The steep rising angle of the car's trajectory and the resulting g-forces settle me deeper into the leather upholstery. The little window in the driver's partition slides aside to reveal the chauffeur's sunglasses framed in the rearview mirror. Speaking to me via his reflection, the driver says, "If you don't mind my asking... are you related to the movie producer Antonio Spencer?" Of his features, all I can see is his mouth, and his smile stretches to become a spooky leer.

I retrieve the copy of Vanity Fair and hold the cover photo of my mother beside my own face, saying, "See any resemblance? Unlike my mom I have pores..." Already,

I'm falling asleep, drifting off. Sadly, I sense where this conversation is going.

The driver says, "I do some screenwriting, myself."

And yes, of course, I saw this reveal coming from the moment I first saw the car. Every driver is named George, and every driver in California has a screenplay ready to fob onto you, and since the age of four—when I came home from Halloween trick-or-treating, my pillowcase loaded with spec screenplays, I've been trained to manage this awkward situation. As my dad would say, "We're not reading for new projects at this time..." Meaning: "Go peddle your spec script to some other sucker for financing." But despite a childhood of arduous training in how to gently and politely dash the hopes and dreams of moderately gifted, earnest young talents... maybe just because I'm exhausted... maybe because I realize that the eternal afterlife will seem even longer without the distraction of even low-quality reading material... I say, "Sure." I say, "Get me a clean copy, and I'll give it a read."

Even as I'm drifting off to sleep, my hands still gripping the Vanity Fair with my mom's face on the cover, I sense that the front of the car is no longer climbing into the sky. It's leveled off, and, as if we've crested a mountain, we're slowly beginning to tilt downward in a slow, perilous, straight-down plunge.

From the rearview mirror, still leering, the driver says, "You might want to buckle up, Miss Spencer."

That said, I release my magazine and it falls down, through the partition hole, and lies flattened against the inside of the windshield.

"Another thing is," the driver says, "when we get to our destination, you don't want to touch the cage bars. They're pretty dirty."

The car plummeting, plunging, diving impossibly fast, in ever-accelerating free fall, I quickly and sleepily fasten my seat belt.

XXVII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. By their nature, stories told in the second person can suggest prayers. "Hallowed he thy name... the Lord is with thee..." With this in mind, please don't get the idea that I'm praying to you. It's nothing personal, but I'm simply not a satanist. Nor, despite my parents' best efforts, am I a secular humanist. In light of finding myself in the afterlife, neither am I any longer a confident atheist nor agnostic. At the moment, I'm not certain in what I believe. Far be it from me to pledge my faith to any belief system when, at this point, it would seem that I've been wrong about everything I've ever felt was real.

In truth, I'm no longer even certain who I, myself, am.

 

 

My dad would tell you, "If you don't know what comes next, take a good long look at what came before." Meaning: If you allow it, your past tends to dictate your future. Meaning: It's time I retrace my footsteps. With that in mind, I abandon my job at the telemarketing phone bank and set off on foot, carrying my new high heels, wearing my trusty, durable loafers. Clouds of black houseflies hover, buzzing, dense and heavy as black smoke. The Sea of Insects continues to boil in eternal rolling, gnashing chaos, its shimmering, iridescent surface stretching to the horizon. The prickly hillocks of discarded finger- and toenail parings continue to grow and slough in scratchy avalanches. The desert of broken glass crunches underfoot. The noxious Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm continues to spread, engulfing the hellish landscape around it.

And yes, I find myself a thirteen-year-old dead girl gaining a fuller knowledge of her own trust issues, but what I'd really rather be is an Eastern Bloc orphan abandoned and alone in my misery, ignored, with no possibility of rescue until I become indifferent to my own horrid circumstances and unhappiness. Or, as my mother would tell me, "Blah, blah, blah... shut up, Madison."

My point is, I've made my entire identity about being smart. Other girls, mostly Miss Slutty Vandersluts, they chose to be pretty; that's an easy enough decision when you're young. As my mom would say, "Every garden looks beautiful in May." Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young. Among young ladies, it's a default choice, to compete on the level of physical attractiveness. Other girls, those doomed by hooked noses or ravaged skin, settle on being wildly funny. Other girls turn athletic or anorexic or hypochondriac. Lots of girls choose the bitter, lonely, lifetime path of being Miss Snarky Von Snarkskis, armored within their sharp-tongued anger. Another life choice is to become the peppy and upbeat student body politician. Or possibly to invent myself as the perennial morose poetess, poring over my private verse, channeling the dreary weltschmerz of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. But, despite so many options, I chose to be smart—the intelligent fat girl who possessed the shining brain, the straight-A student who'd wear sensible, durable shoes and eschew volleyball and manicures and giggling.

Suffice it to say that, until recently, I had felt quite satisfied and successful with my own invention. Each of us chooses our personal route—to be sporty or snarky or smart—with the lifelong confidence that one can possess only as a small child.

However, in light of the truth: that I did not die of a marijuana overdose... nor did Goran reveal himself as my romantic ideal... my schemes have brought nothing except heartache to my family... Thus, it would follow that I am not so smart. And with that, my entire concept of self is undermined.

Even now, I hesitate to use words such as eschew and convey and weltschmerz, so thoroughly is my faith in myself shaken. The actual nature of my death reveals me to be an idiot, no longer a Bright Young Thing, but instead a deluded, pretentious poseur. Not brilliant, but an impostor who would craft my own illusory reality out of a handful of impressive words. Such vocabulary props served as my eye shadow, my breast implants, my physical coordination, my confidence. These words: erudite and insidious and obfuscate, served as my crutches.

Perhaps it's better to recognize this degree of personal fallacy while still young, rather than lose one's fixed sense of self in middle age as beauty and youth fade, or strength and agility fail. It might be worse to cling to sarcasm and contempt until one finds herself isolated, loathed by all her peers. Nevertheless, this extreme form of psychological course correction still feels... devastating.

With that crisis fully realized, I retrace my route, returning to the cell where I first arrived in Hell. My arms swinging, the diamond ring which Archer gave me, the finger ring, flashes heavy and stolen. No longer can I present myself as an authority on being dead, so I retreat to my enclosure of filthy bars, the comfort provided inside a lock, the rust and grime scratched by the pointed safety pin of a dead punk rocker. Doomed within their own cells, my neighbors slump, gripping their heads between their hands, so long frozen and catatonic in attitudes of self-pity that spiderwebs envelop them. Or they pace, punching the air and babbling.