Damned

My dad has a penchant for buying me stuffed animals. And, yes, I know the word penchant, although I'm still not certain what constitutes French-kissing.

God only knew what a cute Holly Hobbie or Hello Kitty tramp stamp would stretch and fade to become over the next sixty years. In the same way my parents imagined all the little boys and girls of the third world wanted to become them... my folks thought my childhood should be the childhood they'd wanted to have, resplendent with meaningless sex, recreational drugs, and rock music. Tattoos and body jewelry. All their peers feel pretty much the same, and it leads to children whom the public believes to be nine years old becoming pregnant. Thus the paradox of teaching nursery rhymes along with contraception skills. Birthday presents such as Hello Kitty diaphragms and Holly Hobbie spermicidal foam and Peter Rabbit crotchless panties.

Please don't imagine it's fun being me. My mom tells the stylist, "Maddy's not ready for bangs." She tells the wardrobe person, "Maddy's a little sensitive about her big bottom."

Don't imagine I even get to speak. On top of that, my mom complains that I never talk. My father would tell you that life is a game, and you need to roll up your sleeves and build something: Write a book. Dance a dance. To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. Perhaps that's what I admire about Goran: his distinct lack of hustle. Goran's the only person I know who's not negotiating a six-picture deal with Paramount. He's not staging a show of his paintings at the Musee d'Orsay. Nor is he having his teeth chemically bleached. Goran simply is. He's not secretly lobbying for the stupid Academy of stupid Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give him a shiny statue while a zillion people stand and applaud. He's not campaigning to build his market share. Wherever Goran is at this moment—sitting or standing, laughing or crying—he's doing it with the clarity of an infant who knows that no one will ever come to his rescue.

While technicians blast her upper lip with lasers, my mom says, "Isn't this fun, Maddy? Just us two, together..." Whenever fewer than fourteen people are clutching at us, my mother considers that to be private mother-daughter "alone time."

No, whether he's alone or observed by millions, whether he's loved or loathed, Goran would be the same person. Maybe that's what I love most about him—that he's so much NOT like my parents. Or like anyone I know.

Goran absolutely, positively does NOT need love.

A manicurist with a Gypsy accent, something leftover from some country where brokers analyze the stock market by reading pigeon entrails, this woman buffs my nails, holding my hand cradled in her own. After a moment, she turns my hand palm up and looks at the new, red skin where I'd left my frozen skin stuck to the door handle in Switzerland. She doesn't say anything, this bug-eyed Gypsy manicurist, but she's clearly marveling at how my wrinkles have been erased. How both my lifeline and love line have not merely stopped—but vanished. Still cupping my red hand in her own coarse, rough fingers, the manicurist looks from my palm to my face, and with the fingers of her other hand, she touches her forehead, her chest, her shoulders, making a fast sign of the cross.

XVI.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Over the phone today, I made a new friend. She's not dead, not yet, but I can tell we're going to be way-total best friends.

According to my wristwatch I've been dead for three months, two weeks, five days, and seventeen hours. Subtract that from infinity and you get some idea why loads of doomed souls abandon all their hope. Not to boast, but I've managed to stay reasonably presentable despite the overall grimy local conditions. Lately I've taken to scrubbing my telephone headset and giving my chair a good dusting before I make any calls. At the moment I'm talking with an elderly shut-in who lives, alone, in the Memphis, Tennessee, area code. The unfortunate lady is trapped at home for days at a time, debating whether to suffer through yet another round of chemotherapy despite the lessening quality of her life.

The poor infirm woman has answered nearly every question I've thrown at her about chewing gum preferences, about paper-clip buying habits, about her consumption of cotton swabs. I've long ago come out to her about being thirteen years old and dead and relegated to Hell. For my part, I'm pitching her that death is a breeze, and if she has any question about whether she'd go to Heaven or Hell, this lady needs to run out immediately and commit some heinous crime. Hell, I tell her, is the happening place.

"Jackie Kennedy Onassis is here," I tell her over the phone. " You know you want to meet her... ."