Текст книги "Damned"
Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
XXVII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. By their nature, stories told in the second person can suggest prayers. "Hallowed he thy name... the Lord is with thee..." With this in mind, please don't get the idea that I'm praying to you. It's nothing personal, but I'm simply not a satanist. Nor, despite my parents' best efforts, am I a secular humanist. In light of finding myself in the afterlife, neither am I any longer a confident atheist nor agnostic. At the moment, I'm not certain in what I believe. Far be it from me to pledge my faith to any belief system when, at this point, it would seem that I've been wrong about everything I've ever felt was real.
In truth, I'm no longer even certain who I, myself, am.
My dad would tell you, "If you don't know what comes next, take a good long look at what came before." Meaning: If you allow it, your past tends to dictate your future. Meaning: It's time I retrace my footsteps. With that in mind, I abandon my job at the telemarketing phone bank and set off on foot, carrying my new high heels, wearing my trusty, durable loafers. Clouds of black houseflies hover, buzzing, dense and heavy as black smoke. The Sea of Insects continues to boil in eternal rolling, gnashing chaos, its shimmering, iridescent surface stretching to the horizon. The prickly hillocks of discarded finger– and toenail parings continue to grow and slough in scratchy avalanches. The desert of broken glass crunches underfoot. The noxious Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm continues to spread, engulfing the hellish landscape around it.
And yes, I find myself a thirteen-year-old dead girl gaining a fuller knowledge of her own trust issues, but what I'd really rather be is an Eastern Bloc orphan abandoned and alone in my misery, ignored, with no possibility of rescue until I become indifferent to my own horrid circumstances and unhappiness. Or, as my mother would tell me, "Blah, blah, blah... shut up, Madison."
My point is, I've made my entire identity about being smart. Other girls, mostly Miss Slutty Vandersluts, they chose to be pretty; that's an easy enough decision when you're young. As my mom would say, "Every garden looks beautiful in May." Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young. Among young ladies, it's a default choice, to compete on the level of physical attractiveness. Other girls, those doomed by hooked noses or ravaged skin, settle on being wildly funny. Other girls turn athletic or anorexic or hypochondriac. Lots of girls choose the bitter, lonely, lifetime path of being Miss Snarky Von Snarkskis, armored within their sharp-tongued anger. Another life choice is to become the peppy and upbeat student body politician. Or possibly to invent myself as the perennial morose poetess, poring over my private verse, channeling the dreary weltschmerz of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. But, despite so many options, I chose to be smart—the intelligent fat girl who possessed the shining brain, the straight-A student who'd wear sensible, durable shoes and eschew volleyball and manicures and giggling.
Suffice it to say that, until recently, I had felt quite satisfied and successful with my own invention. Each of us chooses our personal route—to be sporty or snarky or smart—with the lifelong confidence that one can possess only as a small child.
However, in light of the truth: that I did not die of a marijuana overdose... nor did Goran reveal himself as my romantic ideal... my schemes have brought nothing except heartache to my family... Thus, it would follow that I am not so smart. And with that, my entire concept of self is undermined.
Even now, I hesitate to use words such as eschew and convey and weltschmerz, so thoroughly is my faith in myself shaken. The actual nature of my death reveals me to be an idiot, no longer a Bright Young Thing, but instead a deluded, pretentious poseur. Not brilliant, but an impostor who would craft my own illusory reality out of a handful of impressive words. Such vocabulary props served as my eye shadow, my breast implants, my physical coordination, my confidence. These words: erudite and insidious and obfuscate, served as my crutches.
Perhaps it's better to recognize this degree of personal fallacy while still young, rather than lose one's fixed sense of self in middle age as beauty and youth fade, or strength and agility fail. It might be worse to cling to sarcasm and contempt until one finds herself isolated, loathed by all her peers. Nevertheless, this extreme form of psychological course correction still feels... devastating.
With that crisis fully realized, I retrace my route, returning to the cell where I first arrived in Hell. My arms swinging, the diamond ring which Archer gave me, the finger ring, flashes heavy and stolen. No longer can I present myself as an authority on being dead, so I retreat to my enclosure of filthy bars, the comfort provided inside a lock, the rust and grime scratched by the pointed safety pin of a dead punk rocker. Doomed within their own cells, my neighbors slump, gripping their heads between their hands, so long frozen and catatonic in attitudes of self-pity that spiderwebs envelop them. Or they pace, punching the air and babbling.
No, it's not too late for me to devote myself to being funny or artsy, energetically flopping my body around on some gymnastics mats or painting moody masterpieces; however, having failed at my initial strategy, I'll never again have such faith in a single identity. Whether I channel my future into being the sporty girl or stoner girl, the smiling cover on a Wheaties cereal box, or an absinthe-guzzling auteur, that new persona will always feel as phony and put-on as plastic fingernails or a rub-on tattoo. The rest of my afterlife, I'll feel as counterfeit as Babette's Manolo Blahniks.
Nearby, oblivious souls sprawl within their cages, so sunken in their shock and resignation they fail to shoo the houseflies that crawl along their soiled arms. These flies freely roam across their smudged cheeks and foreheads. Black flies, fat as raisins, walk across the glassy surface of people's staring, dazed eyes. Unnoticed, these houseflies wander into slack, open mouths, then emerge from nostrils.
Behind their own jail bars, other condemned souls tear at their hair. Enraged souls, they rend and shred their own togas and vestments, ripping their ermine robes, their shrouds and silk gowns and tweed Savile Row suits. Some of them, Roman senators and Japanese shoguns, dead and damned to Hell since long before I was even born. These tormented wail. Their specks of raving slobber mist the fetid air. Their sweat runs in rivulets down their foreheads and cheeks, glowing orange in the ambient Hellish firelight. The denizens of Hades, they flail and cower, shake fists at the flaming sky, pound their heads into the iron bars until their blood blinds them. Others claw at their own countenances, raking their skin raw, scratching out their own eyes. Their broken, hoarse voices keening. In adjacent cells... in cages beyond cages... trapped, they stretch to the burning horizon in every direction. Countless billions of men and women yammer, despairing, shouting their names and status as kings or taxpayers or persecuted minorities or rightful property owners. In this, the cacophony of Hell, the history of humanity fractures into individual protest. They demand their birthrights. They insist on their righteous innocence as Christians or Muslims or Jews. As philanthropists or physicians. Do-gooders or martyrs or movie stars or political activists.
In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us.
In the distance, following the same route on which I've so recently returned, a bright blue spark floats. The spot of bright blue, vivid against the contrasting blaze of orange and red fire, the blue nimbus bobs along, edging between faraway cages and their shrieking occupants. The blue speck passes the dead presidents gnashing their teeth, ignores the forgotten emperors and potentates. This blue spot disappears behind heaps of rusted cages, vanishing behind crowds of lunatic former popes, obscured behind the iron hives of imprisoned, sobbing deposed shamans and city fathers and exiled, scowling tribesmen, only to appear a little more blue, a little larger, closer, a moment later. In this manner, the bright blue object zigzags, coming nearer, navigating the labyrinth of despair and frustration. The bright blue, lost within clouds of flies. The blue, cloaked in occasional pockets of dense, dark smoke. Still, it emerges, larger, closer, until the blue becomes hair, a dyed-blue Mohawk haircut atop an otherwise shaved head. The head bobs, perched upon the shoulders of a black leather motorcycle jacket, supported and borne along by two legs clad in denim jeans, and two feet shod in black boots. With each step, the boots clank with bicycle chains which are looped about the ankles. The punk-rock kid, Archer, approaches my cell.
Clamped under one leather-clad arm, Archer carries a brown manila envelope. His hands stuffed into the front pockets of his jeans, the envelope pinned between his elbow and his hip, Archer tosses his pimpled chin in my direction and says, "Hey.”
Archer throws a look at the people who surround us, sunk in their addictions and righteousness and lust. Each person cut off, isolated from any future, any new possibility, withdrawn and isolated within the shell of their past life. Archer shakes his head and says, "Don't you be like these losers..."
He doesn't understand. The truth is I'm prepubescent and dead and incredibly naive and stupid—and I'm consigned to Hell, forever.
Archer looks directly into my face and says, "Your eyes look all red... is your psoriasis getting worse?"
And I'm a liar. I tell him, "I don't actually have psoriasis."
Archer says, "Have you been crying?"
And I'm such a big liar that I say, "No."
Not that being damned is entirely my fault. In my own defense, my dad always told me that the Devil was disposable diapers.
"Death is a long process," Archer says. "Your body is just the first part of you that croaks." Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire. "All people ever see is how the body dies," Archer says. "That Helen Gurley Brown only studied the first seven stages of us kicking the bucket."
I ask, "Helen Gurley Brown?"
"You know," Archer says, "denial, bargaining, anger, depression..."
He means Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross.
"See," Archer says, and he smiles. "You are smart... smarter than me."
The truth is, Archer tells me, you stay in Hell until you forgive yourself. "You fucked up. Game over," he says, "so just relax."
The good news is that I'm not some fictional character trapped in a printed book, like Jane Eyre or Oliver Twist; for me anything is now possible. I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.
Archer shrugs and says, "Little Maddy Spencer is dead... now maybe it's time for you to get on with the adventure of your existence." As he shrugs, the envelope slips from under his arm and drifts to the stony ground. The manila envelope. The brown paper is stamped Confidential in red block letters.
I ask, "What's that?"
Stooping to retrieve the fallen envelope, Archer says, "This?" He says, "Here's the results of the salvation test you took." A dark crescent of dirt shows beneath each of his fingernails. Scattered across his face, the galaxy of pimples glow different shades of red.
By "salvation test" Archer refers to that weird polygraph test, the lie-detector setup where the demon asked my opinion about abortion and same-sex marriage. Meaning: the determination of whether I should be in Heaven or Hell, possibly even my permission to return to life on earth. Reaching spontaneously, compulsively for the envelope, I say, "Give it." The diamond ring, the one Archer stole and gave to me, the stone flashes around one finger of my outstretched hand.
Holding the envelope outside of my cell bars, beyond my reach, Archer says, "You have to promise you'll stop sulking."
Stretching my arm toward the envelope, carefully avoiding contact with the smutty metal bars of my cell, I insist that I'm not sulking.
Dangling the test results near my fingertips, Archer says, "You have a fly on your face."
And I wave it away. I promise.
"Well," Archer says, "that's a good start." Using one hand,
Archer unclips the oversize safety pin and withdraws it from his cheek. As he did before, he pokes the sharpened point into the keyhole of my cell door and begins to pick the ancient lock.
The moment the door swings open, I step out, snatching the test results from his hand. My promise still fresh on my lips, still echoing in my ears, I tear open the envelope.
And the winner is...
XXVIII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please consider amending the famous slogan currently synonymous with the entrance of Hell. Rather than "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here..." it seems far more applicable and useful to post, "Abandon all tact..." Or perhaps, "Abandon all common courtesy…”
If you asked my mom, she'd say, "Maddy, life isn't a popularity contest."
Well, in rebuttal, I'd tell her that neither is death.
Those of you who have yet to die, please take careful note.
According to Archer, dead people are constantly sending messages to the living—and not just by opening window curtains or dimming the lights. For example, anytime your stomach is rumbling, that's caused by someone in the afterlife who's attempting to communicate with you. Or when you feel a sudden craving to eat something sweet, that's another means the dead have of being in touch. Another common example is when you sneeze several times in rapid succession. Or when your scalp itches. Or when you jolt awake at night with a savage leg cramp.
Cold sores on your lips... a bouncing, restless leg... ingrown hairs... according to Archer, these are all methods that dead people use to gain your attention, perhaps in order to express their affection or to warn you about an impending hazard.
In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from the musical Grease three times in a single day– seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or wherever—it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset. In contrast, the phantom odor of scorched toast merely means that a deceased loved one continues to watch over you and protect you from harm.
When stray wild hairs sprout from your ears or nostrils or eyebrows, it's the dead trying to make contact. Even before legions of dead people were telephoning the living during the dinner hour and conducting polls about consumer preferences regarding brands of nondairy creamer, before the dead were providing salacious Web site content for the Internet, the souls of the expired have always been in constant contact with the living world.
Archer explains all of this to me while we trudge across the Great Plains of Broken Glass, wading the River of Steaming-hot Vomit, trekking across the vast Valley of Used Disposable Diapers. Pausing a moment, atop a stinking hill, he points out a dark smudge along the horizon. A low ceiling of buzzards, vultures, carrion birds soar and hover above that distant, dark landscape. "The Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions," Archer says, nodding his blue Mohawk in the direction of the shadowy marshes. We catch our breath and move on, skirting said horrors, continuing our foray toward the headquarters of Hell.
It's Archer's assertion that I ought to abandon being likable. My entire life, he's willing to wager, my parents and teachers have taught me to be pleasant and friendly No doubt I was constantly rewarded for being upbeat and peppy...
Plodding along beneath the flaming orange sky, Archer says, "Sure, the meek might inherit the earth, but they don t get jack shit in Hell...
He says that since I spent my entire life being nice, maybe I should consider some alternative demeanor for my afterlife. Ironic as it seems, Archer says nobody nice gets to exercise the kind of freedom a convicted killer enjoys in prison. If a formerly nice girl wants to turn over a new leaf, maybe explore being a bully or a bitch, or being pushy or simply being assertive and not just smiling bright toothpaste smiles and listening politely, well, Hell's the place to take that risk.
How Archer found himself damned for all eternity is, one day, his old lady sent him to shoplift some bread and diapers. Not old lady meaning wife, but old lady referring to his mother; she needed the diapers for his baby sister, except they didn't have the funds to pay, so Archer stalked around a neighborhood grocery store until he thought nobody was watching.
As the two of us walk along, shuffling through the flaky, waxy dead skin of the Dandruff Desert, we approach a small group of doomed souls. They stand in a cluster roughly the size of a cocktail party in the VIP lounge of a top-tier nightclub in Barcelona, every person turned to face the center of the crowd. There, raised above the core of the group, a man's fist waves in the air. Muffled within the people, a man's voice shouts.
At the edge of the crowd, Archer ducks his head near mine and whispers, "Now's your chance to practice."
Seen through the listening figures, filtered between their standing forms, their filthy arms and ratty heads of hair, there's no mistaking the center of their attention: a man with narrow shoulders, his dark hair parted so that it falls across his pale forehead. He thrashes the fetid air with both hands, gesticulating wildly, punching and slashing while he shouts in German. Dancing atop his upper lip is a boxy brown mustache no wider than his flared nostrils. His audience listens with the slack expressions of the catatonic.
Archer asks me, What's the worst that can happen? He says I ought to learn how to throw my weight around. He says to elbow my way to the front of a crowd. Push people out of my path. Play the bully. He shrugs, creaking the black leather sleeves of his jacket, saying, "You choose... " At that, Archer places one hand flat against the small of my back and shoves me forward.
I stumble, jostling the crowd, falling against their woolen coat sleeves, treading on the polished brown uppers of their shoes. Honestly, everyone present wears the type of sensible clothes best suited to Hell: loden coats of deep green and gray flannel, thick-soled shoes and boots of leather, tweed hats. The only ill-chosen fashion accessory present is an abundance of armbands worn around everyone's biceps, red armbands emblazoned with black swastikas.
Archer tosses a look at the speaker. Still whispering to me, he says, "Little girl... if you can't be rude to Hitler..."
He urges me to go pick a fight. Stomp some Nazi ass.
I shake my head no. My face blushing. After a lifetime of being trained never to interrupt, I couldn't. I can't. The skin of my face flushes hot, feeling as deep red as Archer's pimples. As red as the swastika armbands.
"What?" Archer whispers, his mouth pulled into a sideways smirk, his skin bunched around the stainless-steel lance of the safety pin which skewers his cheek. He chides me, saying, "What? Are you afraid Mister Herr Hitler might not like you?"
Within me, a tiny voice asks, What's the worst that can happen? I lived. I suffered. I died—the worst fate any mortal person can imagine. I'm dead, and yet something of me continues to survive. I'm eternal. For better or worse. It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. Under my own steam, I step away from Archer's pushing hand. I'm shouldering my way through woolen coat sleeves, elbowing between the swastikas, clawing and swimming a path toward the center of the crowd. With each step I'm actively stomping on strangers' feet, wedging myself, plunging deeper into the tightly packed mass of the damned, until I burst into the eye of the mob. Tripping over the front row of feet, I tumble, falling with my effort, only to land on my hands and knees, face-first in the loose dandruff, my eyes level with the polished toes of two black boots. Reflected in the buffed, glossy leather, I see myself close-up: a pudgy girl dressed in a cardigan sweater and tweedy skort, a dainty watch strapped around one chubby wrist, my face blazing with bug-eyed, flushed embarrassment. Above me, Adolf Hitler looms with his hands clasped behind his back. Rocking on his boot heels, he looks down and laughs. My glasses have flown from my nose and lie half-buried in dead skin, and without them the world looks distorted. Everyone bleeds together to form a solid mass entrapping me; unfocused, their faces look smeared and melted. His head thrown back, towering monstrously over me, Hitler directs his tiny mustache at the flaming sky and roars with laughter.
Encircling us, Hitler and me, the crowd follows his cue until I'm buried in their laughter. They stand so densely that Archer and his blue Mohawk hair are lost, walled off behind so many dead bodies.
Climbing to my feet, I brush the loose flakes of sticky dandruff from my clothes. I open my mouth to tell everyone to be quiet, please. My hands scrabbling in the layered dermis of greasy dandruff, I feel around in search of my eyeglasses. Even blind, I beg for silence so I can ridicule their leader, but the mob merely bellows with sadistic glee, their blurred faces reduced to their gaping mouths and teeth.
Perhaps it's due to some post-traumatic stress reaction, but in that instant I'm transported to the afternoon at the Swiss boarding school when the trio of Miss Slutty Vandersluts took turns choking me to death, mugging with my eyeglasses and ridiculing me before bringing me back to life. I feel a hand descend to clutch at my arm, a huge, coarse hand, cold as the mortician's table; the calloused fingers wrap my elbow, as tightly as a swastika armband, and something lifts me to my feet. Perhaps it's due to some suppressed memory of some skeezy undertaker's fondling touch, the reek of formaldehyde and men's cologne, but I pull backward. The entire thirteen-year-old weight of me falls backward, pushing my fist and skinny arm forward in a rocketing arc, a pinwheel swing which connects with something solid. This... something... crunches against the bony impact of my knuckles. Again, I collapse into the soft carpet of dandruff flakes, only this time something heavy lands in the dead skin beside me.
The crowd's laughter goes silent. My hands unearth my glasses. Even through the dirty lenses, fogged with dead flakes of scalp, I can see Adolf Hitler crumpled beside me. He moans softly, a purple doughnut of a bruise already forming around one closed eye.
The ring, the diamond ring which Archer had stolen from a groveling, slobbering, doomed soul trapped in the cage beside my own grimy cell, this ring around my finger has collided with Hitler's face. Like a bulbous, seventy-five-carat brass knuckle, the fat diamond has knocked him cold. My fist vibrates. My wrist thrums like a tuning fork, so I shake my fingers to regain full feeling in that hand.
A man's voice shouts. Archer's voice, behind the stunned wall of onlookers, shouts, "Take a souvenir!"
As Archer would explain later, all great bullies have taken totems or fetish objects in order to steal the power of the enemies they have vanquished. Some warriors took scalps they could display on their belts. Others took ears, genitals, noses. Archer insists that taking a souvenir has always been crucial to assuming an enemy's power.
There I stood with Hitler lying prone at my feet. To be honest, I really didn't want his boots. Nor did I feel the slightest desire to lay claim to his necktie or silly armband. His belt? His gun? Some little piece of Nazi costume jewelry, a tin-plate eagle or a skull? No, good taste seemed to preclude taking any readily apparent portion of his costume.
And, yes, I might be a formerly nicety-nice girl with no qualms about using the words preclude or qualms, and no hesitation to coldcock a fascist tyrant, but I continue to be very particular about the manner in which I accessorize my very bland wardrobe.
From the far edge of the crowd, Archer's voice shouts, "Don't be a pussy!" He shouts, "Take the damned mustache!"
Of course, it's the one talisman which bears the entire identity of this madman. His mustache—a tiny scalp to hang from my belt—it represents something without which Hitler would no longer be Hitler. Bracing the heel of one sensible loafer firmly against his neck, I lean over and entwine my fingers through the coarse, pubic-feeling fringe of the tiny lip hairs. His breathing feels warm and damp against my hands. Even as I brace myself for one gigantic pull, one herculean yank, Hitler's eyelashes flutter and his eyes pin me with their focused rage. Stomping my foot into his throat, I jerk, pulling the short hairs with all of my strength—and Hitler screams.
The crowd recoils, retreating a step.
Once again, I fall backward, my arms pinwheeling but still clutching my prize.
Adolf Hitler holds his face wrapped in both hands, blood pouring from between his fingers; his bellowing words sound garbled and choked, the sleeves of his uniform running with blood, so soaked that the vivid red erases the dull swastika banded around his arm.
Cupped within the palm of my hand curls the warm little mustache, torn away, still attached to a pale, thin crescent of upper lip.
