A joyous, shrill cry of laughter escapes my mother's mouth. A pure gasp of relief.
And yes, I assure them, I am thirteen and still their precious baby girl and dead… but I reside forevermore in serene, peaceful Heaven.
XXXIV
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My dead posse and I are planning a little pilgrimage back to hobnob among the living. And to plunder the earth for its wealth of candy.
Leonard goes after the candy corn, those faux kernels of gritty sugar striped in colors of white, orange, and yellow. Patterson craves the chocolate-flavored known as Tootsie Rolls. Archer covets the overly sweet blend of peanuts and toffee marketed as Bit-O-Honey. For Babette, it's peppermint Certs.
As Leonard explains, Halloween is the only regular occasion on which the dead of Hell can revisit the living on earth. From dusk until midnight, the damned may walk — fully visible — among the living. The fun ends with the stroke of midnight; and like Cinderella, missing that curfew merits a special punishment. As Babette describes it, any tardy souls are forced to wander the earth for a year, until dusk of the next Halloween. Thanks to the melted plastic of her dead Swatch, Babette missed the deadline once and was banished to loitering, invisible and unheard, among the self-obsessed living for twelve boring months.
In preparation for our Halloween foray, we sit in a group, sewing, gluing, cutting our costumes. Chess-champion, brain-trust Leonard rips the hem from a pair of pants; with his teeth, he bites and frays the pant legs. 'Scooping a caramels better handful of cinders and ash from the ground, Leonard rubs these into the pants. He soils a tattered shirt and wipes his dirty palms to blacken his face.
Watching, I ask if he's supposed to be a hobo? A tramp?
Leonard shakes his head no.
I ask, "A zombie?"
Leonard shakes his head no and says, “ I’m a fifteen-year-old slave copyist who died in the fire which destroyed the great library of Ptolemy the First in Alexandria."
"That was my next guess," I say. Exhaling breath onto the blade and polishing my jeweled dagger, I ask why Leonard chose that particular costume.
"It's not a costume," Patterson says, and laughs. "That's what he was. It's how he died."
Leonard might look and act like a contemporary kid, but he's been dead since the year 48 B.C. Patterson, with his football uniform and all-American fresh-faced good looks, he explains this while polishing a bronze helmet. Removing his football helmet, he fits the bronze one over his curly hair. "I'm an Athenian foot soldier killed doing battle with the Persians in 490 B.C."
Drawing a comb through her hair, the red scars clearly showing on her wrists, Babette explains, "I am the great Princess Salome, who demanded the death of John the Baptist and was punished by being torn apart by wild dogs."
Leonard says, "You wish."
"Okay," Babette confesses, "I'm a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, and ended my own life rather than face the guillotine in 1792….."
Patterson says, "Liar."
Leonard adds, "And you aren't Cleopatra, either.”
"Okay," Babette says, "it was the Spanish Inquisition… I think. Don't laugh, but it's been so long I don't really remember."
On Halloween, custom requires the dead to not merely revisit the earth, but to do so in the guise of their former lives. Thus, Leonard becomes once more an ancient dweeb. Patterson, a Bronze Age jock. Babette, a tortured witch or whatever. That some of my newfound friends have been dead for centuries, some for millennia, this makes the present moment we're seated together, stitching and polishing, seem all the more fragile and fated and precious.
"Fuck that," says little Emily. She's clearly sewing an elaborate skirt of tulle, decorating it with gems she's gathered from comatose and distraught souls. Stitching away, she says, "I'm not trick-or-treating as a dumb Canadian girl with AIDS." Emily says, "I'm going to be a fairy princess."
In secret, I dread the thought of roaming among the alive. Due to the fact that this is the first Halloween since my demise, I can only shudder at the idea of how many Miss Skuzzy Vanderskuzzies will be out wandering with Hello Kitty condoms looped around their necks, their faces anoxic with blue makeup in a cheap parody of my own tragic end. Walking in those few hours, will I be continually confronted by insensitive revelers as they make fun of me? Like Emily, I consider appearing as some stock character: a genie or angel or ghost. Another possible option is to take my evil armies back to earth and compel them to carry me around in a golden sedan chair while we hunt down my various Snarky Miss Snarky-pants enemies and terrorize them. I could carry Tiger Stripe and present myself as a witch accompanied by her familiar.
Perhaps sensing my reluctance, Leonard asks, "You okay?"
To which I simply shrug. It doesn't help my mood, remembering how I lied to my parents over the telephone.
The only thing that makes Hell feel like Hell, I remind myself, is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.
"This might cheer you up," says a voice. Unbeknownst to me, Archer has entered our company, and instead of a costume, he carries a thick file folder. Holding the folder in one hand, he uses his other to pinch a sheet of paper from the contents and withdraw it. Holding the sheet aloft for everybody to see, Archer says, "Who says you only live once?"
Stamped on the sheet of paper, in red block letters, is the single word approved.
XXXV
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. If you'll forgive me, I need to jump backward for a moment. Funny… me asking for the Devil's forgiveness.
The sheet of paper Archer held aloft, it's my appeal. It's the blah, blah, blah form for reconsideration, which Babette filed on my behalf in response to the results of my polygraph-y salvation test. It could be that my soul has actually been found innocent, and the powers that be are righting their mistake. More likely, what's happened is more political, and my growing political strength — the newly dead recruits I've garnered from earth, and the armies I've gathered — poses such a threat that the demons are willing to release me if that means retaining their overall power. What it all boils down to is… I no longer have to stay in Hell. I no longer even have to be dead.
I can go back to earth, to be with my parents, to live whatever lifetime I have allotted. I'll be able to menstruate and have babies and eat avocados.
The only problem is, I told my parents we'd be together for all time. Yes, of course, I told them we'd all be in Heaven with the Buddha and Martin Luther King Jr. and Teddy Kennedy smoking hashish or whatnot… but I WAS only trying to spare their feelings. Honestly, my motivation was fairly noble. Really, I just wanted them to stop crying.
No, I'm not completely unrealistic about my parents' slim chances of attaining Heaven. To that end, talking over the telephone, I'd made my father promise to honk his car horn at least a hundred times each day. I'd sworn my mother to constantly use the word fuck and to always drop her cigarette butts outdoors. With their existing track record, these behaviors would way guarantee their assured damnation. Forever in Hell is still forever, and at least we'd all be together as an intact nuclear family.
Even as he wept, I forced my father to promise that he'd never pass up an opportunity to break wind in a crowded elevator. My mom I made promise to urinate in every hotel swimming pool she'd ever enter. Divine law allows each person to pass gas in only three elevators, and to urinate in the shared water of only two swimming pools. This is regardless of your age, so most people are already relegated to Hell by the age of five.