Damned

In order to keep the various bloodthirsty armies occupied and out of my hair, I've ordered them to capture and paint all the noxious bats of Hell red and blue, to pass for cardinals and bluebirds. The industrious butchers previously employed by Pol Pot and Madame Defarge, I've dispatched them to fabricate bright butterfly wings out of colorful construction paper and glitter, then glue these false wings to the real wings of our ever-present houseflies. Not only does this spruce up the normally dismal atmosphere of the underworld, it also prevents what would be the inevitable clashes between Mongolian hordes and Nazi storm troopers and Egyptian charioteers. Most important, it keeps them all busy and allows me to spend my time touring Emily around, eating Milky Ways, and discussing boys.

Throughout our relaxed amble, I remark on possible improvements to the landscape, a flowering dogwood here, a reflecting pool there, perhaps an aviary of colorful parrots, each of which Emily dutifully makes note of on a clipboard she carries.

The potentially needy mobs of newly dead, those anxious souls I've enrolled in dying and relocating to Hell, I've delegated those folks to various other reclamation projects. Really, I could pass as no less than the FDR of the afterlife, what with all the dams I've decreed be build across rivers of scalding blood. I've ordered other work teams to dig channels and drain expansive marshes of rank perspiration; thanks to me the ancient Sweat Swamps of Hell no longer exist. Lost souls who logged entire lifetimes in the study and practice of civil and structural engineering, those people are thrilled for the opportunity to put their existing skills to use. The rolling hills of semicoagulated mucus have been leveled. And an entire gulag of happily damned slave laborers does nothing except fashion false water lily blossoms from crepe paper and float their products on the surface of the Shit Lake.

More and more I see that Hell isn't so much a punitive conflagration as it is the natural result of aeons of deferred maintenance. Frankly put: Hell amounts to nothing more than a marginal neighborhood allowed to deteriorate to the extreme. Picture all the smoldering, underground coal mine fires expanding to rub elbows with all the burning tire dumps, throw in all the open cesspools and hazardous-waste landfills, and the inevitable result would be Hell, a situation hardly improved by the self-absorbed tendency of the residents to focus on their own misfortune and neglect to lift a dead finger in defense of their environment.

From our vantage point, strolling along the shores of the Sea of Insects, Emily and I survey the slow but certain improvements in the dismal landscape. I point out areas of interest: the roiling River of Hot Saliva... the buzzards circling Hitler and his distant colleagues relegated to their unspeakable place. I explain the seemingly arbitrary rules of which people run afoul, how each living person is allowed to use the F-word a maximum of seven hundred times. Most living persons haven't the slightest idea how easy it is to be damned, but should anyone say fuck for the 701st time, he or she is automatically doomed. Similar rules apply to personal hygiene; for example, the 855th time you fail to wash your hands after voiding your bowels or bladder, you're doomed. The three hundredth time you use the word nigger or the word fag, regardless of your personal race or sexual preference, you buy yourself that dreaded one-way ticket to the underworld.

Walking along, I tell Emily how the dead may send messages to the living. In the same way that living people send each other flowers or e-mails, a dead person may send a living person a stomachache or tinnitus or a nagging melody which will occupy the alive person's attention to the point of madness.

The pair of us walking along, idly examining the putrid, boiling landscape, apropos of nothing, Emily nonchalantly says, "I talked to that girl Babette, and she says you have a boyfriend...

I do not, I insist.

"His name," says Emily, "is Goran?"

I insist Goran is not my boyfriend.

Her eyes remaining fixed upon the notes she's jotted on her clipboard, Emily asks if I miss boys. What about prom? Do I miss the opportunity to date and get married and have my own children?