Damned Read online

  Even my own dad would tell you, "She's a dervish." Meaning: I tend to wear people out.

  It's for that reason that when the blue-Mohawk punk unlocks my cell door and swings it open on creaky, rusted hinges I step back deeper into the cage rather than forward to gain my freedom. Despite the diamond ring the punk's just tossed me, which now resides on the middle finger of my right hand, I resist my wanderlust. I ask the kid his name.

  "Me?" he says, stabbing the oversize safety pin through his cheek. He says, "Just call me Archer."

  Still lingering in my cell, I ask, "What are you in for?"

  "Me?" the kid, Archer, says. "I went and got my old man's AK-47 semi...." Dropping to one knee, he shoulders an invisible rifle, saying, "And I blew away my old man and old lady. I slaughtered my kid brother and sister. After them, my granny. Then our collie dog, Lassie..." Punctuating each sentence, Archer pulls an invisible trigger, sighting down the barrel of his phantom rifle. With each trigger pull, his shoulder jerks back as if pushed by recoil, his tall blue hair fluttering. Still sighting through an invisible scope, Archer says, "I flushed my Ritalin down the toilet and drove my folks' car to school and took out the varsity football team and three teachers... all of them, dead, dead, dead." As he stands, he brings the bore of the imaginary rifle barrel to his mouth, purses his lips, and blows away invisible gun smoke.

  "Bullshit," shouts a voice, Patterson, the football player, fully restored to a teenage boy with red hair and gray eyes and the large number 54 on his jersey. In one hand, he carries a helmet. His feet scratch the stone floor, the soles of his shoes tapping and skittering with sharp steel cleats. "That's total bullshit," Paterson says, shaking his head. "I saw your paperwork when you first got here. It said you're nothing but a lousy shoplifter."

  Leonard, the geek, laughs.

  Archer snatches a rock-hard popcorn ball off the ground and wings it, line-drive fast, against the geek's ear.

  Exploded popcorn and the pens from his pocket fly everywhere. Leonard falls silent.

  "Get this," Patterson says. 'According to his file Mr. Serial Killer, here, was trying to steal a loaf of bread and a batch of disposable diapers."

  At this Babette looks up from her mirror and says, "Diapers?"

  Archer strides over to the bars of Patterson's cell, thrusting his chin between the bars; snarling through clenched teeth, Archer says, "Shut up, jockstrap!"

  Babette says, "You have a baby?"

  Turning toward her, Archer shouts, "Shut up!"

  "Get back into your cell," Leonard shouts, "before you get us all in trouble."

  "What?" Archer shouts. He swaggers over, at the same time extracting the safety pin from his cheek, then begins to pick the lock of Leonard's cage door. "You afraid this will go on your permanent record, twerp?" Tripping the lock, Archer says, "You afraid you might not get into an Ivy League college?" On that note he swings the barred door open.

  Grabbing the door, yanking it shut, Leonard says, "Don't." Unlocked, the door won't stay shut and swings open. Holding it closed, Leonard says, "Lock it, quick, before some demon comes along...."

  Already, Archer's blue head is swaggering over to Babette's cell; pin in hand, he's saying, "Hey, sweet thang, I know a scenic spot overlooking the west edge of the Sea of Insects that will take your breath away," and he begins picking her lock.

  Leonard continues to pull on the bars of his cell door, holding it shut.

  My door hangs open. I close my hand into a fist around my new diamond ring.

  Patterson shouts, "You loser, you couldn't find your way across to the far side of Shit Lake."

  As he swings open Babette's door, Archer shouts, "Then join us, jockstrap. Show me."

  Dropping her cosmetics back into her fake Coach bag, Babette says, "Yeah... if you're brave enough." Pointlessly, she pinches her already short skirt and lifts the hem as if to prevent it from dragging. Being a total Miss Harlotty O'Harlot, her legs showing almost to her panty-hose crotch, Babette steps through her open door, picking her way delicately in her fake Manulo Blauhniks.

  Leonard stoops to collect his scattered pens. He brushes the bits of sticky popcorn from his hair.

  Archer swaggers over to Patterson's cell. Holding the safety pin outside the bars, beyond Patterson's reach. Baiting him, Archer says, "You up for a little field trip?"

  To get Leonard's attention I tell him my theory about behavior modification therapies versus plain, old-fashioned exorcisms. How nowadays if any of my friends, my alive girlfriends, sat in their bedrooms all day throwing up, the diagnosis would be bulimia. Rather than engage a priest to confront the girl about her behavior, express love and concern, and evict the occupying demon, contemporary families engage a behavioral therapist. It's weird to think that as recently as the 1970s religious leaders were throwing holy water on adolescent girls with eating disorders.

  My hope really does spring eternal; but, darn it, Leonard isn't listening.

  By now, Archer has sprung Patterson. Babette joins them and the trio is already strolling toward the fiery horizon amid screams and swarms of black houseflies. Patterson offers his hand to steady Babette on her high heels. Archer sneers, but it might just be the pin lanced through his cheek.

  Even as I continue to talk, expounding on my theory about Xanax addiction being caused by demonic possession, Leonard of the lovely brown eyes throws open his cell door and bolts after the vanishing hikers. My last only new friend in Hell, Leonard's scrambling over the terrain of aged Gummi Bears and smoldering coal. His head swiveling, on the lookout for possible demons, he's calling, "Wait!

  Wait up!" Rushing after the fading blue point of Archer's Mohawk hair.

  When all four of them are almost gone, reduced by distance to mere rule-breaking dots in the landscape of bubbling poop and discarded Jujubes, only then do I open my own cell door and take my first forbidden Bass Weejun steps in their pursuit.

  VII.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Like so many tourists, we've embarked on our little walkabout to explore Hell. We take note of the general topography. We view a few interesting landmarks. And I'm prompted to make a small confession.

  The group of us skirted around the margin of the flaky, greasy Dandruff Desert, where scorching winds as hot as a billion hair dryers blow the scabs of dead skin into drifts as tall as the Matterhorn. We traipsed past the Great Plains of Broken Glass. After a fair trek, we stood on a bluff of volcanic cinders overlooking a vast pale ocean which stretched to the horizon. No wave or ripple disturbed its opalescent surface: a shade of soiled ivory similar to the scuffed faux leather of Babette's counterfeit Manolo Blahnik shoes.

  Even as we watch, the viscous tide composed of this off-white ooze seems to rise and consume a finger's width of the ashy, cindery beach. So thick is the corrupt liquid that it appears more to roll up the shoreline than to wash ashore as this flood tide creeps in. Apparently, on this particular ocean, the tide never ebbs and is always flowing, always a rising flood tide.

  "Check it out," Archer says, and waves one leather-jacketed arm in a wide arc to frame the view. "Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm...."

  All ejaculate, according to Archer, expelled in masturbatory emissions over the course of human history, at least since Onan—it all trickles down to accumulate here. Likewise, he explains, all bloodshed on Earth trickles down and collects in Hell. All tears. Every spit gob spit on the ground ends up hereabouts.

  "Since the introduction of VHS tapes and the Internet," Archer says, "this ocean has been rising at record rates."

  I think of my Papadaddy Ben and shudder. To repeat, Long Story.

  In Hell, porn is creating an effect equivalent to that of global warming on earth.

  The group of us take a step backward, away from the rising, shimmering ooze.

  "Now that this twerp is dead," Patterson says, as he cuffs Leonard on the back of the head, "maybe the ol' sperm sea won't be filling up so fast."

  Leonard
rubs his own scalp, wincing, and says, "Don't look now, Patterson, but I think I can see some of your ball juice floating out there."

  Looking at Babette, Archer licks his tongue around his lips and says, "One of these days we're going to be up to our eyeballs...."

  Babette looks at the diamond ring on my finger.

  Archer, still ogling her, says, "Hey, Babs, you ever been up to your foxy eyes in hot sperm?"

  And pivoting on one scuffed heel, Babette says, "Back off, Sid Vicious. I'm not your Nancy Spungen." Waving for us to follow her, fluttering her white-painted fingernails, Babette looks at Patterson in his football jersey and says, "It's your turn. Now you show us someplace interesting."

  Patterson swallows, shrugs his shoulders, and says, "You guys want to see the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions?"

  We, the rest of us, all shake our heads, No. Slowly. In unison, for a long time, no, no, no. Definitely not.

  As Babette strides away from the Ocean of Wasted Sperm, Patterson trots to catch up with her. The pair of them link arms, walking together. The team captain and the head cheerleader. The rest of us, Leonard and Archer and I, follow a few steps behind.

  To be honest, I keep wishing we could all talk. Chew the fat. And, yes, I know that wishing is another symptom of hope, but I can't help it. As we amble along, trudging over steaming brimstone beds of sulfur and coal, I want to ask if anyone else feels an intense sense of shame. By dying, do they feel as if they've disappointed everyone who ever bothered to love them? After all the effort that so many people made to raise them, to feed and teach them, do Archer or Leonard or Babette feel a crushing sense of having failed their loved ones? Do they worry that dying constitutes the biggest sin they could possibly commit? Have they considered the possibility that, by dying, each of us has generated pain and sorrow which our survivors must suffer for the remainder of their lives?

  In dying—worse than flunking a grade in school, or getting arrested, or knocking up some prom date—perhaps we've majorly, irreversibly fucked up.

  But nobody brings up the subject, so I don't either.

  If you asked my mom, she'd tell you that I've always been a little coward. As my mom would say, "Madison, you're dead... now, stop being so needy."

  Probably everyone in the world looks like a coward when compared to my mom and dad. My parents were always leasing a jet to fly round-trip to Zaire and bring home an adopted brother or sister for Christmas—not that we celebrated Christmas—but the same way my friends might find a puppy or kitten under their holiday tree, I'd find a new sibling from some obscure, postcolonial, living-nightmare place. My parents meant well, but the road to Hell is paved with publicity stunts. Any adoption occurred within the media cycle of my mom's film releases or my dad's IPOs, announced with a gale-force flurry of press releases and photo ops. Following the media blitz, my new adopted brother or sister would be warehoused in an appropriate boarding school, no longer starving, now offered an education and a brighter future, but never again present at our dinner table.

  Walking along, now backtracking across the Great Plains of Broken Glass, Leonard explains how ancient Greeks conceived of the afterlife as Hades, a place where both the corrupt and the innocent went to forget the sins and egos left over from their lives on earth. Jews believed in Sheol, which translated as "the place of waiting," again, where all souls collected, regardless of their crimes and virtues, to rest and find peace through discarding their past transgressions and attachments on earth. Kind of Hell as going to detox or rehab instead of Hell as burning punishment. For most of human history, Leonard says, people have perceived of Hell as a sort of inpatient clinic where we go to kick our addiction to life.

  Without breaking stride, Leonard says, "John Scotus Eriugena wrote during the ninth century that Hell is where your own desires take you, stealing you away from God and the original plans God had for fulfilling your soul's perfection."

  I say maybe we should swing by that swamp of terminated pregnancies. There's a good possibility that I might run into a long-lost sibling or two.

  Yes, I may be flip and glib, but I know what constitutes a healthy psychological defense mechanism.

  Droning on while we walk, Leonard lectures about the power structure of Hades. He describes how midway through the fifteenth century, an Austrian Jew named Alphonsus de Spina converted to Christianity, becoming a Franciscan monk, then a bishop, and finally compiling a list of the demonic entities who populate Hell. His numbers ran into the millions.

  "If you see anyone with a goat's horned head, a woman's breasts, and the black wings of a huge raven," Leonard says, "that would be the demon Baphomet." Counting in the air, waving an index finger in the manner of a conductor cueing the sections of an orchestra, Leonard says, "You have the Hebrew Shedim, the Greek demon kings Abaddon and Apollyon. Abigor commands sixty legions of devils. Alocer commands thirty-six legions. Furfur, a royal count of Hell, commands twenty-six legions...."

  Just as the earth is ruled by a hierarchy of leaders, Leonard says, so too is Hell. Most theologians, including Alphonsus de Spina, describe Hell as having ten orders of demons. Among those are 66 princes, each overseeing 6,666 legions, and each legion comprises 6,666 demons. Among them is Valafar, the grand duke of Hell; Rimmon, the chief physician of Hell; Ukobach, the leading engineer of Hell, and reputed to have invented fireworks and presented them as a gift to mankind. Leonard rattles off the names: Zaebos, who boasts the head of a crocodile on his shoulders... Kobal, the patron demon of human comedians... Succorbenoth, the demon of hate....

  Leonard says, "It's like Dungeons and Dragons, only to the tenth power." He says, "Seriously, the biggest brains of the Middle Ages devoted their entire lives to this type of theological bean counting and number crunching."

  Shaking my head, I say that I wish my parents had.

  Periodically along our journey, Leonard stops to point out a figure in the distance. One, flying across the orange sky, flapping pale wings of melting dripping wax, this is Troian, the night demon of Russian culture. Flying along a different trajectory, peering down with the wide head and luminous eyes of an owl, this is Tlacatecolototl, the Mexican god of evil. Wrapped in cyclone winds of rain and dust, there are Japanese Oni demons, who traditionally live at the center of hurricanes.

  What the Human Genome Project would represent for future researchers, Leonard explains, this great inventory represented for previous centuries of world leaders.

  According to the bishop de Spina, a third of Heaven s angels were cast into Hell, and this divine downsizing, this celestial housecleaning, took nine full days—two days longer than it took God to create the Earth. In all, a total of 133,306,668 angels—including much-revered former cherubim, potentates, seraphim, and dominations—were forcibly relocated, among them Asbeel and Gaap, Oza and Marut and Urakabarameel.

  Ahead of us, where she walks arm in arm with Patterson, Babette cuts loose with a peal of laughter, loud and shrill mid as fake as her counterfeit shoes.

  Archer glares at their backs, the big safety pin bunched in the muscles of his clenched jaw.

  Leonard name-drops about the different demons whom we might stumble across: Baal, Beelzebub, Belial, Liberace, Diabolos, Mara, Pazuzu—an Assyrian with a bat's head and scorpion's tail—Lamashtu—a Sumerian she-devil who suckles a pig with one breast and a dog with the other— or Namtaru—the Mesopotamian version of our modern grim reaper. We look for Satan with the same intensity that my mom and dad looked for God.

  In retrospect my parents were always pushing me to expand my consciousness by huffing glue or gasoline or chewing peyote buttons. Simply because they'd done their time, wasted their teen years lolling in the muddy fields of Vermont and the salt flats of Nevada, naked except for rainbow face paints and a thick coating of sweaty filth, their heads festooned with fifty pounds of fetid dreadlocks, teeming with crab lice and pretending to find enlightenment... that does NOT mean I have to make that same mistake.

  Sorry, Satan, once again I've said
the G-word.

  Without breaking stride, Leonard nods and points to indicate the former deities of now-defunct cultures, now warehoused in the underworld. Among them: Benoth, a god of the Babylonians; Dagon, an idol of the Philistines; Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians; Tartak, the god of the Hevites.

  My suspicion is that my parents treasure their sordid recollections of episodes at Woodstock and Burning Man not because those pastimes led to wisdom, but because such folly was inseparable from a period of their lives when they were young and unburdened by obligation; they had free time, muscle tone, and their futures still looked like a great, grand adventure. Furthermore, both my mother and father had been free of social status and therefore had nothing to lose by cavorting nude, their swollen genitals smeared with muck.

  Thus, because they had ingested drugs and flirted with brain damage, they insisted I should do likewise. I was forever opening my boxed lunch at school to discover a cheese sandwich, a carton of apple juice, carrot sticks, and a five-hundred-milligram Percocet. Tucked within my Christmas stocking—not that we celebrated Christmas— would be three oranges, a sugar mouse, a harmonica, and quaaludes. In my Easter basket—not that we called the event Easter—instead of jelly beans, I'd find lumps of hashish. Would that I could forget the scene at my twelfth birthday party where I flailed at a piñata, wielding a broomstick in front of my peers and their respective former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-anarchist throwback parents. The moment the colorful papier-mâché burst, instead of Tootsie Rolls or Hershey's Kisses, everyone present was showered with Vicodins, Darvons, Percodans, amyl nitrate ampoules, LSD stamps, and assorted barbiturates. The now-wealthy, now-middle-aged parents were ecstatic, while my little friends and I couldn't help but feel a tad bit cheated.

  That, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand that very few twelve-year-olds would actually enjoy attending a clothing-optional birthday party.