Damned

assigned its perfect place. The pair of them, so beautifully blocked for a two-shot, I can't resist messing with their Zen.

Dutifully, I cross the hotel room and sit on the Oriental carpet at my mother's feet. Already, I'm wearing the tweedy skort, the pink blouse and cardigan sweater for my long-planned rendezvous with Goran. I gaze up at my parents with guileless terrier eyes. Wide-open Japanese-animation eyes.

'Now, when a man loves a woman very, very much...' my dad says.

My mother retrieves the evening purse from the seat beside her. Snapping open the clasp, she reaches out a pill bottle, saying, 'Would you like a Xanax, Maddy?'

I shake my head, No.

With her perfectly manicured hands, my mom executes the stage business of twisting open the pill bottle, then shaking two of the pills into her own hand. My father reaches down from his perch on the arm of her chair. Instead of giving him one of the two pills she holds, she shakes two more pills out of the bottle into his hand. Both my parents toss back the pills they hold and swallow them dry.

'Now,' my dad says, 'when a man loves a woman very, very much...'

'Or,' my mom adds, shooting him a look, 'when a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman.' In the fingers of one hand, she still toys with the scrap of red grosgrain ribbon.

My father nods. 'Your mother is right.' He adds, 'Or when a man loves two women, or three women, backstage after a big rock concert...'

'Or,' my mom says, 'when a whole cell block of male prisoners love one new inmate very, very much...'

'Or,' my dad interjects, 'when a motorcycle gang making a meth run across the Southwestern United States loves one drunken biker chick very, very much...'

Yes, I know their car is waiting. The Prius. At the awards venue, some poor talent wrangler is no doubt reshuffling their arrival time. Despite all of these stress factors, I merely furrow my preadolescent brow in a confused expression my Botoxed parents can only envy. I shift my gaze back and forth between my mom's eyes and my dad's even as the Xanax turns them glazed and glassy.

My mother looks up, casting her gaze over her shoulder so that her eyes meet my father's.

Finally, my dad says, 'Oh, to hell with it.' Reaching a hand into his tux jacket, he extracts a personal digital assistant, or PDA, from the inside pocket. He crouches next to the chair, bringing the tiny computer level with my face. Flipping the screen open, he keyboards Ctrl+Alt+P, and the screen fills with a view of our media room in Prague. He toggles until the wide-screen television fills the entire computer screen, then keys Ctrl+Alt+L and scrolls down through a list of movie titles. Tabbing down the list, my father selects a movie, and a keystroke later the computer screen fills with a tangle of arms and legs, dangling hairless testicles, and quivering silicone-enhanced breasts.

Yes, I may be a virgin, a dead virgin, with no knowledge of carnality beyond the soft-focus metaphors of Barbara Cartland novels, but I can well recognize a fake booby when I see one.

The camerawork is atrocious. Anywhere from two to twenty men and women grapple, frantically involved in violating every orifice present with every digit, phallus, and tongue available to them. Whole human bodies appear to be disappearing into other bodies. The lighting is abysmal, and the sound has obviously been looped by nonunion amateurs working without a decent final draft. What appears before me bears less resemblance to sexual congress than it does to the writhing, squirming, not-quite-dead-yet-already-partially-decomposed occupants of a mass grave.

My mom smiles. Nodding at the PDA screen, she says, 'Do you understand, Maddy?' She says, 'This is where babies come from.'

My dad adds, 'And herpes.'

'Antonio,' my mother says, 'let's not go down that road.' To me, she says, 'Young lady, are you absolutely sure you don't want a Xanax?'

In the center of the tiny pornographic movie, the hideous little orgy is interrupted. The words Incoming Call superimpose themselves over the grappling bodies. A red light blinks at the top of the PDA case, and a shrill bell rings. My dad says, 'Wait,' and he holds the PDA to his ear, where the gruesome assemblage of entwined limbs and genitals squirm against his cheek; videotaped penises erupt their vile sputum dangerously near his eye and mouth. Answering the call thus, he says, 'Hello?' He says, 'Fine. We'll be downstairs in a moment.'

I shake my head again, No. No, thank you, to the Xanax.

Already, my mom starts poking around inside her evening purse. 'This isn't your real birthday present,' she says, 'but just in case...' What she hands me is round, a rolled batch of shiny plastic or vinyl, printed with the repeating pattern of a cartoon cat face. The plastic or foil feels so slick that it could be wet, too slick to easily hold on to; thus when I reach to take it from her hand, the roll drops to the floor, unspooling itself to reveal a seemingly endless series of the same cartoon cat face. The long plastic strip, quilted into little squares, this trails from my hand to the floor. The length of it gives off a powdery, hospital smell of latex.

By then, my parents are gone; they've swept out the door of the hotel suite before I realize I'm holding a fifteen-foot-long supply of Hello Kitty condoms.

XVIII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Little by little, I forget my life on earth, how it felt to be alive and living, but today something happened which shocked me back to remembering—maybe not everything— but at least I realize how much I might be forgetting. Or suppressing.

The computerized autodialer in Hell makes it a top priority to call mostly numbers on the federal government's No Call List. I can practically smell the mercury-enhanced tuna casserole on the breath of people whose dinner I interrupt, even over the fiber-optic or whatever phone lines that connect earth and Hell, when they yell at me. Their dinner napkins still tucked into the collars of their T-shirts, flapping down their fronts, spotted with Hamburger Helper and Green Goddess salad dressing, these angry people in Detroit, Biloxi, and Allentown, they yell for me to, 'Go to Hell...'

And yes, I might be a thoughtless, uncouth interloper into the savory ritual of their evening repast, but I'm way ahead of their hostile request.

This current day or month or century, I'm plugged into my workstation, getting shouted at, asking people their consumer preferences regarding ballpoint pens, when something new occurs. A telephone call comes through the system. An incoming call. Even as some meat loaf-eating moron shouts at me, a beep sound starts within my headset. Some kind of call-waiting sound. Whether this call's coming from earth or Hell, I can't begin to guess, and the caller identification is blocked. The instant the meat-loaf moron hangs up, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to clear my line, and say, 'Hello?'

A girl's voice says, 'Is this Maddy? Are you Madison Spencer?'

I ask, Who's calling?

'I'm Emily,' the girl says, 'from British Columbia.' The thirteen-year-old. The girl with the really bad case of AIDS. She's *69'd me. Over the telephone, she says, 'Are you really and truly dead?'

As a doornail, I tell her.

This Emily girl says, 'The caller ID says your area code is for Missoula, Montana... .'

I tell her, Same deal.

She says, 'If I called you back, collect, would you accept the charges?'

Sure, I tell her. I'll try.

And—click—she hangs up on her end.

Granted it's not entirely ethical to make personal calls from Hell, but everybody does it. To one side of me, the punk kid, Archer, sits with his leather-jacketed elbow almost touching my cardigan-sweatered elbow. Archer toys with the big safety pin which hangs from his cheek, while into his headset he's saying, '... No, seriously, you sound gnarly-hot.' He says, 'After your skin-cancer thing metastasizes, you and me need to totally hook up... .'