Damned (10 page)

Pirates and masked highwaymen and kidnapped wenches.

The giant's knees begin to tremble, to weaken and buckle a little. The
labia become more pronounced and highly colored, flooded with fresh blood flow.

At this point, I reach into the fleshy hood, where the hardening
clitoris threatens to eject Archer's slathering, slurping noggin. Grasping the
hidden head, I pull it free.

In the open air, slick with the juices of female passion and drooling
wildly, Archer gasps a huge breath. His eyes dilated and crossed with pleasure,
he shouts. His lips webbed with the noxious fluids inherent in adult sexual
congress, Archer shouts, "I AM THE LIZARD KING... !"

At that, I stuff his head back to do hidden oral battle with the
stiffening, engorged clitoral tissues.

The giant looks down upon me, her eyes also glazed with orgasmic
ecstasy. Her head lolling loosely on her neck. Her nipples jut, the size and
hardness of sidewalk fire hydrants, the same bright red color.

In the blue-jeaned leg which remains dangling from between
Psezpolnica's lips, the severed leg of Archer, clearly outlined within one
denim pant leg appears the sizable bulge of a male erection.

Looking up, I meet the giant's loose, sloppy grin with my own cheerful,
competent smile. With one hand gripping the pubic hair to maintain my position,
my other hand holds Archer's head within the confines of the slippery clitoral
hood. That's the hand I risk waving in a friendly gesture while I shout,
"Hello, my name is Madison." I shout, "Now that we've met...
would you mind very much doing me just the smallest favor?"

It's at that moment the hood retracts, the fully erect clitoris popping
free to make its appearance, ejecting Archer's eager advances so quickly that
his slimy, delirious head plummets, trailed like a vivid blue comet by a broken
stream of spittle or vaginal mucosa, tumbling, falling, rocketing to land with
a hushed splash amid the loose fingernails far below.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Don't take the following as a
scolding. Please regard what I'm about to say as strictly constructive feedback.
On the plus side, you've been running one of the largest, most successful
enterprises in the history of... well, history. You've managed to grow your
market share despite overwhelming competition from a direct, omnipotent
competitor. You're synonymous with torment and suffering. Nevertheless, if I
may be bluntly honest, your level of customer service skills really suck.

My
mom would always say, "You can
trust-Madison to tell you anything about herself—except the truth."
Meaning: Don't expect me to instantly disassemble and leave you simply awash in
revelations concerning my deep, personal self. Go ahead and chalk up this
reticence to some deep, secret shame on my part, but that's not the case. I may
not have been educated beyond the seventh grade, may be insufferably naive and
lack solid workplace experience, but I'm not so desperate for attention that I
feel compelled to share my most intimate, inner blah, blah, blah.

All you need to know is that I've seen beyond the veil. I'm dead, and
in my own admittedly limited life experience, I'd wager that the best people
are. Dead, I mean. Although, I'm not sure if anything since my overdose counts
as "life experience."

I'm dead, and I'm riding in the cupped palm of a towering giant female
demon as she strides across the hellish landscape, just burning up the miles.
Accompanying me are my newfound compatriots: Leonard, Patterson, Archer, and
Babette. The brain, the jock, the rebel, and the prom queen. Ergonomically
speaking, traveling nested within an enormous hand is infinitely comfortable,
combining the contour of a Singapore Air first-class seat with the gently
rolling feel of a drawing room berth on the Orient Express. From this height,
comparable to the cattle level of the Eiffel Tower or the top of the London
Eye, we pass various landmarks. And not a small number of condemned A-list
celebrities.

The football jock, Patterson, points out the most important locales:
the Steaming Dog Pile Mountains... the Swamp of Rancid Perspiration... a meadow
of what could be heather but is actually a luxuriant growth of unchecked
toenail fungus.

Riding along, Leonard explains that Psezpolnica stands exactly three
hundred cubits tall. Our hostess-slash-SUV is the offspring of angels who gazed
down from Heaven and fell madly in lust with mortal women. All this history,
Leonard says, comes down from no less a source than Saint Thomas Aquinas, who
wrote in the thirteenth century that these angels appeared on earth as
incubi—these revved-up, way-horny divine superbeings. The angels did the Hot
Nasty Thing with mortal women, and giants such as Psezpolnica were conceived.
The horny angels themselves were cast into Hell to become demons. Before you
question the bullshitty way this scenario sounds, Saint Thomas Aquinas is
nowhere to be found in Hades, so he must've gotten something correct.

Likewise, when earthly men lusted after angels in the cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah, Leonard says, God gave them a good thrashing. The full
pillar-of-salt treatment.

No, it's not fair, but it would seem that the only immortal being
allowed to indulge in a dalliance with mortals is God Himself.

Sorry about how I keep using the G-word. I guess old habits do die
hard.

"Keep it up," Patterson says. He cuffs Leonard on the back of
the head, adding, "You fucking heretic!"

"Such language," Babette says. "Why don't you just take
a dump in my ears!"

Riding along, Archer waves down at a couple demons. Shouting at a
hulking blond man with deer antlers sprouting from his head, Archer says,
"Yo! Cernunnos, my man!"

Whispering to me, Leonard explains that this is the dethroned Celtic
god of stags. He says our Christian devil is depicted with horns as a snide dig
at Cernunnos.

Archer flashes a thumbs-up at another demon, this one in the middle
distance, a lion-headed man listlessly eating a dead lawyer. Archer cups one
hand around his mouth and shouts, "What's up, Mastema?"

"The prince of spirits," Leonard whispers to me.

This entire time, Babette keeps asking, "What time is it?"
She asks, "Is it still Thursday?" Sitting off to one side of the
enormous palm, her arms folded across her chest, impatiently tapping the toe of
one dirty Manolo Blahnik, Babette says, "I can't believe there's no wifi
in Hell...."

Our vessel, our hostess, Psezpolnica strides along, her features still
lit with a soft postcoital smile.

Her smile is matched only by Archer's, his entire body regenerated,
from his blue Mohawk down to his black boots, his grin so wide it shoves his
safety pin almost to one ear.

Far below, a withered old man shambles along, leaning on a cane,
dragging a way-long beard. I ask Archer if he's a demon.

"Him?" says Archer, pointing at the old man. "That's
Charles fucking Darwin!" Archer hawks a gob of spit, which falls, falls,
falls to land near enough to make the old man look up. When they make eye
contact, Archer shouts, "Hey, Chuck! You still doing the Devil's
work?"

Darwin lifts one withered, veined hand to flip Archer the bird.

As it turns out, the way-fundamentalist Christian creationists were
correct. How I wish I could tell my parents: Everybody in Kansas was right.
Yes, the inbred snake handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my
secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad. The dark forces of evil really
did
plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records
to mislead mankind. Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and
sinker.

On the horizon, outlined against the flaming orange sky, a building
takes shape.

Craning his head to look up into the vast, floating, full-moon face of
our sated giant, Leonard shouts,
"Glavni stab.
Ugoditi. Zatim."

To me, Leonard says, "Serbian." He says, "I picked up a
few words in my advanced-placement courses."

The building in the distance is still partly hidden below the curve of
the horizon, but as we draw closer and closer, it rises to reveal a sprawling
complex of wings and complicated renovations.

As I started to boast earlier, really the best people are dead. Since
I've been in Hell I’ve sighted just oodles of notables from throughout history.
Even now, peering over the edge of the giant's palm, I point out a tiny figure
and say, "Everybody, look!"

Patterson shields his eyes with one hand, holding it to his forehead
like a salute, to cut down on the ambient orange glare. Looking to where I
point, he says, "You mean that old guy?"

That "old guy," I tell him, just happens to be Norman Mailer.

You can't turn around in Hell without elbowing somebody important:
Marilyn Monroe or Genghis Khan, Clarence Darrow or Cain. James Dean. Susan
Sontag. River Phoenix. Kurt Cobain. Honestly, the resident population reads
like the guest list of a party that would make both my parents cream. Rudolf
Nureyev. John F. Kennedy. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. John Lennon and Jimi
Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. A permanent Woodstock. Probably, if
he knew the networking opportunities hereabouts, my dad would immediately gulp
down rat poison and throw himself on a samurai sword.

Just to schmooze with Isadora Duncan, my mom would pop open the
emergency-exit door and bail out of our Learjet midflight.

Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor
souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can't help but
picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream
social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone's idea
of a "with-it" social register.

And, yes, I am thirteen years old, fat, and dead—but I am not
overcompensating in the same manner as insecure homosexuals who constantly trot
out Michelangelo and Noel Coward and Abraham Lincoln in order to bolster their
own fragile self-esteem. True, being dead AND in Hell seems to suggest that one
has committed the double whammy of Big Mistakes, but at least I find myself
mingling in very, capital-V, Very good company.

Trotting along, still borne aloft in our giant's hand, we draw closer
to the complex of buildings which now appear to spread far beyond the horizon,
covering acres, even square miles of Hellish real estate. Along the outer
edges, the buildings' perimeter consists of postmodern pastiche, a collage of
styles borrowing heavily from Michael Graves and I. M. Pei, with an assortment
of laborers already excavating and laying the foundations for an ever-spreading
series of additions ribbed to suggest the undulating forms of Frank Gehry.
Within this outer margin stand concentric circles of older additions, like the
rings of a bisected tree, each inner ring identifiable with the fashion of an
earlier era. Adjacent to the PoMo sections rise the boxy glass towers of the
International style. Within those lie the campy futuristic spires of the Art
Deco, then the Period Revival of Victorian times, the Federal, the Georgian,
the Tudor, Egyptian, Chinese, Tibetan palace architecture, Babylonian minarets,
all of it comprising an ever-widening history of building. Even as the edges
expand, covering land almost as rapidly as the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, at
the same time the buildings' ancient core is rotting and collapsing.

As Psezpolnica stands at the buildings' outskirts, from this height we
can see that the oldest, inner portions, predating the Etruscan and Incan and
Mesopotamian, those lowers and chambers at the center have crumbled to decayed
wood and clay dust.

Here, this place is the nerve center, the headquarters of Hell.

Leonard shouts upward,
"Ovdje."

At this, the giant stops walking.

Snaking away from the outermost walls of the building, way-long queues
of people stand waiting in line. Literally, no exaggeration, miles of the
damned. Each queue leads to a different doorway, and every so often the people
in a line step forward as someone enters.

Leonard shouts,
"Prekid."
He shouts,
"Ovdje,
please."

Hearing this strange Slavic babble, I wonder how close it comes to the
language of Goran's thoughts. The cryptic, mysterious lingo of my beloved
Goran's memories and dreams. Goran's native tongue. To be entirely honest, I'm
not certain from which war-torn homeland my Goran even harkened.