Damned

XXVIII

If you asked my mom, she'd say, "Maddy, life isn't a popularity contest."

Well, in rebuttal, I'd tell her that neither is death.

Those of you who have yet to die, please take careful note.

According to Archer, dead people are constantly sending messages to the living — and not just by opening window curtains or dimming the lights. For example, anytime your stomach is rumbling, that's caused by someone in the afterlife who's attempting to communicate with you. Or when you feel a sudden craving to eat something sweet, that's another means the dead have of being in touch. Another common example is when you sneeze several times in rapid succession. Or when your scalp itches. Or when you jolt awake at night with a savage leg cramp.

Cold sores on your lips… a bouncing, restless leg… ingrown hairs… according to Archer, these are all methods that dead people use to gain your attention, perhaps in order to express their affection or to warn you about an impending hazard.

In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from the musical Grease three times in a single day— seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or wherever — it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset. In contrast, the phantom odor of scorched toast merely means that a deceased loved one continues to watch over you and protect you from harm.

When stray wild hairs sprout from your ears or nostrils or eyebrows, it's the dead trying to make contact. Even before legions of dead people were telephoning the living during the dinner hour and conducting polls about consumer preferences regarding brands of nondairy creamer, before the dead were providing salacious Web site content for the Internet, the souls of the expired have always been in constant contact with the living world.

Archer explains all of this to me while we trudge across the Great Plains of Broken Glass, wading the River of Steaming-hot Vomit, trekking across the vast Valley of Used Disposable Diapers. Pausing a moment, atop a stinking hill, he points out a dark smudge along the horizon. A low ceiling of buzzards, vultures, carrion birds soar and hover above that distant, dark landscape. "The Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions," Archer says, nodding his blue Mohawk in the direction of the shadowy marshes. We catch our breath and move on, skirting said horrors, continuing our foray toward the headquarters of Hell.

It's Archer's assertion that I ought to abandon being likable. My entire life, he's willing to wager, my parents and teachers have taught me to be pleasant and friendly No doubt I was constantly rewarded for being upbeat and peppy…

Plodding along beneath the flaming orange sky, Archer says, "Sure, the meek might inherit the earth, but they don t get jack shit in Hell…

He says that since I spent my entire life being nice, maybe I should consider some alternative demeanor for my afterlife. Ironic as it seems, Archer says nobody nice gets to exercise the kind of freedom a convicted killer enjoys in prison. If a formerly nice girl wants to turn over a new leaf, maybe explore being a bully or a bitch, or being pushy or simply being assertive and not just smiling bright toothpaste smiles and listening politely, well, Hell's the place to take that risk.

How Archer found himself damned for all eternity is, one day, his old lady sent him to shoplift some bread and diapers. Not old lady meaning wife, but old lady referring to his mother; she needed the diapers for his baby sister, except they didn't have the funds to pay, so Archer stalked around a neighborhood grocery store until he thought nobody was watching.

As the two of us walk along, shuffling through the flaky, waxy dead skin of the Dandruff Desert, we approach a small group of doomed souls. They stand in a cluster roughly the size of a cocktail party in the VIP lounge of a top-tier nightclub in Barcelona, every person turned to face the center of the crowd. There, raised above the core of the group, a man's fist waves in the air. Muffled within the people, a man's voice shouts.

At the edge of the crowd, Archer ducks his head near mine and whispers, "Now's your chance to practice."

Seen through the listening figures, filtered between their standing forms, their filthy arms and ratty heads of hair, there's no mistaking the center of their attention: a man with narrow shoulders, his dark hair parted so that it falls across his pale forehead. He thrashes the fetid air with both hands, gesticulating wildly, punching and slashing while he shouts in German. Dancing atop his upper lip is a boxy brown mustache no wider than his flared nostrils. His audience listens with the slack expressions of the catatonic.

Archer asks me, What's the worst that can happen? He says I ought to learn how to throw my weight around. He says to elbow my way to the front of a crowd. Push people out of my path. Play the bully. He shrugs, creaking the black leather sleeves of his jacket, saying, "You choose… " At that, Archer places one hand flat against the small of my back and shoves me forward.

I stumble, jostling the crowd, falling against their woolen coat sleeves, treading on the polished brown uppers of their shoes. Honestly, everyone present wears the type of sensible clothes best suited to Hell: loden coats of deep green and gray flannel, thick-soled shoes and boots of leather, tweed hats. The only ill-chosen fashion accessory present is an abundance of armbands worn around everyone's biceps, red armbands emblazoned with black swastikas.

Archer tosses a look at the speaker. Still whispering to me, he says, "Little girl… if you can't be rude to Hitler…"

He urges me to go pick a fight. Stomp some Nazi ass.

I shake my head no. My face blushing. After a lifetime of being trained never to interrupt, I couldn't. I can't. The skin of my face flushes hot, feeling as deep red as Archer's pimples. As red as the swastika armbands.

"What?" Archer whispers, his mouth pulled into a sideways smirk, his skin bunched around the stainless-steel lance of the safety pin which skewers his cheek. He chides me, saying, "What? Are you afraid Mister Herr Hitler might not like you?"

Within me, a tiny voice asks, What's the worst that can happen? I lived. I suffered. I died — the worst fate any mortal person can imagine. I'm dead, and yet something of me continues to survive. I'm eternal. For better or worse. It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. Under my own steam, I step away from Archer's pushing hand. I'm shouldering my way through woolen coat sleeves, elbowing between the swastikas, clawing and swimming a path toward the center of the crowd. With each step I'm actively stomping on strangers' feet, wedging myself, plunging deeper into the tightly packed mass of the damned, until I burst into the eye of the mob. Tripping over the front row of feet, I tumble, falling with my effort, only to land on my hands and knees, face-first in the loose dandruff, my eyes level with the polished toes of two black boots. Reflected in the buffed, glossy leather, I see myself close-up: a pudgy girl dressed in a cardigan sweater and tweedy skort, a dainty watch strapped around one chubby wrist, my face blazing with bug-eyed, flushed embarrassment. Above me, Adolf Hitler looms with his hands clasped behind his back. Rocking on his boot heels, he looks down and laughs. My glasses have flown from my nose and lie half-buried in dead skin, and without them the world looks distorted. Everyone bleeds together to form a solid mass entrapping me; unfocused, their faces look smeared and melted. His head thrown back, towering monstrously over me, Hitler directs his tiny mustache at the flaming sky and roars with laughter.

Encircling us, Hitler and me, the crowd follows his cue until I'm buried in their laughter. They stand so densely that Archer and his blue Mohawk hair are lost, walled off behind so many dead bodies.

Climbing to my feet, I brush the loose flakes of sticky dandruff from my clothes. I open my mouth to tell everyone to be quiet, please. My hands scrabbling in the layered dermis of greasy dandruff, I feel around in search of my eyeglasses. Even blind, I beg for silence so I can ridicule their leader, but the mob merely bellows with sadistic glee, their blurred faces reduced to their gaping mouths and teeth.

Perhaps it's due to some post-traumatic stress reaction, but in that instant I'm transported to the afternoon at the Swiss boarding school when the trio of Miss Slutty Vandersluts took turns choking me to death, mugging with my eyeglasses and ridiculing me before bringing me back to life. I feel a hand descend to clutch at my arm, a huge, coarse hand, cold as the mortician's table; the calloused fingers wrap my elbow, as tightly as a swastika armband, and something lifts me to my feet. Perhaps it's due to some suppressed memory of some skeezy undertaker's fondling touch, the reek of formaldehyde and men's cologne, but I pull backward. The entire thirteen-year-old weight of me falls backward, pushing my fist and skinny arm forward in a rocketing arc, a pinwheel swing which connects with something solid. This… something… crunches against the bony impact of my knuckles. Again, I collapse into the soft carpet of dandruff flakes, only this time something heavy lands in the dead skin beside me.

The crowd's laughter goes silent. My hands unearth my glasses. Even through the dirty lenses, fogged with dead flakes of scalp, I can see Adolf Hitler crumpled beside me. He moans softly, a purple doughnut of a bruise already forming around one closed eye.

The ring, the diamond ring which Archer had stolen from a groveling, slobbering, doomed soul trapped in the cage beside my own grimy cell, this ring around my finger has collided with Hitler's face. Like a bulbous, seventy-five-carat brass knuckle, the fat diamond has knocked him cold. My fist vibrates. My wrist thrums like a tuning fork, so I shake my fingers to regain full feeling in that hand.

A man's voice shouts. Archer's voice, behind the stunned wall of onlookers, shouts, "Take a souvenir!"

As Archer would explain later, all great bullies have taken totems or fetish objects in order to steal the power of the enemies they have vanquished. Some warriors took scalps they could display on their belts. Others took ears, genitals, noses. Archer insists that taking a souvenir has always been crucial to assuming an enemy's power.

There I stood with Hitler lying prone at my feet. To be honest, I really didn't want his boots. Nor did I feel the slightest desire to lay claim to his necktie or silly armband. His belt? His gun? Some little piece of Nazi costume jewelry, a tin-plate eagle or a skull? No, good taste seemed to preclude taking any readily apparent portion of his costume.

And, yes, I might be a formerly nicety-nice girl with no qualms about using the words preclude or qualms, and no hesitation to coldcock a fascist tyrant, but I continue to be very particular about the manner in which I accessorize my very bland wardrobe.

From the far edge of the crowd, Archer's voice shouts, "Don't be a pussy!" He shouts, "Take the damned mustache!"

Of course, it's the one talisman which bears the entire identity of this madman. His mustache — a tiny scalp to hang from my belt — it represents something without which Hitler would no longer be Hitler. Bracing the heel of one sensible loafer firmly against his neck, I lean over and entwine my fingers through the coarse, pubic-feeling fringe of the tiny lip hairs. His breathing feels warm and damp against my hands. Even as I brace myself for one gigantic pull, one herculean yank, Hitler's eyelashes flutter and his eyes pin me with their focused rage. Stomping my foot into his throat, I jerk, pulling the short hairs with all of my strength — and Hitler screams.

The crowd recoils, retreating a step.

Once again, I fall backward, my arms pinwheeling but still clutching my prize.

Adolf Hitler holds his face wrapped in both hands, blood pouring from between his fingers; his bellowing words sound garbled and choked, the sleeves of his uniform running with blood, so soaked that the vivid red erases the dull swastika banded around his arm.

Cupped within the palm of my hand curls the warm little mustache, torn away, still attached to a pale, thin crescent of upper lip.