Текст книги "Damned"
Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
XXXI.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My mom used to say, "Madison, you're a worrier." Meaning: I fret over everything. Meaning: EVERYTHING. Now I'm worried that I've won. My ascent to power seems to have been too easy. In my life, in my parents' lives, the rewards have come with so little struggle. The homes in Dubai and Singapore and Brentwood. The afterlife goes on; however; it's not quite death as usual. Something seems fishy, but I can't put my finger on it.
Gone is the previous Maddy Spencer, she of the sterling posture and finishing-school manners. That winsome me has been declared extinct. True, once more I am seated before the console of my telemarketing station, but the headset rests canted atop my head to allow for the pearl-studded de Medicis crown, and my demeanor is forever altered, for the better or not.
Instead of wheedling the chronically ill, diplomatically and nonthreateningly, with my assurance about the liability of Hades—is there such a word as "die-ability"?– espousing all the wonderful opportunities offered by the afterlife, the new me browbeats those who procrastinate, those lollygaggers who postpone their deaths. Rather than nurture and assure, the aggressive new me harangues the dying who have the misfortune to engage me in telephone conversation. Yes, I'm thirteen years old and dead and doing child labor in Hell—but at least I'm not whining and crying about my situation. In contrast, the people to whom I talk are so endlessly attached to their wealth and achievements, their homes and loved ones and physical bodies. So attached to their stupid fear. These failing strangers with their stage-four brain tumors and kidney failure, they've put a lifetime into perfecting themselves, practicing and fine-tuning every nuance of their identity, and now all of this effort is about to be wasted. In all honesty, they irk the bejesus out of me.
The previous Madison Spencer would bother to hold their frightened hand, to calm and comfort them. Who I am now, however, I tell them to cry me a stinking shit river and fall down dead, already.
On occasion, a division or company of my stained hordes, the armies I've inherited from Gilles de Rais or Hitler or Idi Amin will stop by, begging for a work assignment, some large-scale task to perform on my behalf.
More often, the people I've coached into Hell stop by to pay their respects. The just-arrived dead still smelling of funeral carnations and formaldehyde, these immigrant souls sport the troweled-on cosmetics and overly primped hairdos that only an undertaker would inflict, and only a corpse would tolerate. These new arrivals, they all feel compelled to talk through their terrible death experience, and I just let them chatter away. More often than not, I direct them to one of the numerous talk-therapy sessions I've launched, my new hope-aholics recovery groups, a twelve-step peer-supported cliché. But with our high graduation rate and low recidivism it would do Dante
Alighieri proud. After a couple weeks of complaining and self-mourning—the usual railing over lost luxury items and surviving enemies and wrongs left unavenged, plus the typical gloating about past awards and accomplishments– most people get their fill and decide to move forward with their eternal existence. Crude as my methods might appear, my dead friends are not among those people who linger for centuries in their soiled cages cursing their new reality. The dead whom I coach prove to be remarkably well-adjusted and productive. Among them, Richard Volk who died of blunt-force trauma caused by an automobile accident last week in Missoula, Montana, this week he's leading the former battalions of Genghis Khan in their current campaign to collect all the discarded cigarette butts which inevitably end up here. Here also is Hazel Kunzeler, who succumbed to hemophilia two weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida; she's now commanding former Roman legions in their latest me-assigned mission to propagate a billion flowering rosebushes in the space now occupied by the Lake of Tepid Bile. Obviously this constitutes a blatant make-work project—so sue me—but the effort keeps everyone occupied for contented aeons, and even a small measure of success improves the overall atmosphere of the underworld. What's of most importance is how these • assignments deflect would-be hangers-on and allow me to focus on my own projects.
Yes, I might be a dead child strangled in a poorly understood sex game, but to me the glass is most times half-full. Despite my optimism there remains no sign of Goran—not that I've been scouring the afterlife searching for him in a desperate, lonely stalker way.
At the limits of my peripheral vision, Babette comes walking in my direction, my salvation polygraph test clasped in her chipped white fingernails.
Into my telephone headset, I ask a middle-aged woman dying in Austin, Texas, "Are you familiar with the old Reno-style divorces?" I explain how, decades ago, one simply took a six-week vacation to establish residency in Nevada in order to file for a no-fault dissolution of marriage. Well, I tell her to catch the next flight to Oregon, where they have legalized assisted suicide. She won't even have to buy a round-trip plane ticket, and she can be dead by this coming weekend. "Book yourself into some luxury hotel in downtown Portland," I say, "get a massage, and call room service for an overdose of Phenobarbital. It's that easy. Make a real junket out of it......"
Sitting here, talking on the telephone, my fingers crossed, I swear all of this is true. Honest Injun. My workstation, what would pass as my office cubicle on earth, is arrayed with my power souvenirs, the various murder weapons and body parts and symbols of imperial power. Staring me in the face, pinned to my cork bulletin board, the dried monkey patch of the Hitler mustache does not inspire honesty In my peripheral vision, Babette proceeds ever closer, bearing the inevitable results of my test.
Into my telephone, I assure this dying Texas person that her permanent record is open on the desk in front of me, and it shows she's been pretty much on the fast track to Hell since the age of twenty-three, when she committed adultery. Despite the fact that she'd been married to her husband for barely two weeks, she engaged in sexual intercourse with a local mail carrier, largely because he reminded her of a former beau. Upon the heels of that revelation, the woman gasps. She convulses into racking coughs, struggling to ask, "How'd you know that?"
In addition, it would appear that she honked her automobile horn one too many times. According to divine law, I explain, each human being is allowed to honk no more than five hundred times over the course of a lifetime. One honk beyond that number, regardless of circumstances, results in an automatic condemnation to Hell—suffice to say all taxicab drivers are Hellhound. A similar unbreakable law applies to discarded cigarette butts. The first hundred are permitted, but any dropped butts beyond that number result in eternal damnation with no hope for recourse. It seems she's also in violation of this regulation. It's all spelled out, here, printed in almost illegible dot-matrix black and white in her personal file.
By now Babette has arrived at my elbow, where she stands, tapping the toe of one faux Blahnik, twisting her wrist to look pointedly at the time on her long-dead Swatch.
To stall for time I hold up one straightened index finger, mouthing the word wait, while into the telephone I tell the Texas lady there's nothing she can do in the brief time she has left on earth which will earn her a place in Heaven. She needs to consider her loved ones, to stop hogging the spotlight and allow the people who love her to go back to their own precious, brief, messed-up lives. Yes, she should warn them about not honking their automobile horns and not discarding cigarette butts, but then she ought to move on.
I tell her, "Die already." My finger hovering above the control board, I say, "Hold, please... ," and punch the button. I twist in my seat to face Babette, my eyebrows arched in expectation. My entire face a silent, begging, Please.
Babette offers the report. She taps a chipped fingernail on a number at the bottom of a long column of faint dot-matrix numbers, saying, "Just from your overall culpability score..." She says, "This number, here." Handing me the sheet of paper, Babette says, "You need to file for an appeal." With that, she turns on one battered high heel and begins to walk away.
My latest Hell recruit, the horn-honking, cigarette-strewing gal slowly dying in Texas, she's still blinking, blinking on hold.
Calling after Babette, I ask what she means by appeal.
In response, without looking back, Babette shouts, already four... five... six workstations away; still receding, she says, "You shouldn't even be here......"
From even farther gone, Babette shouts, "There's been an official screw-up." Loud enough for everyone to overhear, she shouts, "Double-check the numbers yourself." She shouts, "Because, right this minute, you ought to be in Heaven."
Up and down the infinite row of telemarketers, faces twist to see mine. A lingering crowd of mercenaries and fresh-off-the-boat Hell newbies wait within earshot, their faces slack with confusion. One of their small group steps forward, not a dastardly blood-drenched pirate, nor an aged person attired in her best funeral suit of clothes. No, this stranger stands approximately my height. A reasonable guess would place her age at thirteen. This stranger could almost pass as the earlier me, the pristine, well-behaved Madison wearing sensible shoes and a tweedy ensemble carefully chosen to mask future soiling. In contrast to my current self, this small stranger presents herself with no dried demonic blood on her hands and face, her hair neatly combed and meticulously arranged. Offering a dainty hand of nicety-nice pink fingernails, this girl says, "Madison Spencer?" She meets my gaze with calm, unblinking eyes, her perfect double row of white teeth bound in stainless-steel braces, saying, "You win......"
At that, the girl's dainty hands dip into the pockets of her tweed skirt, and then the pockets of her cardigan sweater, and she brings forth candy. Seven, eight, nine candy bars. Ten full-sized Milky Way bars, my new best friend—my first best friend, ever—this dead girl offers these sweet chocolaty prizes to me.
XXXII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It's no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his—or her—coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired. At this point I've been in Hell for a longer period of time than I've ever spent in any of my earthly homes, in Durban, in London, in Manila. Worse than feeling merely conflicted, I'm miserable at the thought of leaving.
In order to keep the various bloodthirsty armies occupied and out of my hair, I've ordered them to capture and paint all the noxious bats of Hell red and blue, to pass for cardinals and bluebirds. The industrious butchers previously employed by Pol Pot and Madame Defarge, I've dispatched them to fabricate bright butterfly wings out of colorful construction paper and glitter, then glue these false wings to the real wings of our ever-present houseflies. Not only does this spruce up the normally dismal atmosphere of the underworld, it also prevents what would be the inevitable clashes between Mongolian hordes and Nazi storm troopers and Egyptian charioteers. Most important, it keeps them all busy and allows me to spend my time touring Emily around, eating Milky Ways, and discussing boys.
Throughout our relaxed amble, I remark on possible improvements to the landscape, a flowering dogwood here, a reflecting pool there, perhaps an aviary of colorful parrots, each of which Emily dutifully makes note of on a clipboard she carries.
The potentially needy mobs of newly dead, those anxious souls I've enrolled in dying and relocating to Hell, I've delegated those folks to various other reclamation projects. Really, I could pass as no less than the FDR of the afterlife, what with all the dams I've decreed be build across rivers of scalding blood. I've ordered other work teams to dig channels and drain expansive marshes of rank perspiration; thanks to me the ancient Sweat Swamps of Hell no longer exist. Lost souls who logged entire lifetimes in the study and practice of civil and structural engineering, those people are thrilled for the opportunity to put their existing skills to use. The rolling hills of semicoagulated mucus have been leveled. And an entire gulag of happily damned slave laborers does nothing except fashion false water lily blossoms from crepe paper and float their products on the surface of the Shit Lake.
More and more I see that Hell isn't so much a punitive conflagration as it is the natural result of aeons of deferred maintenance. Frankly put: Hell amounts to nothing more than a marginal neighborhood allowed to deteriorate to the extreme. Picture all the smoldering, underground coal mine fires expanding to rub elbows with all the burning tire dumps, throw in all the open cesspools and hazardous-waste landfills, and the inevitable result would be Hell, a situation hardly improved by the self-absorbed tendency of the residents to focus on their own misfortune and neglect to lift a dead finger in defense of their environment.
From our vantage point, strolling along the shores of the Sea of Insects, Emily and I survey the slow but certain improvements in the dismal landscape. I point out areas of interest: the roiling River of Hot Saliva... the buzzards circling Hitler and his distant colleagues relegated to their unspeakable place. I explain the seemingly arbitrary rules of which people run afoul, how each living person is allowed to use the F-word a maximum of seven hundred times. Most living persons haven't the slightest idea how easy it is to be damned, but should anyone say fuck for the 701st time, he or she is automatically doomed. Similar rules apply to personal hygiene; for example, the 855th time you fail to wash your hands after voiding your bowels or bladder, you're doomed. The three hundredth time you use the word nigger or the word fag, regardless of your personal race or sexual preference, you buy yourself that dreaded one-way ticket to the underworld.
Walking along, I tell Emily how the dead may send messages to the living. In the same way that living people send each other flowers or e-mails, a dead person may send a living person a stomachache or tinnitus or a nagging melody which will occupy the alive person's attention to the point of madness.
The pair of us walking along, idly examining the putrid, boiling landscape, apropos of nothing, Emily nonchalantly says, "I talked to that girl Babette, and she says you have a boyfriend...
I do not, I insist.
"His name," says Emily, "is Goran?"
I insist Goran is not my boyfriend.
Her eyes remaining fixed upon the notes she's jotted on her clipboard, Emily asks if I miss boys. What about prom? Do I miss the opportunity to date and get married and have my own children?
Not particularly, I reply. A crew of sinister Snarky Miss Snarky-pants girls at my old boarding school, the infamous three who taught me the French-kissing Game, they once professed to educate me about human reproduction. As they told it to me, the reason boys desire so desperately to kiss girls is because, with each kiss, the activity makes the boy's wanger grow larger. The more girls a boy can kiss, the larger a wanger he'll eventually possess, and the boys boasting the largest are awarded the best-paying, highest-status jobs. Really, it's all very simple. All boys devote their lives to amassing the most elongated genitals, growing the nasty things so that when they eventually wedge them inside some unfortunate girl, the distant end of the enlarged wanger actually breaks off—yes, the wanger flesh becomes so hardened that it shatters—and the broken portion remains lodged within the girl's hoo-hoo. This natural event is much like those lizards that live in arid deserts and can voluntarily detach their squirming tails. Any amount, from the pointed tip to almost the entire wiener, can literally snap off inside a girl, and she's fully unable to remove it.
Emily stares at me, her face distorted in far more disgust than she registered even when first witnessing the Lake of Tepid Bile or the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm. The clipboard hangs, ignored, between her hands.
Continuing, I explain that the embedded portion of the fractured wanger grows to become the resulting baby. In the event the wanger has broken into two or three portions, each of these evolves to become twins or triplets. All of this factual information comes from a very legitimate source, I assure Emily. If anyone at my Swiss boarding school knew anything about boys and their ridiculous genitals it would be those three Miss Coozy O'Cooznicks.
"Knowing the facts of life as I do," I tell Emily, "no, I certainly do not miss having a boyfriend......"
The two of us continue walking along in silence. My array of fetishes and power objects dangle and sway from my belt. They clang and knock against each other. On occasion I suggest a lovely birdbath be placed here or there. Or a sundial surrounded by a picturesque bedding scheme of red and white petunias. Eventually, to break an extended silence, I ask what she misses about being alive.
"My mother," Emily says. Good-night kisses, she says. Birthday cake. Flying kites.
I suggest tinkling wind chimes might improve the black smoke that swirls and billows around us.
Emily fails to write down my idea. "And summer vacation from school," she says, “ And I miss swing sets......"
Ahead of us, a figure comes walking down the path in the opposite direction. It's a boy, passing in and out of the drifting clouds of smoke. In turns, he's revealed and occluded. Apparent and hidden.
She misses parades, says Emily. Petting zoos. Fireworks.
The figure, a boy, approaches us holding some sort of pillow cradled to his chest. His eyes are rakish, his brow surly and moody, his lips twisted into a sensuously puckered sneer. The pillow he carries is colored bright orange, textured such that it appears simultaneously soft and vivid. The boy wears a hot-pink jumpsuit with a long number stitched across one side of his chest.
"I miss roller coasters," Emily says. 'And birds... real birds, I mean. Not just red-painted bats."
The boy, now blocking our path, he's Goran.
Looking up from her clipboard, Emily says, "Hello."
Nodding to her, he speaks to me. "I am sorry I choked you into dead," says Goran in his vampire accent, and he hands his orange pillow toward me. 'At present, you see now I am dead as well," Goran says, placing the pillow in my arms. He says, "I found this for you."
The pillow feels warm. It hums in short pulses. Bright orange, soft, it looks at me with flashing green eyes, fully alive and purring, nestled against my bloodstained sweater. It swats a paw, its tiny claws batting at the Caligula testicles.
No longer dead and stuffed in the plumbing of some luxury hotel, no longer a pillow, it's my little kitten. Alive. It's Tiger Stripe.
XXXIII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I have my kitty. I have my boyfriend. I have my best friend. I have more dead than I ever did while alive. Except for my mom and dad.
No sooner had I made my peace with Goran than another crisis occurred.
No sooner had I accepted the warm, cuddly fuzz ball of my beloved kitty, Tiger Stripe, than my emotional equilibrium was again knocked askew. Goran, I assured him, did not kill me. Yes, in some sense, he accidentally killed the person identified as Madison Spencer; he forever destroyed that physical manifestation of me, but Goran did not kill... me. I continue to exist. Furthermore, his actions were precipitated by my own fallacious concept of French-kissing. What transpired in that hotel suite was a comedy of errors.
Graciously, I accepted Tiger Stripe, then introduced Goran to Emily. The trio of us continued to stroll until obligation required I resume my telemarketing duties. My beloved kitty curled and snoozing in my lap, happily purring away, my headset firmly in place, I began to field survey calls as the central computer connected me to households, to breathing people alive in time zones where the evening meal was set to commence.
In one such residence, someplace with a familiar Californian area code, a man s voice answered the telephone, "Hello?"
"Hello, sir," I said, following by rote the script which dictated my every statement and response. Petting the cat at rest in my lap, I say, "May I have a few minutes of your time for an important consumer study concerning buying habits in relation to several competing brands of adhesive tape... ?"
If not adhesive tape, the topic would be something else just as mundane: aerosol furniture polish, dental floss, thumbtacks.
In the background, almost lost in the distance behind the man's voice, a woman's voice says, "Antonio? Are you ill?"
The woman's voice, like the telephone number, feels strangely familiar.
Still petting Tiger Stripe, I say, "This will only take a few moments......"
A beat of silence follows.
I say, "Hello?" I say, "Sir?"
Another beat of silence occurs, broken by a gasp, almost a sob, and the man's voice asks, "Maddy?"
Double-checking the telephone number, the ten-digit number which reads on my little computer screen, I recognize it.
Over my headset, the man says, "Oh, my baby... is that you?"
The woman's voice in the background says, "I'll grab the bedroom extension."
The telephone number is our unlisted line for the house in Brentwood. By sheer coincidence, the autodialer has connected me with my family. This man and woman are the former beatniks, former hippies, former Rastas, former anarchists—my former parents. A loud click sounds, someone lifting another receiver, and my mother's voice says, "Darling?" Not waiting for an answer, she begins to weep, begging, "Please, oh, my sweetness, please say something to us......"
At my elbow, brainiac Leonard sits at his workstation plotting chess moves against some alive adversary in New Delhi. On my opposite side, Patterson conspires with living football enthusiasts, keeping track of teams and quarterbacks, marking their statistics in the blank spaces of a fantasy spreadsheet. The business of Hell continues unabated, spread to either horizon. Elsewhere, the afterlife continues as usual, but within my headset, my mother's voice begs, "Please, Maddy... Please tell your daddy and me where we can come find you."
Sniffing, his voice choked and his breath exploding into the telephone receiver, my father sobs, "Please, baby, just don't hang up......" He sobs, "Oh, Maddy, we're so sorry we left you alone with that evil bastard."
"That..." my mother hisses, "that... assassin!"
My guess is that they're referring to Goran.
And yes, I've vanquished demons. I've deposed tyrants and taken command of their conquering armies. I'm thirteen years old, and I've shepherded thousands of dying people into the next life with relatively little upset. I never finished junior high school, but I'm overhauling the entire nature of Hell, on schedule and under budget. I deftly toss off words such as absentia and multivalent and convey, but I'm caught completely off guard by the sound of my parents' tears. For help lying, I finger the dried scrap of the Hitler mustache. For coldness, to quell the tears already building in my burning eyes, I consult the de Medicis crown. Over the telephone I tell my weeping mother and father to hush. It's true, I assure them: I am dead. In the icy voice of child killer Gilles de Rais, I tell my family I have passed out of fragile mortal life and now dwell in the eternal.
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.
