoulders narrowed and his form appeared to lengthen. What was formerly a man was now a writhing white stalk in the limo, its pale face’s largest feature a mouth like an eel.

He was now a muscled lamprey. A thick and winding white neck undulated beneath his two too-bright eyes. The moon-colored skin pulsed and moved, as though its neck had sought to dislodge the troublesome oversized morsel of an unfortunate deep-sea fish it had gobbled up too greedily.

The voice became high and winding, wild and hoarse...

"Amanda—go to work.  It is your very birthright to reign over the others, those ... mere aesthetes, those serfs of gauche aspiration.  They are a bland gaggle of inebriates and imbeciles—the blind who would lead the blind with their own bleating.  Such hubris!  They grasp at fool's gold with their feeble, febrile dreams and feckless scrawling.  And in your own grasp, they must remain.  It's part of the plan, Amanda—the plan," here the chalk-colored figure chortled at her, "and who better appreciates a good plan than an Ogilvie?”

"He is The Devil," Amanda heard herself think.  Or maybe she'd spoken the thought aloud—she was so stupefied by his glare that she could not be sure.  She did know this—it was her first coherent thought since she had laid eyes upon that terrible white face.  "But he isn't tempting me. He's obstructing me. The Devil deters."

"Besides," the figure continued, "we can't have you catching some nasty sense of meaning."

Then, mercifully, the window in the green car ascended once again, though she could still see the winding white monstrosity of its rider writhe behind the tinted window. Finally, the opulent, oblong bullet shot forward, its silvery viridescence slicing through traffic like the blade of an otherworldly scythe.

Anatoliy snapped awake. His eyelids fluttered; his gray-blue eyes, now clear of fog, regarded the street ahead nonchalantly. He seemed unaware he had, only a moment earlier, been unconscious.

No, Amanda had never wanted a fairy tale existence. But, as the voice had exhorted to her, she now seemed mortgaged to it. The interloper had co-opted the demon of her father’s own venal spirit. Some brutal, unearthly thing had shanghaied his ghost, wielding his life’s oppression the way that a troll might wield an ax.

Still envying “the weak,” envying passersby, still wishing for the sidewalk, Amanda remained alone, in the back of her limousine.

She was on her way to work.