Damned (4 page)

Forgive me my possible breach of hellish protocol, but I can't resist
the opportunity. Lifting one hand, waving it above my head as if to flag a
passing taxi, I shout, "Hello? Mister Satan?" I shout, "It's me,
Madison!"

The horned figure stops beside a cage wherein a mortal man cowers and
screams wearing the frayed, sullied uniform of some football team. With jagged
eagle talons instead of hands, the horned figure flips the lock on the man's
cage, reaches in, and snatches about in the small space while the screaming
football man dodges and evades being caught.

Still waving, I call, "Over here!" I shout, "Look over
here!" I just want to say hello, to introduce myself. This seems like the
polite thing to do.

Finally, one talon clutches the panting, breathless football man and
withdraws him from the iron cage. The captives in all the surrounding cells
scream, pulling themselves as far away from the action as possible; each
huddles and shivers in some far corner, bug-eyed and hyperventilating. Their
combined wails sound hoarse and broken from effort. In the same manner you'd
dismember a steamed crab, the horned figure grasps one of the football man's
legs and twists it around and around, the hip socket popping and tendons
snapping, until the leg pulls free from the torso. Repeating the process, the
figure removes each of the man's limbs, lifting each to his own mouth of jagged
shark's teeth and biting the meaty, hypertrophied flesh from the man's bones.

All the while, I continue to call, "Hello? When you have a moment,
Mister Satan... ," uncertain about the etiquette of interrupting such a
meal.

After consuming each limb, the horned figure throws the remaining bones
back into the football man's original cage. Even the screams are drowned out by
the wet sounds of sucking and lip smacking and chewing. Then a thunderous
belch. When finally the football man is reduced to a bony thorax, much like the
picked-over carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey, all white rib cage and hanging
shreds of leftover skin, only then does the horned figure toss the final
remains into the cage and once more lock the door.

At this lull I'm spastically leaping in place, waving both arms above
my head and shouting. Ever mindful to not come in contact with my own dirty,
filthy iron bars, I shout, "Hello?! Madison, here!" I pick up a
soiled popcorn ball and lob it, shouting, "I've been dying to meet
you!"

Already the loose, bloodied bones of the football man are assembling
themselves, pulling back together to form a human being, once more sheathing
themselves with muscle and skin, coming back to re-create the man himself,
restored in order to be tortured again, indefinitely, forever.

His hunger seemingly satiated, the horned figure turns and begins
walking into the distance.

In desperation, I scream. No, it's not fair; I did tell you that to
scream in Hell was to exhibit very bad form. I consider screaming to be a
complete impropriety, but I scream, "Mister Satan!"

The towering, tailed figure is gone.

From next door, Babette's voice says, "What day is it now?"

If anything, life in Hell is like a vintage Warner Bros, cartoon where
characters are forever getting decapitated by guillotines and dismembered by
dynamite explosions, then being completely restored in time for the next
assault. It's a system not without both its comfort and its monotony.

A voice says, "That's not Satan." From a nearby cell, a
teenage boy calls, "That was Ahriman, just a demon of the Iranian
desert." The teenage boy wears a short-sleeved, button-down shirt tucked
into chinos. He wears a thick submariner's wristwatch with deep-water diver
chronograph functions and a built-in calculator. On his feet, he wears
crepe-soled Hush Puppies, and his chinos are hemmed so short you can see his
white sweat socks. Rolling his eyes, shaking his head, the boy says,
"Geez, don't you know
anything
about basic ancient cross-cultural
theological anthropology?"

Babette squats down and starts spit-shining her own bad shoes with
another wad of Kleenex. "Shut up, nerd," she mutters.

"My mistake," I tell the boy. I point a finger at myself,
such a lame gesture—even in the sweltering heat of Hell I can feel myself
blushing—and I say, "I'm Madison."

"I know," the boy says. "I've got ears."

Just seeing the boy's brown eyes... the terrible, horrible threat of
hope swells inside my tubby self.

Ahriman, he explains, is nothing more than a deposed deity native to
ancient Persian culture. He was the twin of Ohrmazd, born of the god Zurvan the
Creator. Ahriman is responsible for poison, drought, famine, scorpions, mostly
stereotypical desert stuff. His own son is named Zohak and has venomous snakes
which grow from the skin of his shoulders. According to this teenage boy, the
only food these snakes will eat is human brains. All this... it's so much the
gruesome trivia an adolescent boy would bother to know. So way-totally D&D.

Babette buffs her fingernails against the strap of her bag, ignoring
us.

The teenage boy jerks his head in the direction where the horned figure
disappeared, saying, "Usually he hangs out on the far side of the Vomit
Pond, just west from the River of Hot Saliva, over on the opposite shore of
Shit Lake...." The boy shrugs and says, "For a ghoul, he's pretty
rad."

Babette's voice pipes up; interrupting, she says, 'Ahriman ate me, one
time...." Seeing the expression on the boy's face, looking at the tented
front of his chinos, Babette says, "NOT in that way, you gross, puny
little twerp."

Yes, I might be dead and suffering from a world-class inferiority
complex, but I can recognize an erection when I see one. Even as the stinking,
poop-scented air around us swarms with fat, black houseflies, I ask the boy,
"What's your name?"

"Leonard," he says.

I ask, "What are you condemned to Hell for?"

"Jerking off," Babette says.

Leonard says, "Jaywalking."

I ask, "Do you like
The Breakfast Club?"

He says, "What's that?"

I ask, "Do you think I'm pretty?"

The boy, Leonard, his dreamy brown eyes flit all over me, alighting
like wasps on my stubby legs, my pop-bottle eyeglasses, my crooked nose and
flat chest. He glances at Babette. He looks at me, again, his eyebrows jump up
toward his hairline, wrinkling his forehead into long accordion folds. He
smiles, but shakes his head, No.

"Just testing," I say, and cover my own smile by pretending
to scratch the eczema I don't have on my cheek.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. After a somewhat rocky start,
I'm having simply the best time. I continue to meet new people, and I'm sorry
about the mix-up... just imagine: me mistaking just some regular ordinary,
nobody-special demon for you. I'm learning something new and interesting all the
time from Leonard. On top of that, I've concocted a way-brilliant idea for how
to overcome my insidious addiction to hope.

Who could imagine that cross-cultural anthropological theology could be
so absolutely fascinating! According to Leonard, who really does have the
loveliest brown eyes, all the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in
previous cultures.

No, it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each
subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose
and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshiped. The Jews attacked
Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki and
Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The
Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as
the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he
carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was
deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving
tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul
mood.

And, ye gods, I knew the word
relegated
before it came out of
Leonard's mouth. I might be thirteen and a newbie to the underworld, but don't
take me for an idiot.

"Our friend Ahriman was originally cast out of the pantheon by the
pre-Zoroastrian Iranians," Leonard says, shaking his index finger in my
direction and adding, "but don't be tempted to perceive Essenism as a
Judaic avatar of Mazdaism."

Shaking his head, Leonard says, "Nothing related to Nebuchadnezzar
the Second and Cyaxares is ever that simple."

Babette gazes at the compact she holds open in one hand, retouching her
eye shadow with a little brush. Looking up from her reflection in the tiny
mirror, Babette calls to Leonard, "Could you possibly BE more
boring?"

Among the early Catholics, he says, the Church found l hat monotheism
couldn't replace the long-beloved polytheism now outdated and considered pagan.
Celebrants were too used to petitioning individual deities, so the Church
created the various saints, each a counterpart to an earlier deity,
representing love, success, recovery from illness, etc. As battles raged and
kingdoms rose and fell the god Aryaman was replaced by Sraosha. Mithra
supplanted Vishnu. Zoroaster made Mithra obsolete, and with each succeeding
god, the prior ruling deity was cast into obscurity and contempt.

"Even the word
demon,"
Leonard says, "originates
with Christian theologians who misinterpreted
'daimon'
in the writings
of Socrates. Originally the word meant 'muse' or 'inspiration,' but its most
common definition was 'god.'" He adds that if civilization lasts long
enough into the future, one day even Jesus will be skulking around Hades,
banished and ticked off.

"Bullshit!" a man yells. The yelling erupts from the jail
cell of the football man, where his bare bones foam with red corpuscles, the
red bubbles running together to form muscles which swell and stretch to attach
with their tendons, the white ligaments braiding, a process both compelling and
revolting to watch. Even before a layer of skin has fully enveloped the skull,
the mandible drops open to shout, "That's
bullshit,
geek!" The
flow of new skin breaks like a pink wave to form lips around the teeth, the
lips saying, "You just keep talking that way, twerp! That's exactly why
you're stuck here."

Without looking up from her own reflection in her compact mirror,
Babette asks, "What are you down here for?"

"Offsides," the football man calls back.

Leonard shouts, "Why am I here?"

I ask, "What's 'offsides'?"

Auburn hair sprouts from the football man's scalp. Curly, coppery hair.
Gray eyes inflate within each socket. Even his uniform weaves itself whole from
the scraps and threads scattered around his cell floor. Printed across the back
of his jersey is a big number 54 and the name Patterson. To me, the football
man says, "I had a part of my foot over the scrimmage line when the ref
blew his whistle to signal the start of play. That's 'offsides.'"

I ask, 'And that's in the
Bible?"

With all his hair and skin replaced, you can tell the football man is
only a high schooler. Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. Even as he talks,
little silver wires weave themselves between his teeth, becoming a mouthful of
braces. "Two minutes into the second quarter," he says, "I
intercepted a pass and got sacked by a defensive tackle—pow! Now, I'm
here."

Again, Leonard shouts, "But
why am I here?"

"Because you don't believe in the one true God," says
Patterson, the football player. Now that he's covered in skin again, his new
eyes keep glancing over at Babette.

She doesn't look up from her little mirror, but Babette makes faces,
pursing her lips and tossing her hair, fluttering her eyelashes, fast. As my
mom would tell you, "Nobody stands that straight when she's not on
camera." Meaning: Babette loves the attention.

No, it's not fair. From within their respective cages, Patterson and
Leonard both stare at Babette locked within hers. No one looks at me. If I
wanted to be ignored I'd have stayed on earth as a ghost, watching my mom and
dad walk around naked, opening the drapes and chilling rooms as I bully them to
put on some clothes. Even that Ahriman demon showing up to tear me apart and
devour me would be better than getting no attention whatsoever.

There it is, again—that nagging tendency to hope. My addiction.

While Patterson and Leonard ogle Babette, and Babette ogles herself, I
pretend to watch the vampire bats flit around. I watch the surf crest and break
in rolling brown waves on Shit Lake. I pretend to scratch the make-believe
psoriasis on my face. In the neighboring cages, sinners huddle, weeping out of
old habit. A damned soul dressed in the uniform of a Nazi soldier smashes his
face, again and again, into the stone floor of his cell, crushing and
collapsing his nose and forehead as if he were tapping a hard-boiled egg
against a plate in order to shatter the shell. In the pause between each impact
on the stone, his crushed nose and features inflate to their normal appearance.
In another cell, a teenage kid wears a black leather biker jacket, an oversize
safety pin piercing his cheek, his head shaved except for a stripe of hair,
dyed blue and gelled to stand in a spiky Mohawk which runs from his forehead to
the nape of his neck. As I watch, the leather-jacket punk reaches up to his
cheek and flicks open the safety pin. He draws it out from the holes in his
skin, then reaches through the bars of his cage and pokes the point of the open
pin into the lock of his cell door, working the point around within the
keyhole.