Damned

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.

And, yes, while the dead do miss everything and everybody, they don't hang around the earth forever.

This one time, my dad flew our Learjet to attend some stockholder meeting in Prague, except that same day, my mom needed to be in Nairobi to collect some harelip-and-cleft-palate orphan or a film-festival award or some dumb something, so she leased a jet to fly her and me, except the leasing time-share jet people... they sent the exact diametrically WRONG kind of jet from what my mother had ordered, thoughtlessly dispatching one with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and hand-painted frescoes on the ceilings, exactly the sort of jet which younger members of the Saudi royal family would hire to fly a harem of Miss Coozey Coozerbilt call girls to Kuwait, and it was too late to send a different jet, and my mom went nuts, she was just so way-aesthetically freaked out.

Well, walking into the hotel suite after the Academy Awards and stepping into about a billion half-eaten plates of old club sandwiches, then finding me dead and strangulated by a strip of Hello Kitty condoms—let's just say my mom freaked out even worse.

At that time my spirit was still hovering in the room, crossing my spiritual fingers that somebody might bother to call the paramedics, and they'd rush in and perform some resuscitation miracle. Needless to say Goran was long gone. He and I had hung the Do Not Disturb sign so the maid hadn't performed the turndown service. No chocolates rested on the bed pillows. All the lights were turned off, plunging the suite into total pitch-darkness. My parents enter, tiptoeing because they think Goran and I are fast asleep. It wasn't pretty.

No, it's never a special treat to watch your mom just scream and scream your name, then fall to her knees in a mess of ketchupy onion rings and cold prawn cocktails, grabbing at your dead shoulders, shaking you and yelling for you to wake up. It was my dad who called 911, but that was really, really way too late. The EMTs who came did more to treat my mom's hysterics than to rescue me. Of course the police came; they took as many photographs of me dead as People magazine had taken of me as a newborn baby. The homicide detectives lifted about a million of Goran's fingerprints off the strip of condoms. My mom took about a million Xanax, one after another. During all of this, my dad stalked over to the closet where Goran's new clothes were stored, threw open the closet door, and ripped the Ralph Lauren sportswear from the hangers, rending, shredding without a word shirts and trousers, buttons popping and ricocheting around the suite.

All that time, all night, I could merely watch, as detached and distant as my mother accessing security cameras on her laptop. Maybe I drew the hotel curtains closed, or turned on a light, but nobody seemed to notice. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.

It's power, but a kind of pointless, impotent power.

No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies... vampires... ghosts, always something threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.

That said, go ahead and laugh at me. You're still alive, so apparently you're doing something right. I'm dead, so go right ahead and kick sand in my fat, deceased face.

In the prejudiced, bigoted modern world, alive is alive. Dead is dead. And the two factions must not interact. This attitude is entirely understandable when you consider what the dead would do to property values and stock prices. Once the dead informed the living that material possessions were a big joke—ARE a big joke—well, the De Beers people could never sell another diamond. Pension funds would truly wither.