Damned

XXXVI

We' re all dressed in our Halloween costumes, which aren't really costumes, with the exception of Emily's fairy-princess outfit. Babette refuses to accept the possibility that she's some dead nobody; instead, she's dolled herself up as Marie Antoinette, with jagged, black-thread stitches going around her neck, and at present we're loitering around the shore of the Lake of Tepid Bile, waiting to hitch a ride back to Real Life and hustle ourselves some sweet, sweet candy riches.

Just when it appears that we'll be compelled to take some nasty-dirty cattle-car leftover from commuting the Jews to the Holocaust, a familiar black Lincoln Town Car drifts to a slow-motion stop beside us. It's the same car as from my funeral, and the same uniformed chauffeur wearing a visored cap and mirrored sunglasses steps from the driver's seat and approaches our group. In one driving-gloved hand he holds an ominous-looking sheaf of white paper. Along one edge, three Chicago screws bind the pages together. Clearly, it's a spec screenplay, and from even a few steps' distance it stinks of hunger and naively high expectations and absurd outsider optimism — more outsider than I could possibly dream.

Holding the thickness of pages out in front of him, obviously waiting for me to take it, the driver says, "Hey." His mirrored glasses twitch between the pages and my face, baiting me to see the screenplay and acknowledge it. "I found my script for you to read," he says. "On your trip back to earth."

In this taut moment, one corner of the driver s mouth twitches into a possible leer, some expression either shy or snide, showing a tangle of browned rodent teeth sprouting from his gums. His exposed cheeks flush crimson red. He twists and ducks his head, hunching his shoulders. With the toe of one foot, shod in gleaming black riding boots— very old-school for a chauffeur, almost like hooves — he draws a five-pointed star in the dust and ash. He's holding his breath, his vulnerability so tangible you can taste it, but I know from vast experience that the moment I touch his cinematic pipe dream I'll be expected to attach bankable talent to it, secure financing for principal photography, and land a fat distribution deal for him. Even in Hades, such moments are excruciatingly painful.

Nevertheless, I want to ride back to Halloween trick-or-treating in style, not in some typhus-stinking, lice-ridden Nazi boxcar, so I acquiesce to actually looking at the proffered title page. There, centered in boldface all-caps letters — the first dreaded sign of an amateur's precious, self-important work — I read the script's title:

the madison spencer story

Authored by and Copyright Belonging to Satan

First off, I read the title again. And again. Second, I look at the name tag pinned to the lapel of his chauffeur s uniform, the engraved silver, and it does, indeed, read: Satan.

With his free hand, the driver removes his cap, revealing two bone-colored horns that poke up through his mop of ordinary brown hair. He slips off his mirrored sunglasses to show eyes cut with side-to-side irises, like a goat's. Yellow eyes.

My heart…. instantly, my heart is in my throat. At long last, it's you. Without thinking I step forward, ignoring the offered screenplay, and throw my arms around the driver, asking, "You want me to read that?" Burying my face in his tweedy uniform — in your tweedy uniform. The cloth smells of methane and sulfur and gasoline. A hug later, I step away. Nodding at the pages, I ask, "You wrote a movie about me?"

There it is again, that leering smile, as if he sees me naked. As if he knows my thinking. He says, "Read this? My little Maddy, you've lived it." Satan shakes his horned head, saying, "But, technically speaking, there is no 'you.’"

His gloved hands flip open the manuscript and shove it toward me, demanding, "Look!" He says, "Every moment of your past is here! Every second of your future!"

Madison Spencer does not exist, Satan claims. I am nothing but a fictional character he invented aeons ago. I am his Rebecca de Winter. I am his Jane Eyre. Every thought I've ever had, he wrote into my head. Every word I've said, he claims he scripted for me.

Baiting me with the screenplay, his yellow eyes flashing, Satan says, "You have no free will! No freedom of any kind. You've done nothing I didn't plot for you since the beginning of time!"

I've been manipulated since the day I was born, he insists, steered as gracefully as Elinor Glyn would position a heroine on a tiger-skin rug for a tryst with an Arab sheik. The course of my life has been channeled as efficiently as pressing Ctrl+Alt+Madison on a laptop keyboard. My entire existence is predestined, decreed in the script he holds out for my inspection.

I step back, still not accepting that dreck script. Not accepting any of this new concept. If Satan is telling the truth then even my refusal is already written here.

Arching his thorny eyebrows, he says smugly, "If you have courage and intelligence it's because I willed for you to have them. Those qualities were my gift! I demanded that Baal surrender to you. Your so-called 'friends' work for me!"

Hitler, Caligula, Idi Amin, he claims that they each threw the battle to me. That's why my ascent to power happened so quickly. It's why Archer egged me to fight in the first place.

But I refuse. "Why should I believe you?" I stammer. I scream, "You're the Prince of Tides!"

Satan throws his head back, stretching his stained teeth at the orange sky and shouting, "I am the 'Prince of Lies'!"

Whatever, I say. I say that — if he's really and truly responsible for my every quote — then HE fucked up my last line of dialogue.

"I gave your mother movie fame! I gave your father a fortune!" he bellows. "If you want proof, just listen…," and he flips the script open, reading aloud: "'Madison suddenly felt confused and terrified/"

And I did. I did feel confused and terrified.

He reads, "'Madison looked around anxiously for reassurance from her clique of friends.'"

And at that moment I had, indeed, been craning my neck, trying to catch sight of Babette and Patterson and Archer. But they'd already climbed into the waiting Town Car.

And yes, I know the words panic and racing pulse and anxiety attack, but I'm not certain whether I even exist to experience them. Instead of a fat, smart thirteen-year-old girl… I might be a figment of Satan's imagination. Just ink stains on paper. Whether reality actually shifted in that instant… or only my perception of it changed… I can't tell. But everything seems undermined. Everything good seems spoiled.

In his nerdy way, Leonard had tried to warn me. It's possible that reality was exactly the way he'd described: Demon = Daimon = Muse or Inspiration = My Creator.

Perusing the pages of his script, chuckling over his work, Satan says, "You are my best character." He beams. "I'm so proud of you, Madison. You have such a natural talent for luring souls to perdition!" With more than a smidgen of wistfulness, he says, "People hate me. No one trusts me." He looks at me almost lovingly, tears trembling in his goat eyes, and Satan says, "That's why I've created you……"