Damned (25 page)

With the gates not yet a shoulders' width apart, a figure appears from
the interior, a young woman with nice breasts and good hair; wearing beat-up
fake Manolo Blahnik shoes, dime-size cubic zirconium earrings, a counterfeit
Coach bag slung over one arm, there stands—Babette.

Looking at me, with Caligula's shriveled balls worn on my belt, next to
that Hitler's nasty mustache hanging like a tiny scalp, my assorted
bloodstained daggers and bludgeons, then wrinkling her button nose, Babette
says, "You never could accessorize for shit."

No doubt she still wants to transform me into some Whorey Vanderwhore
version of an overly made up Ally Sheedy.

Stepping forward, I say, "Do me a favor?"

The multitudes surrounding us wait in pensive silence while I withdraw
the folded polygraph test from the hip pocket of my bloodied skort. That
cryptic report concerning my views on gay marriage and stem cell research and
women's rights, I place this, the final scored version of my test, into
Babette's outstretched hand and say, "Did I pass, or what?"

And with the chipped white nail polish of her manicure, Babette slides
the test results from their manila envelope and begins to read.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My mom used to say,
"Madison, you're a worrier." Meaning: I fret over everything.
Meaning: EVERYTHING. Now I'm worried that I've won. My ascent to power seems to
have been too easy. In my life, in my parents' lives, the rewards have come
with so little struggle. The homes in Dubai and Singapore and Brentwood. The
afterlife goes on; however; it's not quite death as usual. Something seems
fishy, but I can't put my finger on it.

Gone is the previous Maddy Spencer, she of the sterling posture and
finishing-school manners. That winsome me has been declared extinct. True, once
more I am seated before the console of my telemarketing station, but the
headset rests canted atop my head to allow for the pearl-studded de Medicis
crown, and my demeanor is forever altered, for the better or not.

Instead of wheedling the chronically ill, diplomatically and
nonthreateningly, with my assurance about the liability of Hades—is there such
a word as "die-ability"?— espousing all the wonderful opportunities
offered by the afterlife, the new me browbeats those who procrastinate, those
lollygaggers who postpone their deaths. Rather than nurture and assure, the
aggressive new me harangues the dying who have the misfortune to engage me in
telephone conversation. Yes, I'm thirteen years old and dead and
doing
child labor in Hell—but at least I'm not whining and crying about my situation.
In contrast, the people to whom I talk are so endlessly attached to their
wealth and achievements, their homes and loved ones and physical bodies. So
attached to their stupid
fear.
These failing strangers with their stage-four brain tumors and kidney failure,
they've put a lifetime into perfecting themselves, practicing and fine-tuning
every nuance of their identity, and now all of this effort is about to be
wasted. In all honesty, they irk the bejesus out of me.

The previous Madison Spencer would bother to hold their frightened
hand, to calm and comfort them. Who I am now, however, I tell them to cry me a
stinking shit river and fall down dead, already.

On occasion, a division or company of my stained hordes, the armies
I've inherited from Gilles de Rais or Hitler or Idi Amin will stop by, begging
for a work assignment, some large-scale task to perform on my behalf.

More often, the people I've coached into Hell stop by to pay their
respects. The just-arrived dead still smelling of funeral carnations and
formaldehyde, these immigrant souls sport the troweled-on cosmetics and overly
primped hairdos that only an undertaker would inflict, and only a corpse would
tolerate. These new arrivals, they all feel compelled to talk through their
terrible death experience, and I just let them chatter away. More often than
not, I direct them to one of the numerous talk-therapy sessions I've launched,
my new hope-aholics recovery groups, a twelve-step peer-supported cliché. But
with our high graduation rate and low recidivism it would do Dante

Alighieri proud. After a couple weeks of complaining and
self-mourning—the usual railing over lost luxury items and surviving enemies
and wrongs left unavenged, plus the typical gloating about past awards and
accomplishments— most people get their fill and decide to move forward with
their eternal existence. Crude as my methods might appear, my dead friends are
not among those people who linger for centuries in their soiled cages cursing
their new reality. The dead whom I coach prove to be remarkably well-adjusted
and productive. Among them, Richard Volk who died of blunt-force trauma caused
by an automobile accident last week in Missoula, Montana, this week he's
leading the former battalions of Genghis Khan in their current campaign to
collect all the discarded cigarette butts which inevitably end up here. Here
also is Hazel Kunzeler, who succumbed to hemophilia two weeks ago in
Jacksonville, Florida; she's now commanding former Roman legions in their
latest me-assigned mission to propagate a billion flowering rosebushes in the
space now occupied by the Lake of Tepid Bile. Obviously this constitutes a
blatant make-work project—so sue me—but the effort keeps everyone occupied for
contented aeons, and even a small measure of success improves the overall
atmosphere of the underworld. What's of most importance is how these •
assignments deflect would-be hangers-on and allow me to focus on my own
projects.

Yes, I might be a dead child strangled in a poorly understood sex game,
but to me the glass is most times half-full. Despite my optimism there remains
no sign of Goran—not that I've been scouring the afterlife searching for him in
a desperate, lonely stalker way.

At the limits of my peripheral vision, Babette comes walking in my
direction, my salvation polygraph test clasped in her chipped white
fingernails.

Into my telephone headset, I ask a middle-aged woman dying in Austin,
Texas, "Are you familiar with the old Reno-style divorces?" I explain
how, decades ago, one simply took a six-week vacation to establish residency in
Nevada in order to file for a no-fault dissolution of marriage. Well, I tell
her to catch the next flight to Oregon, where they have legalized assisted
suicide. She won't even have to buy a round-trip plane ticket, and she can be
dead by this coming weekend. "Book yourself into some luxury hotel in
downtown Portland," I say, "get a massage, and call room service for
an overdose of Phenobarbital.
It's that easy.
Make a real junket out of
it......"

Sitting here, talking on the telephone, my fingers crossed, I swear all
of this is true. Honest Injun. My workstation, what would pass as my office
cubicle on earth, is arrayed with my power souvenirs, the various murder
weapons and body parts and symbols of imperial power. Staring me in the face,
pinned to my cork bulletin board, the dried monkey patch of the Hitler mustache
does not inspire honesty In my peripheral vision, Babette proceeds ever closer,
bearing the inevitable results of my test.

Into my telephone, I assure this dying Texas person that her permanent
record is open on the desk in front of me, and it shows she's been pretty much
on the fast track to Hell since the age of twenty-three, when she committed
adultery. Despite the fact that she'd been married to her husband for barely
two weeks, she engaged in sexual intercourse with a local mail carrier, largely
because he
reminded her of a former beau. Upon the heels
of that revelation, the woman gasps. She convulses into racking coughs,
struggling to ask, "How'd you know that?"

In addition, it would appear that she honked her automobile horn one
too many times. According to divine law, I explain, each human being is allowed
to honk no more than five hundred times over the course of a lifetime. One honk
beyond that number, regardless of circumstances, results in an automatic
condemnation to Hell—suffice to say all taxicab drivers are Hellhound. A
similar unbreakable law applies to discarded cigarette butts. The first hundred
are permitted, but any dropped butts beyond that number result in eternal
damnation with no hope for recourse. It seems she's also in violation of this
regulation. It's all spelled out, here, printed in almost illegible dot-matrix
black and white in her personal file.

By now Babette has arrived at my elbow, where she stands, tapping the
toe of one faux Blahnik, twisting her wrist to look pointedly at the time on
her long-dead Swatch.

To stall for time I hold up one straightened index finger, mouthing the
word
wait,
while into the
telephone I tell the Texas lady there's nothing she can do in the brief time
she has left on earth which will earn her a place in Heaven. She needs to
consider her loved ones, to stop hogging the spotlight and allow the people who
love her to go back to their own precious, brief, messed-up lives. Yes, she
should warn them about not honking their automobile horns and not discarding
cigarette butts, but then she ought to move on.

I tell her, "Die already." My finger hovering above the
control board, I say, "Hold, please... ," and punch the button. I
twist in my seat to face Babette, my eyebrows arched in expectation. My entire
face a silent, begging,
Please.

Babette offers the report. She taps a chipped fingernail on a number at
the bottom of a long column of faint dot-matrix numbers, saying, "Just
from your overall culpability score..." She says, "This number,
here." Handing me the sheet of paper, Babette says, "You need to file
for an appeal." With that, she turns on one battered high heel and begins
to walk away.

My latest Hell recruit, the horn-honking, cigarette-strewing gal slowly
dying in Texas, she's still blinking, blinking on hold.

Calling after Babette, I ask what she means by
appeal.

In response, without looking back, Babette shouts, already four...
five... six workstations away; still receding, she says, "You shouldn't
even be here......"

From even farther gone, Babette shouts, "There's been an official
screw-up." Loud enough for everyone to overhear, she shouts,
"Double-check the numbers yourself." She shouts, "Because, right
this minute, you ought to be in Heaven."

Up and down the infinite row of telemarketers, faces twist to see mine.
A lingering crowd of mercenaries and fresh-off-the-boat Hell newbies wait
within earshot, their faces slack with confusion. One of their small group
steps forward, not a dastardly blood-drenched pirate, nor an aged person
attired in her best funeral suit of clothes. No, this stranger stands
approximately my height. A reasonable guess would place her age at thirteen.
This stranger could almost pass as the earlier me, the pristine, well-behaved
Madison wearing sensible shoes and a tweedy
ensemble carefully
chosen to mask future soiling. In contrast to my current self, this small
stranger presents herself with no dried demonic blood on her hands and face,
her hair neatly combed and meticulously arranged. Offering a dainty hand of
nicety-nice pink fingernails, this girl says, "Madison Spencer?" She
meets my gaze with calm, unblinking eyes, her perfect double row of white teeth
bound in stainless-steel braces, saying, "You win......"

At that, the girl's dainty hands dip into the pockets of her tweed
skirt, and then the pockets of her cardigan sweater, and she brings forth
candy. Seven, eight, nine candy bars. Ten full-sized Milky Way bars, my new
best friend—
my first best friend, ever
—this dead girl offers these sweet
chocolaty prizes to me.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. How miserably hypocritical, you
might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to
stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages
sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who
seek to bring them to justice. It's no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so
relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited
detectives with his—or her—coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long
to be desired. At this point I've been in Hell for a longer period of time than
I've ever spent in any of my earthly homes, in Durban, in London, in Manila.
Worse than feeling merely conflicted, I'm miserable at the thought of leaving.

I
n order to keep the
various bloodthirsty armies occupied and out of my hair, I've ordered them to
capture and paint all the noxious bats of Hell red and blue, to pass for
cardinals and bluebirds. The industrious butchers previously employed by Pol
Pot and Madame Defarge, I've dispatched them to fabricate bright butterfly
wings out of colorful construction paper and glitter, then glue these false
wings to the real wings of our ever-present houseflies. Not only does this
spruce up the normally dismal atmosphere of the underworld, it also prevents
what would be the inevitable clashes between Mongolian hordes and Nazi
storm
troopers and Egyptian charioteers. Most important, it keeps them all busy and
allows me to spend my time touring Emily around, eating Milky Ways, and
discussing boys.