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bloodied bones of the football man are assembling
themselves, pulling back together to form a human being, once more sheathing
themselves with muscle and skin, coming back to re-create the man himself,
restored in order to be tortured again, indefinitely, forever.
    His hunger seemingly satiated, the horned figure turns and begins
walking into the distance.
    In desperation, I scream. No, it's not fair; I did tell you that to
scream in Hell was to exhibit very bad form. I consider screaming to be a
complete impropriety, but I scream, "Mister Satan!"
    The towering, tailed figure is gone.
    From next door, Babette's voice says, "What day is it now?"
    If anything, life in Hell is like a vintage Warner Bros, cartoon where
characters are forever getting decapitated by guillotines and dismembered by
dynamite explosions, then being completely restored in time for the next
assault. It's a system not without both its comfort and its monotony.
    A voice says, "That's not Satan." From a nearby cell, a
teenage boy calls, "That was Ahriman, just a demon of the Iranian
desert." The teenage boy wears a short-sleeved, button-down shirt tucked
into chinos. He wears a thick submariner's wristwatch with deep-water diver
chronograph functions and a built-in calculator. On his feet, he wears
crepe-soled Hush Puppies, and his chinos are hemmed so short you can see his
white sweat socks. Rolling his eyes, shaking his head, the boy says,
"Geez, don't you know anything about basic ancient cross-cultural
theological anthropology?"
    Babette squats down and starts spit-shining her own bad shoes with
another wad of Kleenex. "Shut up, nerd," she mutters.
    "My mistake," I tell the boy. I point a finger at myself,
such a lame gesture—even in the sweltering heat of Hell I can feel myself
blushing—and I say, "I'm Madison."
    "I know," the boy says. "I've got ears."
    Just seeing the boy's brown eyes... the terrible, horrible threat of
hope swells inside my tubby self.
    Ahriman, he explains, is nothing more than a deposed deity native to
ancient Persian culture. He was the twin of Ohrmazd, born of the god Zurvan the
Creator. Ahriman is responsible for poison, drought, famine, scorpions, mostly
stereotypical desert stuff. His own son is named Zohak and has venomous snakes
which grow from the skin of his shoulders. According to this teenage boy, the
only food these snakes will eat is human brains. All this... it's so much the
gruesome trivia an adolescent boy would bother to know. So way-totally D&D.
    Babette buffs her fingernails against the strap of her bag, ignoring
us.
    The teenage boy jerks his head in the direction where the horned figure
disappeared, saying, "Usually he hangs out on the far side of the Vomit
Pond, just west from the River of Hot Saliva, over on the opposite shore of
Shit Lake...." The boy shrugs and says, "For a ghoul, he's pretty
rad."
    Babette's voice pipes up; interrupting, she says, 'Ahriman ate me, one
time...." Seeing the expression on the boy's face, looking at the tented
front of his chinos, Babette says, "NOT in that way, you gross, puny
little twerp."
    Yes, I might be dead and suffering from a world-class inferiority
complex, but I can recognize an erection when I see one. Even as the stinking,
poop-scented air around us swarms with fat, black houseflies, I ask the boy,
"What's your name?"
    "Leonard," he says.
    I ask, "What are you condemned to Hell for?"
    "Jerking off," Babette says.
    Leonard says, "Jaywalking."
    I ask, "Do you like The Breakfast Club?"
    He says, "What's that?"
    I ask, "Do you think I'm pretty?"
    The boy, Leonard, his dreamy brown eyes flit all over me, alighting
like wasps on my stubby legs, my pop-bottle eyeglasses, my crooked nose and
flat chest. He glances at Babette. He looks at me, again, his eyebrows jump up
toward his hairline, wrinkling his forehead into long accordion folds. He
smiles, but shakes his head, No.
    "Just testing," I say, and cover my own smile by pretending
to scratch the eczema I don't have