Damned (26 page)

Throughout our relaxed amble, I remark on possible improvements to the
landscape, a flowering dogwood here, a reflecting pool there, perhaps an aviary
of colorful parrots, each of which Emily dutifully makes note of on a clipboard
she carries.

The potentially needy mobs of newly dead, those anxious souls I've
enrolled in dying and relocating to Hell, I've delegated those folks to various
other reclamation projects. Really, I could pass as no less than the FDR of the
afterlife, what with all the dams I've decreed be build across rivers of
scalding blood. I've ordered other work teams to dig channels and drain
expansive marshes of rank perspiration; thanks to me the ancient Sweat Swamps
of Hell no longer exist. Lost souls who logged entire lifetimes in the study
and practice of civil and structural engineering, those people are thrilled for
the opportunity to put their existing skills to use. The rolling hills of
semicoagulated mucus have been leveled. And an entire gulag of happily damned
slave laborers does nothing except fashion false water lily blossoms from crepe
paper and float their products on the surface of the Shit Lake.

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.

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.