Damned (19 page)

Exhaling, I coughed. I coughed and coughed, a genuine fit, finally
reaching for a glass of orange juice which sat on a tray with a cold plate of
buffalo wings. The air in the suite smelled like every wrap party my parents
had ever hosted on the final day of principal photography. Stinking of cannabis
and French fries and scorched rolling paper. Cannabis and congealed chocolate
fondue. On television, a European luxury sedan raced across desert salt flats,
swerving between orange traffic cones, driven by a movie star, and I'm not
certain whether this is another commercial or something sampled from a nominated
movie. Next, a famous actress drinks a major brand of diet soda in what could
be either an advertisement or a feature film. Even the fast cars seem to drag
along in slow motion. My hand reaches out toward a plate of cold garlic toast,
and Goran slips the smoldering roach between my fingers. I take another hit,
and hand it back. I reach toward a plate heaped with steaming, buttery,
mouthwatering prawns, but my fingertips touch only smooth glass. My fingernails
scratch at this glass barrier.

Goran laughs, blasting out great clouds of sour dope stench.

My prawns, so enticing and delicious-looking, are merely a television
commercial for a franchised seafood restaurant. Tasty and crunchy and
completely beyond my reach. They're only a teasing mirage of savoriness on the
high-definition screen.

On television, gigantic hamburgers rotate slowly, their grilled meat so
hot it still bubbles and spits with grease. Slices of cheese collapse, molding
themselves over the contours of searing-hot beef patties. Molten rivers of
fudge flow through a mountainous landscape of vanilla soft-serve ice cream
under a cruel hail of chopped Spanish peanuts. Blizzards of powdered sugar bury
frosted doughnuts. Pizza drips dollops of tomato sauce and trails gooey whitish
strings of mozzarella.

Goran takes the smoking roach from between my fingers. He takes another
hit, chasing the smoke with a swig of chocolate milk shake.

Once more mouthing the damp butt of the shared marijuana cigarette, I
attempt to discern the flavor of my beloved's saliva. Tonguing the moist folds
of paper, I taste chocolate-chip cookies purloined from the minibar. I taste
the tang of artificial fruit, lemons, cherries, watermelon, stolen candies,
forbidden to us because of their tooth-decaying qualities. At last, beneath it
all, my taste buds locate something earthy, fecund, the spit of my primitive
rebel man-boy, the foreign pong of my stolid Heathcliff. My rustic rude savage.
I relish this, the appetizer to a banquet of Goran's moist tongue kisses. In
the scorched ganja I taste the residue of his chocolate milk shake.

On television, a basket of nachos, heavily laden with sliced olives and
gory salsa, this vision dissolves to take the shape of a beautiful woman. The
woman wears a red gown—in hindsight, more orange than red—a scrap of grosgrain
ribbon pinned to her bodice. The ribbon as pink as diced tomatoes. The woman
says, "The nominees for this year's best motion picture are..."

The woman on screen is my mom.

At this, I climb to my feet, towering above the hotel carpet, swaying
high above the discarded food and Goran. I stumble into the suite's bathroom;
there, I unroll an awful lot of toilet paper, miles of toilet paper, making two
lumps of roughly equal size which I proceed to stuff into the front of my sweater.
In the bathroom mirror, my eyes look red-rimmed and bloodshot. I stand sideways
to the mirror and study my new busty profile. I pull the tissue from inside my
sweater and flush it down the toilet—the tissue, not the sweater. I am
so
high.
It seems as if I've been in this bathroom for years. Decades have
passed. Aeons. I pull open a drawer next to the sink and retrieve the long
strip of Hello Kitty condoms. I reemerge from the bathroom, presenting myself
before Goran with the strip of condoms looped around the back of my neck like a
feather boa.

On television, the camera shows my dad sitting in the audience, midway
down the main floor, right on the aisle, his favorite seat, so he can sneak out
and drink martinis during the awards for boring foreign crap. Only scant
moments have actually gone by. Everyone applauds. Still standing in the
bathroom doorway I bow, deeply.

Goran looks from the television to me. His eyes almost glow red, and
Goran coughs. Crimson seafood sauce is smeared on his chin. Gooey dabs of
tartar sauce trail down the front of his shirt. The air in the suite hangs
misty, foggy with dope smoke.

I knot the strip of condoms around my neck and pull the knot tight,
saying, "You want to play a game?" I say, "You only need to blow
into my mouth." I step forward, slinking toward my beloved, and say,
"It's called the French-kissing Game."

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please don't take this as a
criticism, but you really ought to upgrade your word-processing equipment. The
readability of your dot-matrix printer especially way sucks, not to mention
those perforated tracks that hang off the edges of every printed page.

My
mom would tell you, "Two lips and a
tongue can promise you anything." Meaning: Get all your deals in writing.
Meaning: Always preserve a paper trail.

Across the top of the printed form, the faint dot-matrix words read:
Hell Induction Report for Goran Metro Spencer. Age 14.

Under "Site of Death" it says:
Los Angeles River Detention
Center for Violent Juvenile Offenders.

That would explain his hot-pink getup, complete with the prison number
sewn to his chest. While somewhat fashion-forward, still not an obvious choice
for the moody, imperious Goran I know.

Under "Cause of Death" the report says:
Stabbed by fellow
inmate during riot.

Under "Reason for Damnation" it says:
Manslaughter
conviction for the strangulation of Madison Spencer.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Unpleasant as death might seem,
the upside is that you only suffer it once. Subsequent to that, the sting is
gone. The memory might be enormously traumatic, but that's all it is: a memory.
You won't be asked to perform an encore. Unless, just possibly, you're a Hindu.

Probably I shouldn't even tell you this next part. I know how self-righteous
alive people are.

Face it, every time you scan the obituary pages in the newspaper and
you see somebody younger than yourself who died—especially if the obit features
a photograph of them smiling, sitting on some mown lawn beside a golden retriever,
wearing shorts—admit it, you feel so damned superior. It could be you also feel
a smidgen lucky, but mostly you feel all smug. Everybody alive feels so
superior to the dead, even homosexuals and American Indians.

Probably when you read this you'll just laugh and make fun of me, but I
remember gasping for breath, choking there on the carpet of the hotel suite.
The crown of my head was wedged against the bottom of the television screen,
the remains of our room-service banquet arrayed on plates around me. Goran
knelt astride my waist, leaning over me, his face looming above my face; his
hands gripped the two ends of the Hello Kitty condoms which were knotted around
my neck, and he was yanking the noose tight.

The stink of our every exhaled breath hung heavy, clouding the suite
with its skunkweed reek.

Towering above me on television, so real she seemed to be standing
there, rose the figure of my mother. She seemed to tower up to the distant
ceiling of the suite. The full length of her, glowing, radiant in the stage
lights. Luminescent in her perfect beauty. A glorious vision. An angel garbed
in a designer gown. On the television, my mom stands, gracious and patient in
silence, waiting for the applause of her adoring world to subside.

In contrast, my arms and legs flail and thrash, scattering the nearby
plates of jumbo prawns. My desperate convulsions upset the bowls of leftover
buffalo wings. Spill ranch dressing. Strew old egg rolls.

On television, the cameras cut to show my dad seated in the audience,
beaming.

As the applause fades to quiet, my serene, lovely mother, smiling and
enigmatic, says, "Before presenting this year's Oscar for best feature
film..." She says, "I'd like to wish my dear, sweet daughter,
Madison, a happy eighth birthday..."

As of today, the truth is—I'm thirteen. My pulse pounds in my ears, and
the condoms cut into the tender skin of my neck. The stars and comets of red
and gold and blue begin to fill my vision, obscuring Goran's grim face,
obscuring my view of the room's ceiling and my radiant mother. In my school
uniform of sweater and skort, I'm sweating. My kiltie tassel loafers, kicked
off my feet.

As my vision narrows to a smaller and smaller tunnel, edged by a
growing margin of darkness, I can still hear my mother's voice say, "Happy
birthday, my dearest baby girl. Your daddy and I love you very, very
much." A beat later, muffled and far away, she adds, "Now, good
night, and sleep well, my precious love...."

In the hotel suite, I hear panting, gasping, someone drawing great
inhales of breath, but it's not me. It's Goran panting with the effort to
suffocate me, to strangle me in exactly the manner I'd dictated according to
the rules of the French-kissing Game.

By then I'm floating up, my face drifting closer to the painted plaster
of the ceiling. My heartbeat, silent. My own breathing, stilled. From the
highest point in the room, I turn and look back at Goran. I'm shouting,
"Kiss me!" I'm screaming, "Give me the kiss of life!" But
nothing makes a sound except for the rush of televised applause for my mother.

Splayed there on the carpet, I'm reduced to the status of the cooling
food which surrounds me: my life only partially consumed. Wasted. Soon to be
consigned to the garbage. My swollen, livid face and blue lips, they're merely
a conglomerate of rancid fats, so like the old onion rings and stale potato
chips. My precious life, rendered nothing more than congealing and coagulating
liquids. Desiccating proteins. A rich banquet only nibbled at. Barely tasted.
Rejected and discarded and alone.

Yes, I know I sound quite cold, insensitive to the pathetic sight of a
thirteen-year-old Birthday Girl dead on the floor of a hotel suite, but any
other attitude would overwhelm me with self-pity. Floating here, I want nothing
more than to go back and to fix this hideous error. In this moment, I've lost
both my parents. I've lost Goran. Worst of all, I've lost... myself. In all my
romantic scheming, I've ruined everything.

On television, my mom puckers her lips. She presses the fingers of her
manicured hand to her lips, then blows me a kiss.

Goran drops the ends of the condom strip and gazes down on my body, a
stricken look on his face. He leaps to his feet, dashing into the bedroom, then
reemerges wearing his coat. He doesn't take the room key. He doesn't intend to
return. Nor does he call 911. My beloved, the object of my romantic affection,
simply races from the hotel suite without so much as a single look back.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Ask me the square root of pi.
Ask me how many pecks are in a bushel. Ask me anything about the truncated,
tragic life of Charlotte Bronte. I can tell you exactly when Joyce Kilmer died
in the Second Battle of the Marne. I can tell you the combination of keys,
Ctrl+Alt+S or Ctrl+Alt+Q, which will access the security cameras or manipulate
the lighting and window treatments of my sealed bedrooms in Copenhagen or Oslo,
those rooms my mother has air-conditioned down to meat locker... down to
archival temperatures, where the electrostatic air filters prohibit a speck of
dust to ever settle, where my clothes and shoes and stuffed animals wait in the
darkness, locked away from sun fade and humidity, patient as the alabaster jars
and gilded toys which accompanied any boy pharaoh into his eternal tomb. Ask me
about the ecology in Fiji and the amusing personal habits of tony Hollywood
gadabouts. Ask me to describe the political machinations embedded in the
all-girls culture of a
très
-reserved Swiss boarding
school. Just do NOT ask me how I'm feeling. Do not ask if I still miss my
parents. Don't ask if I still cry from being so homesick. Of course the dead
miss the living.

Personally, I myself miss sipping Twinings English Breakfast Tea and
reading Elinor Glyn novels on rainy days. I miss smelling the citrus tang of
Bain de Soleil, cheating at backgammon against our Somali maids, and practicing
the gavotte and the minuet.

But on a larger scale, to be brutally honest, the dead miss everything.

In my desperation to talk, for the comfort of a little chat therapy, I
telephone Canadian Emily, and a woman answers the phone. When she asks my name
I tell her that I'm Emily's friend from long distance and ask if Emily can
please come talk, just for a minute. Please.