Текст книги "Damned"
Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk
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XIV.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I know what you're thinking... to you I'm just some spoiled, rich brat who's never had to work a day in her life. In my defense, I'm proud to say that I've obtained full-time employment. A genuine job. As of now I'm a regular working stiff—if you'll pardon the terrible pun. What follows might seem ragged, but please consider it an impressionistic slice o' death. A glimpse into a day in the death of me.
As far as I can tell, you have a choice between two types of careers in Hell. Your first option is you can work for one of those Web sites which everyone assumes are run in Russia or Burma, where naked men and women stare unflinchingly into the webcams, a dazed look in their glassy eyes, while they lick their fingers and insert greasy plastic model airplanes or plantain bananas halfway into their shaved woo-woos or hoo-hoos. Either that, or they fake-smile while sipping their own urine out of champagne flutes. You see, Hell is responsible for about 85 percent of the Internet's total smut content. The demons just tack up some old, soiled bed sheet to serve as a backdrop, they throw a foam-rubber mattress on the ground, and you're expected to flop around, putting junk inside yourself and responding to the real-time Web chat of alive perverts, worldwide.
Frankly, I've never been that desperate for attention. Do not mistake me for one of those troubled preteens who walk around, practically wearing a T-shirt which says: Ask Me About My Rape. Or, Ask Me About My Alcoholism.
The dirty little secret about Hell is that the demons are always running tabs on you. If you breathe their air, if you loiter, the powers that be are constantly dinging you for the cost. No, it's not fair, but the demons charge you for your upkeep. The meter is always running, and you're piling up years of additional torture, according to Babette, who it turns out used to manage people's paperwork until she had to take a stress-related disability leave of absence and return to her cage for a little nonclerical R&R. Babette says most people are condemned for only a few aeons, but they accrue additional time simply by occupying space in Hell. It's like being over the limit on your charge cards, or accidentally flying your jet into French airspace; the clock starts ticking the moment you've gone too far. The bean counters are keeping track, and someday you'll be socked with a massive bill.
Jewels and cash are worthless here. The currency is candy, and marshmallow peanuts are accepted as payment for all bribes and debts. Root Beer Barrels are as valuable as rubies. The hellish equivalent of pennies are popcorn balls... black licorice... wax lips... and these are cast aside in disdain.
Probably I shouldn't even tell you this—the job market is tight enough as it is—but if you have any aspirations to earn your daily Junior Mints, you need to find a career and get working.
Not that you'll ever actually die—not you—not after all the antioxidants you've choked down and all those laps around the reservoir. Ha!
But just in case you don't want to spend eternity giving yourself high colonics on some sleazy Web site, ogled by mil-lions of men with serious intimacy problems, the other type of work which most people do in Hell is—telemarketing. Yes, this means sitting at a desk, elbow-to-elbow with fellow doomed telemarketing associates who stretch to the horizon in either direction, all of you yakking on headsets.
My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it's dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone's meal. My goal isn't actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets. I get to wear my headset telephone and work from a flowchart of possible responses. Best of all, I get to talk to real-live people—like yourself—who are still living and breathing and have no idea that I'm dead and phoning them from the Afterlife. Trust me, the vast majority of telemarketing people who ring you up, they're dead. As are pretty much all Internet porn models.
Okay, it's not as if I'm practicing brain surgery or tax law, but it beats sticking crayons inside my hoo-hoo on a Web site called "Crazy Nympho Girly Pleasures Self Using School Supply [sic]."
The autodialer connects me to somebody alive, and I say, "I'm conducting a market study to better serve the chewing gum consumers in your area...Do you have a moment to answer a few questions?" If the alive person hangs up, the computer connects me to a new phone number. If the living person answers my questions, the flowchart instructs me to ask more. Each person seated at the phone bank has a laminated sheet of questions, more questions than you could count. The point is to impose on the respondent, always entreating to ask just one more question, please... until the would-be diner loses their composure, and their mood and evening meal are both ruined.
Once you're dead and in Hell your options are either to do something trivial, but in a very self-important manner, for instance, market research about paper-clip usage. Or you can do something serious in a very trivial manner, for instance, looking bored and disengaged while taking a poop into a crystal dish and eating it with a silver spoon– the poop, I mean, not the dish.
If you asked my dad about selecting any kind of professional career, he'd tell you, "Don't make a date with a heart attack." Meaning: You've got to pace yourself and not forget to slow down. No job is forever. So relax and have some fun.
With that goal in mind, I let my attention wander. While hungry alive people wheedle to end our conversation, begging that their pot roast is growing cold, I'm actually thinking, musing whether my mother would've acted differently had she known I had fewer than forty-eight hours to live. In hindsight, I wonder, if she'd known about my impending demise, would she still have cheaped out and planned to give me her swag bag of Academy Award luxury crap in lieu of a real birthday present. If she'd known the clock was ticking, I mean, and most of the sand had already run out from my hourglass.
Asking hungry people about their dental floss preferences, I remember how, when I was really young, I thought the United States would just keep adding states, sewing more and more stars to our flag until we owned the entire world. I mean, why stop at fifty? Why stop with Hawaii? It seemed natural that Japan and Africa would eventually be absorbed into the starry part of our national flag. In the past we'd pushed aside the pesky Navajos and Iroquois to create Californians and Texans. We could do the same with Israel and Belgium and finally achieve world peace. When you're a little kid, you really do think that getting bigger– growing tall, sprouting big muscles and breasts—will be the answer to all of your problems. That's how my mom still is: always acquiring new houses in other cities. Ditto for my dad: always trying to collect appreciative kids from awful places like Darfur and Baton Rouge.
The problem is, troubled kids never stay saved. The Rwandan brother I had for about two hours, he ran off with my debit card. My Bhutanese little sister of about a day, she kept downing the Xanax my mom was happy to offer... and spiraled into drug abuse. Nothing stays safe. Even our homes in Hamburg and London and Manila sit empty, tempting burglars and hurricanes and collecting dust.
And Goran, well, the way that adoption ultimately turned out, it's difficult to call his rescue a Big Success.
Yes, I can recognize my parents' faulty logic, but if I'm so talented-and-gifted, why is it that the only authors I've ever read are Emily Bronte and Daphne du Maurier and Judy Blume? Why have I read Forever Amber, like, two hundred times? Seriously, if I were truly-truly brilliant, I'd be alive and skinny, and the structure of this story would be one epically long homage to Marcel Proust.
Instead, on my telephone headset, I'm asking some stupid alive person what colors of cotton swab would best complement her primary bathroom decorating scheme. On a scale of one to ten, I'm asking how she would rate the following flavors of lip gloss: warm honey... saffron breeze... ocean mint... lemon glow... blue sapphire... creamy rose... tangy ember... and douche-berry.
In regard to my polygraph test, Babette says not to hold my breath. Collating the results can take forever. Until we hear something back, she says I should just hang tight and do my telephone job. A few chairs away from me, Leonard asks someone about toilet paper. Beside him, Patterson sits in his football uniform, asking someone their opinion concerning mosquito repellent. Near them, Archer holds his headset to the side of his face, so it doesn't smash his blue Mohawk, while he seeks public opinions about a candidate for political office.
According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellhound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads. For whatever reason, people standing shorter than five-foot-one are more likely to be condemned. Also, people with a body mass index greater than 0.0012. Babette begins spouting these stats and you'd swear she was autistic. Just because she once worked processing paperwork for incoming souls, she can tell you that blondes outnumber brunettes three to one in Hell. People with at least two years of continuing education beyond high school are almost six times more likely to be damned. As are people earning more than a seven-figure annual income.
Bearing all of this in mind, I figure my parents have roughly a 165 percent likelihood of joining me forever.
And no, I have no idea how "douche-berry" is supposed to taste.
Over my own headset, some old-lady voice crackles, droning on and on about the flavor of something called "Beech-Nut" chewing gum, and over the telephone I swear I can smell the pee stink of her nine hundred cats. Her old-lady breathing sounds wet and full of static, popping and rasping from her old throat, the lisping effect of ill-fitted dentures, the shouted volume of age-related hearing loss, and she allows me to go deeper into the flowchart than anyone I've ever called. Already we're at the twelfth level, topic four, question seventeen: flavored toothpicks, for God's sake.
I'm asking, Would she consider purchasing toothpicks artificially treated to taste like chocolate? Like beef? Like apples? Then I realize how desperately lonely and isolated this old lady must feel. Probably I'm the only human contact she's enjoyed all day, and her meat loaf or rice pudding sits rotting on the plate in front of her because she's more starved for communication with another person.
Even as a telemarketer, it's best not to enjoy yourself too much. If you don't look miserable, the demons will reseat you next to someone who whistles. Then next to someone who farts.
From the survey questions I've already asked, I know the old lady is eighty-seven years old. She lives alone in a freestanding home. She has three grown children who live more than five hundred miles distant from her. She watches seven hours of television each day; and in the past month, she's read fourteen romance novels.
Just so you know, before you decide to do telemarketing over doing Internet porn, the sleazy Pervy Vanderpervs who text you with one hand while they abuse themselves with their other—at least they're not going to break your heart. Not like the pathologically lonely oldsters and cripples you quiz about nonstreak glass cleaner.
Listening to this sad old lady, I want so much to reassure her that death isn't so bad. Even if the Bible is correct, and it's easier to push caramels through the eye of a needle than get to Heaven, well, Hell doesn't totally suck. Sure, you're menaced by demons and the landscape is rather appalling, but she'll meet new people. I can tell from her 410 area code that she lives in Baltimore, so even if she dies and goes straight to Hell and gets immediately dismembered and gobbled by Psezpolnica or Yum Cimil, it won't be a huge culture shock. She might not even notice the difference. Not at first.
Too, I yearn to tell her that—if she loves reading books– she's going to adore being dead. Reading most books feels exactly like you're a dead body. It's all so... finished. True, Jane Eyre is an eternal, ageless character, but no matter how many times you read that darned book, she always gets married to gross, burn-victim Mr. Rochester. She never enrolls at the Sorbonne to earn her master's degree in French ceramics, nor does she open a swanky bistro in New York's Greenwich Village. Reread that Bronte book all you want, but Jane Eyre's never going to get gender-reassignment surgery or train to become a kick-ass ninja assassin. And it's pathetic that she believes she's real. Jane's just ink stamped on a page, but she really, truly thinks she's a living-alive person. She's convinced she has free will.
Listening to this eighty-seven-year-old voice weep about her aches and pains, I yearn to encourage her to just give up and die. Kick the bucket. Forget toothpicks. Forget chewing gum. It won't hurt, I swear. In fact, death will make her feel way better. Look at me, I want to say, I'm only thirteen, and being deceased constitutes about the best thing that's ever happened to me.
As a word to the wise, I'd advise her just to make sure she's wearing some durable, low-heeled, dark-colored shoes before she croaks.
A voice says, "Here." And standing at my elbow is Babette with her fake Coach bag and straight skirt and breasts. In one hand, Babette holds a strappy pair of high heels. She says, "I got these from Diana Vreeland. I hope they fit. And she drops them into my lap.
On the phone, the old lady in Baltimore continues to sob.
The high heels are silver-colored patent leather, with ankle straps and rhinestone buckles across the toe, stilettos so tall I'll never have to wade through cockroaches. These are shoes like I've never worn before because they'd make me look too old, and thereby make my mom REALLY look too old. Ridiculous shoes. These silly shoes are uncomfortable and impractical and too formal, and way too grown-up.
With the old lady still yammering through my headset, I kick off my Bass Weejuns and slip my feet into the strappy high heels.
And yes, I'm well aware of all the valid reasons why I should politely but firmly refuse these shoes...But instead, I LOVE THEM. And they fit.
XV.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I hope this won't sound too confusing, but I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess', I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.
How come I click so well with Goran is that he's never been allowed to be a child, and I'm strictly forbidden to grow any older. The day before my mom was supposed to appear at the Oscars, she took me to a day spa on Wilshire for a little industrial-strength pampering, mother-daughter style. While she and I got our hair highlighted, belted in identical fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobes, our faces caked with masks of Sonoran mud, my mom explained how Goran grew up as a refugee in one of those Iron Curtain orphanages where the babies all lie ignored and untouched in cavernous wards until they're old enough to vote for the current regime. Or to be conscripted.
There in the day spa, even as Laotian masseuses knelt to buff the dead skin from our feet, my mom told me that infants require a minimum amount of physical touch in order to develop any sense of empathy and connection with other human beings. Without such handling, a baby Would grow up to be a sociopath, lacking any conscience or ability to love. More as a political gesture—not merely for publicity's sake—we're having all of our acrylic finger– and toenail overlays replaced. One of my mom's deepest political convictions is that, if people want so desperately to come to the United States, wading across the Rio Grande at great risk to their life and limb simply for the opportunity to pick our lettuce and iron our hair, well, we should allow them. Entire nations would enjoy nothing more than the opportunity to scrub our kitchen floors, she says, and to prevent them from doing so would be a violation of their most basic human rights.
My mom is adamant on the subject. At the moment, "We're surrounded by various political and economic refugees as they crowd forward to scrape and wax and pluck at °Ur imperfections.
After all the herbal high colonics I've endured, not to Mention the electrolysis, the tortures of Hell hold little terror. It never fails to impress me how so many of the huddled masses and wretched refuse can flee the political oppression and torture of a foreign government, then arrive in America ready and eager to inflict largely the same tortures on the ruling classes here.
As my mom sees it, her dry, flaky skin is some immigrant's vocational opportunity. Plus, hurting her offers immigrants a nifty cathartic therapy for venting their rage. Her chapped lips and split ends constitute someone's rungs up the socioeconomic ladder to escape poverty. Sliding into her middle age complete with cellulite and scaly elbows, my mother has become an economic engine, generating millions of dollars which will be wired to feed families and purchase cholera medicine in Ecuador. Should she ever decide to "let herself go," no doubt tens of thousands would perish.
And no, I haven't overlooked the steadfast way in which my parents blame Goran's failure to adore them on everyone except themselves. To them, if Goran doesn't love them, that clearly indicates that Goran is damaged and incapable of loving anyone.
In the spa, the stylists and artists hover around us, those minions as dense as the worst Harpies of Hell, circling and offering the information—always credited to a way-inside source—that while Dakota makes a lovely girl, she was in fact born with superfluous male genitalia. My mom's personal assistant: Cherry or Nadine or Ulrike or whoever, she brays that Cameron is so dense that she bought the morning-after abortion pill and, instead of swallowing, stuck one up inside her woo-woo.
According to my mom, national boundaries must be adequately porous, and incomes must be redistributed to allow all people, regardless of race and religion and circumstances of birth, to be able to purchase her films. Her noble egalitarian philosophy holds that all human beings should be allowed to buy tickets to her movies AND to vacuum her pores. She insists neither Africa nor the Indian subcontinent will ever achieve technological and cultural parity with the Western world until their density of DVD players makes them a major consumer of her body of filmic work. And by that, she means her REAL work, marketed in its actual studio-designed packaging, not merely some crappy pirated, black-market unit which pays royalties to nobody except drug lords and child sex slaves.
Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that's only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.
Rallying the pedicurists and aestheticians around the white terry-cloth hem of her robe, my mother speechifies that they're not just grooming an actor in order to pimp a motion picture. In actuality, the team of us, my mom and her stylists and masseuses and manicurists, we're engaged in raising awareness around bold, cinematic narratives which model the possibility of truly equal standards of blah, blah, blah...Instead of spending their lives as pregnant, dirt-eating, genitally mutilated victims of some crushing theocracy... now, third-world ladies can aspire to become cosmo-swilling, Jimmy Choo-wearing sexual predators. By our deft use of acrylic fingernails and bleached-blond hair extensions—here she flutters her outflung arms in an all-inclusive gesture—we're empowering the downtrodden, exploited peoples of the world.
Yes, my mom lacks even the remotest sense of irony, but she's certain that in a perfect world, any miserable little boy or girl should be able to grow up and become nothing less than... her. Best left unsaid was the fact that she and my dad were already brandishing glossy, gate-folded brochures for all-boys boarding schools in Nova Scotia. Military schools in Iceland. It was clear: Goran wasn't a success, and some impending dawn I'd find him packed up and gone, replaced by a four-year-old Bhutanese leper.
If I wanted to practice my feminine wiles on Goran, my time was running out.
As my mother would say, "You've got to strike while the flatiron is hot." Meaning: I needed to get pretty and make my move soon. Ideally, tomorrow night. Ideally, while my folks were onstage, doling out the Oscars.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was, this week, when Goran sold five of my mom's Emmys over the Internet for ten dollars apiece. Before that, apparently, he'd collected a bunch of her Palme d'Or awards from our house in Cannes and sold them all for five bucks a pop. After a decade of my parents insisting that movie-industry awards meant nothing, and amounted to little more than a crass gold-plated embarrassment, my mom and dad went ape shit.
The way my mom saw it, Goran's every transgression, his every misanthropic misbehavior was simply a result of his not receiving adequate love and cuddling.
"You must promise me, Maddy," my mom said, "that you'll show your poor brother an extra-special amount of patience and affection."
His deprived infancy is how come, when my parents rented out a Six Flags amusement park for his birthday, and trotted out a purebred Shetland pony as his gift, Goran assumed the animal was lunch. For Halloween, they'd dressed him up as Jean-Paul Sartre, with me as Simone de Beauvoir, trick-or-treating up and down the hallways of the Ritz in Paris with copies of La Nausee and The Second Sex, and Goran didn't get the joke. More recently, Goran had hacked into my mother's bathroom security camera and sold Web subscriptions.
Of course, my dad wanted to introduce the concept of discipline and consequences into Goran s life, but a boy who's no doubt been tortured with electroshocks and waterboarding and intravenous injections of liquid drain cleaner, he's not going to be easily cowed by the threat of a spanking and a one-hour time-out.
By now my pink blouse had arrived from Barcelona. I planned to wear it with a skort and my cardigan sweater embroidered with the crest which represented my boarding school in Switzerland. That, and basic low-heeled Bass Weejun penny loafers. Soon enough Goran and I would settle ourselves in front of the television in our hotel suite. Alone, just him and me, we'd watch my parents arrive at the red carpet in the Prius arranged by the publicist. Frigid, reclusive Goran would be mine alone as we watched my mom and dad preen for the paparazzi. Once they were safely away, I planned to phone room service and request dinner pour deux, lobster and oysters and onion rings. For dessert, I'd procured five ounces of my parents' genetically enhanced Mexican sinsemilla. No, it's not especially logical: My parents constantly railed in opposition to irradiated, genetically spliced and engineered corn, but where marijuana was concerned plant scientists could never monkey with it too much. No matter how hybrid a Frankenstein skunkweed, they would pack the sticky resinous mess into a pipe and torch it.
In case you have yet to notice, my parents do nothing in moderation. On one hand, they mourn the fact that Goran spent his babyhood alone and untouched. While on the other hand they never cease touching me, hugging and kissing me, especially when the paparazzi are around. My mother limits my wardrobe to pink and yellow. My shoes are either cute Capezio ballet flats or Mary Janes. The only makeup I own is forty different shades of pink lipstick. You see, neither of my parents wants me to appear any older than seven or eight. Officially, I've been in the second grade for years.
When my baby teeth began to fall out, they went so far as to suggest I wear a set of the painful primary-teeth dentures that Twentieth Century Fox forced into little Shirley Temple's adolescent mouth. In times like these, being kneaded, probed, and polished by a team of beauty experts, I wished I had also been raised, untouched, in an Iron Curtain orphanage.
This year, the Academy Awards fell smack-dab on my thirteenth birthday. With stylists swarming around her, dressing and undressing her like a giant doll, makeup artists experimenting to decide which eye shadow worked best with what designer gown, hairdressers curling and straightening her hair, my mother suggests I get a small tattoo to mark the occasion. A little Hello Kitty or Holly Hobbie, she says, or a piercing in my navel.
My dad has a penchant for buying me stuffed animals. And, yes, I know the word penchant, although I'm still not certain what constitutes French-kissing.
God only knew what a cute Holly Hobbie or Hello Kitty tramp stamp would stretch and fade to become over the next sixty years. In the same way my parents imagined all the little boys and girls of the third world wanted to become them... my folks thought my childhood should be the childhood they'd wanted to have, resplendent with meaningless sex, recreational drugs, and rock music. Tattoos and body jewelry. All their peers feel pretty much the same, and it leads to children whom the public believes to be nine years old becoming pregnant. Thus the paradox of teaching nursery rhymes along with contraception skills. Birthday presents such as Hello Kitty diaphragms and Holly Hobbie spermicidal foam and Peter Rabbit crotchless panties.
Please don't imagine it's fun being me. My mom tells the stylist, "Maddy's not ready for bangs." She tells the wardrobe person, "Maddy's a little sensitive about her big bottom."
Don't imagine I even get to speak. On top of that, my mom complains that I never talk. My father would tell you that life is a game, and you need to roll up your sleeves and build something: Write a book. Dance a dance. To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. Perhaps that's what I admire about Goran: his distinct lack of hustle. Goran's the only person I know who's not negotiating a six-picture deal with Paramount. He's not staging a show of his paintings at the Musee d'Orsay. Nor is he having his teeth chemically bleached. Goran simply is. He's not secretly lobbying for the stupid Academy of stupid Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give him a shiny statue while a zillion people stand and applaud. He's not campaigning to build his market share. Wherever Goran is at this moment—sitting or standing, laughing or crying—he's doing it with the clarity of an infant who knows that no one will ever come to his rescue.
While technicians blast her upper lip with lasers, my mom says, "Isn't this fun, Maddy? Just us two, together..." Whenever fewer than fourteen people are clutching at us, my mother considers that to be private mother-daughter "alone time."
No, whether he's alone or observed by millions, whether he's loved or loathed, Goran would be the same person. Maybe that's what I love most about him—that he's so much NOT like my parents. Or like anyone I know.
Goran absolutely, positively does NOT need love.
A manicurist with a Gypsy accent, something leftover from some country where brokers analyze the stock market by reading pigeon entrails, this woman buffs my nails, holding my hand cradled in her own. After a moment, she turns my hand palm up and looks at the new, red skin where I'd left my frozen skin stuck to the door handle in Switzerland. She doesn't say anything, this bug-eyed Gypsy manicurist, but she's clearly marveling at how my wrinkles have been erased. How both my lifeline and love line have not merely stopped—but vanished. Still cupping my red hand in her own coarse, rough fingers, the manicurist looks from my palm to my face, and with the fingers of her other hand, she touches her forehead, her chest, her shoulders, making a fast sign of the cross.
