Damned

IV

To be completely technical about the matter, time in Hell doesn't consist of days and nights, only a constant low-light condition accented by the flickering orange glow of flames, billowing white clouds of steam, and black clouds of smoke. These elements combine to create a perpetual rustic après-ski atmosphere.

Recognizing that, thank God I wore a self-winding calendar wristwatch. Sorry, Satan, my mistake, I said the G-word.

To all of you alive people walking around, taking your multivitamins and busy being Lutheran or getting colonoscopies, you need to invest in a good-quality, long-lasting wristwatch with day and date functions. Don't count on getting any cell phone reception in Hell, and don't think for a second you'll have the forethought to die with your charger cord in hand or even find yourself locked inside a rusted jail cell with a compatible electrical outlet. That doesn't mean go buy a Swatch. Swatches equal plastic, and plastic melts in Hell. Do yourself a big favor and invest in a high-quality leather wristband or the springy expandable metal kind.

In the event you neglect to equip yourself with an adequate wristwatch, do NOT scope out some bright, proactive thirteen-year-old chubby girl wearing low-heeled Bass Weejuns and horn-rimmed eyeglasses and then keep asking her, "What day is it?" and "What time is it?" The aforementioned intelligent-albeit-beefy girl will simply feign looking at her watch, then tell you, "It's five thousand years since the LAST time you asked me that…."

Yes, I know the word feign. I may be a tad annoyed and defensive, but — no matter how nicely you ask with that wheedling tone in your voice — I am NOT your little timekeeping servant bitch slave.

And before you make the effort to give up smoking, take note that smoking cigarettes and cigars is excellent practice for being in Hell.

AND before you make some snide remark, based on my general temperament, that I must be "riding the cotton pony" or suffering from a "red-letter day," need I remind you that I am dead, deceased, and rendered eternally pre-pubescent and therefore immune to the mindless reproductive biological imperatives that, no doubt, shape every living, breathing moment of your crummy living, breathing life.

Even now I can hear my mom saying, "Madison, you're dead, so just calm down."

Increasingly, I'm not sure to which I was more addicted: hope or Xanax.

In the cell next to mine, Babette exhausts her time by examining her cuticles and buffing her fingernails against the strap of her white shoulder bag. Anytime she glances in my direction, I make a big show of scratching my neck and around my eyes. It never seems to occur to Babette that we're dead, so conditions like psoriasis would be fairly unlikely to continue into the afterlife; however, when you consider her choice of frosted-white nail varnish, it's clear that Babette is no one's idea of a scholarship girl. A Cover Girl, maybe.

Catching my eye, Babette calls over, "What day is this?"

Scratching myself, I callback, "Thursday." Actually, I don't allow my fingernails to make contact with my skin; what I execute is an air-guitar equivalent of scratching; otherwise, my face would be raw as hamburger. The last problem I need is an infection in such dirty, filthy surroundings.

Squinting her eyes, peering at her fingernail beds, Babette says, "I love Thursdays…." She fishes a bottle of white nail varnish out of her fake Coach bag and says, "Thursday feels like Friday, but without the pressure to get out and have fun. It's like Christmas Eve Eve, you know, December twenty-third…." Shaking the little bottle of nail varnish, Babette says, "Thursday is like a really, really good second date, when you still think that the sex might be okay…."

From another cell, fairly close by, someone begins to scream. Alone in their cells, other people slump in the classic postures of catatonic stupor, wearing the soiled costumes of Venetian doges, Napoleonic vivandiers, Maori headhunters. They've clearly been able to abandon all hope and clutch their filthy cage bars. They've flailed and thrashed in complete resignation, and now lie stained, staring, and motionless. The lucky bastards.

Painting her fingernails, Babette asks, "Now… what day is it?"

My wristwatch says Thursday. "It's Friday," I lie.

"Your skin looks better today," Babette lies in return.

I counterlie, "Your perfume smells so good."

Babette parries my counterlie with, "I think your breasts grew a little."

That's when I think I see you, Satan. A towering figure steps out of the darkness, striding down alongside a distant row of cages. At least three times as tall as any human being cowering within the bars, the figure drags a forked tail which grows from the base of his spine. His skin sparkles with fish scales. Great black-leather wings sprout from between his shoulder blades — real leather, not like Babette's shabby, fake Manolo Blahniks — and thick horns of bone burst through the scaly surface of his bald pate.

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.