It was the age of invisible wealth – when men who did nothing, who produced nothing and owned nothing and offered nothing except a steady, continuous stream of ones and zeroes, became rich while they slept and awoke to the sudden and disconcerting realization that they ruled the world. It was the age of men like Jeff Bezos – a name nobody knew except by the empire of information he organized – made Time’s man of the year, and high-pitched tennis game of bouncing satellite signals. It was the age of men who did nothing but sit in their claw-wheeled office chairs in front of flickering white screens, and conjured money from them as easily as an ATM – and without a bank card. Men with ideas – no matter how ludicrous – punched keys like those hypothetical monkeys typing up Shakespeare, created search engines and new online banking services that also produced no product or offered no unique service, but did it online, where the common man in his underpants and his hand clutched around a mug of coffee could do it without moving any more than his eyes and his right hand. The word “entrepreneurs” meant people whose toast had emerged from the toaster with a blurred silhouette of some flighty daughter of the nouveau-nouveau-riche who skipped out on her wedding from nerves and ended up in the middle of a scandal as mighty as any politician’s, and offered it on e-bay for a fortune of their own. Fame, wealth, power – these were the arbitrary gifts of little counters on the bottoms of pages, stylishly designed like a speedometer with rotating numbers, tallying how many visitors there had been since creation. And there was no formula of prediction for that.

I had better reasons than most. I needed to go to college. When I think back to how many people were making multiple millions without even that small pittance, maybe I should have skipped it and just taken to the mouse and keyboard like every other dumb-luck-rich-fuck. But my parents had instilled in me that wholly debilitating respect for knowledge and education that ends up trapping perfectly healthy young individuals in the ivory tower for the duration of their lives, only to perpetuate that same misguided respect and imprisonment. But college tuition rates were rising as quickly as the amount of money flowing into the market from the software-lottery winners, and the expense of going to Harvard without a dynasty of predecessors or the sort of ten-year-old-college-level test scores that you hear about every now and again (though you never hear about what happens to them afterward), I was forced to find my own means of funding. And in the spirit of the age, and in keeping with my own certain flair for the dramatic, I decided to sell my soul on e-bay.

In hindsight, it was far easier than it should have been, but I supposed that was just how e-bay worked. All of these mega-websites with their library of pages and links like a pick-a-path edition of The Brothers Karamazov, somehow simplifying the task of driving down to the local Wal-Mart, which was in turn a simplification of driving to the town square and walking in and out of so many individual specialty shops, were supposed to paradoxically streamline the act of selling or buying, and did, and it was hardly an hour until I had the required set of bits sailing into every search engine across the country like a virus that everybody wants to contract.

By the next morning, there were bids on the table in five-digit numbers. At the end of the week, I was looking at eight-digit numbers. And then somebody requested a formal meeting with me to talk over the purchase – some big-time software manufacturer and web-host in Seattle – and I was at the swankiest restaurant in a fifty-mile radius, wearing the nicest suit in my closet and looking over a table full of slimy hors d’ouevres which I had never seen before except in old movies, fifteen minutes before my appointment was actually scheduled – you get antsy when you start thinking about interminable trailing zeroes too hard and too long – and my buyer walked into the room.

He had jet-black, mousse-slicked hair that swam down the back of his skull to the nape of his neck and flipped outward like a collar of fine, black spikes. His suit was deep blue with pinstripes of red sliding down the jacket and slacks in a statement that said, quite blatantly, “I’m too obnoxiously rich to care that you think my suit is too obnoxiously rich.” He had an intricate, expansive wristwatch with a hundred buttons and knobs, each with their own convenient and useless function, and a slick black cell phone that slid out of his sleeves like a trick knife. His belt was lined with devices – pagers and palm pilots and personal speech recorders, all blinking and displaying their pointless messages, detecting invisible signals in the air like Geiger counters of the information age, all in that identical jet-black color scheme, sharp and aerodynamic and engineered by teams of Japanese scientists working round-the-clock to make every inconvenient convenience look damn cool, and all of them scrolling messages across LCD displays and flashing or blinking silently to themselves as he sat down and covered them with the red silk napkin, making no move to acknowledge any of them.

He looked at me through square, frameless sunglasses. He made a two-fingered gesture in the air and there were suddenly waiters surrounding us.

“The veal,” he said. “Best in house. I want the goddamn name of the cow – lineage back seven generations. Do it in fifteen minutes and I’ll make you all richer than God.” The waiters scattered again and I looked around at all the other patrons, but the restaurant was suddenly empty except for the pinstriped connoisseur and his team of black-suited attendants that stood faceless and inscrutable with their earphone transmitters buzzing away silently – that faint mechanical whine that you hear when the television is on in the next room, even over the sound of the programming itself.

“Let’s cut the crap,” he said, pulling out a sheet of pure-white paper and a sharp-looking black pen with a gleaming silver tip. He lowered his sunglasses and looked at me with oddly-red eyes. “I’m the devil. And I’m a busy man. I want to be out of here before the manager shows up to personally offer us the house’s best red wine. What do you want. I can top any offer.”

You would think that I’d be scared. Or that some glimmer of common sense would light up in my brain and make me think about what I was doing – the ethical implications of actually selling my soul to the devil. Or that seventeen years of wasted dogmatic preaching from the church would somehow hold up a holy cross before my brain and ward off the temptation. You’d think it would somehow be more complicated than it was, but it wasn’t. No ethical equivocation. No angst or doubt. The only thing that was running through my mind was literally, “Shit – I’m in a great bargaining position.”

And I’m a writer, naturally, so I barely even hesitate before I’m saying, “I want to know the greatest story that could ever be written.”

And the devil doesn’t miss a beat. “Anything else?”

I saved myself some dignity: “A million dollars,” I said. “College expenses.”

The devil whisked the pen out of my hands and scrawled an illegible mark on the left-hand dotted line – just long enough to look like a signature, but too high and square and glowing like a firebrand as he wrote it. Then he offered the pen and paper to me. With hardly a glance at the terms of the contract – my own words, verbatim – I put the pen to the page. It didn’t write. The devil glared at me over his sunglasses. Taking the hint, I stabbed the sharp point of the pen into my finger – it didn’t even hurt, well up, or bleed – and signed over my name. In blood.

“A pleasure,” the devil said, shaking my hand and taking back the paper and pen with the other.

“Wait a second,” I said, and the devil sat back in his chair, impatiently looking at me over his sunglasses. “What about your end? The greatest story ever written?”

“I don’t have time for this,” the devil said, looking at his watch and sweeping one long, curved finger over the interfaces of his many blinking and gleaming devices. “I can’t just give it to you. It doesn’t work that way. Give it a little time, and I’ll get it to you eventually.” I tried to argue but he stopped me. “Technically,” he said, “you didn’t tell me when, so I’ve got all the time in the world. Oversight on your part. But I won’t screw with you or anything. You’ll get it before you die.”

“How can I get in touch with you?” I asked.

His cell phone appeared in one hand. “I’m in the machines,” he said, tapping it. “Any damned answering machine or voice mail or chat room. You’ll figure it out.” He got up, and left.

The million dollars appeared in my e-bay account via electronic-funds-transfer. And then it was just a matter of waiting.

That summer, after I graduated, I called up Dell customer service from a beach house on the California coastline where my friends and I were hanging out for the summer. “You finish that story yet?” I asked.

“You’ll get it soon,” he said.

My first semester at college, during a seminar hosted by my favorite writer, I snuck out to the bathroom and called my parents’ answering machine. “I will be able to write it down, right?”

“You’ll have plenty of time,” he said.

Spring break of my freshman year, I went to Alaska on a road trip. While I was in the cabin one night, before I went to bed, I logged onto World of Warcraft and met him outside a dungeon. “It will be something I can write, won’t it?”

“It won’t be quite the same,” he said, “but yeah, you can try.”

That summer, I took an internship in New York City and e-mailed my boss’s auto-response system while he took his family to DisneyWorld. “How long’s the story going to be?”

“Depends on how you write it,” he said.

That spring, one of my professors took me to a writing conference in Iowa. I messaged my friend’s away message on AOL Instant Messenger. “This isn’t something somebody else has written – like the Bible – right?”

“Jesus!” he replied. “What the hell do you take me for?”

The next year, I published my first short story in the New Yorker. It was met with high praise by critics and an editor contacted me to add the piece to an anthology. When I returned his call, I wandered through a dozen layers of push-button automata. “Nobody’s ever even heard this story before, right?”

“It’s more unique than your fingerprint,” he said.

And then, half-way through my first draft of my first novel, I figured it out. I pulled out my cell phone and called the United Nations, just to be ironic. I was met by yet another helpful, recorded female voice.

“You bastard. It’s my life, isn’t it. That’s the schtick. It’s not even original, but some trite, Reader’s Digest moral. You tell me the greatest story that’s ever been told, but you don’t have to, because I’m living it out right now.”

“Yep,” he said. “Now get writing.”