Splayed there on the carpet, I'm reduced to the status of the cooling food which surrounds me: my life only partially consumed. Wasted. Soon to be consigned to the garbage. My swollen, livid face and blue lips, they're merely a conglomerate of rancid fats, so like the old onion rings and stale potato chips. My precious life, rendered nothing more than congealing and coagulating liquids. Desiccating proteins. A rich banquet only nibbled at. Barely tasted. Rejected and discarded and alone.
Yes, I know I sound quite cold, insensitive to the pathetic sight of a thirteen-year-old Birthday Girl dead on the floor of a hotel suite, but any other attitude would overwhelm me with self-pity. Floating here, I want nothing more than to go back and to fix this hideous error. In this moment, I've lost both my parents. I've lost Goran. Worst of all, I've lost… myself. In all my romantic scheming, I've ruined everything.
On television, my mom puckers her lips. She presses the fingers of her manicured hand to her lips, then blows me a kiss.
Goran drops the ends of the condom strip and gazes down on my body, a stricken look on his face. He leaps to his feet, dashing into the bedroom, then reemerges wearing his coat. He doesn't take the room key. He doesn't intend to return. Nor does he call 911. My beloved, the object of my romantic affection, simply races from the hotel suite without so much as a single look back.
XXIV
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Ask me the square root of pi. Ask me how many pecks are in a bushel. Ask me anything about the truncated, tragic life of Charlotte Bronte. I can tell you exactly when Joyce Kilmer died in the Second Battle of the Marne. I can tell you the combination of keys, Ctrl+Alt+S or Ctrl+Alt+Q, which will access the security cameras or manipulate the lighting and window treatments of my sealed bedrooms in Copenhagen or Oslo, those rooms my mother has air-conditioned down to meat locker… down to archival temperatures, where the electrostatic air filters prohibit a speck of dust to ever settle, where my clothes and shoes and stuffed animals wait in the darkness, locked away from sun fade and humidity, patient as the alabaster jars and gilded toys which accompanied any boy pharaoh into his eternal tomb. Ask me about the ecology in Fiji and the amusing personal habits of tony Hollywood gadabouts. Ask me to describe the political machinations embedded in the all-girls culture of a très-reserved Swiss boarding school. Just do NOT ask me how I'm feeling. Do not ask if I still miss my parents. Don't ask if I still cry from being so homesick. Of course the dead miss the living.
Personally, I myself miss sipping Twinings English Breakfast Tea and reading Elinor Glyn novels on rainy days. I miss smelling the citrus tang of Bain de Soleil, cheating at backgammon against our Somali maids, and practicing the gavotte and the minuet.
But on a larger scale, to be brutally honest, the dead miss everything.
In my desperation to talk, for the comfort of a little chat therapy, I telephone Canadian Emily, and a woman answers the phone. When she asks my name I tell her that I'm Emily's friend from long distance and ask if Emily can please come talk, just for a minute. Please.
At this, the woman begins to sniff, then sob. Over the telephone, she's drawing deep shuddering breaths, choked with guttering sobs. Keening. "Emily," she says, "my baby…" Her words dissolving into cries, she says, "My baby girl's gone back into the hospital…" The woman rallies, sniffing, asking if she can relay a message from me to Emily.
And yes, despite all my considerable Swiss training in decorum, regardless of my hippie training in empathy, over the telephone I ask, "Is Emily about to die?"
No, it's not fair, but what makes life feel like Hell is our expectation that it should last forever. Life is short. Dead is forever. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset.
"Yes," the woman says, her voice hoarse, deep with emotion. "Emily is about to die." Her voice flat with resignation, she asks, "Would you like me to tell her something for you?"
And I say, "Never mind."
I say, "Don't let her forget to bring my ten Milky Way candy bars."
XXV
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Helclass="underline" It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.
And, yes, while the dead do miss everything and everybody, they don't hang around the earth forever.
This one time, my dad flew our Learjet to attend some stockholder meeting in Prague, except that same day, my mom needed to be in Nairobi to collect some harelip-and-cleft-palate orphan or a film-festival award or some dumb something, so she leased a jet to fly her and me, except the leasing time-share jet people… they sent the exact diametrically WRONG kind of jet from what my mother had ordered, thoughtlessly dispatching one with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and hand-painted frescoes on the ceilings, exactly the sort of jet which younger members of the Saudi royal family would hire to fly a harem of Miss Coozey Coozerbilt call girls to Kuwait, and it was too late to send a different jet, and my mom went nuts, she was just so way-aesthetically freaked out.
Well, walking into the hotel suite after the Academy Awards and stepping into about a billion half-eaten plates of old club sandwiches, then finding me dead and strangulated by a strip of Hello Kitty condoms — let's just say my mom freaked out even worse.
At that time my spirit was still hovering in the room, crossing my spiritual fingers that somebody might bother to call the paramedics, and they'd rush in and perform some resuscitation miracle. Needless to say Goran was long gone. He and I had hung the Do Not Disturb sign so the maid hadn't performed the turndown service. No chocolates rested on the bed pillows. All the lights were turned off, plunging the suite into total pitch-darkness. My parents enter, tiptoeing because they think Goran and I are fast asleep. It wasn't pretty.
No, it's never a special treat to watch your mom just scream and scream your name, then fall to her knees in a mess of ketchupy onion rings and cold prawn cocktails, grabbing at your dead shoulders, shaking you and yelling for you to wake up. It was my dad who called 911, but that was really, really way too late. The EMTs who came did more to treat my mom's hysterics than to rescue me. Of course the police came; they took as many photographs of me dead as People magazine had taken of me as a newborn baby. The homicide detectives lifted about a million of Goran's fingerprints off the strip of condoms. My mom took about a million Xanax, one after another. During all of this, my dad stalked over to the closet where Goran's new clothes were stored, threw open the closet door, and ripped the Ralph Lauren sportswear from the hangers, rending, shredding without a word shirts and trousers, buttons popping and ricocheting around the suite.
All that time, all night, I could merely watch, as detached and distant as my mother accessing security cameras on her laptop. Maybe I drew the hotel curtains closed, or turned on a light, but nobody seemed to notice. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.
It's power, but a kind of pointless, impotent power.
No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies… vampires… ghosts, always something threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.