Chuck Palahniuk - Damned

Graciously, I accepted Tiger Stripe, then introduced Goran to Emily. The trio of us continued to stroll until obligation required I resume my telemarketing duties. My beloved kitty curled and snoozing in my lap, happily purring away, my headset firmly in place, I began to field survey calls as the central computer connected me to households, to breathing people alive in time zones where the evening meal was set to commence.

In one such residence, someplace with a familiar Californian area code, a man s voice answered the telephone, "Hello?"

"Hello, sir," I said, following by rote the script which dictated my every statement and response. Petting the cat at rest in my lap, I say, "May I have a few minutes of your time for an important consumer study concerning buying habits in relation to several competing brands of adhesive tape... ?"

If not adhesive tape, the topic would be something else just as mundane: aerosol furniture polish, dental floss, thumbtacks.

In the background, almost lost in the distance behind the man's voice, a woman's voice says, "Antonio? Are you ill?"

The woman's voice, like the telephone number, feels strangely familiar.

Still petting Tiger Stripe, I say, "This will only take a few moments......"

A beat of silence follows.

I say, "Hello?" I say, "Sir?"

Another beat of silence occurs, broken by a gasp, almost a sob, and the man's voice asks, "Maddy?"

Double-checking the telephone number, the ten-digit number which reads on my little computer screen, I recognize it.

Over my headset, the man says, "Oh, my baby... is that you?"

The woman's voice in the background says, "I'll grab the bedroom extension."

The telephone number is our unlisted line for the house in Brentwood. By sheer coincidence, the autodialer has connected me with my family. This man and woman are the former beatniks, former hippies, former Rastas, former anarchists—my former parents. A loud click sounds, someone lifting another receiver, and my mother's voice says, "Darling?" Not waiting for an answer, she begins to weep, begging, "Please, oh, my sweetness, please say something to us......"

At my elbow, brainiac Leonard sits at his workstation plotting chess moves against some alive adversary in New Delhi. On my opposite side, Patterson conspires with living football enthusiasts, keeping track of teams and quarterbacks, marking their statistics in the blank spaces of a fantasy spreadsheet. The business of Hell continues unabated, spread to either horizon. Elsewhere, the afterlife continues as usual, but within my headset, my mother's voice begs, "Please, Maddy... Please tell your daddy and me where we can come find you."

Sniffing, his voice choked and his breath exploding into the telephone receiver, my father sobs, "Please, baby, just don't hang up......" He sobs, "Oh, Maddy, we're so sorry we left you alone with that evil bastard."

"That..." my mother hisses, "that... assassin!"

My guess is that they're referring to Goran.

And yes, I've vanquished demons. I've deposed tyrants and taken command of their conquering armies. I'm thirteen years old, and I've shepherded thousands of dying people into the next life with relatively little upset. I never finished junior high school, but I'm overhauling the entire nature of Hell, on schedule and under budget. I deftly toss off words such as absentia and multivalent and convey, but I'm caught completely off guard by the sound of my parents' tears. For help lying, I finger the dried scrap of the Hitler mustache. For coldness, to quell the tears already building in my burning eyes, I consult the de Medicis crown. Over the telephone I tell my weeping mother and father to hush. It's true, I assure them: I am dead. In the icy voice of child killer Gilles de Rais, I tell my family I have passed out of fragile mortal life and now dwell in the eternal.

At this, their weeping subsides. In a hushed, hoarse whisper, my father asks, "Maddy?" In a voice weighted with awe, he asks, "Are you seated with the Buddha?"

In the lying voice of serial murderer Thug Behram, I tell my parents that everything they taught me about moral relativism, about recycling, about secular humanism and organic food and expanded Gaia consciousness—it's all turned out to be absolutely true.

A joyous, shrill cry of laughter escapes my mother's mouth. A pure gasp of relief.

And yes, I assure them, I am thirteen and still their precious baby girl and dead... but I reside forevermore in serene, peaceful Heaven.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My dead posse and I are planning a little pilgrimage back to hobnob among the living. And to plunder the earth for its wealth of candy.

Leonard goes after the candy corn, those faux kernels of gritty sugar striped in colors of white, orange, and yellow. Patterson craves the chocolate-flavored known as Tootsie Rolls. Archer covets the overly sweet blend of peanuts and toffee marketed as Bit-O-Honey. For Babette, it's peppermint Certs.

As Leonard explains, Halloween is the only regular occasion on which the dead of Hell can revisit the living on earth. From dusk until midnight, the damned may walk—fully visible—among the living. The fun ends with the stroke of midnight; and like Cinderella, missing that curfew merits a special punishment. As Babette describes it, any tardy souls are forced to wander the earth for a year, until dusk of the next Halloween. Thanks to the melted plastic of her dead Swatch, Babette missed the deadline once and was banished to loitering, invisible and unheard, among the self-obsessed living for twelve boring months.

In preparation for our Halloween foray, we sit in a group, sewing, gluing, cutting our costumes. Chess-champion, brain-trust Leonard rips the hem from a pair of pants; with his teeth, he bites and frays the pant legs. 'Scooping a caramels better handful of cinders and ash from the ground, Leonard rubs these into the pants. He soils a tattered shirt and wipes his dirty palms to blacken his face.

Watching, I ask if he's supposed to be a hobo? A tramp?

Leonard shakes his head no.

I ask, "A zombie?"

Leonard shakes his head no and says, “ I’m a fifteen-year-old slave copyist who died in the fire which destroyed the great library of Ptolemy the First in Alexandria."

"That was my next guess," I say. Exhaling breath onto the blade and polishing my jeweled dagger, I ask why Leonard chose that particular costume.

"It's not a costume," Patterson says, and laughs. "That's what he was. It's how he died."

Leonard might look and act like a contemporary kid, but he's been dead since the year 48 B.C. Patterson, with his football uniform and all-American fresh-faced good looks, he explains this while polishing a bronze helmet. Removing his football helmet, he fits the bronze one over his curly hair. "I'm an Athenian foot soldier killed doing battle with the Persians in 490 B.C."

Drawing a comb through her hair, the red scars clearly showing on her wrists, Babette explains, "I am the great Princess Salome, who demanded the death of John the Baptist and was punished by being torn apart by wild dogs."

Leonard says, "You wish."

"Okay," Babette confesses, "I'm a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, and ended my own life rather than face the guillotine in 1792....."

Patterson says, "Liar."

Leonard adds, "And you aren't Cleopatra, either.”

"Okay," Babette says, "it was the Spanish Inquisition... I think. Don't laugh, but it's been so long I don't really remember."

On Halloween, custom requires the dead to not merely revisit the earth, but to do so in the guise of their former lives. Thus, Leonard becomes once more an ancient dweeb. Patterson, a Bronze Age jock. Babette, a tortured witch or whatever. That some of my newfound friends have been dead for centuries, some for millennia, this makes the present moment we're seated together, stitching and polishing, seem all the more fragile and fated and precious.