Free Damned by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

new set of
rules about accounting for every girl. My legacy will be a ghost story which
girls my age will tell to scare each other after lights-out. Maybe I'll linger
as a naked spirit they glimpse in mirrors, outside windows, at the far end of
moonlit corridors. Those future privileged urchins will summon my ghost by
repeating: "Maddy Spencer... Maddy Spencer... ," three times while
gazing into a mirror.
    Again, that's a form of power, albeit a fairly impotent form of power.
    And, yes, I know the word disassociation.
    As much as I fancy that spooky gothic immortality, I start screaming
for a guard. Shouting, "Help!" Shouting, "Au sec-ours!" Shouting, "Bitte, helfen sie mir!" The falling rush
of snow hushes every sound, dampening the acoustics of the entire midnight
world, blocking any echo that might carry my voice very far into the dark.
    By this time my hands were the hands of a stranger. I could see my
bare, blue feet, but they belonged to someone else. As blue as Goran's veins.
In a glass pane of the door, I could see my own face reflected, my image framed
by the frost of my breath condensing and freezing on the small window. Yes, we
all appear somewhat absurd and mysterious to each other, but that girl I saw
was no one to me.
    Her pain was not my pain. Here was Catherine Earnshaw's dead face
haunting the wintry windows of Wuthering Heights, blah, blah, blah....
    That waifish me, reflected in moonlight or streetlight, I watched her
pulling her fingers away from the steel handles, her skin peeling away still
clinging to the metal, leaving the whorls and palm prints like patterns of
frost. Abandoning the wrinkled road map of her lifeline, her love line and
heart line, I watched this strange girl, her face grim and resolute, walk on
frozen stick legs to retrieve the key and save my life. This girl I didn't know,
she pulled open the heavy door, her hands sticking once more, tearing away yet
another thin layer of this stranger's fragile skin. Her hands, so frozen they
didn't bleed. The metal key froze between her fingers so resolutely she was
forced to carry it to bed.
    Only in bed, smothered between blankets, drifting to sleep, did her
skin thaw and the girl's hands began to bleed quietly into her clean, starched
white sheets.

X.
    Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please do NOT get   the idea that I'm some Miss Trollopy Van
Trollop. It's true that I've read the Kama Sutra, hut why anyone would bother
to attempt such revolting gymnastics remains largely a mystery to me. In regard
to sex, mine is a kind of complete intellectual understanding with no real aesthetic
appreciation whatsoever. Forgive my uneducated distaste. While I know what
organ stimulates what, the bizarre, sordid business of phallus and orifice
interaction, the exchange of chromosomes required for procreation of the
species, I have yet to grasp the appeal. Meaning: yuck.
     

     
    It is no accident that I segue from a scene in which my group is
confronted by a towering nude giantess to a flashback in which I, myself, am
undressed and exploring both my interior and exterior environs without the usual
protective layers of clothing or shame. In the enormous, exposed figure of
Psezpolnica, no doubt I feel an affinity, perhaps an admiration for any female
who can present herself with such apparent lack of self-consciousness,
seemingly in complete disregard for how she might be judged and exploited by
her audience. Having masqueraded one Halloween as Simone de Beauvoir, I guess
I'll always be a bit de Beauvoir.
    The satire of Jonathan Swift remains a staple of English-speaking
primary education—including my own—but it's usually limited to the first volume
of Gulliver's Travels; or, in very daring and progressive classrooms, strictly as an illustrative example
of irony, students might also read Swift's classic essay "A Modest Proposal." Few teachers would
risk introducing the second volume of Lemuel Gulliver's memoirs, his
misadventures in the island