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.
And yes, I've sworn off hoping, but a girl can still carry a torch.
As we approach the tail end of one long queue, Leonard says, "Spustati. Sledeic."
Babette says, "Is this even the same year?”
Only in Hell do you wish a wristwatch included the day, date, and century functions.
At this, Psezpolnica sinks to one knee, leaning forward to carefully, gently lower us back to the ground.
XII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. If you can tolerate yet another admission on my part, I've never been very adept at taking tests. Trust me, I'm not trying to lay the blame elsewhere, but I loathe the kind of game-show context in which so much of our lives is determined: proving my memory and mental skills in a sedentary situation under the pressure of limited time. While death has its obvious drawbacks, it is a blessing that I now have an unassailably valid excuse to not take the SATs. However, it seems that I've not entirely dodged that dreaded bullet.
At the present I'm sitting in a small room, seated in a straight-backed chair next to a desk. Picture the archetypal all-white room, featuring no windows, which Jungian analysts say best represents death. A demon with cat's claws and folded leathery wings leans close to adjust a blood-pressure cuff which is wrapped around my upper arm, inflating the cuff until I can feel my pulse throbbing along the inside of my elbow. Sticky pads hold the wires of a heart-rate monitor to the skin of my chest, snaking between the buttons on my blouse. Adhesive tape holds another wire which monitors the pulse at my wrist. Other sensors are wired to the front and back of my neck.
"To monitor the tremors in your speech patterns," Leonard explained. One sensor sticks to the cricothyroid muscle on the front of your neck, he says. Another sensor, the cricoarytenoid muscle on the back of your neck, near your spine. As you speak, a low-voltage current runs between the two sensors, registering any microtremors in the muscles which control your voice box, indicating when you're telling an untruth.
The demon with the leathery wings and cat's claws, his breath smells putrid.
This comes after Babette escorted us into the headquarters building, sidestepping the endless lines of waiting people to usher our little party through a crumbled portion of the building's simultaneously unfinished yet decayed facade. Babette shepherded us into a cavernous waiting hall as large as any stadium, wherein countless souls stood around, constituting a sort of Department of Motor Vehicles mélange: people wearing soiled rags next to people wearing Chanel couture and carrying briefcases. All the plastic scoop-seated chairs were booby-trapped with wads of fresh chewing gum, so, really, only the people who've succeeded in abandoning all hope risk sitting down. An enormous reader board sign mounted at the front of the hall said, Now Serving Number 5. The distant stone walls and ceiling looked to be brown. Everything earth-toned, sepia, the color of grime, the color of nose pickings. Almost everyone stood, their heads sagging at a slight angle, dispirited, like the heads of broken necks.
The stone floor teemed, almost carpeted by legions of fat cockroaches feasting on the ever-present popcorn balls and nonpareils. Hell is very much like Florida in that the resident bug life never dies. As a result of the steamy heat and immortality, the roaches achieve fat, meaty proportions more associated with mice or squirrels. Babette watched me hopping, one-legged, always holding the opposite leg aloft, storklike, to avoid treading on roaches, and she said, "We need to steal you some high heels."
Even Patterson, wearing his football shoulder pads and jersey, practically danced, skewering an ever-thickening layer of cockroaches smashed under his steel cleats. World-weary Archer also pranced, the chrome chains clanking around his boots, his feet skidding and skating on the crushed beetles. In contrast, even falling to pieces, Babette's fake high-heeled shoes allowed her to stilt-walk, impervious, above the roachy debris.
Outstriding the rest of us, elbowing aside the aeons of people already waiting, Babette arrived at a counter or long desk that ran the entire length of the far wall. There, a row of demons appeared to work as clerks, standing on the opposite side of the desk. Babette plopped her fake Coach bag on the countertop, addressing the demon who stood closest, saying, "Hey, Astraloth." She produced a Big Hunk candy bar from her bag and slid the candy across the counter, leaning into the demon's face, and said, "Give us an A137-B17. The short form. For an appeal and records search." Babette jerked her head in my direction, adding, "It's for the new kid, here."
It was clear Babette meant business.
The air in the assembly hall was so humid that every exhalation hung like a white cloud in front of my face, fogging my glasses. Cockroaches crunched beneath my every footstep.
No, it's not fair, but my mom and dad were always happy to tell me the sordid details of every sex act or fetish that existed. Other girls might get a training bra at thirteen, but my mom offered to have me fitted for a training diaphragm. Beyond the birds and the bees—and tea-bagging, rimming, and scissoring—my parents never taught me a single thing about death. At most my dad pestered me to use moisturizer with sunblock and to floss my teeth. If they perceived death at all, it was only on the most superficial level, as the wrinkles and gray hairs of very old people fated soon to expire. Therefore they seemed heavily invested in the belief that if one could constantly maintain one's personal appearance and mitigate the signs of aging, then death would never be a pressing issue. To my parents, death existed as merely the logical, albeit extreme, result of not adequately exfoliating your skin. A slippery slope. If one simply failed to practice meticulous grooming, one's life would grind to an end.