Awake in Hell

by Downing, Helen

  Of course once they get back to their domiciles and sleep, 90% of them will wake up looking the same as they did the day they arrived, which might be why they come in. Their curiosity and sense of boredom outweighs the risk of being scarred forever.

  The best part is, that it’s practically the end of the day, and I haven’t screwed up! I do a little dance as I sweep hair off the floor. It’s going to be officially named heretofore my ‘I made it through a day of work without getting shitcanned’ dance. Lottie also has decided that she thinks I’m the shit. We are chatting and laughing and having a generally surprising good time considering where we are in the big picture, when the bell on the door rings. “Looks like one more for the day. You up to it, newbie?” says Lottie. “Of course!” I answer right away. “I’m a natural!” Lottie laughs low and soft. “Yeah, I think you just might be.” she agrees.

  I look up to see who will be next in my chair. Standing in front of me is a frail girl, who looks like she may be in her early 20s. Her face was stunningly beautiful even without make up. I could describe how thin, yet still curvy and feminine she was, how striking her gray eyes were, how she seemed to be dressed in tights, bike shorts, and a puffy shirt all in contrasting colors. But, no one walking down the street or running into her would have noticed any of that. All they would see is her hair. Her hair was awful, and keep in mind I’ve been giving people bad haircuts deliberately all day. This was worse than anything I had done in the last 8 hours. “You poor thing.” I say breathlessly. “You seem to have already gotten a haircut today!”

  She looks at me and gives me the most emptiest of smiles. “Yeah.” she said in a childlike voice. “I did this to myself. I do this every day, and every morning I wake up and it’s back. Can you help me?” When she said the last part it was almost pleading. This girl doesn’t need help with her hair. She just needs help.

  I sit her in my chair and put the smock around her shoulders, squeezing them as I do. “So tell me...” I say and sit in the chair next to hers “why would you do this to yourself?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Not here in the shop. I mean here, here. I’m obviously not a good person. I may as well look as bad on the outside as I seem to be on the inside.” She looks so sad, I once again find myself wondering about this crazy place and how so many of us ended up here. I stand behind her and run my fingers through the mess that is her hair. While I do that I say, “You want to tell me about it?” And for a minute I feel like Deedy, making someone come to terms with their own damned soul. That thought makes me a smile.

  And so she starts talking, and while she talks I’m snipping away at her hair like I’ve been doing this all my life. Stopping occasionally to look her in the eye from behind her in the mirror and offer an, “Uh Huh” or “Yes, I know,” so that she’ll continue.

  She tells me about how beauty was her obsession in life. So much so, that she was unable to function sometimes. She dabbled in drugs, but not to get high, usually to stay thin or because she needed to stay awake to exercise more. She spent all of her disposable income and a lot of other people’s too, on the latest laser treatment, botox, or some kind of spa. She always had perfect hair, perfect teeth, and perfect nails. And whenever anything started to fall, she’d be in her plastic surgeon’s office getting it picked up or made bigger, smaller, or tighter. At the end, she didn’t even recognize herself in the mirror anymore. And, no one else did either. She talked about how boyfriends would leave her when they couldn’t take her constant need for validation any longer. How all of her friends thought she was becoming unhealthy and so they would drift away. She died alone, leaving a corpse that was more silicone than actual body parts. She made a joke about not needing to be embalmed because there was nothing organic left and I forced a laugh. Then she woke up here and found that she had not brought any enhancement with her. She was at point zero. She looks younger then she was when she died because she was so young when she started trying to re-engineer her looks.

  I look at her with amazement. “This was you before you did anything?” I say incredulously.

  “Yes.” she says sadly, as if I’m looking at the most wretched thing ever placed on earth.

  I turned her chair around and made her face me. “You realize you are absolutely beautiful. I would kill to look like you! And I’m a person that others describe as self-assured... to say the least.” I’m continuing to snip at her hair as I talk. “From what you have told me, you believe it was your vanity that brought you here. So, now you are trying to pay penance by trying to erase any signs of your ego, at all. What if you still haven’t gotten it right?” I stand back and look at my handy work. I have actually managed to fix most of the damage. And I’m not a real hairdresser! However, her gorgeous face is now framed in a cute bob. I start to brush it out to make it shine as she asks me her one question.

  “So, how am I supposed to get it right?” she looks at me with hope in her eyes. I know what this means, but my heart begins to ache with the need to provide her with something to hang onto down here. So I finish brushing out her hair, I whip her chair around so that she can see her reflection, and I say “Understand that you’ve been beautiful the whole time.”

  Tears well up in her eyes as she runs her fingers through her now perfectly cut hair. I can’t help but feel just a tiny bit proud of myself. Then she stands and gives me a long, tight hug. “I may not be able to do it today. But, knowing that someone out here thinks I’m pretty is already enough for now.” I squeeze her back and just enjoy the human contact for a moment. Then, as she leaves the shop I collapse into my chair. At least, it will be my chair for five or ten more minutes until Lottie gets a hold of me. I cringe at the thought of that. But suddenly I look up and Lottie is staring at me with complete wonder.

  “What have you done, luv?” she asked quietly.

  “I’ve apparently lost another job,” I say back, and smile at her through my tears.

  I’m slouching in Deedy’s comfy chair like a sullen teenager. Deedy is looking at me from behind his desk with a bemused expression, as usual. That whole boyish charm thing that made me feel so welcome when I first got here is starting to get on my nerves. After about five minutes of nothing but that smile, since I told him all about the girl in the shop, I just look at him and roll my eyes. To which he responds by leaping forward in his chair and placing his chin on his folded hands and says, “I think there is an American expression, Louise, so you’ve probably heard of it. Something about practicing what you preach?”

  “Here’s another American expression,” I retort, “Shut up!”

  Deedy laughs. “Now, no need to be temperamental darling girl.”

  “Apparently not,” I say with an almost smug tone. “Because, from what I’ve been able to gather about The Second Chance Temp Agency, it’s not about the jobs but about my uncanny ability to lose them.”

  “That’s almost profound,” he says, and again adopts his Deedy-is-so-amused face.

  “I’ve made another observation, while we are having this discussion. Every time I have come in here, there’s not been a single other client. Are there more people that come here or is it just me? Deedy adopts his infomercial voice and says, “The Second Chance Temp Agency has helped hundreds of thousands of people just like you find their true purpose in the afterlife.”

  Then, back to the same old Deedy. “However, darling girl, your insistence that the universe — to include the Hellverse — revolves solely around you, is always an amusement for me.”

  I just look at him. “Whatever.” I say with a bit of disappointment. “I was beginning to think that maybe you were my Hell equivalent to a guardian angel, if there is such a thing?” I pose the last part as a question, just in case he’s willing to answer it.

  “Let’s not speculate.” Of course, he’s not going to answer it. “Let’s stick to the facts. You told me about the poor dear in the salon and how she felt when she left. But you forgot to mention how all of it made you feel, Louise.” He sets hi
s chin down on his desk, actually resting on his desk, and looks at me expectantly.

  “Well, I felt as good as anyone who’s just been handed a termination slip can, I guess,” I say with a smile, because I know that termination slip says that I was fired due to “Recognizing Beauty.” I point at that on the slip and ask Deedy, “How could anyone feel really bad about getting shown the door when it’s for something like that?”

  Deedy looks at me with feigned confusion and shrugs his shoulders. One more time I find myself laughing in Hell. Deedy is laughing with me.

  “Then on the way over here I had another memory...” I started, and Deedy pushed himself up with keen interest. So, I continue my story.

  When Linda got married, everyone knows how badly I behaved at the rehearsal dinner. But, before that, when all getting married meant to either of us was an excuse to shop for pretty dresses, Linda and I were in our glory. We had a blast going from store to store trying on all the clothes, drinking complimentary champagne, standing on those pedestals with the mirrors around them feeling like princess fairies, and basically avoiding any real conversation about the great event that all of this was leading up to. We stopped into a small, local, bridal boutique early on in the process. A small shop owned by an elderly woman everyone called, Miss Shanie. Miss Shanie was so excited that we were there that she immediately began rushing around the store grabbing dresses for us both to try on. Beautiful wedding dresses for Linda and, well, interesting bridesmaid dresses for me. Now, let me say this right off the bat. I had no intention of buying my bridesmaid dress from Ms Shanie. She was a sweet old lady to be sure, but the accent on that has to be on the word old, especially when it came to her taste in auxiliary wedding fashion. While her bridal gowns were traditional, yet stunning, her bridesmaid dresses were awful. A few of them I swear were made of the exact fabric of my grandmother’s throw pillows in her “fancy” living room where no one was allowed to sit, — ever. You literally had to avert your eyes and try not to take the entire thing in at once with most of them. Ever been to Vegas? Walk into any casino and look down at the carpet. I heard once that casinos notoriously pick out the ugliest carpet patterns so that you’ll avert your gaze and keep your eyes at slot machine level to make you more likely to stop and gamble. Bridesmaid dresses used to have the same basic end game. To be so hideous that everyone at the wedding would look only at the bride, at all times.

  Linda and I planned to look at a couple of wedding dresses for her and then leave with a polite excuse and head to the outlets in the next town. But Ms Shanie had different ideas. She brought out a pink-ish nightmare on a hanger and showed it to me with the same giddy enthusiasm that a young child has when presenting a handful of crushed dandelions to his mother, claiming it’s a bouquet of beautiful flowers. The dress was so horrific that Linda and I just looked at each other and immediately fell out into peals of laughter. However, the reaction that was apparent on Ms Shanie’s face prompted me to straighten up and make a half-hearted excuse about too much champagne, which of course, prompted Ms Shanie to suggest that I try it on. So I took it from her, holding it like a cobra about to strike at my face, and made my way to the dressing room.

  Now, you know how sometimes when you see something that looks really bad on the rack, but once it’s on you and you step back and really look at it, you realize it’s not so bad? That didn’t happen to me. The dress fused to my body like a bad science fiction movie monster. There was so much fabric I could never be really sure that my arms were in the actual arm holes and there was some sort of flower-slash-bow thing that was pinned to the chest, but was so big, it covered part of my face. And, regardless of how many yards of unnecessary, pepto-bismal pink satin was killed to make this dress, it still had a mermaid skirt. I couldn’t walk more than three inches a stride. When I exited the dressing room, I was met by Linda laughing so hard I kept waiting for her to pee herself. Ms Shanie on the other hand regarded me with great concern and kept circling me and making these “tsk tsk” noises until finally she stopped and said one word — one word that destroyed me and Linda for the rest of the day — “backwards.” We started rolling with uncontrolled laughter. Even after I managed to get out of that wretched straightjacket of a dress. We had somehow made it out of the store without reducing Ms. Shanie to tears, we were clinging to each other as we stumbled down the street trying to catch our breath from laughing so hard.

  “That was a deeply traumatizing experience.” I say, when we were finally able to speak.

  “I may never be able to scrub that image off of my brain.” Linda says in between gasps. “Now, I know what everyone means by some things can’t be unseen!” she says giggling once more. We continued to laugh and hold each other like children as we walked down the street to the bus stop.

  In the next town, we came across the glitzy dress shop where all the private high school girls bought their prom dresses and the like. Inside, we both spotted a little lavender dress that promised to accentuate my assets in an amazing way. As I stepped out of the dressing room, now being embraced by the softest silk fitting my every curve, other customers actually stopped their shopping to gaze admiringly my way. Linda looked at me with glazed eyes and said “You are going to be the prettiest girl at my wedding!” with total enthusiasm and pride.

  But, that statement bothered me, for whatever reason. While normally, I seek out those kinds of compliments, in this case I felt, and still feel, that there was something severely wrong with the idea of a bride who does not believe that she, herself, is not the prettiest girl at her own wedding. Which is why I ended up doing the single, craziest thing I’d ever done, up to that point in my life. Unless you haven’t been paying any attention whatsoever to my tale up to this point, that covers a shit load of crazy.

  The morning of Linda’s wedding, I woke up to a screaming brain, cursing me for a night filled with brown liquor and toxic words directed at my best friend. With that fateful (and regrettable) rehearsal dinner toast still playing a highlight reel inside my head, I found myself in front of Ms. Shanie. To her delight, I handed over a couple hundred dollars for the ugliest bridesmaid dress in the universe, and then I actually wore it to Linda’s wedding.

  To be sure, when Linda first caught sight of me in all my hideousness, the thought crossed her mind that I was trying to mount a final protest. But once she realized that it wasn’t anything like that, and that my intentions were actually kind of noble, she grabbed on to me and held me close for a very long time. During that embrace, we finally got an opportunity to thank each other for the years of friendship, for every great experience, forgive each other for every transgression and express our total devotion to each other, all without saying a single word.

  Deedy sits back in his chair as I finish my story and looks at me with gentle affection. Finally he says, “My Darling Girl, I must say you, are always a pleasant surprise.”

  “Speaking of surprises!” I had almost forgotten my epiphany from the night before. I excitedly begin to relay last night’s dream and its revelations.

  “So, Bobby is someone special?” Deedy says, while scribbling as if he’s taking notes in my file. I have long suspected however, that he just doodles.

  “Uh Huh,” I say, excited once more. “I can’t remember how long we were together or whether it ended badly, but I do know that we were very much together and very fond of one another. Actually, I cannot believe that I had forgotten him. Is it weird that I did?” My words are just pouring out. I don’t really expect an answer. Deedy looks at me with a kind of sadness and replies, “No, down here all kinds of things are lost.”

  Now, it’s my turn to sit back in my chair and regard Deedy with anticipation. “And, I figured out who the little girl is!” I say. He regards me with mild suspicion. “And, the little girl is?” he asks.

  “Linda!” I announce, then launch into my whole ‘inner child’ theory, complete with every psychological term I’ve ever learned or read, to explain why she’s appearing to me as a cute
kid instead of as herself.

  Deedy looks almost preoccupied. He says, almost to himself, “Fy merch annwyl, eich bod mor agos.”

  “You are speaking Welsh again,” I say, bringing him back.

  “Sorry,” Deedy says, seemingly shaking something off then moving forward with his usual gusto. “You are very close now, Louise. Tell me, how does that inner child you speak of feel about coming out to play?” he asks.

  “Why?” Now I’m suspicious.

  Deedy slides yet another sticky note across the desk. Yay! Another temp job, and apparently, this one is going to be fun!

  ***

  I jump up and grab it from the desk. Looking down at it for my new gig. The air around me constricts like hands wrapping around my throat. I suddenly feel wobbly and sink back down in my chair before I fall over. I feel my blood, as imaginary as it may be, sinking down to my feet. For the first time ever in Hell, I feel chilled to the bone. I struggle to find the word ‘no’ inside of my head, but it gets lost in the horror of the word in front of me. Instead I let out a scream.

  The sound of my own scream clears the way for my mouth to start forming words. “I...I...I...no,” is the best I can do.

  “What did you just say to me, Louise?” Deedy rises from his chair and leans on his desk. There is no more concern for me. He is as stern as he’s ever been. I look into his eyes and realize that they’ve suddenly become hardened. I feel like I’m in the principal’s office getting in trouble. I realize that I’ve never felt this way in Deedy’s office before.

  “I can’t do it Deedy. I can’t!” I’m not firm or definitive. I’m pleading with him. My chest feels like it weighs a thousand pounds and the tears have started again. Damn tears, this time hot with panic and fear.