Damned (12 page)

In secret, putting my hands into the side pockets of my skort, I cross
my fingers.

The demon asks, "Does mankind hold ultimate dominion over all
earthly plants and animals?"

Fingers crossed, I say, "Yes?"

"Do you approve," the demon says, "of marriage between
individuals of differing racial backgrounds?"

The demon continues without hesitation, asking, "Should the
Zionist state of Israel be allowed to exist?"

Question after question, I'm stumped. Even fingers crossed. The
paradox: Is God a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic ass? Or is God testing to
see if I am?

The demon asks, "Should women be allowed to hold public office? To
own real property? To operate motor vehicles?"

Now and then, he leans over the polygraph machine, using a felt-tipped
pen to scribble notes next to the readouts on the rolling banner of paper.

We've journeyed here to the headquarters of Hell because I asked about
filing an appeal. My reasoning is... if convicted murderers can linger on death
row for decades, demanding access to law libraries and gratis public defenders,
while scribbling briefs and arguments with blunt crayons and pencil stubs, it
seems only fair that I ought to appeal my own eternal sentence.

In the same tone that a supermarket cashier would ask, "Paper or
plastic?" or a fast-food server would ask, "Do you want fries with
that?" the demon asks, 'Are you, yourself, a virgin?"

Since last Christmas, when I froze my hands to the door of my residence
hall and was forced to rip off the outermost layers of skin, my hands have yet
to totally heal. The lines crisscrossing my palms, the lifeline and love line,
are almost erased. My fingerprints look faint, and the new skin feels tight and
sensitive. In my pockets, now, it hurts to keep my fingers crossed, but all I can
do is just sit here, betraying my parents, betraying my gender and politics,
betraying myself to tell some bored demon what I hope is the perfect mix of
blah, blah, blah. If anybody should spend eternity in Hell, it's me.

The demon asks, "Do you support the profoundly evil research which
utilizes embryonic stem cells?"

I correct his grammar, telling him,
"That...
research
that
utilizes..."

The demon asks, "Does physician-assisted suicide fly in the face
of God's beautiful will?"

The demon asks, "Do you espouse the obvious truth of intelligent
design?"

With the needles scribbling my every heartbeat, my respiration rate, my
blood pressure, the demon waits, watching for my body to turn traitor on me
when he asks, "Are you familiar with the William Morris Agency?"

Despite myself, my hands relax a little and let my fingers slip and
stop lying. I say, "Why... yes."

And the demon looks up from his machine, smiles, and says, "That's
who represents me...."

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Don't get the idea that I'm way
homesick; but lately, but I've been thinking about my family. This is no
reflection on you or the fabulousness of Hell. I've just been feeling a tad
nostalgic.

For my last birthday, my parents announced we were headed for Los Angeles
in order for my mom to present some awards-show trophy. My mom had her personal
assistant buy no fewer than a thousand-million gilded envelopes with blank
pieces of card stock tucked inside. For the past week, all my mom's done is
practice tearing open these envelopes, pulling out the cards, and saying,
"The Academy Award for Best Motion Picture goes to . . To train herself
not to laugh, my mom asked me to write movie titles on the cards like
Smokey and the Bandit II
and
Saw IV
and
The English Patient
III.

We're sitting in the back of a town car, being driven from some airport
to some hotel in Beverly Hills. I'm sitting in the jump seat facing my mother
so she can't see what I write. After that, I hand the card to her assistant,
who tucks it into an envelope, affixes a gold-foil seal, and hands the finished
product to my mom to rip open.

We're not going to the Beverly Wilshire because that's where I tried to
flush the dead body of my kitten, poor Tiger Stripe, and a plumber had to come
and unclog half the toilets in the hotel. We're also not going to the house in
Brentwood, because this trip is only for, like, seventy-two hours, and my mom
doesn't trust Goran and me not to mess up the whole place.

On one blank card, I'm writing
Porky's Revenge.
On another I write
Every Which Way but Loose.
As I write
Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy's Dead,
I ask my mom where she put my pink blouse with the smocking on the front.

Tearing open an envelope, my mom says, "Did you check your closet
in Palm Springs?"

My dad isn't here in the car. He stayed back to supervise work on our
jet. Whether this is a joke, I won't even venture a guess, but my dad is
redesigning our Learjet to feature an interior crafted of organic brick and
hand-hewn pegged beams, with knotty pine floors. All of it sustainably grown by
the Amish. Yeah—installed in a jet. To cover the floors, he hoisted all my
mom's last-season Versace and Dolce on some Tibetan rag-rug braiders and he's
called this "recycling." We'll have a jet outfitted with faux
wood-burning fireplaces and antler chandeliers. Macramé plant hangers. Of
course, all the brick and wood is just veneer; but trying to take off, the
plane will still consume somewhere around the entire daily output of dinosaur
juice pumped by Kuwait.

Welcome to the start of another glorious media cycle. All this muss and
fuss is to justify their getting the cover of
Architectural
Digest.

Sitting opposite me, my mom tears open an envelope, saying, "This
year's Academy Award for Best Picture goes to..." She plucks the card out
of the envelope and starts to laugh, saying, "Maddy, shame on you!"
My mom shows the card to Emily or Amanda or Ellie or Daphne or WHOEVER her PA
is this week. The card reads,
The Piano II:
Attack of the Finger.
Emily or Audrey or
whoever, she doesn't get the joke.

The good news is the Prius is way too dinky for Goran and me to
accompany my folks to the awards ceremony. So, while my mom's onstage trying
not to get a paper cut or crack up laughing from having to give an Oscar to
somebody she hates, Goran is supposed to babysit me at the hotel. Be still, my
wildly beating heart. Technically, because Goran doesn't speak enough English
to order pay-per-view cable porn, I'll be babysitting him, but we're required
to watch the awards on television so we can tell mom whether she ought to
bother doing them again next season.

That's how come I need my pink blouse—to look hot for Goran. Booting my
mom's notebook computer, I press the Control, Alt, and S keys, using the
security cams to scan my bedroom closet in Palm Springs. I toggle to the
cameras in Berlin and check my bedroom there.

"Check in Geneva," says my mom. "Tell the Somali maid to
FedEx it to you."

I hit Ctrl+Alt+G. I hit Ctrl+Alt+B. Checking Geneva. Checking Berlin.
Athens. Singapore.

To be honest, Goran is the most likely reason he and I aren't going to
this year's Oscars. It's too big a gamble that, when the cameras zoom in on us
in our seats, the Spencer children, Goran would be yawning or picking his nose
or snoring, slumped in his red velvet theater seat, asleep, with drool trailing
out one corner of his sensuously full lips. This is all water under the bridge,
but whatever flunky does the screening to identify potential adoptees, he or
she definitely lost his or her job for putting Goran's name forward. My parents
fund a charity foundation which primarily employs approximately a billion
publicists who issue press releases touting my dad's generosity. Yes, they
might donate a thousand dollars to build a cinder-block school in Pakistan, but
then they'll pay a half million to film a documentary about the school, hold
press conferences and media junkets, and make certain the entire world knows
what they've accomplished. From his very first photo op Goran was a letdown. He
wouldn't weep tears of happiness for the cameras, nor would he refer to his new
guardians as anything more endearing than "the Mister and Missus
Spencer."

We're all familiar with those television commercials where a cat or dog
dives nose-first into its bowl of dried kibble to demonstrate how delicious,
but really because the poor animal has been starved beforehand. Well, the same
principle should prompt Goran to beam proudly in his new Ralph Lauren togs, or
Calvin Klein or whomever my parents are shilling for. Goran is expected to
scarf down whatever cage-free, bean-curd delicacy while gulping from a bottle
of whatever sponsoring sports beverage, holding the bottle so the label is
prominently displayed. It's a lot of work for one battle-scarred orphan, but
I've seen kids my folks adopted, as young as four years, from Nepal and Haiti
and Bangladesh, simultaneously model my parents' largesse and baby Gap and
heat-and-serve figs stuffed with pain-free haggis and cumin-infused aioli—plus
continually mention whatever film project my mom had going into theatrical
release.

I had this one sister for about five minutes—my folks had rescued her
from a brothel in Calcutta—but the moment she sensed a camera in the room, she
could hug her new Nike shoes and Barbie dolls, weeping such realistic,
photogenic tears of joy that she made Julia Roberts look like a slacker.

In contrast, Goran would sip the requisite corn syrup-flavored,
vitamin-enhanced energy drink and grimace as if in pain. Goran just flat-out
refuses to play this game. All Goran does is scowl at me, but that's all he
does to anyone. When his hateful, brooding gaze bores into me, I swear, I feel
exactly like Jane Eyre being stared at by Mr. Rochester. I'm Rebecca de Winter
under the cold scrutiny of her new husband, Maxim. After a lifetime of being
coddled and courted, by servants, by underlings and media sycophants, I find
Goran's hateful distain to be utterly irresistible.

The other reason we're not going to the Academy Awards is because I'm a
great, huge, roly-poly pig. My mom would never fess up to that, except maybe to
Vanity Fair.

Even as our driver bears my mom and me hotel-ward, Goran remains on the
tarmac, where my dad will try his best to explain the surreal wit inherent in
decorating the interior of a space-age, multimillion-dollar aircraft to
resemble the wattle yurt of a Stone Age caveman family. My dad will drone about
the multivalent way in which our ersatz mud hut will resonate as smart and
ironic with the well-educated literati, yet read as sincere and environmentally
forward with the erstwhile younger fan base of my mother's films.

And, yes, I might be dreamy and preadolescent, but I know the meaning
of
multivalent.
Kind of. I think.
Pretty much.

On the notebook computer, I key Ctrl+Alt+J to spy on the interior of our
jet. There, my dad is trying to tell Goran all about Marshall McLuhan while
Goran simply glares at the security camera, scowling out of the computer screen
directly at me.

Strictly by accident, mind you, one time—I swear, I'm no Miss Wanton
McSlutski—but I toggled Ctrl+Alt+T and caught a gander of Goran taking a
shower, naked. Not that I was peeking on purpose, but I did see that he already
had some hair...
down there.
To understand my panting pursuit of Goran, he of the plush lips and frigid
glare, you need to know my first baby picture appeared on the cover of
People
magazine. Personally, I've never served as a
satisfactory mirror for my parents' success because luxuries were a given. From
my birth, the world was already rendered deferential. At best I served as a
souvenir—like drugs or grunge music—of my parents' long-gone younger selves.
The adopted children were supposed to affirm my mom and dad's hard work and
resulting rewards. You pluck some famished skeleton out of an Ethiopian dirt
hole, hustle him aboard a Gulfstream, and serve him a selection of free-range
Havarti baked in gluten-free, whole-grain tart shells, and it's way more likely
that kid will bother to say thank-you. Here's some kid who had a life
expectancy of around zero—the drooling vultures already circling overhead—and,
no duh, he's going to get all excited about a dumb weekend house party with
Babs Streisand in East Hampton.