Damned

  More and more I see that Hell isn't so much a punitive conflagration as it is the natural result of aeons of deferred maintenance. Frankly put: Hell amounts to nothing more than a marginal neighborhood allowed to deteriorate to the extreme. Picture all the smoldering, underground coal mine fires expanding to rub elbows with all the burning tire dumps, throw in all the open cesspools and hazardous-waste landfills, and the inevitable result would be Hell, a situation hardly improved by the self-absorbed tendency of the residents to focus on their own misfortune and neglect to lift a dead finger in defense of their environment.

  From our vantage point, strolling along the shores of the Sea of Insects, Emily and I survey the slow but certain improvements in the dismal landscape. I point out areas of interest: the roiling River of Hot Saliva... the buzzards circling Hitler and his distant colleagues relegated to their unspeakable place. I explain the seemingly arbitrary rules of which people run afoul, how each living person is allowed to use the F-word a maximum of seven hundred times. Most living persons haven't the slightest idea how easy it is to be damned, but should anyone say fuck for the 701st time, he or she is automatically doomed. Similar rules apply to personal hygiene; for example, the 855th time you fail to wash your hands after voiding your bowels or bladder, you're doomed. The three hundredth time you use the word nigger or the word fag, regardless of your personal race or sexual preference, you buy yourself that dreaded one-way ticket to the underworld.

  Walking along, I tell Emily how the dead may send messages to the living. In the same way that living people send each other flowers or e-mails, a dead person may send a living person a stomachache or tinnitus or a nagging melody which will occupy the alive person's attention to the point of madness.

  The pair of us walking along, idly examining the putrid, boiling landscape, apropos of nothing, Emily nonchalantly says, "I talked to that girl Babette, and she says you have a boyfriend...

  I do not, I insist.

  "His name," says Emily, "is Goran?"

  I insist Goran is not my boyfriend.

  Her eyes remaining fixed upon the notes she's jotted on her clipboard, Emily asks if I miss boys. What about prom? Do I miss the opportunity to date and get married and have my own children?

  Not particularly, I reply. A crew of sinister Snarky Miss Snarky-pants girls at my old boarding school, the infamous three who taught me the French-kissing Game, they once professed to educate me about human reproduction. As they told it to me, the reason boys desire so desperately to kiss girls is because, with each kiss, the activity makes the boy's wanger grow larger. The more girls a boy can kiss, the larger a wanger he'll eventually possess, and the boys boasting the largest are awarded the best-paying, highest-status jobs. Really, it's all very simple. All boys devote their lives to amassing the most elongated genitals, growing the nasty things so that when they eventually wedge them inside some unfortunate girl, the distant end of the enlarged wanger actually breaks off—yes, the wanger flesh becomes so hardened that it shatters—and the broken portion remains lodged within the girl's hoo-hoo. This natural event is much like those lizards that live in arid deserts and can voluntarily detach their squirming tails. Any amount, from the pointed tip to almost the entire wiener, can literally snap off inside a girl, and she's fully unable to remove it.

  Emily stares at me, her face distorted in far more disgust than she registered even when first witnessing the Lake of Tepid Bile or the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm. The clipboard hangs, ignored, between her hands.

  Continuing, I explain that the embedded portion of the fractured wanger grows to become the resulting baby. In the event the wanger has broken into two or three portions, each of these evolves to become twins or triplets. All of this factual information comes from a very legitimate source, I assure Emily. If anyone at my Swiss boarding school knew anything about boys and their ridiculous genitals it would be those three Miss Coozy O'Cooznicks.

  "Knowing the facts of life as I do," I tell Emily, "no, I certainly do not miss having a boyfriend......"

  The two of us continue walking along in silence. My array of fetishes and power objects dangle and sway from my belt. They clang and knock against each other. On occasion I suggest a lovely birdbath be placed here or there. Or a sundial surrounded by a picturesque bedding scheme of red and white petunias. Eventually, to break an extended silence, I ask what she misses about being alive.

  "My mother," Emily says. Good-night kisses, she says. Birthday cake. Flying kites.

  I suggest tinkling wind chimes might improve the black smoke that swirls and billows around us.

  Emily fails to write down my idea. "And summer vacation from school," she says, “ And I miss swing sets......"

  Ahead of us, a figure comes walking down the path in the opposite direction. It's a boy, passing in and out of the drifting clouds of smoke. In turns, he's revealed and occluded. Apparent and hidden.

  She misses parades, says Emily. Petting zoos. Fireworks.

  The figure, a boy, approaches us holding some sort of pillow cradled to his chest. His eyes are rakish, his brow surly and moody, his lips twisted into a sensuously puckered sneer. The pillow he carries is colored bright orange, textured such that it appears simultaneously soft and vivid. The boy wears a hot-pink jumpsuit with a long number stitched across one side of his chest.

  "I miss roller coasters," Emily says. 'And birds... real birds, I mean. Not just red-painted bats."

  The boy, now blocking our path, he's Goran.

  Looking up from her clipboard, Emily says, "Hello."

  Nodding to her, he speaks to me. "I am sorry I choked you into dead," says Goran in his vampire accent, and he hands his orange pillow toward me. 'At present, you see now I am dead as well," Goran says, placing the pillow in my arms. He says, "I found this for you."

  The pillow feels warm. It hums in short pulses. Bright orange, soft, it looks at me with flashing green eyes, fully alive and purring, nestled against my bloodstained sweater. It swats a paw, its tiny claws batting at the Caligula testicles.

  No longer dead and stuffed in the plumbing of some luxury hotel, no longer a pillow, it's my little kitten. Alive. It's Tiger Stripe.

  XXXIII.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I have my kitty. I have my boyfriend. I have my best friend. I have more dead than I ever did while alive. Except for my mom and dad.

  No sooner had I made my peace with Goran than another crisis occurred.

  No sooner had I accepted the warm, cuddly fuzz ball of my beloved kitty, Tiger Stripe, than my emotional equilibrium was again knocked askew. Goran, I assured him, did not kill me. Yes, in some sense, he accidentally killed the person identified as Madison Spencer; he forever destroyed that physical manifestation of me, but Goran did not kill... me. I continue to exist. Furthermore, his actions were precipitated by my own fallacious concept of French-kissing. What transpired in that hotel suite was a comedy of errors.

  Graciously, I accepted Tiger Stripe, then introduced Goran to Emily. The trio of us continued to stroll until obligation required I resume my telemarketing duties. My beloved kitty curled and snoozing in my lap, happily purring away, my headset firmly in place, I began to field survey calls as the central computer connected me to households, to breathing people alive in time zones where the evening meal was set to commence.

  In one such residence, someplace with a familiar Californian area code, a man s voice answered the telephone, "Hello?"

  "Hello, sir," I said, following by rote the script which dictated my every statement and response. Petting the cat at rest in my lap, I say, "May I have a few minutes of your time for an important consumer study concerning buying habits in relation to several competing brands of adhesive tape... ?"

  If not adhesive tape, the topic would be something else just as mundane: aerosol furniture polish, dental floss, thumbtacks.

  In the background, almost lost in the distance behind the man's voice, a woman's voice says, "Antonio? Are you ill?"

 
The woman's voice, like the telephone number, feels strangely familiar.

  Still petting Tiger Stripe, I say, "This will only take a few moments......"

  A beat of silence follows.

  I say, "Hello?" I say, "Sir?"

  Another beat of silence occurs, broken by a gasp, almost a sob, and the man's voice asks, "Maddy?"

  Double-checking the telephone number, the ten-digit number which reads on my little computer screen, I recognize it.

  Over my headset, the man says, "Oh, my baby... is that you?"

  The woman's voice in the background says, "I'll grab the bedroom extension."

  The telephone number is our unlisted line for the house in Brentwood. By sheer coincidence, the autodialer has connected me with my family. This man and woman are the former beatniks, former hippies, former Rastas, former anarchists—my former parents. A loud click sounds, someone lifting another receiver, and my mother's voice says, "Darling?" Not waiting for an answer, she begins to weep, begging, "Please, oh, my sweetness, please say something to us......"

  At my elbow, brainiac Leonard sits at his workstation plotting chess moves against some alive adversary in New Delhi. On my opposite side, Patterson conspires with living football enthusiasts, keeping track of teams and quarterbacks, marking their statistics in the blank spaces of a fantasy spreadsheet. The business of Hell continues unabated, spread to either horizon. Elsewhere, the afterlife continues as usual, but within my headset, my mother's voice begs, "Please, Maddy... Please tell your daddy and me where we can come find you."

  Sniffing, his voice choked and his breath exploding into the telephone receiver, my father sobs, "Please, baby, just don't hang up......" He sobs, "Oh, Maddy, we're so sorry we left you alone with that evil bastard."

  "That..." my mother hisses, "that... assassin!"

  My guess is that they're referring to Goran.

  And yes, I've vanquished demons. I've deposed tyrants and taken command of their conquering armies. I'm thirteen years old, and I've shepherded thousands of dying people into the next life with relatively little upset. I never finished junior high school, but I'm overhauling the entire nature of Hell, on schedule and under budget. I deftly toss off words such as absentia and multivalent and convey, but I'm caught completely off guard by the sound of my parents' tears. For help lying, I finger the dried scrap of the Hitler mustache. For coldness, to quell the tears already building in my burning eyes, I consult the de Medicis crown. Over the telephone I tell my weeping mother and father to hush. It's true, I assure them: I am dead. In the icy voice of child killer Gilles de Rais, I tell my family I have passed out of fragile mortal life and now dwell in the eternal.

  At this, their weeping subsides. In a hushed, hoarse whisper, my father asks, "Maddy?" In a voice weighted with awe, he asks, "Are you seated with the Buddha?"

  In the lying voice of serial murderer Thug Behram, I tell my parents that everything they taught me about moral relativism, about recycling, about secular humanism and organic food and expanded Gaia consciousness—it's all turned out to be absolutely true.

  A joyous, shrill cry of laughter escapes my mother's mouth. A pure gasp of relief.

  And yes, I assure them, I am thirteen and still their precious baby girl and dead... but I reside forevermore in serene, peaceful Heaven.

  XXXIV.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My dead posse and I are planning a little pilgrimage back to hobnob among the living. And to plunder the earth for its wealth of candy.

  Leonard goes after the candy corn, those faux kernels of gritty sugar striped in colors of white, orange, and yellow. Patterson craves the chocolate-flavored known as Tootsie Rolls. Archer covets the overly sweet blend of peanuts and toffee marketed as Bit-O-Honey. For Babette, it's peppermint Certs.

  As Leonard explains, Halloween is the only regular occasion on which the dead of Hell can revisit the living on earth. From dusk until midnight, the damned may walk—fully visible—among the living. The fun ends with the stroke of midnight; and like Cinderella, missing that curfew merits a special punishment. As Babette describes it, any tardy souls are forced to wander the earth for a year, until dusk of the next Halloween. Thanks to the melted plastic of her dead Swatch, Babette missed the deadline once and was banished to loitering, invisible and unheard, among the self-obsessed living for twelve boring months.

  In preparation for our Halloween foray, we sit in a group, sewing, gluing, cutting our costumes. Chess-champion, brain-trust Leonard rips the hem from a pair of pants; with his teeth, he bites and frays the pant legs. 'Scooping a caramels better handful of cinders and ash from the ground, Leonard rubs these into the pants. He soils a tattered shirt and wipes his dirty palms to blacken his face.

  Watching, I ask if he's supposed to be a hobo? A tramp?

  Leonard shakes his head no.

  I ask, "A zombie?"

  Leonard shakes his head no and says, “ I’m a fifteen-year-old slave copyist who died in the fire which destroyed the great library of Ptolemy the First in Alexandria."

  "That was my next guess," I say. Exhaling breath onto the blade and polishing my jeweled dagger, I ask why Leonard chose that particular costume.

  "It's not a costume," Patterson says, and laughs. "That's what he was. It's how he died."

  Leonard might look and act like a contemporary kid, but he's been dead since the year 48 B.C. Patterson, with his football uniform and all-American fresh-faced good looks, he explains this while polishing a bronze helmet. Removing his football helmet, he fits the bronze one over his curly hair. "I'm an Athenian foot soldier killed doing battle with the Persians in 490 B.C."

  Drawing a comb through her hair, the red scars clearly showing on her wrists, Babette explains, "I am the great Princess Salome, who demanded the death of John the Baptist and was punished by being torn apart by wild dogs."

  Leonard says, "You wish."

  "Okay," Babette confesses, "I'm a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, and ended my own life rather than face the guillotine in 1792....."

  Patterson says, "Liar."

  Leonard adds, "And you aren't Cleopatra, either.”

  "Okay," Babette says, "it was the Spanish Inquisition... I think. Don't laugh, but it's been so long I don't really remember."

  On Halloween, custom requires the dead to not merely revisit the earth, but to do so in the guise of their former lives. Thus, Leonard becomes once more an ancient dweeb. Patterson, a Bronze Age jock. Babette, a tortured witch or whatever. That some of my newfound friends have been dead for centuries, some for millennia, this makes the present moment we're seated together, stitching and polishing, seem all the more fragile and fated and precious.

  "Fuck that," says little Emily. She's clearly sewing an elaborate skirt of tulle, decorating it with gems she's gathered from comatose and distraught souls. Stitching away, she says, "I'm not trick-or-treating as a dumb Canadian girl with AIDS." Emily says, "I'm going to be a fairy princess."

  In secret, I dread the thought of roaming among the alive. Due to the fact that this is the first Halloween since my demise, I can only shudder at the idea of how many Miss Skuzzy Vanderskuzzies will be out wandering with Hello Kitty condoms looped around their necks, their faces anoxic with blue makeup in a cheap parody of my own tragic end. Walking in those few hours, will I be continually confronted by insensitive revelers as they make fun of me? Like Emily, I consider appearing as some stock character: a genie or angel or ghost. Another possible option is to take my evil armies back to earth and compel them to carry me around in a golden sedan chair while we hunt down my various Snarky Miss Snarky-pants enemies and terrorize them. I could carry Tiger Stripe and present myself as a witch accompanied by her familiar.

  Perhaps sensing my reluctance, Leonard asks, "You okay?"

  To which I simply shrug. It doesn't help my mood, remembering how I lied to my parents over the telephone.

  The only thing that makes Hell feel like Hell, I remind myself, is our expectation that it should fe
el like Heaven.

  "This might cheer you up," says a voice. Unbeknownst to me, Archer has entered our company, and instead of a costume, he carries a thick file folder. Holding the folder in one hand, he uses his other to pinch a sheet of paper from the contents and withdraw it. Holding the sheet aloft for everybody to see, Archer says, "Who says you only live once?"

  Stamped on the sheet of paper, in red block letters, is the single word approved.

  XXXV.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. If you'll forgive me, I need to jump backward for a moment. Funny... me asking for the Devil's forgiveness.

  The sheet of paper Archer held aloft, it's my appeal. It's the blah, blah, blah form for reconsideration, which Babette filed on my behalf in response to the results of my polygraph-y salvation test. It could be that my soul has actually been found innocent, and the powers that be are righting their mistake. More likely, what's happened is more political, and my growing political strength—the newly dead recruits I've garnered from earth, and the armies I've gathered—poses such a threat that the demons are willing to release me if that means retaining their overall power. What it all boils down to is... I no longer have to stay in Hell. I no longer even have to be dead.

  I can go back to earth, to be with my parents, to live whatever lifetime I have allotted. I'll be able to menstruate and have babies and eat avocados.

  The only problem is, I told my parents we'd be together for all time. Yes, of course, I told them we'd all be in Heaven with the Buddha and Martin Luther King Jr. and Teddy Kennedy smoking hashish or whatnot... but I WAS only trying to spare their feelings. Honestly, my motivation was fairly noble. Really, I just wanted them to stop crying.