Damned (16 page)

And all the people who drowned on the
Titanic,
rich and poor,
they're here roasting away also. Every single soul. To repeat: This is
Hell—don't ask for too much logic.

On the phone, Emily coughs. She coughs and coughs. At last, she catches
enough breath to say the AIDS isn't her fault. Besides that, she's not going to
die, not for a long, long time. She coughs once more, and her coughing ends in
sobs, sniffing, and weeping, real way-genuine little-girl boo-hooing.

No, it's not fair, I reply. In reality, within my head, I'm still so
excited. Oh, Satan, just imagine it: Me with Bangs!

On the phone it's silent except for the sound of crying. Then, Emily
shrieks, "You're lying!"

Into my headset, I say, "You'll see." I tell her to look me
up once she arrives. By then I'll probably be Mrs. River Phoenix, but we'll
make a bet. Ten Milky Way bars says she's down here with me faster than she can
imagine. "Ask anybody for directions," I tell her. "The name's
Maddy Spencer," I say, and she needs to make sure and die with ten candy
bars in her pocket so we can settle our bet. Ten!
Not snack-size!

And, yes, I know the word
masticated.
It's not as dirty a word
as it sounds. But no, I'm not way-totally surprised when this Canadian Emily
girl hangs up.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I suspect that my parents had
an inkling about my covert plan to seduce Goran. This night, while they're both
out, I'll profess my love as vehemently as Scarlett O'Hara throwing herself at
Ashley Wilkes in the library of his Twelve Oaks plantation house.

Mere hours prior to the Academy Awards, my parents are fussing over
which color of political action ribbon to pin on themselves. Pink, for breast
cancer. Yellow, for Bring the Soldiers Home. Green, for climate change— except
for my mom's gown arrived looking more orange than crimson, so any symbolic
protest against climate change would clash. My mom folds a scrap of red ribbon,
holding it against the bodice of her gown. Studying the effect in a mirror, she
says, "Do people still get AIDS?" She says, "Don't laugh, but it
just seems so... 1989."

The three of us, her, me, and my dad, are in the hotel suite, waiting
in the lull between the siege of the stylist army and the launch of the Prius.
My dad says, "Maddy?" In one hand, he holds out a pair of gold cuff
links.

I step closer to him, my own hand extended, palm up.

My father drops his cuff links into my cupped palm. Then he shoots his
shirt cuffs, French cuffs, extending both hands, turned wrist-up, for me to
insert and fasten the cuff links. These are the teeny-tiny malachite cuff links
some producer gave everyone as a wrap gift after shooting ended on my mom's
last film.

My dad asks, "Maddy, do you know where babies come from?"

Theoretically, yes. I understand the messy ordeal of the egg and the
sperm, plus all the ancient tropes about finding infants beneath cabbage leaves
or storks bringing them, but just to force what's obviously an uncomfortable
situation, I say, "Babies?" I say, "Mommy, Daddy..." Canting
my head in a not-unappealing manner, I widen my eyes and say, "Doesn't the
casting director
bring them?"

My father bends one elbow, pulls back the shirt cuff on that hand, and
looks at his wristwatch. He looks at my mother. He smiles wanly.

My mom drops her evening bag into a hotel chair and heaves a deep,
heavy sigh. She settles herself into the chair and pats her knees in a gesture
for me to move closer.

My father steps to stand immediately beside her chair, then bends his
knees to sit on the chair's arm. The two of them create a tableau of elegant
good looks. So meticulously outfitted in their tuxedo and gown. Every hair
assigned its perfect place. The pair of them, so beautifully blocked for a
two-shot, I can't resist messing with their Zen.

Dutifully, I cross the hotel room and sit on the Oriental carpet at my
mother's feet. Already, I'm wearing the tweedy skort, the pink blouse and
cardigan sweater for my long-planned rendezvous with Goran. I gaze up at my
parents with guileless terrier eyes. Wide-open Japanese-animation eyes.

"Now, when a man loves a woman very, very much..." my dad
says.

My mother retrieves the evening purse from the seat beside her.
Snapping open the clasp, she reaches out a pill bottle, saying, "Would you
like a Xanax, Maddy?"

I shake my head,
No.

With her perfectly manicured hands, my mom executes the stage business
of twisting open the pill bottle, then shaking two of the pills into her own
hand. My father reaches down from his perch on the arm of her chair. Instead of
giving him one of the two pills she holds, she shakes two more pills out of the
bottle into his hand. Both my parents toss back the pills they hold and swallow
them dry.

"Now," my dad says, "when a man loves a woman very, very
much..."

"Or," my mom adds, shooting him a look, "when a man
loves a
man
or a woman loves a
woman."
In the fingers of one
hand, she still toys with the scrap of red grosgrain ribbon.

My father nods. "Your mother is right." He adds, "Or
when a man loves two women, or three women, backstage after a big rock
concert..."

"Or," my mom says, "when a whole cell block of male
prisoners love one new inmate very, very much..."

"Or," my dad interjects, "when a motorcycle gang making
a meth run across the Southwestern United States loves one drunken biker chick
very, very much..."

Yes, I know their car is waiting. The Prius. At the awards venue, some
poor talent wrangler is no doubt reshuffling their arrival time. Despite all of
these stress factors, I merely furrow my preadolescent brow in a confused expression
my Botoxed parents can only envy. I shift my gaze back and forth between my
mom's eyes and my dad's even as the Xanax turns them glazed and glassy.

My mother looks up, casting her gaze over her shoulder so that her eyes
meet my father's.

Finally, my dad says, "Oh, to hell with it." Reaching a hand
into his tux jacket, he extracts a personal digital assistant, or PDA, from the
inside pocket. He crouches next to the chair, bringing the tiny computer level
with my face. Flipping the screen open, he keyboards Ctrl+Alt+P, and the screen
fills with a view of our media room in Prague. He toggles until the wide-screen
television fills the entire computer screen, then keys Ctrl+Alt+L and scrolls
down through a list of movie titles. Tabbing down the list, my father selects a
movie, and a keystroke later the computer screen fills with a tangle of arms
and legs, dangling hairless testicles, and quivering silicone-enhanced breasts.

Yes, I may be a virgin, a dead virgin, with no knowledge of carnality
beyond the soft-focus metaphors of Barbara Cartland novels, but I can well
recognize a fake booby when I see one.

The camerawork is atrocious. Anywhere from two to twenty men and women
grapple, frantically involved in violating every orifice present with every
digit, phallus, and tongue available to them. Whole human bodies appear to be
disappearing into other bodies. The lighting is abysmal, and the sound has
obviously been looped by nonunion amateurs working without a decent final
draft. What appears before me bears less resemblance to sexual congress than it
does to the writhing, squirming,
not-quite-dead-yet-already-partially-decomposed occupants of a mass grave.

My mom smiles. Nodding at the PDA screen, she says, "Do you
understand, Maddy?" She says, "This is where babies come from."

My dad adds, 'And herpes."

"Antonio," my mother says, "let's not go down that
road." To me, she says, "Young lady, are you absolutely sure you
don't want a Xanax?"

In the center of the tiny pornographic movie, the hideous little orgy is
interrupted. The words
Incoming Call
superimpose themselves over the
grappling bodies. A red light blinks at the top of the PDA case, and a shrill
bell rings. My dad says, "Wait," and he holds the PDA to his ear,
where the gruesome assemblage of entwined limbs and genitals squirm against his
cheek; videotaped penises erupt their vile sputum dangerously near his eye and
mouth. Answering the call thus, he says, "Hello?" He says,
"Fine. We'll be downstairs in a moment."

I shake my head again,
No. No, thank you,
to the Xanax.

Already, my mom starts poking around inside her evening purse.
"This isn't your real birthday present," she says, "but just in
case..." What she hands me is round, a rolled batch of shiny plastic or
vinyl, printed with the repeating pattern of a cartoon cat face. The plastic or
foil feels so slick that it could be wet, too slick to easily hold on to; thus
when I reach to take it from her hand, the roll drops to the floor, unspooling
itself to reveal a seemingly endless series of the same cartoon cat face. The
long plastic strip, quilted into little squares, this trails from my hand to
the floor. The length of it gives off a powdery, hospital smell of latex.

By then, my parents are gone; they've swept out the door of the hotel
suite before I realize I'm holding a fifteen-foot-long supply of Hello Kitty
condoms.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Little by little, I forget my
life on earth, how it felt to be alive and living, but today something happened
which shocked me back to remembering—maybe not everything—but at least I
realize how much I might be forgetting. Or suppressing.

The computerized autodialer in Hell makes it a top priority to call
mostly numbers on the federal government's No Call List. I can practically
smell the mercury-enhanced tuna casserole on the breath of people whose dinner
I interrupt, even over the fiber-optic or whatever phone lines that connect
earth and Hell, when they yell at me. Their dinner napkins still tucked into
the collars of their T-shirts, flapping down their fronts, spotted with
Hamburger Helper and Green Goddess salad dressing, these angry people in
Detroit, Biloxi, and Allentown, they yell for me to, "Go to Hell..."

And yes, I might be a thoughtless, uncouth interloper into the savory
ritual of their evening repast, but I'm way ahead of their hostile request.

This current day or month or century, I'm plugged into my workstation,
getting shouted at, asking people their consumer preferences regarding
ballpoint pens, when something new occurs. A telephone call comes through the
system. An incoming call. Even as some meat loaf-eating moron shouts at me, a
beep sound starts within my head
set. Some kind of
call-waiting sound. Whether this call's coming from earth or Hell, I can't
begin to guess, and the caller identification is blocked. The instant the
meat-loaf moron hangs up, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to clear my line, and say,
"Hello?"

A girl's voice says, "Is this Maddy? Are you Madison
Spencer?"

I ask, Who's calling?

"I'm Emily," the girl says, "from British
Columbia." The thirteen-year-old. The girl with the really bad case of
AIDS. She's *69'd me. Over the telephone, she says, "Are you really and
truly dead?"

As a doornail, I tell her.

This Emily girl says, "The caller ID says your area code is for
Missoula, Montana... ."

I tell her, Same deal.

She says, "If I called you back, collect, would you accept the
charges?"

Sure, I tell her. I'll try.

And—click—she hangs up on her end.

Granted it's not entirely ethical to make personal calls from Hell, but
everybody does it. To one side of me, the punk kid, Archer, sits with his
leather-jacketed elbow almost touching my cardigan-sweatered elbow. Archer toys
with the big safety pin which hangs from his cheek, while into his headset he's
saying, "... No, seriously, you sound gnarly-hot." He says, 'After
your skin-cancer thing metastasizes, you and me need to totally hook up...
."

At my opposite elbow, the brainiac Leonard stares forward, his eyes
unfocused, telling his headset, "Queen's rook to G-five..."

Even as I sit here, my head clamped in a headset, the earpiece covering
one ear and the microphone looped around to hang in front of my mouth, at the
same time, Babette hovers over me, circling and snipping at my hair with the
cuticle scissors from her purse, shaping me the most way-perfect pageboy
haircut with straight-across bangs. Even she doesn't care that I'm socializing
on Hell's dime.