Damned

VII

The group of us skirted around the margin of the flaky, greasy Dandruff Desert, where scorching winds as hot as a billion hair dryers blow the scabs of dead skin into drifts as tall as the Matterhorn. We traipsed past the Great Plains of Broken Glass. After a fair trek, we stood on a bluff of volcanic cinders overlooking a vast pale ocean which stretched to the horizon. No wave or ripple disturbed its opalescent surface: a shade of soiled ivory similar to the scuffed faux leather of Babette's counterfeit Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Even as we watch, the viscous tide composed of this off-white ooze seems to rise and consume a finger's width of the ashy, cindery beach. So thick is the corrupt liquid that it appears more to roll up the shoreline than to wash ashore as this flood tide creeps in. Apparently, on this particular ocean, the tide never ebbs and is always flowing, always a rising flood tide.

"Check it out," Archer says, and waves one leather-jacketed arm in a wide arc to frame the view. "Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm…."

All ejaculate, according to Archer, expelled in masturbatory emissions over the course of human history, at least since Onan — it all trickles down to accumulate here. Likewise, he explains, all bloodshed on Earth trickles down and collects in Hell. All tears. Every spit gob spit on the ground ends up hereabouts.

"Since the introduction of VHS tapes and the Internet," Archer says, "this ocean has been rising at record rates."

I think of my Papadaddy Ben and shudder. To repeat, Long Story.

In Hell, porn is creating an effect equivalent to that of global warming on earth.

The group of us take a step backward, away from the rising, shimmering ooze.

"Now that this twerp is dead," Patterson says, as he cuffs Leonard on the back of the head, "maybe the ol' sperm sea won't be filling up so fast."

Leonard rubs his own scalp, wincing, and says, "Don't look now, Patterson, but I think I can see some of your ball juice floating out there."

Looking at Babette, Archer licks his tongue around his lips and says, "One of these days we're going to be up to our eyeballs…."

Babette looks at the diamond ring on my finger.

Archer, still ogling her, says, "Hey, Babs, you ever been up to your foxy eyes in hot sperm?"

And pivoting on one scuffed heel, Babette says, "Back off, Sid Vicious. I'm not your Nancy Spungen." Waving for us to follow her, fluttering her white-painted fingernails, Babette looks at Patterson in his football jersey and says, "It's your turn. Now you show us someplace interesting."

Patterson swallows, shrugs his shoulders, and says, "You guys want to see the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions?"

We, the rest of us, all shake our heads, No. Slowly. In unison, for a long time, no, no, no. Definitely not.

As Babette strides away from the Ocean of Wasted Sperm, Patterson trots to catch up with her. The pair of them link arms, walking together. The team captain and the head cheerleader. The rest of us, Leonard and Archer and I, follow a few steps behind.

To be honest, I keep wishing we could all talk. Chew the fat. And, yes, I know that wishing is another symptom of hope, but I can't help it. As we amble along, trudging over steaming brimstone beds of sulfur and coal, I want to ask if anyone else feels an intense sense of shame. By dying, do they feel as if they've disappointed everyone who ever bothered to love them? After all the effort that so many people made to raise them, to feed and teach them, do Archer or Leonard or Babette feel a crushing sense of having failed their loved ones? Do they worry that dying constitutes the biggest sin they could possibly commit? Have they considered the possibility that, by dying, each of us has generated pain and sorrow which our survivors must suffer for the remainder of their lives?

In dying — worse than flunking a grade in school, or getting arrested, or knocking up some prom date — perhaps we've majorly, irreversibly fucked up.

But nobody brings up the subject, so I don't either.

If you asked my mom, she'd tell you that I've always been a little coward. As my mom would say, "Madison, you're dead… now, stop being so needy."

Probably everyone in the world looks like a coward when compared to my mom and dad. My parents were always leasing a jet to fly round-trip to Zaire and bring home an adopted brother or sister for Christmas — not that we celebrated Christmas — but the same way my friends might find a puppy or kitten under their holiday tree, I'd find a new sibling from some obscure, postcolonial, living-nightmare place. My parents meant well, but the road to Hell is paved with publicity stunts. Any adoption occurred within the media cycle of my mom's film releases or my dad's IPOs, announced with a gale-force flurry of press releases and photo ops. Following the media blitz, my new adopted brother or sister would be warehoused in an appropriate boarding school, no longer starving, now offered an education and a brighter future, but never again present at our dinner table.

Walking along, now backtracking across the Great Plains of Broken Glass, Leonard explains how ancient Greeks conceived of the afterlife as Hades, a place where both the corrupt and the innocent went to forget the sins and egos left over from their lives on earth. Jews believed in Sheol, which translated as "the place of waiting," again, where all souls collected, regardless of their crimes and virtues, to rest and find peace through discarding their past transgressions and attachments on earth. Kind of Hell as going to detox or rehab instead of Hell as burning punishment. For most of human history, Leonard says, people have perceived of Hell as a sort of inpatient clinic where we go to kick our addiction to life.

Without breaking stride, Leonard says, "John Scotus Eriugena wrote during the ninth century that Hell is where your own desires take you, stealing you away from God and the original plans God had for fulfilling your soul's perfection."

I say maybe we should swing by that swamp of terminated pregnancies. There's a good possibility that I might run into a long-lost sibling or two.

Yes, I may be flip and glib, but I know what constitutes a healthy psychological defense mechanism.

Droning on while we walk, Leonard lectures about the power structure of Hades. He describes how midway through the fifteenth century, an Austrian Jew named Alphonsus de Spina converted to Christianity, becoming a Franciscan monk, then a bishop, and finally compiling a list of the demonic entities who populate Hell. His numbers ran into the millions.

"If you see anyone with a goat's horned head, a woman's breasts, and the black wings of a huge raven," Leonard says, "that would be the demon Baphomet." Counting in the air, waving an index finger in the manner of a conductor cueing the sections of an orchestra, Leonard says, "You have the Hebrew Shedim, the Greek demon kings Abaddon and Apollyon. Abigor commands sixty legions of devils. Alocer commands thirty-six legions. Furfur, a royal count of Hell, commands twenty-six legions…."

Just as the earth is ruled by a hierarchy of leaders, Leonard says, so too is Hell. Most theologians, including Alphonsus de Spina, describe Hell as having ten orders of demons. Among those are 66 princes, each overseeing 6,666 legions, and each legion comprises 6,666 demons. Among them is Valafar, the grand duke of Hell; Rimmon, the chief physician of Hell; Ukobach, the leading engineer of Hell, and reputed to have invented fireworks and presented them as a gift to mankind. Leonard rattles off the names: Zaebos, who boasts the head of a crocodile on his shoulders… Kobal, the patron demon of human comedians… Succorbenoth, the demon of hate….

Leonard says, "It's like Dungeons and Dragons, only to the tenth power." He says, "Seriously, the biggest brains of the Middle Ages devoted their entire lives to this type of theological bean counting and number crunching."

Shaking my head, I say that I wish my parents had.

Periodically along our journey, Leonard stops to point out a figure in the distance. One, flying across the orange sky, flapping pale wings of melting dripping wax, this is Troian, the night demon of Russian culture. Flying along a different trajectory, peering down with the wide head and luminous eyes of an owl, this is Tlacatecolototl, the Mexican god of evil. Wrapped in cyclone winds of rain and dust, there are Japanese Oni demons, who traditionally live at the center of hurricanes.

What the Human Genome Project would represent for future researchers, Leonard explains, this great inventory represented for previous centuries of world leaders.

According to the bishop de Spina, a third of Heaven s angels were cast into Hell, and this divine downsizing, this celestial housecleaning, took nine full days — two days longer than it took God to create the Earth. In all, a total of 133,306,668 angels — including much-revered former cherubim, potentates, seraphim, and dominations — were forcibly relocated, among them Asbeel and Gaap, Oza and Marut and Urakabarameel.

Ahead of us, where she walks arm in arm with Patterson, Babette cuts loose with a peal of laughter, loud and shrill mid as fake as her counterfeit shoes.

Archer glares at their backs, the big safety pin bunched in the muscles of his clenched jaw.

Leonard name-drops about the different demons whom we might stumble across: Baal, Beelzebub, Belial, Liberace, Diabolos, Mara, Pazuzu — an Assyrian with a bat's head and scorpion's tail — Lamashtu — a Sumerian she-devil who suckles a pig with one breast and a dog with the other— or Namtaru — the Mesopotamian version of our modern grim reaper. We look for Satan with the same intensity that my mom and dad looked for God.

In retrospect my parents were always pushing me to expand my consciousness by huffing glue or gasoline or chewing peyote buttons. Simply because they'd done their time, wasted their teen years lolling in the muddy fields of Vermont and the salt flats of Nevada, naked except for rainbow face paints and a thick coating of sweaty filth, their heads festooned with fifty pounds of fetid dreadlocks, teeming with crab lice and pretending to find enlightenment… that does NOT mean I have to make that same mistake.

Sorry, Satan, once again I've said the G-word.

Without breaking stride, Leonard nods and points to indicate the former deities of now-defunct cultures, now warehoused in the underworld. Among them: Benoth, a god of the Babylonians; Dagon, an idol of the Philistines; Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians; Tartak, the god of the Hevites.

My suspicion is that my parents treasure their sordid recollections of episodes at Woodstock and Burning Man not because those pastimes led to wisdom, but because such folly was inseparable from a period of their lives when they were young and unburdened by obligation; they had free time, muscle tone, and their futures still looked like a great, grand adventure. Furthermore, both my mother and father had been free of social status and therefore had nothing to lose by cavorting nude, their swollen genitals smeared with muck.

Thus, because they had ingested drugs and flirted with brain damage, they insisted I should do likewise. I was forever opening my boxed lunch at school to discover a cheese sandwich, a carton of apple juice, carrot sticks, and a five-hundred-milligram Percocet. Tucked within my Christmas stocking — not that we celebrated Christmas— would be three oranges, a sugar mouse, a harmonica, and quaaludes. In my Easter basket — not that we called the event Easter — instead of jelly beans, I'd find lumps of hashish. Would that I could forget the scene at my twelfth birthday party where I flailed at a piñata, wielding a broomstick in front of my peers and their respective former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-anarchist throwback parents. The moment the colorful papier-mâché burst, instead of Tootsie Rolls or Hershey's Kisses, everyone present was showered with Vicodins, Darvons, Percodans, amyl nitrate ampoules, LSD stamps, and assorted barbiturates. The now-wealthy, now-middle-aged parents were ecstatic, while my little friends and I couldn't help but feel a tad bit cheated.

That, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand that very few twelve-year-olds would actually enjoy attending a clothing-optional birthday party.

Some of the most gruesome images in Hell seem downright laughable when compared to seeing an entire generation of adults stripped nude and wrestling on the floor, grasping and panting in frantic competition for a scattered handful of codeine spansules.

These were the same people who worried that I might grow up to become a Miss Nymphy Nymphoheimer.

At present, Archer, Leonard, and I trail after Babette and Patterson, navigating a switchback route through hummocks of discarded toe- and fingernail parings, between sloughing gray hillocks heaped with every thin crescent of nail ever trimmed. Some nail fragments are painted pink or red or blue. As we tread along the narrow canyons, thin rivulets of loose fingernails trickle down. Trickling toenails threaten to become full-fledged avalanches which could bury us alive (alive?) in their talus of prickly keratin. Overhead arches the flaming orange sky, and down branching canyons, dwarfed in the distance we can glimpse communities of cages where our fellow doomed souls sit in permanent soiled desolation.

As we meander, Leonard continues to recite the names of demons we might encounter: Mevet, the Judaic demon of death; Lilith, who steals children; Reshev, the plague demon; Azazel, demon of deserts; Astaroth… Robert Mapplethorpe… Lucifer… Behemoth….

Ahead of us, Patterson and Babette stroll up a gentle slope, topping a rise which blocks the view beyond. Reaching the crest, the two of them stop. Even from behind we can see Babette's body stiffen. In reaction to what she now sees in the distance, both her hands come up to cover her face, her fingers cupped over her eyes. Babette bends slightly from the waist, bracing her hands against her thighs, and turns away from the view, stretching her neck as if about to retch. Patterson turns to see us, jerking his head for us to hurry and catch up. To witness some new atrocity just over this next horizon.

Archer and Leonard and I trudge along, mounting the slope of nail parings, soft under each labored step, like snow or loose sand, climbing until we stand alongside Patterson and Babette, at the edge of a steep cliff. Half a step ahead of us, the land drops away, and below us boils a sea of insects which stretches to the horizon… beetles, centipedes, fire ants, earwigs, wasps, spiders, grubs, locusts, and what-all churning constantly, a shifting soft quicksand composed of pincers, feelers, segmented legs, stingers, shells, and teeth, darkly iridescent, largely black but speckled with hornet yellows and bright grasshopper greens. Their constant clicking and rustling generates a din not unlike the crashing surf of a briny ocean on earth.

"Cool, huh?" says Patterson, waving his football helmet in one hand as if to direct our attention over this morass of seething, undulating horrors. He says, "Check it out… the Sea of Insects."

Gazing down into the surging swells and rolling troughs of clamoring bugs, Leonard sneers in righteous disgust, saying, "Spiders are not insects."

Not to belabor the point, but counterfeit luxury goods truly represent a false economy. To witness, Babette's plastic shoes look to be falling apart, the straps severed and the soles loose and flapping — subjecting her lithe feet to fingernail and busted-glass abrasions — while my own sturdy Bass Weejun loafers barely appear to be broken in by our lengthy underworld trek.

As we gaze out across the vast squirming, humming pudding of insect life, a scream approaches us from behind. There, sprinting between the hills of nail parings, panting and running, comes a bearded figure dressed in the toga of a Roman senator. Craning his neck to glance backward Over his shoulder, the man races toward us, screaming the word Psezpolnica. Screaming, "Psezpolnica!"

At the cliff's edge, teetering near where we stand, the lunatic toga man points a quaking finger in the direction he's come. Beseeching us with his wide-open eyes, he screams, Psezpolnica!" and dives, plummeting, flailing, falling to vanish beneath the seething surface of bug life. Once, twice, three times the toga man comes up for air; his mouth is choked with beetles. Crickets and spiders sting and strip t he flesh from his twitching arms. Earwigs swarm, eating deep into his eye sockets, and millipedes weave through ragged, bloody holes nibbled between his now-exposed rib bones.

As we watch in horror, wondering what could drive a person to such an extreme course of action… Babette, Patterson, Leonard, Archer, and I… we turn in unison to see a lumbering, towering figure approach.