Damned (20 page)

At this, the woman begins to sniff, then sob. Over the telephone, she's
drawing deep shuddering breaths, choked with guttering sobs. Keening.
"Emily," she says, "my baby..." Her words dissolving into
cries, she says, "My baby girl's gone back into the hospital..." The
woman rallies, sniffing, asking if she can relay a message from me to Emily.

And yes, despite all my considerable Swiss training in decorum,
regardless of my hippie training in empathy, over the telephone I ask, "Is
Emily about to die?"

No, it's not fair, but what makes life feel like Hell is our
expectation that it should last forever. Life is short. Dead is forever. You'll
find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get
all upset.

"Yes," the woman says, her voice hoarse, deep with emotion.
"Emily is about to die." Her voice flat with resignation, she asks,
"Would you like me to tell her something for you?"

And I say, "Never mind."

I say, "Don't let her forget to bring my ten Milky Way candy
bars."

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It's not true that your life
flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your
life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years
to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering.
Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our
lives as it is to forgive them.

And, yes, while the dead do
miss
everything and everybody, they don't hang around the earth forever.

T
his one time, my dad flew our Learjet to
attend some stockholder meeting in Prague, except that same day, my mom needed
to be in Nairobi to collect some harelip-and-cleft-palate orphan or a
film-festival award or some dumb
something, so
she leased a jet to fly
her and me, except the leasing time-share jet people... they sent the exact
diametrically WRONG kind of jet from what my mother had ordered, thoughtlessly
dispatching one with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and hand-painted frescoes on
the ceilings, exactly the sort of jet which younger members of the Saudi royal
family would hire to fly a harem of Miss Coozey Coozerbilt call girls to
Kuwait, and it was too late to send a different jet, and my mom went nuts, she
was just so way-aesthetically freaked out.

Well, walking into the hotel suite after the Academy Awards and
stepping into about a billion half-eaten plates of old club sandwiches, then
finding me dead and strangulated by a strip of Hello Kitty condoms—let's just
say my mom freaked out even worse.

At that time my spirit was still hovering in the room, crossing my
spiritual fingers that somebody might bother to call the paramedics, and they'd
rush in and perform some resuscitation miracle. Needless to say Goran was long
gone. He and I had hung the Do Not Disturb sign so the maid hadn't performed
the turndown service. No chocolates rested on the bed pillows. All the lights
were turned off, plunging the suite into total pitch-darkness. My parents
enter, tiptoeing because they think Goran and I are fast asleep. It wasn't
pretty.

No, it's never a special treat to watch your mom just scream and scream
your name, then fall to her knees in a mess of ketchupy onion rings and cold
prawn cocktails, grabbing at your dead shoulders, shaking you and yelling for
you to wake up. It was my dad who called 911, but that was really, really way
too late. The EMTs who came did more to treat my mom's hysterics than to rescue
me. Of course the police came; they took as many photographs of me dead as
People
magazine had taken of me as a newborn baby. The homicide detectives
lifted about a million of Goran's fingerprints off the strip of condoms. My mom
took about a million Xanax, one after another. During all of this, my dad
stalked over to the closet where Goran's new clothes were stored, threw open
the closet door, and ripped the Ralph Lauren sportswear from the hangers,
rending, shredding without a word shirts and trousers, buttons popping and
ricocheting around the suite.

All that time, all night, I could merely watch, as detached and distant
as my mother accessing security cameras on her laptop. Maybe I drew the hotel
curtains closed, or turned on a light, but nobody seemed to notice. At best, a
sentry. At worst, a voyeur.

It's power, but a kind of pointless, impotent power.

No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate
against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in
popular culture it's as zombies... vampires... ghosts, always something
threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s
mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be
banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth
century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.

That said, go ahead and laugh at me. You're still alive, so apparently
you're doing something right. I'm dead, so go right ahead and kick sand in my
fat, deceased face.

In the prejudiced, bigoted modern world, alive is alive. Dead is dead.
And the two factions must not interact. This attitude is entirely
understandable when you consider what the dead would do to property values and
stock prices. Once the dead informed the living that material possessions were
a big joke—ARE a big joke—well, the De Beers people could never sell another
diamond. Pension funds would truly wither.

In reality, the dead are always around the living. I hung around with
my parents for a month; seriously, it beat tagging along to watch the Mr.
Skeazy Vanderskeaze mortuary guy pump out my blood and monkey with my naked
thirteen-year-old corpse. My environmentalist parents chose a biodegradable
casket of pressed-wood pulp guaranteed to rapidly break down and encourage
bacterial subsoil life-forms. This is typical of how little respect you get
once you're dead. I mean, the well-being of earthworms gets a higher priority.

Consider that as proof positive that you're never too young to record a
final directive.

It was like being buried inside a piñata.

If I'd managed to call the shots I'd have been buried in an all-bronze,
hermetically sealed casket studded with rubies, not even buried but laid to
rest in a crypt of carved white marble. On a tiny wooded island in the center
of a lake. In the Italian Alps. However, my parents pursued their own vision.
Instead of something elegant, they chose a caterwauling gospel choir from some
church that needed to garner national exposure for an album they were ready to
launch. Somebody reworked that Elton John song about the candle so it went,
"Good-bye, Madison Spencer, though I never knew you at all..." They
even released about a zillion white doves. Talk about clichéd. Talk about
derivative.

Among the loitering dead, even JonBenet Ramsey felt sorry for me. Even
the Lindbergh baby was embarrassed on my behalf.

Here I was, dead, and all the little Miss Skanky Von Skankenbergs at my
boarding school were still alive and attending my memorial service. The three
Slutty MacSluts stood there, all pious, heads bowed, not saying a word about
how they'd taught me the French-kissing Game. Those three Whorey Vander Whores
took their printed funeral programs to my mom and asked her to autograph them.
The president of the United States helped carry the papier-mâché, eco-friendly
biotainer to my grave. So did the prime minister of Great Britain.

Movie stars were in somber attendance. Some famous poet said some crap
flowery poem that didn't even rhyme. World leaders were there to pay their
vaunted respects. Connected by satellite, the entire planet was there to say,
"Good-bye."

Except Goran, my beloved, my one true love... Goran wasn't.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It dawns on me that I've never
adequately thanked you for sending the car, and I ought to; it was an extremely
sensitive, thoughtful gesture on your part. You acted very kindly toward me at
a time when I desperately needed such courtesy, and I want you to know that
I'll always appreciate that generosity.

I
t's no easier to be a just-dead spirit than
it is to be a just-born infant, and I'm pathetically grateful for any modicum
of care and nursemaiding. Clustered around my grave site at Forest Lawn,
everyone was crying: my mom and dad were crying, the president of Senegal was
crying. Everyone was just boo-hooing with the notable exception of me, and
that's because me crying at my own funeral strikes me as awfully egocentric. It
goes without saying that no one can see the real me, the spirit me, standing in
their grieving midst. I know, I know, in that totally archetypal
Tom Sawyer
scenario it's supposed to be way satisfying to attend your own funeral and
witness how everyone secretly loved and adored you, but the sad truth is that
most people are just as fakey-fake to you after you're dead as when you're
alive. If there's even a thin margin of profit in it, everyone who hated you
will
rend
their garments and flop around like phony
crybabies. Case in point: the trio of Miss Trampy McTramptons station their
skeazy preteen selves around my bereft mother and tell her how much they loved
me, even as their spidery anorexic fingers and French manicures toy with
bejeweled rosaries all lumpy with Tahitian black pearls and fat rubies and
emeralds designed by Christian Lacroix for Bulgari that they ran off and bought
on Rodeo Drive just for today's funeral. These three Miss Slutty Sluttenheimers
keep whispering to my bereft mom that they've each been receiving psychic
messages from me, that I keep visiting them in their dreams and begging them to
pass along messages of love and support to my family, and my poor mom seems
traumatized enough to listen to these three horrid harpies and take their lies
seriously.

In greater numbers, a bevy of blond production assistants glom onto my
dad, all of them wearing sexy black stripper gloves and trying to out-leg one
another by letting their black miniskirts ride up too far on their
tanned-and-waxed thighs while they clutch little brand-new, black leather-bound
Bibles the same way they would Chanel pocketbooks, and all told it's obvious
they're all sleeping with him—my father, with all his noble-sounding,
high-minded, left-wing platitudes—but he can't expense their various salaries
to any project's shooting budget if he admits that the only job they ever
perform is blow jobs. This weepy media circus centers around my earthly
remains, which are wadded deep inside an organic shroud of unbleached bamboo
fiber with some bullshit Asian-looking calligraphy scribbled all over it,
resembling like nothing so much as a gigantic off-white turd covered with
Chinese gang tags, situated next to my own freshly hewn tombstone. Such are the
myriad indignities foisted upon the dead: The stone is chiseled with my full
ridiculous name of Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, a
monstrous personal secret I’ve been vigorously covering up for all my thirteen
years and which the three Miss Coozy Coozenburgs clearly can't wait to share
with all my old classmates back in Switzerland, not to mention the fact that
the birth and death dates carved into the granite will forever fix me at an
erroneous nine years old. To add insult to injury, the epitaph says:
Maddy
Rests Now, Cupped and Suckling at the Sacred Breast Milk of the Eternal
Goddess.

This, all of this asinine crap is what you justly deserve if you die
without a legally binding final directive. I'm dead and standing a decent
distance apart from this mad crush, but I can still smell all their makeup and
hair spray.

And if I didn't know the meaning of
asinine
before, I certainly
do now. As for the definition of
erroneous,
I only have to look around.

And if you can stomach knowing one more fact about the afterlife, here
it is: Nobody grieves more at funerals than does the newly deceased. That's why
I'm so pathetically grateful when I avert my gaze from this dismal tableau to see,
parked at the curb, just idling at the edge of a graveyard lane, a black
Lincoln Town Car. The shiny waxed-and-polished black of it reflects the army of
mourners... the blue sky... the gravestones of Forest Lawn... really, it
reflects everything except for me, because the dead don't have reflections. On
earth, the dead don't cast a shadow or show up in photographs. Best of all,
standing beside the car is a uniformed chauffeur, his hair hidden beneath a
visored cap and half his face blocked behind mirrored sunglasses. In his
black-driving-gloved hand he holds a white clipboard with, written across it in
blocky handwriting,
Madison Spencer.
This driver wears a little chrome
name tag on his lapel, his name engraved there, but it's not worth the bother
to read, because I know from long habit that I'll forget it a millisecond from
now and just start calling him George.