No, I'm not completely unrealistic about my parents' slim chances of attaining Heaven. To that end, talking over the telephone, I'd made my father promise to honk his car horn at least a hundred times each day. I'd sworn my mother to constantly use the word fuck and to always drop her cigarette butts outdoors. With their existing track record, these behaviors would way guarantee their assured damnation. Forever in Hell is still forever, and at least we'd all be together as an intact nuclear family.
Even as he wept, I forced my father to promise that he'd never pass up an opportunity to break wind in a crowded elevator. My mom I made promise to urinate in every hotel swimming pool she'd ever enter. Divine law allows each person to pass gas in only three elevators, and to urinate in the shared water of only two swimming pools. This is regardless of your age, so most people are already relegated to Hell by the age of five.
I told my mom she looked way beautiful giving away those dumb Academy Awards, but that she should hit Control+Alt+D and unlock the doors of my bedrooms in Dubai, London, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, and everywhere, all of my rooms. By keystroking Control+Alt+C she ought to open all my curtains and allow sunlight into those sealed, shadowy places. I made my dad promise to give all my dolls and clothes and stuffed animals to the Somali maids we had in every household— and to give them all a sizable raise in their wages. On top of all those demands I asked my parents to adopt all our Somali maids, to really legally adopt them, and make certain those girls get college degrees and become successful cosmetic surgeons and tax attorneys and psychoanalysts— and that my mom can't lock them in bathrooms anymore, even as a joke—and both my parents yelled in unison over the telephone: "Enough! Madison, we promise!"
In my effort to comfort my parents, I said, "Keep your promises, and we'll be one big, happy family, forever!" My family, my friends, Goran, Emily, Mister Wiggles, and Tiger Stripe...we'll all spend eternity together.
And now, ye gods... it seems as though I'm the one who won't be in Hell.
XXXVI.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. But I guess you already knew that. If you're to be believed I guess you know more about me than I do. You know everything, but I suspected that something was not right. At last we meet face-to face......
We' re all dressed in our Halloween costumes, which aren't really costumes, with the exception of Emily's fairy-princess outfit. Babette refuses to accept the possibility that she's some dead nobody; instead, she's dolled herself up as Marie Antoinette, with jagged, black-thread stitches going around her neck, and at present we're loitering around the shore of the Lake of Tepid Bile, waiting to hitch a ride back to Real Life and hustle ourselves some sweet, sweet candy riches.
Just when it appears that we'll be compelled to take some nasty-dirty cattle-car leftover from commuting the Jews to the Holocaust, a familiar black Lincoln Town Car drifts to a slow-motion stop beside us. It's the same car as from my funeral, and the same uniformed chauffeur wearing a visored cap and mirrored sunglasses steps from the driver's seat and approaches our group. In one driving-gloved hand he holds an ominous-looking sheaf of white paper. Along one edge, three Chicago screws bind the pages together. Clearly, it's a spec screenplay, and from even a few steps' distance it stinks of hunger and naively high expectations and absurd outsider optimism—more outsider than I could possibly dream.
Holding the thickness of pages out in front of him, obviously waiting for me to take it, the driver says, "Hey." His mirrored glasses twitch between the pages and my face, baiting me to see the screenplay and acknowledge it. "I found my script for you to read," he says. "On your trip back to earth."
In this taut moment, one corner of the driver s mouth twitches into a possible leer, some expression either shy or snide, showing a tangle of browned rodent teeth sprouting from his gums. His exposed cheeks flush crimson red. He twists and ducks his head, hunching his shoulders. With the toe of one foot, shod in gleaming black riding boots— very old-school for a chauffeur, almost like hooves—he draws a five-pointed star in the dust and ash. He's holding his breath, his vulnerability so tangible you can taste it, but I know from vast experience that the moment I touch his cinematic pipe dream I'll be expected to attach bankable talent to it, secure financing for principal photography, and land a fat distribution deal for him. Even in Hades, such moments are excruciatingly painful.
Nevertheless, I want to ride back to Halloween trick-or-treating in style, not in some typhus-stinking, lice-ridden Nazi boxcar, so I acquiesce to actually looking at the proffered title page. There, centered in boldface all-caps letters—the first dreaded sign of an amateur's precious, self-important work—I read the script's title:
the madison spencer story
Authored by and Copyright Belonging to Satan
First off, I read the title again. And again. Second, I look at the name tag pinned to the lapel of his chauffeur s uniform, the engraved silver, and it does, indeed, read: Satan.
With his free hand, the driver removes his cap, revealing two bone-colored horns that poke up through his mop of ordinary brown hair. He slips off his mirrored sunglasses to show eyes cut with side-to-side irises, like a goat's. Yellow eyes.
My heart.... instantly, my heart is in my throat. At long last, it's you. Without thinking I step forward, ignoring the offered screenplay, and throw my arms around the driver, asking, "You want me to read that?" Burying my face in his tweedy uniform—in your tweedy uniform. The cloth smells of methane and sulfur and gasoline. A hug later, I step away. Nodding at the pages, I ask, "You wrote a movie about me?"
There it is again, that leering smile, as if he sees me naked. As if he knows my thinking. He says, "Read this? My little Maddy, you've lived it." Satan shakes his horned head, saying, "But, technically speaking, there is no 'you.’"
His gloved hands flip open the manuscript and shove it toward me, demanding, "Look!" He says, "Every moment of your past is here! Every second of your future!"
Madison Spencer does not exist, Satan claims. I am nothing but a fictional character he invented aeons ago. I am his Rebecca de Winter. I am his Jane Eyre. Every thought I've ever had, he wrote into my head. Every word I've said, he claims he scripted for me.
Baiting me with the screenplay, his yellow eyes flashing, Satan says, "You have no free will! No freedom of any kind. You've done nothing I didn't plot for you since the beginning of time!"
I've been manipulated since the day I was born, he insists, steered as gracefully as Elinor Glyn would position a heroine on a tiger-skin rug for a tryst with an Arab sheik. The course of my life has been channeled as efficiently as pressing Ctrl+Alt+Madison on a laptop keyboard. My entire existence is predestined, decreed in the script he holds out for my inspection.
I step back, still not accepting that dreck script. Not accepting any of this new concept. If Satan is telling the truth then even my refusal is already written here.
Arching his thorny eyebrows, he says smugly, "If you have courage and intelligence it's because I willed for you to have them. Those qualities were my gift! I demanded that Baal surrender to you. Your so-called 'friends' work for me!"
Hitler, Caligula, Idi Amin, he claims that they each threw the battle to me. That's why my ascent to power happened so quickly. It's why Archer egged me to fight in the first place.
But I refuse. "Why should I believe you?" I stammer. I scream, "You're the Prince of Tides!"
Satan throws his head back, stretching his stained teeth at the orange sky and shouting, "I am the 'Prince of Lies'!"
Whatever, I say. I say that—if he's really and truly responsible for my every quote—then HE fucked up my last line of dialogue.
"I gave your mother movie fame! I gave your father a fortune!" he bellows. "If you want proof, just listen... ," and he flips the script open, reading aloud: "'Madison suddenly felt confused and terrified/"
And I did. I did feel confused and terrified.
He reads, "'Madison looked around anxiously for reassurance from her clique
of friends.'"
And at that moment I had, indeed, been craning my neck, trying to catch sight of Babette and Patterson and Archer. But they'd already climbed into the waiting Town Car.
And yes, I know the words panic and racing pulse and anxiety attack, but I'm not certain whether I even exist to experience them. Instead of a fat, smart thirteen-year-old girl... I might be a figment of Satan's imagination. Just ink stains on paper. Whether reality actually shifted in that instant... or only my perception of it changed... I can't tell. But everything seems undermined. Everything good seems spoiled.
In his nerdy way, Leonard had tried to warn me. It's possible that reality was exactly the way he'd described: Demon = Daimon = Muse or Inspiration = My Creator.
Perusing the pages of his script, chuckling over his work, Satan says, "You are my best character." He beams. "I'm so proud of you, Madison. You have such a natural talent for luring souls to perdition!" With more than a smidgen of wistfulness, he says, "People hate me. No one trusts me." He looks at me almost lovingly, tears trembling in his goat eyes, and Satan says, "That's why I've created you......"
XXXVII.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison, and I'm not your Jane Eyre. I'm nobody's Catherine Earnshaw. And you? You're certainly no writer. You're not the boss of me; you're just messing with my head. If anybody wrote me it would be Judy Blume or Barbara Cartland. I have confidence and determination and free will—at least, I guess I do......
On a whim, I didn't take any of my storm troopers or Mongol hordes with me trick-or-treating. If I can trust them—if I won them fair and square—I don't know anymore. Besides, there are only so many people you can fit into a Lincoln Town Car, and despite what my mom says, an entourage can be too large. At the last minute, I couldn't even wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on somebody's front stoop. In the end it was just us, Archer and Emily, Leonard, Babette, Patterson, and me, going door-to-door. The Dead Breakfast Club.
That said, I did wear the belt of King Ethelred II, the dagger of Vlad III, the hook with which Gilles de Rais murdered so many children. Emily, dressed as a fairy princess, wears the diamond ring of Elizabeth Bathory. Leonard trades everyone for their candy corn. First we went to the town where Archer had last lived, someplace with houses lined up along streets brimming with alive children. Maybe some are dead children, returned like us for a few hours of nostalgia. For one millisecond I could swear I saw JonBenet Ramsey wearing sequined tap shoes and waving hi to us.
Surrounded as we are by the marauding packs of costumed urchins, it's unsettling to know that some of these diminutive living goblins will die in drunk-driving accidents. Some little cheerleaders and angels will develop eating disorders and starve to death. Some geishas and butterflies will marry alcoholic husbands who beat them to death. Some little vampires and sailors will stick their necks through nooses or get shanked in prison riots or be poisoned by jellyfish while on dream vacations snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. Of the lucky superheroes and werewolves and cowgirls, old age will bring them diabetes, heart disease, dementia.
On the porch of one brick house, a man answers the doorbell, and the group of us shout, "Trick or treat!" in his face. As he gives us chocolate bars, this man effuses over Emily's fairy costume... Babette's bejeweled Marie Antoinette outfit... Patterson as a Greek foot soldier. As his eyes settle on me, the man scans the strip of Hello Kitty condoms twisted around my neck. Placing a candy bar in my bloodstained hand, the man says, "Wait, don't tell me......" He says, "You're supposed to be that girl, the movie star's kid, who got choked to death by the psycho brother, right?"
Standing beside me on the man's porch, Goran wears a turtleneck sweater and a beret. Goran smokes an empty pipe. Even shielded behind heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles, Goran's sultry eyes look wounded.
It's possible that Satan scripted this moment. Or it might really be happening.
"No, sir," I tell the man. "I happen to be Simone de Beauvoir." Motioning to Goran, I add, "And this, of course, is the much-celebrated Monsieur Jean-Paul Sartre."
Even now I'm lost. Was I just being clever and compassionate, or was I reading smart-ass dialogue written by the Devil? Leaving the porch, our group continues down the street. Almost without notice, Archer has veered away in a different direction, so I sprint after him to collect him and herd him along with the rest of us. Catching him by one black leather sleeve, I tug for him to follow me, but Archer only continues to walk in the opposite direction, clearly on his own mission, putting more and more distance between the two of us and the larger group of our peers. Abandoning the Breakfast Clubbers. Without further words, I follow until the streetlights occur only irregularly, then not at all. We continue until the concrete sidewalk ends, until the houses end and the two of us are walking along the gravel shoulder of an empty, dark road.
Archer looks at me and asks, "Maddy? Are you okay?"
Is he being concerned, or is he playing a role? Is Satan writing our walk? I don't know, so I don't respond.
A wrought-iron gateway rises near us in the shadows, and Archer turns into it. We pass through a wrought-iron fence, and we're instantly surrounded by tombstones, treading on mown grass, listening to crickets chirp. Even in near-total darkness, Archer marches without a false step. Only by clutching the sleeve of his leather jacket can I follow, and even with such guidance I'm stumbling over grave markers. I'm kicking aside bouquets of cut flowers, my high-heeled shoes wet from the damp.
Archer comes to an abrupt stop, and I collide with his legs. Not saying a word, he stands looking down on a grave, the stone carved with a picture of a sleeping lamb, engraved with two dates only a year apart. "My sister," Archer says. "She must've gone to Heaven, because I ain't ever seen her."
Beside the grave a second stone bears the name Archibald Merlin Archer.
"Me," says Archer, tapping the second stone with the toe of his boot.
We stand there, silent. The moon hovers, throwing a weak light over the scene around us, countless headstones spread in every direction. Moonlit grass covers the ground. Uncertain how to respond, I study Archer's face for clues. The moonlight glows blue in his Mohawk and glints silvery off his safety pin. Finally, I say, "Your name was Archie Archer?"
Archer says, "Don't make me punch your lights out."
The night after his baby sister was buried, Archer explains how he'd returned to the grave site. That night a storm was rolling in, pushing along thunderclouds, so Archer had hurried to shoplift a spray bottle of herbicide, the aerosol kind used to kill weeds and grass. He'd spritzed his motorcycle boots until the leather was sodden, and then walked to the newly mounded grave. Once there, his boots squishing and squirting poison with every step, Archer had done a primitive shuffle, a rain dance in the last hour before the storm would hit. He'd pirouetted and leaped. His leather jacket flapping, he'd cursed, craning his neck and rolling his eyes. Stomping his toxic feet, Archer had ranted and bellowed, bounding and capering in the growing onslaught of wind. With the storm building, he'd pranced and cavorted and gamboled. He'd raved and howled. As the first raindrops touched his face, Archer had felt the air surrounding him crackle with static electricity. His blue hair had stood to its full, straight-up height, and the safety pin in his cheek had sparked and vibrated.
A white finger of light had zigzagged down from Heaven, Archer says, and his whole body had cooked around the oversize safety pin. "Right here," he says, standing beside his sister's tombstone, on the spot which would become his own grave. He smirks and says, "What a rush."
In that swath of mown grass extending over a dozen graves in either direction, that allèe, a ghost of Archer's dance steps still lingers. There, a new generation of grass, greener, softer, like the first fresh blades grown to cover a battlefield, this new grass traces every toxic footstep Archer left before being struck down by lightning. Everywhere he'd stomped his poisoned boots, he says, the grass ha
d died, and it was only now growing back, reseeded, to erase his late-night choreography.
There, only days after he'd been rendered a giant heretical, sacrilegious shish kebab skewered around his own red-hot piercing, in time for his own funeral, his final words had already surfaced as poisoned yellow letters clearly legible in the manicured green. Even as the pallbearers bore his casket to the grave, they marched across these last angry dance steps, this shuffling, stumbling path which spelled—in dead-yellow letters too tall for anyone except a deity to read: Fuck Life.
"Two kids in one week..." says Archer, “... my poor mom."
In the silence which follows, I begin to hear my name streaming on the nighttime breeze, as thin as the distant smell of candle flames cooking carved pumpkins from the inside. From somewhere over the nighttime horizon, a chorus of three faint voices seems to call me. In the distant, faraway dark, three different voices chant repeatedly: "Madison Spencer... Maddy Spencer... Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer..." With this siren's song entrancing, captivating, luring me into the unknown, I stagger in pursuit of the bait. I'm edging between tombstones, hypnotized, listening. Thoroughly pissed off.
Behind me, Archer calls, "Where are you going?"
I have an appointment, I call back. I don't know where.
"On Halloween?" Archer shouts. "We've all got to be back in Hell by midnight."
Not to worry, I shout to reassure him. Still drifting, dazed, in pursuit of the mysterious voices, drawn along by the sound of my own name, I call back to Archer, "Don't worry." Distracted, I shout, "I'll see you in Hell......"
XXXVIII.
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