Damned (6 page)

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.