Damned

Trotting along, still borne aloft in our giant's hand, we draw closer to the complex of buildings which now appear to spread far beyond the horizon, covering acres, even square miles of Hellish real estate. Along the outer edges, the buildings' perimeter consists of postmodern pastiche, a collage of styles borrowing heavily from Michael Graves and I. M. Pei, with an assortment of laborers already excavating and laying the foundations for an ever-spreading series of additions ribbed to suggest the undulating forms of Frank Gehry. Within this outer margin stand concentric circles of older additions, like the rings of a bisected tree, each inner ring identifiable with the fashion of an earlier era. Adjacent to the PoMo sections rise the boxy glass towers of the International style. Within those lie the campy futuristic spires of the Art Deco, then the Period Revival of Victorian times, the Federal, the Georgian, the Tudor, Egyptian, Chinese, Tibetan palace architecture, Babylonian minarets, all of it comprising an ever-widening history of building. Even as the edges expand, covering land almost as rapidly as the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, at the same time the buildings' ancient core is rotting and collapsing.

As Psezpolnica stands at the buildings' outskirts, from this height we can see that the oldest, inner portions, predating the Etruscan and Incan and Mesopotamian, those lowers and chambers at the center have crumbled to decayed wood and clay dust.

Here, this place is the nerve center, the headquarters of Hell.

Leonard shouts upward, "Ovdje."

At this, the giant stops walking.

Snaking away from the outermost walls of the building, way-long queues of people stand waiting in line. Literally, no exaggeration, miles of the damned. Each queue leads to a different doorway, and every so often the people in a line step forward as someone enters.

Leonard shouts, "Prekid." He shouts, "Ovdje, please."

Hearing this strange Slavic babble, I wonder how close it comes to the language of Goran's thoughts. The cryptic, mysterious lingo of my beloved Goran's memories and dreams. Goran's native tongue. To be entirely honest, I'm not certain from which war-torn homeland my Goran even harkened.

And yes, I've sworn off hoping, but a girl can still carry a torch.

As we approach the tail end of one long queue, Leonard says, "Spustati. Sledeic."

Babette says, "Is this even the same year?”

Only in Hell do you wish a wristwatch included the day, date, and century functions.

At this, Psezpolnica sinks to one knee, leaning forward to carefully, gently lower us back to the ground.

XII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. If you can tolerate yet another admission on my part, I've never been very adept at taking tests. Trust me, I'm not trying to lay the blame elsewhere, but I loathe the kind of game-show context in which so much of our lives is determined: proving my memory and mental skills in a sedentary situation under the pressure of limited time. While death has its obvious drawbacks, it is a blessing that I now have an unassailably valid excuse to not take the SATs. However, it seems that I've not entirely dodged that dreaded bullet.

At the present I'm sitting in a small room, seated in a straight-backed chair next to a desk. Picture the archetypal all-white room, featuring no windows, which Jungian analysts say best represents death. A demon with cat's claws and folded leathery wings leans close to adjust a blood-pressure cuff which is wrapped around my upper arm, inflating the cuff until I can feel my pulse throbbing along the inside of my elbow. Sticky pads hold the wires of a heart-rate monitor to the skin of my chest, snaking between the buttons on my blouse. Adhesive tape holds another wire which monitors the pulse at my wrist. Other sensors are wired to the front and back of my neck.

"To monitor the tremors in your speech patterns," Leonard explained. One sensor sticks to the cricothyroid muscle on the front of your neck, he says. Another sensor, the cricoarytenoid muscle on the back of your neck, near your spine. As you speak, a low-voltage current runs between the two sensors, registering any microtremors in the muscles which control your voice box, indicating when you're telling an untruth.

The demon with the leathery wings and cat's claws, his breath smells putrid.