Chuck Palahniuk: Damned

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......"

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.