Damned (17 page)

My line rings again, and a mechanical voice says, "You have a
collect phone call from..."

And the Canadian AIDS girl adds, "Emily."

The computer says, "Will you accept the charges?"

And I say, Yes.

Over the phone, Emily says, "I only called because this
constitutes a way-terrible emergency." She says, "My parents want me
to see a new shrink. Do you think I should go?"

Shaking my head, I tell her, "No way."

Babette's hand grips the back of my neck, her white-painted fingernails
digging in until I hold still.

“And don't let them feed you full of Xanax, either," I say into the
phone. From my personal experience, nothing feels as awful as pouring your
heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is
actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to
some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock. Or you see an Earth
First! bumper sticker on the rear of his diesel Hummer
H3T
in the parking lot. Or you catch him picking his
nose. Your precious confidant you expected would sort out your entire twisted
psyche, who now harbors all your darkest confessions, he's just some jerk with
a master's degree. To change the subject, I ask Emily how it was that she
contracted AIDS.

"How else?" Emily says. "From my
last
therapist,
of course."

I ask, Was he cute?

Emily shrugs audibly, saying, "Cute enough, for a sliding-scale
therapist."

Toying with a strand of my hair, looping it around my finger, then
pulling it to where my teeth can nibble the tips, I ask Emily what it's like to
have AIDS.

Even over the phone, her eye roll is audible. "It's like being
Canadian," she says. "You get used to it."

Trying to sound impressed, I say, "Wow." I say, "I guess
people can get used to pretty much anything."

Just to make conversation, I ask if Emily has gotten her first period
yet.

"Sure," Emily says, "but when your viral loads are this
sky-high, menstruation is less like a big celebration of attaining womanhood,
and more like a way-biologically hazardous toxic spill in your pants."

Without realizing it, I must still be biting my hair, because Babette
slaps my hand away. She waves the little scissors in my face and gives me a
stern look.

Over the phone, Emily says, "I figure that once I'm dead I can
start dating." She says, "Is Corey Haim seeing anybody?"

I don't answer, not right away, not that instant, because a herd of new
Hell inductees is crowding past my workstation. A regular flood of people has
just arrived, still not entirely certain they're dead. Most of them wear leis
made of silk flowers looped around their necks. The ones not wearing sunglasses
have a stunned, worried look in their eyes. A mob that could easily be the
entire population of some country, it's usually proof that something terrible
has just befallen folks on earth.

Over the phone, I ask Emily if something awful just occurred. A major
earthquake? A tidal wave? A nuclear bomb? Did a dam burst? Of the milling,
stunned newcomers, most appear to be wearing vivid Hawaiian-print shirts, with
cameras slung on cords hanging around their necks. These people all boast
roasted-red sunburns, some with white stripes of zinc oxide smeared across the
bridge of their nose.

In response, Emily says, "Some big cruise-ship disaster, like, a
jillion tourists died of food poisoning from eating bad lobsters." She
says, "Why do you ask?"

I say, "No reason."

Deep in this crowd, a familiar face floats. A boy's face, his eyes
glowering beneath the overhang of a heavy brow. His hair, too thick to comb
flat.

In my ear, Emily asks, "How did you die?"

"Marijuana," I tell her. Still watching the boy's face in the
middle distance, I say, "I'm not altogether certain." I say, "I
was so way stoned."

Around me, Archer flirts with dying cheerleaders. Leonard checkmates
some alive dweeb. Patterson asks somebody on earth how the Raiders are ranked
this season.

Emily says, "Nobody dies from marijuana." Pressing the
subject, she says, "What's the last detail you remember about your
life?"

I say, I don't know.

Beyond this new flood of the damned, the boy's face turns. His eyes
meet mine. He of the moody, wrinkled forehead. He of the snarling Heathcliff
lips.

Emily says, "But what killed you?"

I say, I don't know.

The boy in the distance, he turns and begins to walk away, dodging and
weaving to escape through the crowd of poisoned tourists.

By reflex, I stand, my headset still tethering me to my workstation.
And with a sharp shove against my shoulder, Babette sits me back down in my
chair and continues to snip at my hair.

"But what do you remember?" Emily asks.

Goran, I tell her. I remember watching the television, lying on the
carpet on my stomach, propped on my elbows, next to Goran. Arrayed on the
carpet around us, I recall half-eaten room-service trays containing onion
rings, cheeseburgers. My mom appeared on the television screen. She'd pinned
the pink breast cancer ribbon to her gown, and—as the applause died down—she
said, "Tonight is a very special night, in more ways than one. For it was
on this night, eight years ago, that my precious daughter was born... ."

Sprawled on the hotel carpet amid cold food and Goran, I remember
seething.

It was my
thirteenth
birthday.

I remember the television cameras cutting to show my dad, seated in the
audience, beaming with a proud smile to show off his new dental implants.

Even now, dead and in Hell, way-totally ready to get busted for
accepting a collect call from Canada, I ask Emily, "In second or third
grade..." I ask, "did you play the French-kissing Game?"

Emily says, "Is that how you died?"

No, I tell her, but that game is all I remember.

And, yes, I might be forgetful or in denial or five years older than my
mother would like me to be, but as I stare across the landscape of Hawaiian
shirts and fake-flower leis, some of those loud shirts and silk flowers still
splashed with food-poisoning vomit, the face I see receding into the distance
of Hell is that of my brother, Goran. In contrast to the garish tropical cruise
apparel, Goran wears a pink jumpsuit, bright pink, with some sort of multidigit
number stitched across one side of his chest.

On the phone, her voice still in my earpiece, Emily says, "What's
the French-kissing Game?"

And then Goran, he of the kissable, lusciously full lips and bright
pink jumpsuit, he's vanished in the crowd.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please don't get the impression
that I've always boasted a brilliant intellect. On the contrary, I've made more
than my share of mistakes, not the least of which was my misconceived idea of
what constituted French-kissing.

It was some Miss Whorey Von Whoreski girls at my school who taught me
the French-kissing Game. At my boarding school in Switzerland, where I almost
froze to death but only lost all the skin off" my hands instead, a bunch
of these same snotty girls always spent time together, three of them, but they
were all way-total Trollopy McTrollops and Slutty Vandersluts and Harley
O'Harlots who spoke English and French in the same flat accent as the Global
Positioning System of my dad's Jaguar. They walked on the outside edge of their
feet, each step slightly crossing in front of the last, to prove they'd taken
too many years of ballet. These three girls were always together, usually
cutting themselves or helping one another vomit; within the insular sphere of
the boarding school, they were infamous.

I was in my room one day, reading Jane Austen, when these three knocked
on the door and asked to enter.

And no, I may display occasional antisocial tendencies brought about by
years of witnessing my parents pander to the film-going public, but I'm not so
rude that I would tell three classmates to beat it. No, I politely set aside
Persuasion
and invited these three Miss Tarty Tartnicks to enter, and bade
them sit a moment on my austere-yet-comfortable single bed.

Upon entering, the first of them asked, "Do you know the
French-kissing Game?"

The second asked, "Where's your bathrobe?"

The third said, "Do you promise not to tell?"

Of course I feigned curiosity. In all honesty I was not intrigued, but
at their request I presented said bathrobe and watched as one of the Miss
Slutty O'Slutskis withdrew the white terry-cloth belt from the robe's belt
loops. Another of the Whorey Vanderwhores requested I lie back until I was
prone on the bed, gazing up at the distant ceiling. The third Miss Harlot
MacHarlot threaded the terry-cloth belt behind my neck and tied the two ends
across my tender throat.

More out of politeness and an innate courtesy than any actual interest,
I asked if these preparations were part of the game. The French-kissing Game.
We were, all of us present in my small room, wearing the same school uniform of
dark skorts and long-sleeved cardigan sweaters, kiltie tassel loafers, and
white ankle socks. We were all either eleven or twelve years of age. The
particular day was, I believe, a Tuesday.

"Just wait," said one Skanky Von Skankenberg.

"It feels
... si bon,"
said another Miss Vixey
Vandervixen.

The third said, "We won't hurt you; we promise."

Mine has always been an open, vulnerable nature. Where the motives and
agendas of others come into play, I am perhaps too trusting. To suspect three
of my own schoolmates struck me as a tad unseemly, so I merely consigned myself
to their instruction as these girls arrayed themselves around me on the bed. A
girl sat at each of my shoulders. The third girl gently lifted the eyeglasses
from my face, folded them shut, and held them as she seated herself on the bed
near my feet. The two flanking me each took one end of the cloth belt which was
knotted loosely about my neck. The third instructed them to pull.

May this episode demonstrate the hazards inherent in being the
offspring of former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-punk rock parents. Even as the
belt constricted more snugly, restricting my breathing, collapsing not only my
air supply but also the flow of blood to my precious brain, as all of this
occurred I made no vehement protest. Even as shooting stars flooded my view of
the ceiling, and I felt my face flushing deeper and deeper red, and the pulse
of my heartbeat throbbed beneath my collarbones, I offered no resistance. After
all, what was transpiring was nothing more than a game, being taught to me by
members of my peer group in an enormously exclusive girls' boarding school
located deep in the safe bosom of the Swiss Alps. Despite their current status
as Miss Whorey Whorebergs and Miss Trampy Vandertramps, these girls would one
day graduate to take positions as the chief editor of British
Vogue
or,
failing that, first lady of Argentina. Etiquette and protocol and decorum were drummed
into us daily. Such genteel young ladies would never attempt anything untoward.

Under their assault, I imagined myself the innocent governess in
Frankenstein,
hung from the gallows, the noose tightening unjustly around
my neck for the murder of my charge by the reanimated monster of a mad
scientist. Suffocating, I imagined tightly laced whalebone corsets. A lingering
death by consumption. Opium dens. I envisioned fainting and swooning and
massive overdoses of laudanum. I became Scarlett O'Hara, feeling Rhett Butler's
powerful hands as they tried to choke away my love for the dashing, chivalrous
Ashley Wilkes, and in that moment, even as my own red, raw fingers clutched at
the bedclothes, my voice hoarse with effort, I cried out as Katie Scarlett O'Hara,
"Unhand me, you vile cad!"

Even as the shooting stars filled my vision, stars and comets of every
color, red and blue and gold, the ceiling of my room seemed to drift more and
more near. Within moments, my heartbeat seemed to have ceased, and my nose was
almost touching this, the bedroom ceiling which had only moments before soared
so high above me. My awareness seemed to be hovering, floating, gazing down
upon the occupants of the bed.

A girl's voice said, "Hurry and give her the kiss." The
voice, coming from somewhere behind me. Turning, I saw myself still laid out on
my bed, the cloth belt still knotted tightly around my neck. My face looked
pasty and pale white, and the two girls seated beside my shoulders still pulled
at the ends of the cloth belt.