Damned Page 3

  Still waving, I call, "Over here!" I shout, "Look over here!" I just want to say hello, to introduce myself. This seems like the polite thing to do.

  Finally, one talon clutches the panting, breathless football man and withdraws him from the iron cage. The captives in all the surrounding cells scream, pulling themselves as far away from the action as possible; each huddles and shivers in some far corner, bug-eyed and hyperventilating. Their combined wails sound hoarse and broken from effort. In the same manner you'd dismember a steamed crab, the horned figure grasps one of the football man's legs and twists it around and around, the hip socket popping and tendons snapping, until the leg pulls free from the torso. Repeating the process, the figure removes each of the man's limbs, lifting each to his own mouth of jagged shark's teeth and biting the meaty, hypertrophied flesh from the man's bones.

  All the while, I continue to call, "Hello? When you have a moment, Mister Satan... ," uncertain about the etiquette of interrupting such a meal.

  After consuming each limb, the horned figure throws the remaining bones back into the football man's original cage. Even the screams are drowned out by the wet sounds of sucking and lip smacking and chewing. Then a thunderous belch. When finally the football man is reduced to a bony thorax, much like the picked-over carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey, all white rib cage and hanging shreds of leftover skin, only then does the horned figure toss the final remains into the cage and once more lock the door.

  At this lull I'm spastically leaping in place, waving both arms above my head and shouting. Ever mindful to not come in contact with my own dirty, filthy iron bars, I shout, "Hello?! Madison, here!" I pick up a soiled popcorn ball and lob it, shouting, "I've been dying to meet you!"

  Already the loose, bloodied bones of the football man are assembling themselves, pulling back together to form a human being, once more sheathing themselves with muscle and skin, coming back to re-create the man himself, restored in order to be tortured again, indefinitely, forever.

  His hunger seemingly satiated, the horned figure turns and begins walking into the distance.

  In desperation, I scream. No, it's not fair; I did tell you that to scream in Hell was to exhibit very bad form. I consider screaming to be a complete impropriety, but I scream, "Mister Satan!"

  The towering, tailed figure is gone.

  From next door, Babette's voice says, "What day is it now?"

  If anything, life in Hell is like a vintage Warner Bros, cartoon where characters are forever getting decapitated by guillotines and dismembered by dynamite explosions, then being completely restored in time for the next assault. It's a system not without both its comfort and its monotony.

  A voice says, "That's not Satan." From a nearby cell, a teenage boy calls, "That was Ahriman, just a demon of the Iranian desert." The teenage boy wears a short-sleeved, button-down shirt tucked into chinos. He wears a thick submariner's wristwatch with deep-water diver chronograph functions and a built-in calculator. On his feet, he wears crepe-soled Hush Puppies, and his chinos are hemmed so short you can see his white sweat socks. Rolling his eyes, shaking his head, the boy says, "Geez, don't you know anything about basic ancient cross-cultural theological anthropology?"

  Babette squats down and starts spit-shining her own bad shoes with another wad of Kleenex. "Shut up, nerd," she mutters.

  "My mistake," I tell the boy. I point a finger at myself, such a lame gesture—even in the sweltering heat of Hell I can feel myself blushing—and I say, "I'm Madison."

  "I know," the boy says. "I've got ears."

  Just seeing the boy's brown eyes... the terrible, horrible threat of hope swells inside my tubby self.

  Ahriman, he explains, is nothing more than a deposed deity native to ancient Persian culture. He was the twin of Ohrmazd, born of the god Zurvan the Creator. Ahriman is responsible for poison, drought, famine, scorpions, mostly stereotypical desert stuff. His own son is named Zohak and has venomous snakes which grow from the skin of his shoulders. According to this teenage boy, the only food these snakes will eat is human brains. All this... it's so much the gruesome trivia an adolescent boy would bother to know. So way-totally D&D.

  Babette buffs her fingernails against the strap of her bag, ignoring us.

  The teenage boy jerks his head in the direction where the horned figure disappeared, saying, "Usually he hangs out on the far side of the Vomit Pond, just west from the River of Hot Saliva, over on the opposite shore of Shit Lake...." The boy shrugs and says, "For a ghoul, he's pretty rad."

  Babette's voice pipes up; interrupting, she says, 'Ahriman ate me, one time...." Seeing the expression on the boy's face, looking at the tented front of his chinos, Babette says, "NOT in that way, you gross, puny little twerp."

  Yes, I might be dead and suffering from a world-class inferiority complex, but I can recognize an erection when I see one. Even as the stinking, poop-scented air around us swarms with fat, black houseflies, I ask the boy, "What's your name?"

  "Leonard," he says.

  I ask, "What are you condemned to Hell for?"

  "Jerking off," Babette says.

  Leonard says, "Jaywalking."

  I ask, "Do you like The Breakfast Club?"

  He says, "What's that?"

  I ask, "Do you think I'm pretty?"

  The boy, Leonard, his dreamy brown eyes flit all over me, alighting like wasps on my stubby legs, my pop-bottle eyeglasses, my crooked nose and flat chest. He glances at Babette. He looks at me, again, his eyebrows jump up toward his hairline, wrinkling his forehead into long accordion folds. He smiles, but shakes his head, No.

  "Just testing," I say, and cover my own smile by pretending to scratch the eczema I don't have on my cheek.

  V.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. After a somewhat rocky start, I'm having simply the best time. I continue to meet new people, and I'm sorry about the mix-up... just imagine: me mistaking just some regular ordinary, nobody-special demon for you. I'm learning something new and interesting all the time from Leonard. On top of that, I've concocted a way-brilliant idea for how to overcome my insidious addiction to hope.

  Who could imagine that cross-cultural anthropological theology could be so absolutely fascinating! According to Leonard, who really does have the loveliest brown eyes, all the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures.

  No, it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshiped. The Jews attacked Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki and Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul mood.

  And, ye gods, I knew the word relegated before it came out of Leonard's mouth. I might be thirteen and a newbie to the underworld, but don't take me for an idiot.

  "Our friend Ahriman was originally cast out of the pantheon by the pre-Zoroastrian Iranians," Leonard says, shaking his index finger in my direction and adding, "but don't be tempted to perceive Essenism as a Judaic avatar of Mazdaism."

  Shaking his head, Leonard says, "Nothing related to Nebuchadnezzar the Second and Cyaxares is ever that simple."

  Babette gazes at the compact she holds open in one hand, retouching her eye shadow with a little brush. Looking up from her reflection in the tiny mirror, Babette calls to Leonard, "Could you possibly BE more boring?"

  Among the early Catholics, he says, the Church found l hat monotheism couldn't replace the long-beloved polytheism now outdated and considered pagan. Celebrants were too used to petitioning individual deities, so the Church created
the various saints, each a counterpart to an earlier deity, representing love, success, recovery from illness, etc. As battles raged and kingdoms rose and fell the god Aryaman was replaced by Sraosha. Mithra supplanted Vishnu. Zoroaster made Mithra obsolete, and with each succeeding god, the prior ruling deity was cast into obscurity and contempt.

  "Even the word demon," Leonard says, "originates with Christian theologians who misinterpreted 'daimon' in the writings of Socrates. Originally the word meant 'muse' or 'inspiration,' but its most common definition was 'god.'" He adds that if civilization lasts long enough into the future, one day even Jesus will be skulking around Hades, banished and ticked off.

  "Bullshit!" a man yells. The yelling erupts from the jail cell of the football man, where his bare bones foam with red corpuscles, the red bubbles running together to form muscles which swell and stretch to attach with their tendons, the white ligaments braiding, a process both compelling and revolting to watch. Even before a layer of skin has fully enveloped the skull, the mandible drops open to shout, "That's bullshit, geek!" The flow of new skin breaks like a pink wave to form lips around the teeth, the lips saying, "You just keep talking that way, twerp! That's exactly why you're stuck here."

  Without looking up from her own reflection in her compact mirror, Babette asks, "What are you down here for?"

  "Offsides," the football man calls back.

  Leonard shouts, "Why am I here?"

  I ask, "What's 'offsides'?"

  Auburn hair sprouts from the football man's scalp. Curly, coppery hair. Gray eyes inflate within each socket. Even his uniform weaves itself whole from the scraps and threads scattered around his cell floor. Printed across the back of his jersey is a big number 54 and the name Patterson. To me, the football man says, "I had a part of my foot over the scrimmage line when the ref blew his whistle to signal the start of play. That's 'offsides.'"

  I ask, 'And that's in the Bible?"

  With all his hair and skin replaced, you can tell the football man is only a high schooler. Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. Even as he talks, little silver wires weave themselves between his teeth, becoming a mouthful of braces. "Two minutes into the second quarter," he says, "I intercepted a pass and got sacked by a defensive tackle—pow! Now, I'm here."

  Again, Leonard shouts, "But why am I here?"

  "Because you don't believe in the one true God," says Patterson, the football player. Now that he's covered in skin again, his new eyes keep glancing over at Babette.

  She doesn't look up from her little mirror, but Babette makes faces, pursing her lips and tossing her hair, fluttering her eyelashes, fast. As my mom would tell you, "Nobody stands that straight when she's not on camera." Meaning: Babette loves the attention.

  No, it's not fair. From within their respective cages, Patterson and Leonard both stare at Babette locked within hers. No one looks at me. If I wanted to be ignored I'd have stayed on earth as a ghost, watching my mom and dad walk around naked, opening the drapes and chilling rooms as I bully them to put on some clothes. Even that Ahriman demon showing up to tear me apart and devour me would be better than getting no attention whatsoever.

  There it is, again—that nagging tendency to hope. My addiction.

  While Patterson and Leonard ogle Babette, and Babette ogles herself, I pretend to watch the vampire bats flit around. I watch the surf crest and break in rolling brown waves on Shit Lake. I pretend to scratch the make-believe psoriasis on my face. In the neighboring cages, sinners huddle, weeping out of old habit. A damned soul dressed in the uniform of a Nazi soldier smashes his face, again and again, into the stone floor of his cell, crushing and collapsing his nose and forehead as if he were tapping a hard-boiled egg against a plate in order to shatter the shell. In the pause between each impact on the stone, his crushed nose and features inflate to their normal appearance. In another cell, a teenage kid wears a black leather biker jacket, an oversize safety pin piercing his cheek, his head shaved except for a stripe of hair, dyed blue and gelled to stand in a spiky Mohawk which runs from his forehead to the nape of his neck. As I watch, the leather-jacket punk reaches up to his cheek and flicks open the safety pin. He draws it out from the holes in his skin, then reaches through the bars of his cage and pokes the point of the open pin into the lock of his cell door, working the point around within the keyhole.

  Still gazing at herself in her compact mirror, Babette asks of no one in particular, "What day is it?"

  Leonard's arm crooks, instantly, and he looks at his diver's chronograph watch, saying, "It's Thursday. Three-oh-nine p.m." A beat later, he says, "No, wait... now it's three ten."

  In the middle distance, a looming giant with the head of a lion, shaggy with black fur, with cat claws instead of hands, reaches into a cage and plucks out a wailing, flailing sinner, dangling him by his hair. In the same manner you might nibble grapes from a bunch, the demon's lips close around the man's leg. The demon's furry lion cheeks sink inward, hollowed, and the man's screams grow louder as the meat is sucked from the living bone. With one leg reduced to hanging bone, the demon begins to suck the meat from the second leg.

  Despite all of this ruckus, Leonard and Patterson continue to watch Babette, who watches herself. The Ice Age of Dumbness.

  With a muted clank, the punk wearing the leather jacket pries the tip of his safety pin, twisting it sideways within the lock on his cell door to trip the mechanism. He pulls the pin free, then wipes it against his blue jeans until the point is clean of rust and slime before thrusting it back into its previous place, piercing his cheek. At that the punk swings the cell door open and steps out of his cage. His Mohawk stands so tall the blue hair brushes the top of the doorframe.

  Swaggering down the row of cells, the blue-Mohawk punk peers into each cage Inside one lies an Egyptian pharaoh or somebody who went to Hell for praying to the wrong god, crumpled on the floor, gibbering and drooling, one arm sprawled so that the hand rests near the cage bars. A fat diamond ring glitters on one finger, the stone in the four-carat range, D-grade, not cubic zirconium like Babette's cheapo earrings. Next to that cage, the punk kid stops and stoops. Reaching through the bars, he slips the ring off the wasted finger. The kid pockets the diamond ring inside his motorcycle jacket. Standing, he catches me watching him and saunters toward my cell.

  He wears black motorcycle boots—note: an excellent footwear choice for Hades—the ankle of one boot wrapped with a bicycle chain, his other ankle wrapped with a knotted, soiled red bandanna. Pimples swell into red points dotting his pale chin and forehead, in contrast to his bright green eyes. As the Mohawk punk struts closer, one hand slips into his jacket pocket and scoops out something. From a long toss away, still walking, he says, "Catch," and his hand swings, tossing the object, which flashes in a long, high arc, flying between my cage bars, falling to the point where my hands clap together to catch it.

  Acting the part of a complete Miss Slutty Slutovitch, Babette continues to ignore Patterson and Leonard but holds her compact angled to spy on the punk kid, scrutinizing him so closely that when the thrown object flashes, the bright flash bounces off her mirror, reflected into her eyes.

  "What's a nice girl like you," the Mohawk kid asks me, "doing in a place like this?" When he talks the safety pin in his cheek jerks around, flashing orange in the firelight. He struts up to the bars of my cell and winks one green eye at me, but looks at Babette without looking directly at her. He's clearly touched the dirty iron bars, then touched his face, his jeans, his boots, smearing the filth all over himself.

  No, it's not fair, but dirt does manage to make some people look more sexy.

  "My name is Madison," I tell him, "and I'm a hope-aholic."

  Yes, I know the word tool. I may be dead and jailbait and boy-crazy, but I can still be used to make another girl jealous. Warm from the punk's pocket, lying in the palm of my hand is the stolen diamond ring. My first gift from a boy.

  Drawing the oversize safety pin from his cheek, the Mohawk kid pokes the sharp point into
my keyhole and begins to pick the lock.

  VI.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I assume that membership in Hell gives you access to a zillion-million A-list celebrities.... About the only person I'm not excited to meet is my dead grandpa. My long-dead Papadaddy Ben. Long Story. Please credit the impulse to my youthful curiosity, but I can't resist the opportunity to get sprung and take a quick look-see ramble to check out the lay of my new neighborhood.

  Spare me, please, your dime-store psychology, but I really do hope the devil will like me. Note, again, my lingering attachment to the H-word. My being here, locked in a slimy cage, it would seem a foregone conclusion that God isn't my biggest fan, and my parents, it now appears, are largely out of the picture, as are my favorite teachers, nutrition coaches, really all the authority figures I've tried to please for the past thirteen years. Therefore it's not surprising that I've transferred all my immature needs for attention and affection to the only parental adult available: Satan.

  There they both are: the H-word and the G-word, proof of my tenacious addiction to all things upbeat and optimistic. To be honest, all my effort thus far to remain spotless, mind my posture, present myself as perky, affect a cheerful smile, is calculated to endear myself to Satan. In my best-case scenario I see myself assuming a kind of sidekick or comic-relief role, becoming a perky, chubby, sassy girl child who tags along with the Prince of Lies, cracking wise-ass jokes and propping up his flagging ego. So ingrained is my spunky nature that I can't even allow the Prince of Darkness to indulge in the doldrums. I truly am a sort of flesh-and-blood form of Zoloft. Perhaps that explains Satan's general absence: He's simply waiting for my verve to exhaust itself before he makes himself known.

  Yes, I understand that much about pop psychology. I may be dead and vivacious, but I'm not in denial concerning the manic first impression I can make.