Damned

honking their automobile horns and not discarding cigarette butts, but then she ought to move on.

I tell her, 'Die already.' My finger hovering above the control board, I say, 'Hold, please... ,' and punch the button. I twist in my seat to face Babette, my eyebrows arched in expectation. My entire face a silent, begging, Please.

Babette offers the report. She taps a chipped fingernail on a number at the bottom of a long column of faint dot-matrix numbers, saying, 'Just from your overall culpability score...' She says, 'This number, here.' Handing me the sheet of paper, Babette says, 'You need to file for an appeal.' With that, she turns on one battered high heel and begins to walk away.

My latest Hell recruit, the horn-honking, cigarette-strewing gal slowly dying in Texas, she's still blinking, blinking on hold.

Calling after Babette, I ask what she means by appeal.

In response, without looking back, Babette shouts, already four... five... six workstations away; still receding, she says, 'You shouldn't even be here......'

From even farther gone, Babette shouts, 'There's been an official screw-up.' Loud enough for everyone to overhear, she shouts, 'Double-check the numbers yourself.' She shouts, 'Because, right this minute, you ought to be in Heaven.'

Up and down the infinite row of telemarketers, faces twist to see mine. A lingering crowd of mercenaries and fresh-off-the-boat Hell newbies wait within earshot, their faces slack with confusion. One of their small group steps forward, not a dastardly blood-drenched pirate, nor an aged person attired in her best funeral suit of clothes. No, this stranger stands approximately my height. A reasonable guess would place her age at thirteen. This stranger could almost pass as the earlier me, the pristine, well-behaved Madison wearing sensible shoes and a tweedy ensemble carefully chosen to mask future soiling. In contrast to my current self, this small stranger presents herself with no dried demonic blood on her hands and face, her hair neatly combed and meticulously arranged. Offering a dainty hand of nicety-nice pink fingernails, this girl says, 'Madison Spencer?' She meets my gaze with calm, unblinking eyes, her perfect double row of white teeth bound in stainless-steel braces, saying, 'You win......'

At that, the girl's dainty hands dip into the pockets of her tweed skirt, and then the pockets of her cardigan sweater, and she brings forth candy. Seven, eight, nine candy bars. Ten full-sized Milky Way bars, my new best friend—my first best friend, ever—this dead girl offers these sweet chocolaty prizes to me.

XXXII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It's no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his—or her—coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired. At this point I've been in Hell for a longer period of time than I've ever spent in any of my earthly homes, in Durban, in London, in Manila. Worse than feeling merely conflicted, I'm miserable at the thought of leaving.

In order to keep the various bloodthirsty armies occupied and out of my hair, I've ordered them to capture and paint all the noxious bats of Hell red and blue, to pass for cardinals and bluebirds. The industrious butchers previously employed by Pol Pot and Madame Defarge, I've dispatched them to fabricate bright butterfly wings out of colorful construction paper and glitter, then glue these false wings to the real wings of our ever-present houseflies. Not only does this spruce up the normally dismal atmosphere of the underworld, it also prevents what would be the inevitable clashes between Mongolian hordes and Nazi storm troopers and Egyptian charioteers. Most important, it keeps them all busy and allows me to spend my time touring Emily around, eating Milky Ways, and discussing boys.

Throughout our relaxed amble, I remark on possible improvements to the landscape, a flowering dogwood here, a reflecting pool there, perhaps an aviary of colorful parrots, each of which Emily dutifully makes note of on a clipboard she carries.

The potentially needy mobs of newly dead, those anxious souls I've enrolled in dying and relocating to Hell, I've delegated those folks to various other reclamation projects. Really, I could pass as no less than the FDR of the afterlife, what with all the dams I've decreed be build across rivers of scalding blood. I've ordered other work teams to dig channels and drain expansive marshes of rank perspiration; thanks to me the ancient Sweat Swamps of Hell no longer exist. Lost souls who logged entire lifetimes in the study and practice of civil and structural engineering, those people are thrilled for the opportunity to put their existing skills to use. The rolling hills of semicoagulated mucus have been leveled. And an entire gulag of happily damned slave laborers does nothing except fashion false water lily blossoms from crepe paper and float their products on the surface of the Shit Lake.

More and more I see that Hell isn't so much a punitive conflagration as it is the natural result of aeons of deferred maintenance. Frankly put: Hell amounts to nothing more than a marginal neighborhood allowed to deteriorate to the extreme. Picture all the smoldering, underground coal mine fires expanding to rub elbows with all the burning tire dumps, throw in all the open cesspools and hazardous-waste landfills, and the inevitable result would be Hell, a situation hardly improved by the self-absorbed tendency of the residents to focus on their own misfortune and neglect to lift a dead finger in defense of their environment.

From our vantage point, strolling along the shores of the Sea of Insects, Emily and I survey the slow but certain improvements in the dismal landscape. I point out areas of interest: the roiling River of Hot Saliva... the buzzards circling Hitler and his distant colleagues relegated to their unspeakable place. I explain the seemingly arbitrary rules of which people run afoul, how each living person is allowed to use the F-word a maximum of seven hundred times. Most living persons haven't the slightest idea how easy it is to be damned, but should anyone say fuck for the 701st time, he or she is automatically doomed. Similar rules apply to personal hygiene; for example, the 855th time you fail to wash your hands after voiding your bowels or bladder, you're doomed. The three hundredth time you use the word nigger or the word fag, regardless of your personal race or sexual preference, you buy yourself that dreaded one-way ticket to the underworld.

Walking along, I tell Emily how the dead may send messages to the living. In the same way that living people send each other flowers or e-mails, a dead person may send a living person a stomachache or tinnitus or a nagging melody which will occupy the alive person's attention to the point of madness.

The pair of us walking along, idly examining the putrid, boiling landscape, apropos of nothing, Emily nonchalantly says, 'I talked to that girl Babette, and she says you have a boyfriend...

I do not, I insist.

'His name,' says Emily, 'is Goran?'

I insist Goran is not my boyfriend.

Her eyes remaining fixed upon the notes she's jotted on her clipboard, Emily asks if I miss boys. What about prom? Do I miss the opportunity to date and get married and have my own children?

Not particularly, I reply. A crew of sinister Snarky Miss Snarky-pants girls at my old boarding school, the infamous three who taught me the French-kissing Game, they once professed to educate me about human reproduction. As they told it to me, the reason boys desire so desperately to kiss girls is because, with each kiss, the activity makes the boy's wanger grow larger. The more girls a boy can kiss, the larger a wanger he'll eventually possess, and the boys boasting the largest are awarded the best-paying, highest-status jobs. Really, it's all very simple. All boys devote their lives to amassing the most elongated genitals, growing the nasty things so that when they eventually wedge them inside some unfortunate girl, the distant end of the enlarged wanger actually breaks off—yes, the wanger flesh becomes so hardened that it shatters—and the broken portion remains lodged within the girl's hoo-hoo. This natural event is much like those lizards that live in arid deserts and can voluntarily detach their squirming tails. Any amount, from the pointed tip to almost the entire wiener, can literally snap off inside a girl, and she's fully unable to remove it.

Emily stares at me, her face distorted in far more disgust than she registered even when first witnessing the