Damned

  The AIDS girl, Emily, won't believe me at first. Either about being her same age or about being dead. Emily's been kept out of school since her immune system crashed, and she's so far gone that she's no longer even worried about flunking seventh grade. In response, I tell her that I'm dating River Phoenix. And, if she can hurry up, quick, and die, word is that Heath Ledger isn't dating anybody at the moment.

  Of course, I'm not dating anybody, but what's my punishment for telling a little fib? Am I going to Hell? Ha! It's stunning how having nothing to lose will build your self-confidence.

  And, yes, it ought to break my heart, talking to a girl my same age who's stuck alone, dying of AIDS in Canada with both her parents at work, while she watches television and feels weaker every day, but at least Emily's still alive. That alone puts her head and shoulders above me in the pecking order. If anything, it seems to brighten her spirits, meeting someone already dead.

  Over the phone, all self-righteous, Emily announces that not only is she still alive, but she has no intention of ending up in Hell.

  I ask if she's ever buttered her bread before breaking it? Has she ever used the word ain't? Has she ever fixed a fallen-down hem with either a safety pin or adhesive tape? Well, I've met mobs of people condemned to eternal hellfire for just those very slipups, so Emily had best not count her chickens before they're hatched. According to Babette's statistics, 100 percent of people who die of AIDS are consigned to Hell. As are all aborted babies. And all people killed by drunk drivers.

  And all the people who drowned on the Titanic, rich and poor, they're here roasting away also. Every single soul. To repeat: This is Hell—don't ask for too much logic.

  On the phone, Emily coughs. She coughs and coughs. At last, she catches enough breath to say the AIDS isn't her fault. Besides that, she's not going to die, not for a long, long time. She coughs once more, and her coughing ends in sobs, sniffing, and weeping, real way-genuine little-girl boo-hooing.

  No, it's not fair, I reply. In reality, within my head, I'm still so excited. Oh, Satan, just imagine it: Me with Bangs!

  On the phone it's silent except for the sound of crying. Then, Emily shrieks, "You're lying!"

  Into my headset, I say, "You'll see." I tell her to look me up once she arrives. By then I'll probably be Mrs. River Phoenix, but we'll make a bet. Ten Milky Way bars says she's down here with me faster than she can imagine. "Ask anybody for directions," I tell her. "The name's Maddy Spencer," I say, and she needs to make sure and die with ten candy bars in her pocket so we can settle our bet. Ten! Not snack-size!

  And, yes, I know the word masticated. It's not as dirty a word as it sounds. But no, I'm not way-totally surprised when this Canadian Emily girl hangs up.

  XVII.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I suspect that my parents had an inkling about my covert plan to seduce Goran. This night, while they're both out, I'll profess my love as vehemently as Scarlett O'Hara throwing herself at Ashley Wilkes in the library of his Twelve Oaks plantation house.

  Mere hours prior to the Academy Awards, my parents are fussing over which color of political action ribbon to pin on themselves. Pink, for breast cancer. Yellow, for Bring the Soldiers Home. Green, for climate change— except for my mom's gown arrived looking more orange than crimson, so any symbolic protest against climate change would clash. My mom folds a scrap of red ribbon, holding it against the bodice of her gown. Studying the effect in a mirror, she says, "Do people still get AIDS?" She says, "Don't laugh, but it just seems so... 1989."

  The three of us, her, me, and my dad, are in the hotel suite, waiting in the lull between the siege of the stylist army and the launch of the Prius. My dad says, "Maddy?" In one hand, he holds out a pair of gold cuff links.

  I step closer to him, my own hand extended, palm up.

  My father drops his cuff links into my cupped palm. Then he shoots his shirt cuffs, French cuffs, extending both hands, turned wrist-up, for me to insert and fasten the cuff links. These are the teeny-tiny malachite cuff links some producer gave everyone as a wrap gift after shooting ended on my mom's last film.

  My dad asks, "Maddy, do you know where babies come from?"

  Theoretically, yes. I understand the messy ordeal of the egg and the sperm, plus all the ancient tropes about finding infants beneath cabbage leaves or storks bringing them, but just to force what's obviously an uncomfortable situation, I say, "Babies?" I say, "Mommy, Daddy..." Canting my head in a not-unappealing manner, I widen my eyes and say, "Doesn't the casting director bring them?"

  My father bends one elbow, pulls back the shirt cuff on that hand, and looks at his wristwatch. He looks at my mother. He smiles wanly.

  My mom drops her evening bag into a hotel chair and heaves a deep, heavy sigh. She settles herself into the chair and pats her knees in a gesture for me to move closer.

  My father steps to stand immediately beside her chair, then bends his knees to sit on the chair's arm. The two of them create a tableau of elegant good looks. So meticulously outfitted in their tuxedo and gown. Every hair assigned its perfect place. The pair of them, so beautifully blocked for a two-shot, I can't resist messing with their Zen.

  Dutifully, I cross the hotel room and sit on the Oriental carpet at my mother's feet. Already, I'm wearing the tweedy skort, the pink blouse and cardigan sweater for my long-planned rendezvous with Goran. I gaze up at my parents with guileless terrier eyes. Wide-open Japanese-animation eyes.

  "Now, when a man loves a woman very, very much..." my dad says.

  My mother retrieves the evening purse from the seat beside her. Snapping open the clasp, she reaches out a pill bottle, saying, "Would you like a Xanax, Maddy?"

  I shake my head, No.

  With her perfectly manicured hands, my mom executes the stage business of twisting open the pill bottle, then shaking two of the pills into her own hand. My father reaches down from his perch on the arm of her chair. Instead of giving him one of the two pills she holds, she shakes two more pills out of the bottle into his hand. Both my parents toss back the pills they hold and swallow them dry.

  "Now," my dad says, "when a man loves a woman very, very much..."

  "Or," my mom adds, shooting him a look, "when a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman." In the fingers of one hand, she still toys with the scrap of red grosgrain ribbon.

  My father nods. "Your mother is right." He adds, "Or when a man loves two women, or three women, backstage after a big rock concert..."

  "Or," my mom says, "when a whole cell block of male prisoners love one new inmate very, very much..."

  "Or," my dad interjects, "when a motorcycle gang making a meth run across the Southwestern United States loves one drunken biker chick very, very much..."

  Yes, I know their car is waiting. The Prius. At the awards venue, some poor talent wrangler is no doubt reshuffling their arrival time. Despite all of these stress factors, I merely furrow my preadolescent brow in a confused expression my Botoxed parents can only envy. I shift my gaze back and forth between my mom's eyes and my dad's even as the Xanax turns them glazed and glassy.

  My mother looks up, casting her gaze over her shoulder so that her eyes meet my father's.

  Finally, my dad says, "Oh, to hell with it." Reaching a hand into his tux jacket, he extracts a personal digital assistant, or PDA, from the inside pocket. He crouches next to the chair, bringing the tiny computer level with my face. Flipping the screen open, he keyboards Ctrl+Alt+P, and the screen fills with a view of our media room in Prague. He toggles until the wide-screen television fills the entire computer screen, then keys Ctrl+Alt+L and scrolls down through a list of movie titles. Tabbing down the list, my father selects a movie, and a keystroke later the computer screen fills with a tangle of arms and legs, dangling hairless testicles, and quivering silicone-enhanced breasts.

  Yes, I may be a virgin, a dead virgin, with no knowledge of carnality beyond the soft-focus metaphors of Barbara Cartland novels, but I can well recognize a fake booby when
I see one.

  The camerawork is atrocious. Anywhere from two to twenty men and women grapple, frantically involved in violating every orifice present with every digit, phallus, and tongue available to them. Whole human bodies appear to be disappearing into other bodies. The lighting is abysmal, and the sound has obviously been looped by nonunion amateurs working without a decent final draft. What appears before me bears less resemblance to sexual congress than it does to the writhing, squirming, not-quite-dead-yet-already-partially-decomposed occupants of a mass grave.

  My mom smiles. Nodding at the PDA screen, she says, "Do you understand, Maddy?" She says, "This is where babies come from."

  My dad adds, 'And herpes."

  "Antonio," my mother says, "let's not go down that road." To me, she says, "Young lady, are you absolutely sure you don't want a Xanax?"

  In the center of the tiny pornographic movie, the hideous little orgy is interrupted. The words Incoming Call superimpose themselves over the grappling bodies. A red light blinks at the top of the PDA case, and a shrill bell rings. My dad says, "Wait," and he holds the PDA to his ear, where the gruesome assemblage of entwined limbs and genitals squirm against his cheek; videotaped penises erupt their vile sputum dangerously near his eye and mouth. Answering the call thus, he says, "Hello?" He says, "Fine. We'll be downstairs in a moment."

  I shake my head again, No. No, thank you, to the Xanax.

  Already, my mom starts poking around inside her evening purse. "This isn't your real birthday present," she says, "but just in case..." What she hands me is round, a rolled batch of shiny plastic or vinyl, printed with the repeating pattern of a cartoon cat face. The plastic or foil feels so slick that it could be wet, too slick to easily hold on to; thus when I reach to take it from her hand, the roll drops to the floor, unspooling itself to reveal a seemingly endless series of the same cartoon cat face. The long plastic strip, quilted into little squares, this trails from my hand to the floor. The length of it gives off a powdery, hospital smell of latex.

  By then, my parents are gone; they've swept out the door of the hotel suite before I realize I'm holding a fifteen-foot-long supply of Hello Kitty condoms.

  XVIII.

  Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Little by little, I forget my life on earth, how it felt to be alive and living, but today something happened which shocked me back to remembering—maybe not everything—but at least I realize how much I might be forgetting. Or suppressing.

  The computerized autodialer in Hell makes it a top priority to call mostly numbers on the federal government's No Call List. I can practically smell the mercury-enhanced tuna casserole on the breath of people whose dinner I interrupt, even over the fiber-optic or whatever phone lines that connect earth and Hell, when they yell at me. Their dinner napkins still tucked into the collars of their T-shirts, flapping down their fronts, spotted with Hamburger Helper and Green Goddess salad dressing, these angry people in Detroit, Biloxi, and Allentown, they yell for me to, "Go to Hell..."

  And yes, I might be a thoughtless, uncouth interloper into the savory ritual of their evening repast, but I'm way ahead of their hostile request.

  This current day or month or century, I'm plugged into my workstation, getting shouted at, asking people their consumer preferences regarding ballpoint pens, when something new occurs. A telephone call comes through the system. An incoming call. Even as some meat loaf-eating moron shouts at me, a beep sound starts within my headset. Some kind of call-waiting sound. Whether this call's coming from earth or Hell, I can't begin to guess, and the caller identification is blocked. The instant the meat-loaf moron hangs up, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to clear my line, and say, "Hello?"

  A girl's voice says, "Is this Maddy? Are you Madison Spencer?"

  I ask, Who's calling?

  "I'm Emily," the girl says, "from British Columbia." The thirteen-year-old. The girl with the really bad case of AIDS. She's *69'd me. Over the telephone, she says, "Are you really and truly dead?"

  As a doornail, I tell her.

  This Emily girl says, "The caller ID says your area code is for Missoula, Montana... ."

  I tell her, Same deal.

  She says, "If I called you back, collect, would you accept the charges?"

  Sure, I tell her. I'll try.

  And—click—she hangs up on her end.

  Granted it's not entirely ethical to make personal calls from Hell, but everybody does it. To one side of me, the punk kid, Archer, sits with his leather-jacketed elbow almost touching my cardigan-sweatered elbow. Archer toys with the big safety pin which hangs from his cheek, while into his headset he's saying, "... No, seriously, you sound gnarly-hot." He says, 'After your skin-cancer thing metastasizes, you and me need to totally hook up... ."

  At my opposite elbow, the brainiac Leonard stares forward, his eyes unfocused, telling his headset, "Queen's rook to G-five..."

  Even as I sit here, my head clamped in a headset, the earpiece covering one ear and the microphone looped around to hang in front of my mouth, at the same time, Babette hovers over me, circling and snipping at my hair with the cuticle scissors from her purse, shaping me the most way-perfect pageboy haircut with straight-across bangs. Even she doesn't care that I'm socializing on Hell's dime.

  My line rings again, and a mechanical voice says, "You have a collect phone call from..."

  And the Canadian AIDS girl adds, "Emily."

  The computer says, "Will you accept the charges?"

  And I say, Yes.

  Over the phone, Emily says, "I only called because this constitutes a way-terrible emergency." She says, "My parents want me to see a new shrink. Do you think I should go?"

  Shaking my head, I tell her, "No way."

  Babette's hand grips the back of my neck, her white-painted fingernails digging in until I hold still.

  “And don't let them feed you full of Xanax, either," I say into the phone. From my personal experience, nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock. Or you see an Earth First! bumper sticker on the rear of his diesel Hummer H3T in the parking lot. Or you catch him picking his nose. Your precious confidant you expected would sort out your entire twisted psyche, who now harbors all your darkest confessions, he's just some jerk with a master's degree. To change the subject, I ask Emily how it was that she contracted AIDS.

  "How else?" Emily says. "From my last therapist, of course."

  I ask, Was he cute?

  Emily shrugs audibly, saying, "Cute enough, for a sliding-scale therapist."

  Toying with a strand of my hair, looping it around my finger, then pulling it to where my teeth can nibble the tips, I ask Emily what it's like to have AIDS.

  Even over the phone, her eye roll is audible. "It's like being Canadian," she says. "You get used to it."

  Trying to sound impressed, I say, "Wow." I say, "I guess people can get used to pretty much anything."

  Just to make conversation, I ask if Emily has gotten her first period yet.

  "Sure," Emily says, "but when your viral loads are this sky-high, menstruation is less like a big celebration of attaining womanhood, and more like a way-biologically hazardous toxic spill in your pants."

  Without realizing it, I must still be biting my hair, because Babette slaps my hand away. She waves the little scissors in my face and gives me a stern look.

  Over the phone, Emily says, "I figure that once I'm dead I can start dating." She says, "Is Corey Haim seeing anybody?"

  I don't answer, not right away, not that instant, because a herd of new Hell inductees is crowding past my workstation. A regular flood of people has just arrived, still not entirely certain they're dead. Most of them wear leis made of silk flowers looped around their necks. The ones not wearing sunglasses have a stunned, worried look in their eyes. A mob that could easily be the entire population of some
country, it's usually proof that something terrible has just befallen folks on earth.

  Over the phone, I ask Emily if something awful just occurred. A major earthquake? A tidal wave? A nuclear bomb? Did a dam burst? Of the milling, stunned newcomers, most appear to be wearing vivid Hawaiian-print shirts, with cameras slung on cords hanging around their necks. These people all boast roasted-red sunburns, some with white stripes of zinc oxide smeared across the bridge of their nose.

  In response, Emily says, "Some big cruise-ship disaster, like, a jillion tourists died of food poisoning from eating bad lobsters." She says, "Why do you ask?"

  I say, "No reason."

  Deep in this crowd, a familiar face floats. A boy's face, his eyes glowering beneath the overhang of a heavy brow. His hair, too thick to comb flat.

  In my ear, Emily asks, "How did you die?"

  "Marijuana," I tell her. Still watching the boy's face in the middle distance, I say, "I'm not altogether certain." I say, "I was so way stoned."

  Around me, Archer flirts with dying cheerleaders. Leonard checkmates some alive dweeb. Patterson asks somebody on earth how the Raiders are ranked this season.

  Emily says, "Nobody dies from marijuana." Pressing the subject, she says, "What's the last detail you remember about your life?"

  I say, I don't know.

  Beyond this new flood of the damned, the boy's face turns. His eyes meet mine. He of the moody, wrinkled forehead. He of the snarling Heathcliff lips.

  Emily says, "But what killed you?"

  I say, I don't know.

  The boy in the distance, he turns and begins to walk away, dodging and weaving to escape through the crowd of poisoned tourists.

  By reflex, I stand, my headset still tethering me to my workstation. And with a sharp shove against my shoulder, Babette sits me back down in my chair and continues to snip at my hair.