Chuck Palahniuk - Damned

Archer glares at their backs, the big safety pin bunched in the muscles of his clenched jaw.

Leonard name-drops about the different demons whom we might stumble across: Baal, Beelzebub, Belial, Liberace, Diabolos, Mara, Pazuzu—an Assyrian with a bat's head and scorpion's tail—Lamashtu—a Sumerian she-devil who suckles a pig with one breast and a dog with the other— or Namtaru—the Mesopotamian version of our modern grim reaper. We look for Satan with the same intensity that my mom and dad looked for God.

In retrospect my parents were always pushing me to expand my consciousness by huffing glue or gasoline or chewing peyote buttons. Simply because they'd done their time, wasted their teen years lolling in the muddy fields of Vermont and the salt flats of Nevada, naked except for rainbow face paints and a thick coating of sweaty filth, their heads festooned with fifty pounds of fetid dreadlocks, teeming with crab lice and pretending to find enlightenment... that does NOT mean I have to make that same mistake.

Sorry, Satan, once again I've said the G-word.

Without breaking stride, Leonard nods and points to indicate the former deities of now-defunct cultures, now warehoused in the underworld. Among them: Benoth, a god of the Babylonians; Dagon, an idol of the Philistines; Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians; Tartak, the god of the Hevites.

My suspicion is that my parents treasure their sordid recollections of episodes at Woodstock and Burning Man not because those pastimes led to wisdom, but because such folly was inseparable from a period of their lives when they were young and unburdened by obligation; they had free time, muscle tone, and their futures still looked like a great, grand adventure. Furthermore, both my mother and father had been free of social status and therefore had nothing to lose by cavorting nude, their swollen genitals smeared with muck.

Thus, because they had ingested drugs and flirted with brain damage, they insisted I should do likewise. I was forever opening my boxed lunch at school to discover a cheese sandwich, a carton of apple juice, carrot sticks, and a five-hundred-milligram Percocet. Tucked within my Christmas stocking—not that we celebrated Christmas— would be three oranges, a sugar mouse, a harmonica, and quaaludes. In my Easter basket—not that we called the event Easter—instead of jelly beans, I'd find lumps of hashish. Would that I could forget the scene at my twelfth birthday party where I flailed at a piñata, wielding a broomstick in front of my peers and their respective former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-anarchist throwback parents. The moment the colorful papier-mâché burst, instead of Tootsie Rolls or Hershey's Kisses, everyone present was showered with Vicodins, Darvons, Percodans, amyl nitrate ampoules, LSD stamps, and assorted barbiturates. The now-wealthy, now-middle-aged parents were ecstatic, while my little friends and I couldn't help but feel a tad bit cheated.

That, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand that very few twelve-year-olds would actually enjoy attending a clothing-optional birthday party.

Some of the most gruesome images in Hell seem downright laughable when compared to seeing an entire generation of adults stripped nude and wrestling on the floor, grasping and panting in frantic competition for a scattered handful of codeine spansules.

These were the same people who worried that I might grow up to become a Miss Nymphy Nymphoheimer.

At present, Archer, Leonard, and I trail after Babette and Patterson, navigating a switchback route through hummocks of discarded toe- and fingernail parings, between sloughing gray hillocks heaped with every thin crescent of nail ever trimmed. Some nail fragments are painted pink or red or blue. As we tread along the narrow canyons, thin rivulets of loose fingernails trickle down. Trickling toenails threaten to become full-fledged avalanches which could bury us alive (alive?) in their talus of prickly keratin. Overhead arches the flaming orange sky, and down branching canyons, dwarfed in the distance we can glimpse communities of cages where our fellow doomed souls sit in permanent soiled desolation.

As we meander, Leonard continues to recite the names of demons we might encounter: Mevet, the Judaic demon of death; Lilith, who steals children; Reshev, the plague demon; Azazel, demon of deserts; Astaroth... Robert Mapplethorpe... Lucifer... Behemoth....

Ahead of us, Patterson and Babette stroll up a gentle slope, topping a rise which blocks the view beyond. Reaching the crest, the two of them stop. Even from behind we can see Babette's body stiffen. In reaction to what she now sees in the distance, both her hands come up to cover her face, her fingers cupped over her eyes. Babette bends slightly from the waist, bracing her hands against her thighs, and turns away from the view, stretching her neck as if about to retch. Patterson turns to see us, jerking his head for us to hurry and catch up. To witness some new atrocity just over this next horizon.

Archer and Leonard and I trudge along, mounting the slope of nail parings, soft under each labored step, like snow or loose sand, climbing until we stand alongside Patterson and Babette, at the edge of a steep cliff. Half a step ahead of us, the land drops away, and below us boils a sea of insects which stretches to the horizon... beetles, centipedes, fire ants, earwigs, wasps, spiders, grubs, locusts, and what-all churning constantly, a shifting soft quicksand composed of pincers, feelers, segmented legs, stingers, shells, and teeth, darkly iridescent, largely black but speckled with hornet yellows and bright grasshopper greens. Their constant clicking and rustling generates a din not unlike the crashing surf of a briny ocean on earth.

"Cool, huh?" says Patterson, waving his football helmet in one hand as if to direct our attention over this morass of seething, undulating horrors. He says, "Check it out... the Sea of Insects."

Gazing down into the surging swells and rolling troughs of clamoring bugs, Leonard sneers in righteous disgust, saying, "Spiders are not insects."

Not to belabor the point, but counterfeit luxury goods truly represent a false economy. To witness, Babette's plastic shoes look to be falling apart, the straps severed and the soles loose and flapping—subjecting her lithe feet to fingernail and busted-glass abrasions—while my own sturdy Bass Weejun loafers barely appear to be broken in by our lengthy underworld trek.

As we gaze out across the vast squirming, humming pudding of insect life, a scream approaches us from behind. There, sprinting between the hills of nail parings, panting and running, comes a bearded figure dressed in the toga of a Roman senator. Craning his neck to glance backward Over his shoulder, the man races toward us, screaming the word Psezpolnica . Screaming, "Psezpolnica!"

At the cliff's edge, teetering near where we stand, the lunatic toga man points a quaking finger in the direction he's come. Beseeching us with his wide-open eyes, he screams, Psezpolnica!" and dives, plummeting, flailing, falling to vanish beneath the seething surface of bug life. Once, twice, three times the toga man comes up for air; his mouth is choked with beetles. Crickets and spiders sting and strip t he flesh from his twitching arms. Earwigs swarm, eating deep into his eye sockets, and millipedes weave through ragged, bloody holes nibbled between his now-exposed rib bones.

As we watch in horror, wondering what could drive a person to such an extreme course of action... Babette, Patterson, Leonard, Archer, and I... we turn in unison to see a lumbering, towering figure approach.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It might amuse you to hear we were beset by a demon of thrilling size. This precipitated the most amazing act of heroism and self-sacrifice—really, from the least likely person among our company. In addition I've included more of my own background, in the event you're interested in learning more about me as an interesting, fully faceted overweight person.