XI.

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.