Damned

XIV

As far as I can tell, you have a choice between two types of careers in Hell. Your first option is you can work for one of those Web sites which everyone assumes are run in Russia or Burma, where naked men and women stare unflinchingly into the webcams, a dazed look in their glassy eyes, while they lick their fingers and insert greasy plastic model airplanes or plantain bananas halfway into their shaved woo-woos or hoo-hoos. Either that, or they fake-smile while sipping their own urine out of champagne flutes. You see, Hell is responsible for about 85 percent of the Internet's total smut content. The demons just tack up some old, soiled bed sheet to serve as a backdrop, they throw a foam-rubber mattress on the ground, and you're expected to flop around, putting junk inside yourself and responding to the real-time Web chat of alive perverts, worldwide.

Frankly, I've never been that desperate for attention. Do not mistake me for one of those troubled preteens who walk around, practically wearing a T-shirt which says: Ask Me About My Rape. Or, Ask Me About My Alcoholism.

The dirty little secret about Hell is that the demons are always running tabs on you. If you breathe their air, if you loiter, the powers that be are constantly dinging you for the cost. No, it's not fair, but the demons charge you for your upkeep. The meter is always running, and you're piling up years of additional torture, according to Babette, who it turns out used to manage people's paperwork until she had to take a stress-related disability leave of absence and return to her cage for a little nonclerical R&R. Babette says most people are condemned for only a few aeons, but they accrue additional time simply by occupying space in Hell. It's like being over the limit on your charge cards, or accidentally flying your jet into French airspace; the clock starts ticking the moment you've gone too far. The bean counters are keeping track, and someday you'll be socked with a massive bill.

Jewels and cash are worthless here. The currency is candy, and marshmallow peanuts are accepted as payment for all bribes and debts. Root Beer Barrels are as valuable as rubies. The hellish equivalent of pennies are popcorn balls… black licorice… wax lips… and these are cast aside in disdain.

Probably I shouldn't even tell you this — the job market is tight enough as it is — but if you have any aspirations to earn your daily Junior Mints, you need to find a career and get working.

Not that you'll ever actually die — not you—not after all the antioxidants you've choked down and all those laps around the reservoir. Ha!

But just in case you don't want to spend eternity giving yourself high colonics on some sleazy Web site, ogled by mil-lions of men with serious intimacy problems, the other type of work which most people do in Hell is — telemarketing. Yes, this means sitting at a desk, elbow-to-elbow with fellow doomed telemarketing associates who stretch to the horizon in either direction, all of you yakking on headsets.

My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it's dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone's meal. My goal isn't actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets. I get to wear my headset telephone and work from a flowchart of possible responses. Best of all, I get to talk to real-live people — like yourself — who are still living and breathing and have no idea that I'm dead and phoning them from the Afterlife. Trust me, the vast majority of telemarketing people who ring you up, they're dead. As are pretty much all Internet porn models.

Okay, it's not as if I'm practicing brain surgery or tax law, but it beats sticking crayons inside my hoo-hoo on a Web site called "Crazy Nympho Girly Pleasures Self Using School Supply [sic]."

The autodialer connects me to somebody alive, and I say, "I'm conducting a market study to better serve the chewing gum consumers in your area…Do you have a moment to answer a few questions?" If the alive person hangs up, the computer connects me to a new phone number. If the living person answers my questions, the flowchart instructs me to ask more. Each person seated at the phone bank has a laminated sheet of questions, more questions than you could count. The point is to impose on the respondent, always entreating to ask just one more question, please… until the would-be diner loses their composure, and their mood and evening meal are both ruined.

Once you're dead and in Hell your options are either to do something trivial, but in a very self-important manner, for instance, market research about paper-clip usage. Or you can do something serious in a very trivial manner, for instance, looking bored and disengaged while taking a poop into a crystal dish and eating it with a silver spoon— the poop, I mean, not the dish.

If you asked my dad about selecting any kind of professional career, he'd tell you, "Don't make a date with a heart attack." Meaning: You've got to pace yourself and not forget to slow down. No job is forever. So relax and have some fun.

With that goal in mind, I let my attention wander. While hungry alive people wheedle to end our conversation, begging that their pot roast is growing cold, I'm actually thinking, musing whether my mother would've acted differently had she known I had fewer than forty-eight hours to live. In hindsight, I wonder, if she'd known about my impending demise, would she still have cheaped out and planned to give me her swag bag of Academy Award luxury crap in lieu of a real birthday present. If she'd known the clock was ticking, I mean, and most of the sand had already run out from my hourglass.

Asking hungry people about their dental floss preferences, I remember how, when I was really young, I thought the United States would just keep adding states, sewing more and more stars to our flag until we owned the entire world. I mean, why stop at fifty? Why stop with Hawaii? It seemed natural that Japan and Africa would eventually be absorbed into the starry part of our national flag. In the past we'd pushed aside the pesky Navajos and Iroquois to create Californians and Texans. We could do the same with Israel and Belgium and finally achieve world peace. When you're a little kid, you really do think that getting bigger— growing tall, sprouting big muscles and breasts — will be the answer to all of your problems. That's how my mom still is: always acquiring new houses in other cities. Ditto for my dad: always trying to collect appreciative kids from awful places like Darfur and Baton Rouge.

The problem is, troubled kids never stay saved. The Rwandan brother I had for about two hours, he ran off with my debit card. My Bhutanese little sister of about a day, she kept downing the Xanax my mom was happy to offer… and spiraled into drug abuse. Nothing stays safe. Even our homes in Hamburg and London and Manila sit empty, tempting burglars and hurricanes and collecting dust.

And Goran, well, the way that adoption ultimately turned out, it's difficult to call his rescue a Big Success.

Yes, I can recognize my parents' faulty logic, but if I'm so talented-and-gifted, why is it that the only authors I've ever read are Emily Bronte and Daphne du Maurier and Judy Blume? Why have I read Forever Amber, like, two hundred times? Seriously, if I were truly-truly brilliant, I'd be alive and skinny, and the structure of this story would be one epically long homage to Marcel Proust.

Instead, on my telephone headset, I'm asking some stupid alive person what colors of cotton swab would best complement her primary bathroom decorating scheme. On a scale of one to ten, I'm asking how she would rate the following flavors of lip gloss: warm honey… saffron breeze… ocean mint… lemon glow… blue sapphire… creamy rose… tangy ember… and douche-berry.

In regard to my polygraph test, Babette says not to hold my breath. Collating the results can take forever. Until we hear something back, she says I should just hang tight and do my telephone job. A few chairs away from me, Leonard asks someone about toilet paper. Beside him, Patterson sits in his football uniform, asking someone their opinion concerning mosquito repellent. Near them, Archer holds his headset to the side of his face, so it doesn't smash his blue Mohawk, while he seeks public opinions about a candidate for political office.

According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellhound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads. For whatever reason, people standing shorter than five-foot-one are more likely to be condemned. Also, people with a body mass index greater than 0.0012. Babette begins spouting these stats and you'd swear she was autistic. Just because she once worked processing paperwork for incoming souls, she can tell you that blondes outnumber brunettes three to one in Hell. People with at least two years of continuing education beyond high school are almost six times more likely to be damned. As are people earning more than a seven-figure annual income.

Bearing all of this in mind, I figure my parents have roughly a 165 percent likelihood of joining me forever.

And no, I have no idea how "douche-berry" is supposed to taste.

Over my own headset, some old-lady voice crackles, droning on and on about the flavor of something called "Beech-Nut" chewing gum, and over the telephone I swear I can smell the pee stink of her nine hundred cats. Her old-lady breathing sounds wet and full of static, popping and rasping from her old throat, the lisping effect of ill-fitted dentures, the shouted volume of age-related hearing loss, and she allows me to go deeper into the flowchart than anyone I've ever called. Already we're at the twelfth level, topic four, question seventeen: flavored toothpicks, for God's sake.

I'm asking, Would she consider purchasing toothpicks artificially treated to taste like chocolate? Like beef? Like apples? Then I realize how desperately lonely and isolated this old lady must feel. Probably I'm the only human contact she's enjoyed all day, and her meat loaf or rice pudding sits rotting on the plate in front of her because she's more starved for communication with another person.

Even as a telemarketer, it's best not to enjoy yourself too much. If you don't look miserable, the demons will reseat you next to someone who whistles. Then next to someone who farts.

From the survey questions I've already asked, I know the old lady is eighty-seven years old. She lives alone in a freestanding home. She has three grown children who live more than five hundred miles distant from her. She watches seven hours of television each day; and in the past month, she's read fourteen romance novels.

Just so you know, before you decide to do telemarketing over doing Internet porn, the sleazy Pervy Vanderpervs who text you with one hand while they abuse themselves with their other — at least they're not going to break your heart. Not like the pathologically lonely oldsters and cripples you quiz about nonstreak glass cleaner.

Listening to this sad old lady, I want so much to reassure her that death isn't so bad. Even if the Bible is correct, and it's easier to push caramels through the eye of a needle than get to Heaven, well, Hell doesn't totally suck. Sure, you're menaced by demons and the landscape is rather appalling, but she'll meet new people. I can tell from her 410 area code that she lives in Baltimore, so even if she dies and goes straight to Hell and gets immediately dismembered and gobbled by Psezpolnica or Yum Cimil, it won't be a huge culture shock. She might not even notice the difference. Not at first.

Too, I yearn to tell her that — if she loves reading books— she's going to adore being dead. Reading most books feels exactly like you're a dead body. It's all so… finished. True, Jane Eyre is an eternal, ageless character, but no matter how many times you read that darned book, she always gets married to gross, burn-victim Mr. Rochester. She never enrolls at the Sorbonne to earn her master's degree in French ceramics, nor does she open a swanky bistro in New York's Greenwich Village. Reread that Bronte book all you want, but Jane Eyre's never going to get gender-reassignment surgery or train to become a kick-ass ninja assassin. And it's pathetic that she believes she's real. Jane's just ink stamped on a page, but she really, truly thinks she's a living-alive person. She's convinced she has free will.

Listening to this eighty-seven-year-old voice weep about her aches and pains, I yearn to encourage her to just give up and die. Kick the bucket. Forget toothpicks. Forget chewing gum. It won't hurt, I swear. In fact, death will make her feel way better. Look at me, I want to say, I'm only thirteen, and being deceased constitutes about the best thing that's ever happened to me.

As a word to the wise, I'd advise her just to make sure she's wearing some durable, low-heeled, dark-colored shoes before she croaks.

A voice says, "Here." And standing at my elbow is Babette with her fake Coach bag and straight skirt and breasts. In one hand, Babette holds a strappy pair of high heels. She says, "I got these from Diana Vreeland. I hope they fit. And she drops them into my lap.

On the phone, the old lady in Baltimore continues to sob.

The high heels are silver-colored patent leather, with ankle straps and rhinestone buckles across the toe, stilettos so tall I'll never have to wade through cockroaches. These are shoes like I've never worn before because they'd make me look too old, and thereby make my mom REALLY look too old. Ridiculous shoes. These silly shoes are uncomfortable and impractical and too formal, and way too grown-up.

With the old lady still yammering through my headset, I kick off my Bass Weejuns and slip my feet into the strappy high heels.

And yes, I'm well aware of all the valid reasons why I should politely but firmly refuse these shoes…But instead, I LOVE THEM. And they fit.