Damned (28 page)

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......"

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison, and I'm not your Jane Eyre. I'm
nobody's Catherine Earnshaw. And you? You're certainly no writer. You're not
the boss of me; you're just messing with my head. If anybody wrote me it would
be Judy Blume or Barbara Cartland. I have confidence and determination and free
will—at least, I guess I do......

On a whim, I didn't take any of my storm troopers or Mongol hordes with
me trick-or-treating. If I can trust them—if I won them fair and square—I don't
know anymore. Besides, there are only so many people you can fit into a Lincoln
Town Car, and despite what my mom says, an entourage
can
be too large. At the last minute, I couldn't even
wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to
take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on somebody's
front stoop. In the end it was just us, Archer and Emily, Leonard, Babette,
Patterson, and me, going door-to-door. The Dead Breakfast Club.

That said, I did wear the belt of King Ethelred II, the dagger of Vlad
III, the hook with which Gilles de Rais murdered so many children. Emily,
dressed as a fairy princess, wears the diamond ring of Elizabeth Bathory.
Leonard trades everyone for their candy corn. First we went to the town where
Archer had last lived, someplace with houses lined up along streets brimming
with alive children. Maybe some are dead children, returned like us for a few
hours of nostalgia. For one millisecond I could swear I saw JonBenet Ramsey
wearing sequined tap shoes and waving hi to us.

Surrounded as we are by the marauding packs of costumed urchins, it's
unsettling to know that some of these diminutive living goblins will die in
drunk-driving accidents. Some little cheerleaders and angels will develop
eating disorders and starve to death. Some geishas and butterflies will marry
alcoholic husbands who beat them to death. Some little vampires and sailors will
stick their necks through nooses or get shanked in prison riots or be poisoned
by jellyfish while on dream vacations snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. Of the
lucky superheroes and werewolves and cowgirls, old age will bring them
diabetes, heart disease, dementia.

On the porch of one brick house, a man answers the doorbell, and the
group of us shout, "Trick or treat!" in his face. As he gives us
chocolate bars, this man effuses over Emily's fairy costume... Babette's
bejeweled Marie Antoinette outfit... Patterson as a Greek foot soldier. As his
eyes settle on me, the man scans the strip of Hello Kitty condoms twisted
around my neck. Placing a candy bar in my bloodstained hand, the man says,
"Wait, don't tell me......" He says, "You're supposed to be that
girl, the movie star's kid, who got choked to death by the psycho brother,
right?"

Standing beside me on the man's porch, Goran wears
a
turtleneck sweater and a beret. Goran smokes an empty pipe. Even shielded
behind heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles, Goran's sultry eyes look wounded.

It's possible that Satan scripted this moment. Or it might really be
happening.

"No, sir," I tell the man. "I happen to be Simone de
Beauvoir." Motioning to Goran, I add, "And this, of course, is the
much-celebrated Monsieur Jean-Paul Sartre."

Even now I'm lost. Was I just being clever and compassionate, or was I
reading smart-ass dialogue written by the Devil? Leaving the porch, our group
continues down the street. Almost without notice, Archer has veered away in a
different direction, so I sprint after him to collect him and herd him along
with the rest of us. Catching him by one black leather sleeve, I tug for him to
follow me, but Archer only continues to walk in the opposite direction, clearly
on his own mission, putting more and more distance between the two of us and
the larger group of our peers. Abandoning the Breakfast Clubbers. Without
further words, I follow until the streetlights occur only irregularly, then not
at all. We continue until the concrete sidewalk ends, until the houses end and
the two of us are walking along the gravel shoulder of an empty, dark road.

Archer looks at me and asks, "Maddy? Are you okay?"

Is he being concerned, or is he playing a role? Is Satan writing our
walk? I don't know, so I don't respond.

A wrought-iron gateway rises near us in the shadows, and Archer turns
into it. We pass through a wrought-iron fence, and we're instantly surrounded
by tombstones, treading on mown grass, listening to crickets chirp. Even in
near-total darkness, Archer marches without a false step. Only by
clutching
the sleeve of his leather jacket can I follow, and even with such guidance I'm
stumbling over grave markers. I'm kicking aside bouquets of cut flowers, my
high-heeled shoes wet from the damp.

Archer comes to an abrupt stop, and I collide with his legs. Not saying
a word, he stands looking down on a grave, the stone carved with a picture of a
sleeping lamb, engraved with two dates only a year apart. "My
sister," Archer says. "She must've gone to Heaven, because I ain't
ever seen her."

Beside the grave a second stone bears the name Archibald Merlin Archer.

"Me," says Archer, tapping the second stone with the toe of
his boot.

We stand there, silent. The moon hovers, throwing a weak light over the
scene around us, countless headstones spread in every direction. Moonlit grass
covers the ground. Uncertain how to respond, I study Archer's face for clues.
The moonlight glows blue in his Mohawk and glints silvery off his safety pin.
Finally, I say, "Your name was
Archie Archer?"

Archer says, "Don't make me punch your lights out."

The night after his baby sister was buried, Archer explains how he'd
returned to the grave site. That night a storm was rolling in, pushing along
thunderclouds, so Archer had hurried to shoplift a spray bottle of herbicide,
the aerosol kind used to kill weeds and grass. He'd spritzed his motorcycle
boots until the leather was sodden, and then walked to the newly mounded grave.
Once there, his boots squishing and squirting poison with every step, Archer
had done a primitive shuffle, a rain dance in the last hour before the storm
would hit. He'd pirouetted and leaped. His leather jacket flapping, he'd
cursed, craning his neck and rolling his eyes. Stomping his toxic feet, Archer
had ranted and bellowed, bounding and capering in the growing onslaught of
wind. With the storm building, he'd pranced and cavorted and gamboled. He'd
raved and howled. As the first raindrops touched his face, Archer had felt the
air surrounding him crackle with static electricity. His blue hair had stood to
its full, straight-up height, and the safety pin in his cheek had sparked and
vibrated.

A white finger of light had zigzagged down from Heaven, Archer says,
and his whole body had cooked around the oversize safety pin. "Right here,"
he says, standing beside his sister's tombstone, on the spot which would become
his own grave. He smirks and says, "What a rush."

In that swath of mown grass extending over a dozen graves in either
direction, that allèe, a ghost of Archer's dance steps still lingers. There, a
new generation of grass, greener, softer, like the first fresh blades grown to
cover a battlefield, this new grass traces every toxic footstep Archer left
before being struck down by lightning. Everywhere he'd stomped his poisoned
boots, he says, the grass had died, and it was only now growing back, reseeded,
to erase his late-night choreography.

There, only days after he'd been rendered a giant heretical,
sacrilegious shish kebab skewered around his own red-hot piercing, in time for
his own funeral, his final words had already surfaced as poisoned yellow
letters clearly legible in the manicured green. Even as the pallbearers bore
his casket to the grave, they marched across these last angry dance steps, this
shuffling, stumbling path which spelled—in dead-yellow letters too tall for
anyone except a deity to read:
Fuck Life.