Probably I shouldn't even tell you this—the job market is tight enough as it is—but if you have any aspirations to earn your daily Junior Mints, you need to find a career and get working.
Not that you'll ever actually die—not you—not after all the antioxidants you've choked down and all those laps around the reservoir. Ha!
But just in case you don't want to spend eternity giving yourself high colonics on some sleazy Web site, ogled by mil-lions of men with serious intimacy problems, the other type of work which most people do in Hell is—telemarketing. Yes, this means sitting at a desk, elbow-to-elbow with fellow doomed telemarketing associates who stretch to the horizon in either direction, all of you yakking on headsets.
My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it's dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone's meal. My goal isn't actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets. I get to wear my headset telephone and work from a flowchart of possible responses. Best of all, I get to talk to real-live people—like yourself—who are still living and breathing and have no idea that I'm dead and phoning them from the Afterlife. Trust me, the vast majority of telemarketing people who ring you up, they're dead. As are pretty much all Internet porn models.
Okay, it's not as if I'm practicing brain surgery or tax law, but it beats sticking crayons inside my hoo-hoo on a Web site called "Crazy Nympho Girly Pleasures Self Using School Supply [sic]."
The autodialer connects me to somebody alive, and I say, "I'm conducting a market study to better serve the chewing gum consumers in your area...Do you have a moment to answer a few questions?" If the alive person hangs up, the computer connects me to a new phone number. If the living person answers my questions, the flowchart instructs me to ask more. Each person seated at the phone bank has a laminated sheet of questions, more questions than you could count. The point is to impose on the respondent, always entreating to ask just one more question, please... until the would-be diner loses their composure, and their mood and evening meal are both ruined.
Once you're dead and in Hell your options are either to do something trivial, but in a very self-important manner, for instance, market research about paper-clip usage. Or you can do something serious in a very trivial manner, for instance, looking bored and disengaged while taking a poop into a crystal dish and eating it with a silver spoon— the poop, I mean, not the dish.
If you asked my dad about selecting any kind of professional career, he'd tell you, "Don't make a date with a heart attack." Meaning: You've got to pace yourself and not forget to slow down. No job is forever. So relax and have some fun.
With that goal in mind, I let my attention wander. While hungry alive people wheedle to end our conversation, begging that their pot roast is growing cold, I'm actually thinking, musing whether my mother would've acted differently had she known I had fewer than forty-eight hours to live. In hindsight, I wonder, if she'd known about my impending demise, would she still have cheaped out and planned to give me her swag bag of Academy Award luxury crap in lieu of a real birthday present. If she'd known the clock was ticking, I mean, and most of the sand had already run out from my hourglass.
Asking hungry people about their dental floss preferences, I remember how, when I was really young, I thought the United States would just keep adding states, sewing more and more stars to our flag until we owned the entire world. I mean, why stop at fifty? Why stop with Hawaii? It seemed natural that Japan and Africa would eventually be absorbed into the starry part of our national flag. In the past we'd pushed aside the pesky Navajos and Iroquois to create Californians and Texans. We could do the same with Israel and Belgium and finally achieve world peace. When you're a little kid, you really do think that getting bigger— growing tall, sprouting big muscles and breasts—will be the answer to all of your problems. That's how my mom still is: always acquiring new houses in other cities. Ditto for my dad: always trying to collect appreciative kids from awful places like Darfur and Baton Rouge.
The problem is, troubled kids never stay saved. The Rwandan brother I had for about two hours, he ran off with my debit card. My Bhutanese little sister of about a day, she kept downing the Xanax my mom was happy to offer... and spiraled into drug abuse. Nothing stays safe. Even our homes in Hamburg and London and Manila sit empty, tempting burglars and hurricanes and collecting dust.
And Goran, well, the way that adoption ultimately turned out, it's difficult to call his rescue a Big Success.
Yes, I can recognize my parents' faulty logic, but if I'm so talented-and-gifted, why is it that the only authors I've ever read are Emily Bronte and Daphne du Maurier and Judy Blume? Why have I read Forever Amber, like, two hundred times? Seriously, if I were truly-truly brilliant, I'd be alive and skinny, and the structure of this story would be one epically long homage to Marcel Proust.
Instead, on my telephone headset, I'm asking some stupid alive person what colors of cotton swab would best complement her primary bathroom decorating scheme. On a scale of one to ten, I'm asking how she would rate the following flavors of lip gloss: warm honey... saffron breeze... ocean mint... lemon glow... blue sapphire... creamy rose... tangy ember... and douche-berry.
In regard to my polygraph test, Babette says not to hold my breath. Collating the results can take forever. Until we hear something back, she says I should just hang tight and do my telephone job. A few chairs away from me, Leonard asks someone about toilet paper. Beside him, Patterson sits in his football uniform, asking someone their opinion concerning mosquito repellent. Near them, Archer holds his headset to the side of his face, so it doesn't smash his blue Mohawk, while he seeks public opinions about a candidate for political office.
According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellhound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads. For whatever reason, people standing shorter than five-foot-one are more likely to be condemned. Also, people with a body mass index greater than 0.0012. Babette begins spouting these stats and you'd swear she was autistic. Just because she once worked processing paperwork for incoming souls, she can tell you that blondes outnumber brunettes three to one in Hell. People with at least two years of continuing education beyond high school are almost six times more likely to be damned. As are people earning more than a seven-figure annual income.
Bearing all of this in mind, I figure my parents have roughly a 165 percent likelihood of joining me forever.
And no, I have no idea how "douche-berry" is supposed to taste.
Over my own headset, some old-lady voice crackles, droning on and on about the flavor of something called "Beech-Nut" chewing gum, and over the telephone I swear I can smell the pee stink of her nine hundred cats. Her old-lady breathing sounds wet and full of static, popping and rasping from her old throat, the lisping effect of ill-fitted dentures, the shouted volume of age-related hearing loss, and she allows me to go deeper into the flowchart than anyone I've ever called. Already we're at the twelfth level, topic four, question seventeen: flavored toothpicks, for God's sake.
I'm asking, Would she consider purchasing toothpicks artificially treated to taste like chocolate? Like beef? Like apples? Then I realize how desperately lonely and isolated this old lady must feel. Probably I'm the only human contact she's enjoyed all day, and her meat loaf or rice pudding sits rotting on the plate in front of her because she's more starved for communication with another person.