Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385533140
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T10:00:00+00:00

XVI.

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. Over the phone today, I made a new friend. She’s not dead, not yet, but I can tell we’re going to be way-total best friends.

ccording to my wristwatch I’ve been dead for three months, two weeks, five days, and seventeen hours. Subtract that from infinity and you get some idea why loads of doomed souls abandon all their hope. Not to boast, but I’ve managed to stay reasonably presentable despite the overall grimy local conditions. Lately I’ve taken to scrubbing my telephone headset and giving my chair a good dusting before I make any calls. At the moment I’m talking with an elderly shut-in who lives, alone, in the Memphis, Tennessee, area code. The unfortunate lady is trapped at home for days at a time, debating whether to suffer through yet another round of chemotherapy despite the lessening quality of her life.

The poor infirm woman has answered nearly every question I’ve thrown at her about chewing gum preferences, about paper-clip buying habits, about her consumption of cotton swabs. I’ve long ago come out to her about being thirteen years old and dead and relegated to Hell. For my part, I’m pitching her that death is a breeze, and if she has any question about whether she’d go to Heaven or Hell, this lady needs to run out immediately and commit some heinous crime. Hell, I tell her, is the happening place.

“Jackie Kennedy Onassis is here,” I tell her over the phone. “You know you want to meet her.…”

Really, all the Kennedys are hereabouts, but that larger fact might not be such a great selling tool.

Still, despite the pain from her cancer and the sickening side effects of her treatments, the Memphis lady has her reservations about abandoning her life.

I warn her that in no way do people simply arrive in Hell and achieve some instantaneous type of enlightenment. Nobody finds themselves locked within a grimy cell, then slaps a palm to their forehead and says, “No duh! I’ve been a total asshole!”

No one’s histrionics are magically resolved. If anything, people’s character flaws spin out of control. In Hell, bullies remain bullies. Angry people are still angry. People in Hell pretty much keep doing the negative behavior which earned them a one-way ticket.

And, I warn the cancer lady, don’t expect any guidance or mentoring from the demons. Not unless you’re palming them a constant supply of Chick-O-Sticks and Heath bars. The demonic bureaucracy, they might pretend to shuffle some papers in an officious manner, then promise to review your file, but their attitude is: Well, you’re in Hell, so you must’ve done something. In that way, Hell is awfully passive-aggressive. As is earth. As is my mother.

If you believe Leonard, this is how Hell breaks people down—by permitting them to act out to greater and greater extremes, becoming vicious caricatures of themselves, earning fewer and fewer rewards, until they finally realize their folly. Perhaps, I muse over the telephone, that is the one effective lesson which one learns in Hell.

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