The Demon in the Room

Roda Williams could hear the demon before she could see the audience. It sat in the third row most nights, on the aisle, with its legs crossed like a critic. Tonight it had moved up to the second row, which was new, and which she chose to interpret as a kind of promotion.

The green room at the Punch Line smelled like every green room she had ever been in: stale beer, the ghost of someone's body spray, and the faint, sweet rot of carpet that had absorbed two decades of nervous sweat. She liked it. It was honest.

"Five minutes," said the kid with the headset.

"Thanks, friend," Roda said.

The demon, who had followed her into the green room, was studying its fingernails. The demon's fingernails were always perfect. Roda found this annoying.

You're not funny tonight, the demon said.

"I haven't gone up yet," Roda said.

I'm telling you in advance. Saving you the embarrassment.

"Considerate."

I try.

Part One: The Set

The stage lights had the specific quality of stage lights everywhere, which is to say they were too hot and the wrong color and they made everyone in the room slightly more honest than they would otherwise have been. Roda walked to the mic and the audience did the thing audiences do, which is laugh a little before anything has been said.

"Good evening," she said.

The demon was sitting in the second row, on the aisle, exactly where she had known it would be.

She did the new five minutes. It was about her mother, and about a phone call her mother had made to her in January. The audience laughed in the places she had built for them to laugh, and they were quiet in the place she had built for them to be quiet, and at the end of it a woman in the front row was crying a little, in the good way.

The demon was applauding. Slowly. With the kind of slow applause that is not a compliment.

She had not been able to write the bit for months. She had tried in February and the bit had been about anger. She had tried in April and the bit had been about guilt. Somewhere in June she had figured out that the bit was actually about a parking garage, and after that the bit had written itself in about twenty minutes one Tuesday afternoon.

Backstage, after, the kid with the headset said, "That was incredible."

"Thanks, friend."

"Like, the mom stuff. I — my mom — anyway. That was incredible."

"Thanks."

She went out to her car. The demon walked beside her. The parking lot smelled like a dumpster that had at some point contained a lemon.

You used her, the demon said.

"I know."

You used your dying mother for a bit.

"She's not dying. She had a TIA. She's fine. She's at home. She made me a sandwich yesterday."

You used your mother for a bit.

"Yes," Roda said. She unlocked her car. "I did. That's what I do. That's the job."

The demon got in the passenger seat. It always got in the passenger seat. Roda had stopped trying to make it sit in the back about three years ago.

It was a good bit, the demon said, after a minute. It said it the way people say things they have been told they need to say in therapy.

"Yeah," Roda said. "It was."

She started the car. The radio came on. It was playing a song from a year she did not want to think about. She turned it off.

The demon stared out the window the whole way home, and did not say another thing.