Damned

Just as the earth is ruled by a hierarchy of leaders, Leonard says, so too is Hell. Most theologians, including Alphonsus de Spina, describe Hell as having ten orders of demons. Among those are 66 princes, each overseeing 6,666 legions, and each legion comprises 6,666 demons. Among them is Valafar, the grand duke of Hell; Rimmon, the chief physician of Hell; Ukobach, the leading engineer of Hell, and reputed to have invented fireworks and presented them as a gift to mankind. Leonard rattles off the names: Zaebos, who boasts the head of a crocodile on his shoulders... Kobal, the patron demon of human comedians... Succorbenoth, the demon of hate....

Leonard says, "It's like Dungeons and Dragons, only to the tenth power." He says, "Seriously, the biggest brains of the Middle Ages devoted their entire lives to this type of theological bean counting and number crunching."

Shaking my head, I say that I wish my parents had.

Periodically along our journey, Leonard stops to point out a figure in the distance. One, flying across the orange sky, flapping pale wings of melting dripping wax, this is Troian, the night demon of Russian culture. Flying along a different trajectory, peering down with the wide head and luminous eyes of an owl, this is Tlacatecolototl, the Mexican god of evil. Wrapped in cyclone winds of rain and dust, there are Japanese Oni demons, who traditionally live at the center of hurricanes.

What the Human Genome Project would represent for future researchers, Leonard explains, this great inventory represented for previous centuries of world leaders.

According to the bishop de Spina, a third of Heaven s angels were cast into Hell, and this divine downsizing, this celestial housecleaning, took nine full days—two days longer than it took God to create the Earth. In all, a total of 133,306,668 angels—including much-revered former cherubim, potentates, seraphim, and dominations—were forcibly relocated, among them Asbeel and Gaap, Oza and Marut and Urakabarameel.

Ahead of us, where she walks arm in arm with Patterson, Babette cuts loose with a peal of laughter, loud and shrill mid as fake as her counterfeit shoes.

Archer glares at their backs, the big safety pin bunched in the muscles of his clenched jaw.

Leonard name-drops about the different demons whom we might stumble across: Baal, Beelzebub, Belial, Liberace, Diabolos, Mara, Pazuzu—an Assyrian with a bat's head and scorpion's tail—Lamashtu—a Sumerian she-devil who suckles a pig with one breast and a dog with the other— or Namtaru—the Mesopotamian version of our modern grim reaper. We look for Satan with the same intensity that my mom and dad looked for God.

In retrospect my parents were always pushing me to expand my consciousness by huffing glue or gasoline or chewing peyote buttons. Simply because they'd done their time, wasted their teen years lolling in the muddy fields of Vermont and the salt flats of Nevada, naked except for rainbow face paints and a thick coating of sweaty filth, their heads festooned with fifty pounds of fetid dreadlocks, teeming with crab lice and pretending to find enlightenment... that does NOT mean I have to make that same mistake.

Sorry, Satan, once again I've said the G-word.

Without breaking stride, Leonard nods and points to indicate the former deities of now-defunct cultures, now warehoused in the underworld. Among them: Benoth, a god of the Babylonians; Dagon, an idol of the Philistines; Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians; Tartak, the god of the Hevites.

My suspicion is that my parents treasure their sordid recollections of episodes at Woodstock and Burning Man not because those pastimes led to wisdom, but because such folly was inseparable from a period of their lives when they were young and unburdened by obligation; they had free time, muscle tone, and their futures still looked like a great, grand adventure. Furthermore, both my mother and father had been free of social status and therefore had nothing to lose by cavorting nude, their swollen genitals smeared with muck.