Damned (24 page)

Throughout my pilgrimage of transformation, the manila envelope
containing the results of my salvation polygraph test, folded carefully,
remains tucked deep into one hip pocket of my skort. Seldom do we break stride
in our relentless campaign across the burning landscape, beneath the sky
scorched with orange flames.

"After I got the bread and diapers," Archer says, "I
took them home to my old lady......"

I say, "Please tell me that you're
not
a school shooter,
like you originally claimed."

And Archer says, "Just listen, okay?"

He delivered the bread and diapers to his mother, only to discover that
he'd nervously stolen the exact wrong type of diaper. Instead of swiping the
brand with adhesive plastic tabs to hold them in place, Archer had brought home
a less expensive product which required safety pins. To compensate, he'd
offered the pins he normally wore pierced through his cheeks and nipples. It
was one of these poorly sanitized punk accessories which, no doubt, pricked his
infant sister. The frail child fell ill from a blood infection and, almost overnight—died.

Sensing the awkwardness of his admission, I deliberately did not seek
to make eye contact. Instead, I continued to march at Archer's side, our army
streaming along in our wake. Directing my eyes straight ahead, I felt the bump
and jostle of talismans, fetishes, power objects swaying from my waist and
colliding with my striding hips. I stood upright, balancing the weight of my
new pearly crown. Keeping the tone of my voice nonchalant, offhand, I asked if
that was his reason for being eternally damned... because he'd killed his baby
sister.

"That was pretty shitty, the way she died," Archer says,
keeping pace at my side. He says, "But there's more to it......"

It's with our next step that the towers, the turrets and battlements of
the Hell headquarters first poke above the far horizon. At our heels, the
numbers of our marching army, the most vile scofflaws and thugs and criminals
of all human history, the number of our legions has grown
to
become almost infinite. The combined tread of our marching feet shakes the
ground, crushing discarded toffees to dust. We parade, a grand pageant,
underlings prancing ahead to sprinkle our path with a fragrant carpet of Red
Hots, Skittles, peanut M&M's, and gumballs. Our spoils of Boston Baked
Beans and Jolly Ranchers are nearly beyond measure.

The young lady who expired in the glow of a hotel television... she is
not the same young woman who now presents herself before the gates of Hell.
Hannibal should've presented such a fearsome sight. The hordes of Genghis Khan
would appear as nothing compared to my own. The Spartans. The legions of the
Caesars. The armies of the pharaohs. None could hope to survive a battle with
these, my hollow-eyed blackguards, their corroded cutlasses and scimitars
clashing against the dirty sky.

Behold, my name is Madison Spencer, child of Antonio and Camille
Spencer, citizen of Hell, and my army is as numberless as the stars. As is the
wealth of my candy. I bid all the demons and devils of Hades immediately to
open their stout fortress unto me.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Whether you are or you are not,
it hardly matters... because I am here. The prodigal daughter. Little Maddy
Spencer has come home to roost.

Even as we approach the precipice walls of underworld headquarters, the
stout gates of Hell—oaken beams blackened with age and bound in iron—are
already swinging shut to block our entry. Stretched to the horizon on either
hand, these crumbling battlements rise lofty as thunderheads, rearing back as
if braced against our assault. Standing black against the orange sky. Here, the
Great Plains of Discarded Razor Blades, a vast, baked continent paved miles
deep with every dull and rusted razor blade cast off by humanity, this
glittering field ends at the base of these ominous stone walls.

A sole demon stands guard as the gates are made fast, rattling from
within with the telltale rasp of bars sliding into place, chains being wrapped
and locked, bolts shot. This demon, its skin pebbled with infected sores, its
hide running with pus and corruption, the snout of a monstrous boar dominates
its rubbery face. Its eyes are those black stones through which a killer shark
surveys its cold, watery victim. Here presents itself Baal, deposed deity of
the Babylonians, receiver of generations of sacrificial children slaughtered in
tribute. Thundering with the voice of
these screaming
millions, the demon demands, "Halt and approach no closer!" The
demon, Baal, commands, "Disperse your menacing armies! And relinquish your
delicious stores of Nestle Crunch bars!"

Thus blocking the path, this demon hybrid of pig and shark and
pedophile demands to know my name.

As if, at this newest moment, I knew what to call myself.

Who I am is no longer the plump girl who'd smile winningly, bat her
eyelashes, and say, "Pretty please, with sugar on top." My voice
speaks with the rage of the Hitler mustache. My head stands unbowed beneath the
weight of the garish de Medicis crown. My chunky loins, girded with the belt of
murderous kings, swagger and display the spoils of my campaign. My hips bristle
with totems and talismans, proof that I am not simply a character in a fixed
book or film. I am no single narrative. As neither Rebecca de Winter nor Jane
Eyre, I am free to revise my story, to reinvent myself, my world, at any given
moment. Advancing beside Archer, I am resplendent in my savage finery of seized
power. In my service charge the collected blackguards of a dozen tyrants now
dispatched to a lesser oblivion. My fingers, stained crimson with the blood of
despots, are not the fingers which paged through the paper lives of helpless
romantic heroines. No more am I a passive damsel who waits for circumstance to
decide her fate; now have I become the scalawag, the swashbuckler, the
Heathcliff of my dreams bent on rescuing myself. For now do I embody all the
traits I had so hoped to find in Goran. Meaning: No longer am I limited.

I am my own rakish seducer. I do serve as my own surly, brutish
bounder.

As we advance upon the gates of Hell, not slowing our pace, that cadence
of our billion-upon-billion marching feet, Archer whispers to me, "The
greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her
eternal soul."

No slippery, wet heart beats within the damp hollow of my chest. Blood
courses not beneath the delicate skin of my limbs. At this point, I am no
longer anything which can be killed.

Archer whispers, "Your death offers you a golden
opportunity."

The demon pig Baal bares its fangs, its palate brimming with the
ruptured fluids and gore of countless foes, a jagged nightmare of toothy
torture and suffering—but only to those still wedded to their past lives. As
kings or beauties. As rich men or celebrated artists. No, such gnashing,
clashing fangs would frighten only those who have yet to accept the fact of
their immortality. The demon beast snorts flame, hacking the scalding air with
great, slashing claws. The monster roars laughter so greedy, so guttural with
hunger that even the scoundrels and knaves marching in my wake, my rapscallions
and lowlifes, even they begin to fall back in fear. Even Archer, his head bent
against the onslaught of venomous, sulfurous exhalations, even my blue-haired
lieutenant slacks in his brave charge.

Yet I do not venture here to be well liked. Nor do I seek any tribute
of sweet, smiling affection. My objective is not to flirt and curry favor; and
in my mind's eye, my hair streaming, my knees thrown high, dagger unsheathed, I
appear quite Byronic.

Upon arrival within arm's length of the heinous demon, if truth be
told, I am not surprised to find myself standing alone. The entire lot of them,
my legions of cads and gladiators, despite their machetes and bravado, do
tremble and withdraw. Even my second in command, the punk Archer, falters in
his bold attack. The whisper of his sage advice no longer hissing in my ear.

Pity the poor demon with but its single strategy to win. In the same
handicapped way Jane Eyre must remain meek and stoic, this demonic Baal knows
only one way to exist: by being fearsome. While I exist plastic to change and
adapt, tailoring my battle plan to each new moment, Baal can never dissolve an
enemy into helpless laughter, nor charm a foe by using extraordinary beauty.
Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it
powerless.

Issuing a war whoop far more Grace Poole than Jane Eyre, I launch
myself boldly and squarely toward Baal's porcine thorax. In accordance with my
long-ago, school-mandated rape-prevention training, I execute a two-pronged
offensive against the demon's stony eyes and tender pork genitals, gouging the
former and stomping my stiletto heels upon the latter. Paying no heed to the
until-now careful preservation of my neat and clean appearance, I snatch up a
handful of the corroded razor blades which pave the ground and commence to
slash and claw, my efforts bringing forth a flood of piggish blood. The stench
of the demon's exposed, ruptured viscera is the reek of the charnel house. A
fog of spouting slaughterhouse blood and killing-floor screams ensues. The
offal flies in wide arcs, Grand Guignol style, and even the Hellish orange sky
is racked by Baal's squealing protest.

It's a little-known fact, but demons are only slightly more difficult
to defeat than despots or tyrants. Despite their immense size and fearsome
appearance, demons lack any actual self-confidence. All of their advantage lies
in bluster, hideous deformity, and putrid stink, and once those defenses are
breached a demon has very little with which to back them up. The great pride of
a demon is also its weakness. Like all bullies, at the point where it finds
itself losing face, a demon most often takes flight.

What little that was left of Madison Spencer, movie-star scion, is lost
in the subsequent savage flurry. Battling alone against the evil Baal, I am not
unaware of the sullied hordes who, from a distance, witness my bold savagery.
Assaulted with the unrelenting volley of my infantile slaps and girlish pokes,
my churlish vocal taunts, the infuriating flurry of my wet willies and Indian
burns, this fiercest of demons cries in panicked frustration. Subjected to my
fearsome barrage of painful noogies, then my lightning-fast attack of titty
twisters, my entire arsenal of grade-school insults, Baal wrestles to free
himself. Following a particularly violent wedgie inflicted upon him, the demon
unfurls his wrinkled, leathery wings and flees the scene of battle. Those
batlike wings beating, beating the black smoke and clouds of houseflies, Baal
races to vanish over the far orange horizon.

Thus I'm left standing alone at the sealed gates of headquarters but
for only a moment. I savor the glory of being bathed, soaked, drenched with
warm blood which is not my own.

Even before said blood can cool, a sole voice calls down from a window
placed high in the locked battlements. A woman's voice calls, "Maddy? Is
that you?" Little larger
than the face which
fills it, the window is situated so high that it takes a moment for my eyes to
locate it, but there hovers the visage of an old woman, Mrs. Trudy Marenetti,
most recently from Columbus, Ohio, who arrived in Hell by way of pancreatic
cancer. She calls, "Hurray for little Madison!"

From another distant window, another face, that of Mr. Halmott, victim
of congestive heart failure and Boise, Idaho, echoes the shout, "Hurray
for little Maddy!"

From other windows, other battlements and turrets, a multitude of faces
trumpet the name of Madison Spencer. Of these, some I recognize, but others I
do not, for I've spoken to them only over the telephone, counseling them not to
fear their imminent deaths. During my absence, these souls have been arriving
in droves, transforming Hell into a veritable Ellis Island of new arrivals,
shocked but not devastated by their demise, more curious than frightened, in
fact eager to shed their former failing lives and embark upon some new
enterprise. It would seem that I've recruited them. All of them, every one of
these faces lauds me from their far-flung windows in the walls of Hell. They
demand the gates be thrown open so that they might embrace me... their new
hero.

Suddenly the very air is filled with sweetness as dead people shower me
with Sugar Babies and malted-milk balls. In tribute they toss a sugary blizzard
of Pez and Root Beer Barrels.

My army coalesces once more, and the unmistakable sounds of bolts and
chains can be heard from within the barred doors. By fractions of a degree, by
hairbreadths, the two ponderous gates begin to swing aside, offering a glimpse
of the headquarters within. Behind me, the thunderous troops rush forward to
convey me upon their burly, murderous shoulders and carry me, victorious, into
the besieged city. My hordes begin to plunder the candy coffers of Hades.
Looting that treasury of Pixy Stix, Atomic Fire-Bails, and York Peppermint
Patties.