Monday

5:07 on Friday evening—already into the weekend, already into my time—and I was still in the office. I leaned backwards against the printer and tried to match my inhales to its sweeping circular hum.

I was the last one here, except for Marilyn. Looking out over the field of squat, waist-high desk partitions that had replaced our cubicle walls sometime last year I saw her slouched back in her chair. Her mouth was open, though she didn’t appear to know it, and she was reading an astrology blog.

I ached with need for those last eight database summaries. I counted down the whispering mechanical clicks as the machine slipped my copies into the tray. Six…seven…beeeeeeep. The printer clacked to a halt.

As I turned around the printer told me it would give me anything I wanted.

All I had to do was take a stapler from the supply closet next to us and bludgeon Marilyn to death with it. The printer spoke directly in my head, in a high, familiar whir. It knew what I wanted, down to the brand names and sexual positions. It assured me these were reasonable aspirations. The process was nowhere near as ugly as Hollywood made it look, the printer added. Besides, Marilyn was weak and unloved.

I found this strange. Our new Canon imageRUNNER C5832 multi-function color printer and copier had been possessed since the delivery guys left it outside the service entrance in the middle of the night, with a porcelain Virgin of Guadalupe wedged in an open paper tray. But it hadn’t ever spoken to anyone.

*

Just to be clear, the printer wasn’t actually new. “Reconditioned” was the word Jack used in the exclamation point and caps heavy e-mail he sent to everyone, suggesting that Regional give him half what he was saving them on the lease as a bonus.

Copies came quick and smooth on the first day. On the second day I picked up a fresh expense summary and it was cool to the touch. The paper jams started just before our quarterly numbers were due. We followed the step-by-step jam-clear instructions on the LCD display. They took us to within two screws of disassembling the entire machine. Jack tiptoed up to the printer through the field of inky gear assemblies and fuser brackets we’d strewn down the hall. He patted its grey hood as if it were an old, drunk friend.

“She’s just getting used to the place,” he said with an anemic smile. We never found the jammed paper. The next morning every other copy came out in blood.

My semi-cubicle—the farthest away from the printer, but with a clear line of sight so you could see even minor levitation—became our couch cushion fort. The entire office crowded in and around. Except Jack. He barricaded himself in his office.

We searched every Wikipedia page linked to spirit possession and loudly asked one another what we should do. Phones rang and went giddily unanswered. Faxes and e-mails came in and we raced each other to notice them and yawp out “Ignore it! It’s not important! Focus!”

The chatter rose into a swerving three-sided argument on exactly what we were dealing with. Satan was an early contender. But only Erica—our dour, uncomfortably religious office manager—went to bat for him and he fell out of the running. A more conciliatory faction got behind the idea of a non-denominational demon. Or, we could be afflicted with the anguished spirit of the printer’s former lessee: probably a guy who had worked at the same miserable company for decades, finally made up his mind to quit, then died of a massive heart attack while printing his resignation letter. This was the most popular hypothesis. Even the pubescent dealer rep—who came in to hear Jack demand, though his door, that we be let out of our two-year contract—might have been onto something.

“Nuh-uh man. For all I know, you gots your office on some Indian burial ground,” he yelled over his shoulder as he stomped out.

Not that knowing for sure would have helped. The Catholic Church does not recognize instances of possession in non-animate objects. Individual archdioceses screen their calls, and as a general rule will not pick up after the third time. Rabbis will stay on the phone for up to an hour, but will never give you a straight answer. The Church of Scientology will help, no questions asked. They sent over a mild man in a frayed sweater vest. He hovered the cylindrical electrodes of his e-meter in circles over the Canon for too long, nodding too thoughtfully.

“Sometimes you just need to re-boot,” he finally said. He leaned over to swat the switch and had a seizure.

Additional Scientologists came and collected him, reassuring us as they lifted him, slack and twitching off the ground, that he, the situation and everything were okay, fine, perfectly fine and great. But the rest of the afternoon was tense. Since the printer was connected to the network, we started to believe that whatever-it-was would get into the server and into all our computers. It would manipulate our spreadsheets and frame us for embezzlement. (Somewhere along the line “it” became a personally vengeful entity.) From our computers it could get onto the Internet, then to every computer and printer in the world.

Without a word we scattered and started pushing desks away from the wall and ripping Ethernet cables from their sockets. We tore the sockets from the walls and hacked at phone cords with frantically unscrewed paper-cutter arms. Gil let out a whole-chested happy scream. One by one we all followed suit. It was the perfect action movie climax to my life.

We petered out, throwing mouse pads and dumping file drawers when we ran out of cords to cut. We hugged each other in sweaty silence. Gil asked what time it was. 3:56. Gil surveyed the room and sighed. He said he forgot he had a vendor he had to e-mail before four.

Eventually, the stank of burning hair and sulfur around the printer got nearly intolerable and Jack slipped a memo out from under his door, saying we could all take as much time off as we needed.

The next day I sat on my couch and half-watched The Price is Right. In junior high, when I faked sick to stay home from school, I made myself cough all day. Partly to keep my mom fooled, but partly because it seemed only fair that I should. Now I tried to really focus on the printer, to scare myself. Could it hurt me? Or kill me? As long as I kept my hands and tie away from the rollers, I didn’t see how. Could it take me, or, like, my soul, to hell or something? Hell: all I could picture was a grinning red cartoon devil poking me in the butt with a pitchfork. I laughed and went into the office.

Everyone was in when I got there. Gil was making copies.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Serious backlog of input orders this morning. I nearly fainted the first time, but…it still works.”

I felt Gil had wronged me. But the printer did still work, pretty much. Jobs under five pages you would usually get away with just some lewd stick figures and upside-down crosses in the margins. We went through a lot of white out. Big jobs were worse. You would print a 20-page presentation and half your tables would have sales figures and the other half would have blasphemy. You would snarl and say that Jack should really get a shaman in here, like he’d been talking about. Then you would re-send your job and the first 13 pages would come out fine and the last seven would be splattered with goat urine. Aside from taking much longer and being more frustrating and slightly more inexplicable, things were exactly like they always had been.

*

I stepped back from the printer. Indian ghosts did not make these offers. This was Satan.

It was like that time I saw the guy who played Urkel on Family Matters at Outback Steakhouse. I wanted to go over and say hi: to have him ratify the moment, to see where it would take me. Much more than that though, I wanted to run out and tell everyone I knew that I’d seen Urkel. But once I told everyone that it was Satan, that he had approached me directly—then what?

Anything you want, the printer said.

I tried to imagine it: everything I ever wanted. All I could imagine was me and a smiling red cartoon devil in sunglasses, floating on air mattresses in a sunny pool. I looked up and saw through the windows that it was dark out. Already? I would probably hit traffic. I wouldn’t get home until seven. I’d stay up late watching TV I didn’t like. Then sleep until noon, again, and half my Saturday would be gone.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “If you give me my last copy.” Marilyn turned around. She saw I was talking to the printer and turned back, relieved.

The machine surged to life and delivered the last summary.

“Thanks,” I thought. “I really will think about it.”

See you Monday, said the printer.

__________________________________________

Louis Wittig is a writer and editor in New York. His fiction has appeared on Storyglossia.com and his creative nonfiction has popped up in the Concho River Review, The Subway Chronicles and Alligator Juniper.