Laurie Boris

The right-hand man comes into your office. His face is ashen, palms clammy. You can feel the cold sweat from across the room. You knew this day was coming. You’d dreaded it. You’d made crisis-management action plans with alternate scenarios depending on how it went down.

It’s going down.

You pull the bottle of hard stuff out of your lower right-hand desk drawer, along with two cheap tumblers. Because you knew this day was coming.

He shakes his head—you can almost hear his thoughts rattling—and he slinks into the chair across from yours. His eyes look haunted, perhaps for good reason, but he’s a grown man and knew the risks of the job. You’re starting to doubt that now.

“How bad is it?” you finally ask.

“Bad,” he says, voice cracking.

“Twenty-fifth bad?”

He swallows. “Worse. You’ve heard the expression ‘the emperor has no clothes’?”

You smirk. “We’ve all seen the South Park episode—”

“I’m not talking about his microscopic—” He lowers his voice. “I’m talking about…all of a sudden, it’s like nobody’s buying it anymore. The act. The bullying stuff. This morning he fired two aides, and they just stood there and…laughed. And he was all red and fuming and even the vice president refused to come to his defense. To his credit, though, it would have involved running, so…” He mimicked the motion of the vice president’s stride, put up his palms in supplication, leaned back into the chair. “The kids won’t take his calls.” He whispered, “Not even Ivanka.”

It’s worse than you’d imagined. Also in your right-hand desk drawer are battle plans for several scenarios, including the accidental start of a nuclear war, walking too close to an open window overseas, a murder-suicide pact between him and Elon Musk. But you don’t have one for this. You don’t have one in the event of the loss of his so-called powers. You thought he had that bargain with the devil sewn up tight. A terrible feeling comes over you. You tap a few buttons on your keyboard, check the website.

The dread is like an anvil on your chest.

The devil had ended the president’s protection plan. Lucifer himself had left a personal note in the message box: “You were always my favorite, Donnie, but you’ve outlived your usefulness. Ciao, bello.”

Yes. This is the thing you’d dreaded most. Finally he’d pushed Lucifer too hard and the Hoofed One pulled his bargain. Now that you think about it, it was only a matter of time.

“Where is the president now?” you ask.

The man draws in a deep breath, lets it out. “In the TV room watching old episodes of Celebrity Apprentice. He didn’t even want french fries or a Diet Coke. Frankly he was…he was sucking his thumb. But you didn’t hear that from me. Anyway. For now, he’s safe, at least.”

You nod. You wonder if you should call Lucifer, plead the case, promise…whatever was demanded. A payment. A favor. A soul in exchange. In the first term you would have done it gladly.

For a moment, only for a moment, you consider the ultimate sacrifice.

And then you don’t.

You down the rest of your glass, stand, straighten your tie. “Good,” you say to the right-hand man. “Tell him I quit.”