"Antonio," my mother says, "let's not go down that road." To me, she says, "Young lady, are you absolutely sure you don't want a Xanax?"
In the center of the tiny pornographic movie, the hideous little orgy is interrupted. The words Incoming Call superimpose themselves over the grappling bodies. A red light blinks at the top of the PDA case, and a shrill bell rings. My dad says, "Wait," and he holds the PDA to his ear, where the gruesome assemblage of entwined limbs and genitals squirm against his cheek; videotaped penises erupt their vile sputum dangerously near his eye and mouth. Answering the call thus, he says, "Hello?" He says, "Fine. We'll be downstairs in a moment."
I shake my head again, No. No, thank you, to the Xanax.
Already, my mom starts poking around inside her evening purse. "This isn't your real birthday present," she says, "but just in case…" What she hands me is round, a rolled batch of shiny plastic or vinyl, printed with the repeating pattern of a cartoon cat face. The plastic or foil feels so slick that it could be wet, too slick to easily hold on to; thus when I reach to take it from her hand, the roll drops to the floor, unspooling itself to reveal a seemingly endless series of the same cartoon cat face. The long plastic strip, quilted into little squares, this trails from my hand to the floor. The length of it gives off a powdery, hospital smell of latex.
By then, my parents are gone; they've swept out the door of the hotel suite before I realize I'm holding a fifteen-foot-long supply of Hello Kitty condoms.
XVIII
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Little by little, I forget my life on earth, how it felt to be alive and living, but today something happened which shocked me back to remembering — maybe not everything — but at least I realize how much I might be forgetting. Or suppressing.
The computerized autodialer in Hell makes it a top priority to call mostly numbers on the federal government's No Call List. I can practically smell the mercury-enhanced tuna casserole on the breath of people whose dinner I interrupt, even over the fiber-optic or whatever phone lines that connect earth and Hell, when they yell at me. Their dinner napkins still tucked into the collars of their T-shirts, flapping down their fronts, spotted with Hamburger Helper and Green Goddess salad dressing, these angry people in Detroit, Biloxi, and Allentown, they yell for me to, "Go to Hell…"
And yes, I might be a thoughtless, uncouth interloper into the savory ritual of their evening repast, but I'm way ahead of their hostile request.
This current day or month or century, I'm plugged into my workstation, getting shouted at, asking people their consumer preferences regarding ballpoint pens, when something new occurs. A telephone call comes through the system. An incoming call. Even as some meat loaf-eating moron shouts at me, a beep sound starts within my headset. Some kind of call-waiting sound. Whether this call's coming from earth or Hell, I can't begin to guess, and the caller identification is blocked. The instant the meat-loaf moron hangs up, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to clear my line, and say, "Hello?"
A girl's voice says, "Is this Maddy? Are you Madison Spencer?"
I ask, Who's calling?
"I'm Emily," the girl says, "from British Columbia." The thirteen-year-old. The girl with the really bad case of AIDS. She's *69'd me. Over the telephone, she says, "Are you really and truly dead?"
As a doornail, I tell her.
This Emily girl says, "The caller ID says your area code is for Missoula, Montana… "
I tell her, Same deal.
She says, "If I called you back, collect, would you accept the charges?"
Sure, I tell her. I'll try.
And — click — she hangs up on her end.
Granted it's not entirely ethical to make personal calls from Hell, but everybody does it. To one side of me, the punk kid, Archer, sits with his leather-jacketed elbow almost touching my cardigan-sweatered elbow. Archer toys with the big safety pin which hangs from his cheek, while into his headset he's saying, "… No, seriously, you sound gnarly-hot." He says, 'After your skin-cancer thing metastasizes, you and me need to totally hook up… "
At my opposite elbow, the brainiac Leonard stares forward, his eyes unfocused, telling his headset, "Queen's rook to G-five…"
Even as I sit here, my head clamped in a headset, the earpiece covering one ear and the microphone looped around to hang in front of my mouth, at the same time, Babette hovers over me, circling and snipping at my hair with the cuticle scissors from her purse, shaping me the most way-perfect pageboy haircut with straight-across bangs. Even she doesn't care that I'm socializing on Hell's dime.
My line rings again, and a mechanical voice says, "You have a collect phone call from…"
And the Canadian AIDS girl adds, "Emily."
The computer says, "Will you accept the charges?"
And I say, Yes.
Over the phone, Emily says, "I only called because this constitutes a way-terrible emergency." She says, "My parents want me to see a new shrink. Do you think I should go?"
Shaking my head, I tell her, "No way."
Babette's hand grips the back of my neck, her white-painted fingernails digging in until I hold still.
“And don't let them feed you full of Xanax, either," I say into the phone. From my personal experience, nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock. Or you see an Earth First! bumper sticker on the rear of his diesel Hummer H3T in the parking lot. Or you catch him picking his nose. Your precious confidant you expected would sort out your entire twisted psyche, who now harbors all your darkest confessions, he's just some jerk with a master's degree. To change the subject, I ask Emily how it was that she contracted AIDS.
"How else?" Emily says. "From my last therapist, of course."
I ask, Was he cute?
Emily shrugs audibly, saying, "Cute enough, for a sliding-scale therapist."
Toying with a strand of my hair, looping it around my finger, then pulling it to where my teeth can nibble the tips, I ask Emily what it's like to have AIDS.
Even over the phone, her eye roll is audible. "It's like being Canadian," she says. "You get used to it."
Trying to sound impressed, I say, "Wow." I say, "I guess people can get used to pretty much anything."
Just to make conversation, I ask if Emily has gotten her first period yet.
"Sure," Emily says, "but when your viral loads are this sky-high, menstruation is less like a big celebration of attaining womanhood, and more like a way-biologically hazardous toxic spill in your pants."
Without realizing it, I must still be biting my hair, because Babette slaps my hand away. She waves the little scissors in my face and gives me a stern look.
Over the phone, Emily says, "I figure that once I'm dead I can start dating." She says, "Is Corey Haim seeing anybody?"
I don't answer, not right away, not that instant, because a herd of new Hell inductees is crowding past my workstation. A regular flood of people has just arrived, still not entirely certain they're dead. Most of them wear leis made of silk flowers looped around their necks. The ones not wearing sunglasses have a stunned, worried look in their eyes. A mob that could easily be the entire population of some country, it's usually proof that something terrible has just befallen folks on earth.
Over the phone, I ask Emily if something awful just occurred. A major earthquake? A tidal wave? A nuclear bomb? Did a dam burst? Of the milling, stunned newcomers, most appear to be wearing vivid Hawaiian-print shirts, with cameras slung on cords hanging around their necks. These people all boast roasted-red sunburns, some with white stripes of zinc oxide smeared across the bridge of their nose.