Damned (27 page)

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.

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 feel 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.

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.

No, I'm not completely unrealistic about my parents'
slim
chances of attaining Heaven. To that end, talking over the telephone, I'd made
my father promise to honk his car horn at least a hundred times each day. I'd
sworn my mother to constantly use the word
fuck
and to always drop her cigarette butts outdoors. With their existing track
record, these behaviors would way guarantee their assured damnation. Forever in
Hell is still forever, and at least we'd all be together as an intact nuclear
family.

Even as he wept, I forced my father to promise that he'd never pass up
an opportunity to break wind in a crowded elevator. My mom I made promise to
urinate in every hotel swimming pool she'd ever enter. Divine law allows each
person to pass gas in only three elevators, and to urinate in the shared water
of only two swimming pools. This is regardless of your age, so most people are
already relegated to Hell by the age of five.

I told my mom she looked way beautiful giving away those dumb Academy
Awards, but that she should hit Control+Alt+D and unlock the doors of my
bedrooms in Dubai, London, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, and everywhere,
all of my rooms. By keystroking Control+Alt+C she ought to open all my curtains
and allow sunlight into those sealed, shadowy places. I made my dad promise to
give all my dolls and clothes and stuffed animals to the Somali maids we had in
every household— and to give them all a sizable raise in their wages. On top of
all those demands I asked my parents to adopt all our Somali maids, to really
legally adopt them, and make certain those girls get college degrees and become
successful cosmetic surgeons and tax attorneys and psychoanalysts— and that my
mom can't lock them in bathrooms anymore, even as a joke—and both my parents
yelled in unison over the telephone: "Enough! Madison, we promise!"

In my effort to comfort my parents, I said, "Keep your promises,
and we'll be one big, happy family, forever!" My family, my friends,
Goran, Emily, Mister Wiggles, and Tiger Stripe...we'll all spend eternity
together.

And now, ye gods... it seems as though
I'm the one who
won't be in Hell.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. But I guess you already knew
that. If you're to be believed I guess you know more about me than I do. You know
everything, but I suspected that something was not right. At last we meet
face-to face......

We' re all dressed in our Halloween costumes, which aren't really
costumes, with the exception of Emily's fairy-princess outfit. Babette refuses
to accept the possibility that she's some dead nobody; instead, she's dolled
herself up as Marie Antoinette, with jagged, black-thread stitches going around
her neck, and at present we're loitering around the shore of the Lake of Tepid
Bile, waiting to hitch a ride back to Real Life and hustle ourselves some
sweet, sweet candy riches.

Just when it appears that we'll be compelled to take some nasty-dirty
cattle-car leftover from commuting the Jews to the Holocaust, a familiar black
Lincoln Town Car drifts to a slow-motion stop beside us. It's the same car as
from my funeral, and the same uniformed chauffeur wearing a visored cap and
mirrored sunglasses steps from the driver's seat and approaches our group. In
one driving-gloved hand he holds an ominous-looking sheaf of white paper. Along
one edge, three Chicago screws bind the pages together. Clearly, it's a spec
screenplay, and from even a few steps' distance it stinks of hunger and naively
high expectations
and absurd outsider optimism—more outsider
than I could possibly dream.

Holding the thickness of pages out in front of him, obviously waiting
for me to take it, the driver says, "Hey." His mirrored glasses
twitch between the pages and my face, baiting me to see the screenplay and
acknowledge it. "I found my script for you to read," he says.
"On your trip back to earth."

In this taut moment, one corner of the driver s mouth twitches into a
possible leer, some expression either shy or snide, showing a tangle of browned
rodent teeth sprouting from his gums. His exposed cheeks flush crimson red. He
twists and ducks his head, hunching his shoulders. With the toe of one foot,
shod in gleaming black riding boots— very old-school for a chauffeur, almost
like hooves—he draws a five-pointed star in the dust and ash. He's holding his
breath, his vulnerability so tangible you can taste it, but I know from vast
experience that the moment I touch his cinematic pipe dream I'll be expected to
attach bankable talent to it, secure financing for principal photography, and
land a fat distribution deal for him. Even in Hades, such moments are
excruciatingly painful.

Nevertheless, I want to ride back to Halloween trick-or-treating in
style, not in some typhus-stinking, lice-ridden Nazi boxcar, so I acquiesce to
actually looking at the proffered title page. There, centered in boldface
all-caps letters—the first dreaded sign of an amateur's precious,
self-important work—I read the script's title: