Doomed

  When pretending to pray didn’t work, I tiptoed out of my room, down the hallway, to the bookshelf in the parlor. In the dim light I finger-walked from spine to spine, and here it was: The Voyage of the Beagle. It was making the other books stand tight again, stuck back in the place where I’d first found it, looking the same as if nothing had ever happened. As if every gory detail of the past weeks had taken place in a dream. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t pull it from the shelf, because I didn’t want to open it and find the bloody wiener-shaped reality. Because I didn’t want to think my nana had possibly found that same secret truth.

  I stood in the dark parlor until the world turned to Halloween at midnight, counting, Seven hundred eight–alligator, seven hundred nine–Missisippi …, my hand hovering between me and the book so long my shoulder ached. My hand extended like my papadaddy’s rotting hand had been extended. My fingers dyed orange from food coloring; the orange looked dark red in the shadows.

  I counted that way, not touching the truth until something broke the spell. My nana coughed. The comforting, terrible sound came from her bedroom, the proof of life and death, coughs overlapping coughs, so fast I stopped counting. I left the book and went back to bed.

  DECEMBER 21, 9:35 A.M. CST

  Halloween

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  The only thing that makes autumn a tragedy is our expectation that summer ought to last forever. Summer is summer. Autumn is autumn. Neither do grandmothers last an eternity. On Halloween my Nana Minnie had laid open my suitcases on the bed in my room, and she spent the day packing. The next day, November, a car would collect me for the drive to Boston, for the jet to New York, for the jet to Cairo, for the jet to Tokyo, for the rest of my life. While packing my clothes, it occurred to me that I lived a perpetual journey home, from Mazatlán to Madrid to Miami, but I never arrived.

  While she ironed and folded underwear, my nana recited, “When your mama was your age, she used to pick her nose and wipe it under the chairs.” Reciting, “She bit her own toenails.” Reciting, “Your mama wrote in books.…”

  That summer in tedious upstate had been the longest stretch of time I’d lingered in one place. In a way I’d gone back in time, had lived my mother’s childhood. I could see why my mom had rushed off in such a frantic hurry, out to the world, to meet everyone and proceed to do everything wrong.

  I hovered around my half-filled luggage and asked, “She wrote in what?”

  As my nana plucked my freshly laundered items from the clothesline, she repeated, “Your mama used to write in books.”

  The Pencil and the Blue Pen. The ferns and thyme and rose petals.

  I did not, Gentle Tweeter, inquire about the ultimate fate of my ejaculate-spoiled chambray shirt.

  Patterson says to start collecting flowers.…

  Leonard wants me to pick some flowers.…

  These had all been my mother’s and my nana’s thoughts when they had been my age. I studied my nana as intently as I’d study my own reflection in a mirror. For there was my nose, my future nose. Hers were my thighs. How her shoulders stooped forward when she walked was how I’d someday walk. Even her cough, ragged and constant, would likely be part of my inheritance. The liver spots on her hands I’d someday find on my own. It looked like such an impossible task: growing old. It scared me how I’d ever manage to achieve all those wrinkles.

  My nana never asked about her missing tea jar. She didn’t seem to notice me always wearing my second-best eyeglasses. And in turn I went from not eating anything to scarfing down everything. In Toulouse, cooks say the first crepe is always “pour le chat.” For the cat. The first crepe is always flawed, scorched, or torn, so they let the cat eat it. Somehow I decided that I could do the same with my nana’s flaws. The more she cooked and baked, the more I ate. I could absolve her sins by eating them. And, if not forgive them, I could carry them around my hips as my own burden.

  With every bite I swallowed my fear and grew older. And fatter. In every mouthful I choked down my bilious guilt.

  The Beagle book had taught me about turtle eggs, but the Bible book taught me about Jesus Christ, and Jesus seemed like the greatest ally I could ever gain in the battle against my do-gooder parents. What a summer this had been. I’d gotten plump … chunky … just awful, in fact. And I’d begun to love reading. And I’d killed a man. I’d killed my grandfather. And I’d learned discretion.

  Yes, I might’ve been eleven years old and a secret grandpa killer, an upstate-hating, passive-aggressive snob, but I learned what discretion meant. That summer I learned discretion and reserve and patience: qualities my former-hippie, former-punk, former-everything parents would never acquire.

  On Halloween day, I didn’t speak up when I spied my nana sneaking on tiptoe. I was pretending to take a nap on the parlor sofa when she crept to the bookshelf, and from the wall of books she untucked one I’d never noticed. Hiding the book in the folds of her apron, Nana Minnie carried it back to where she was packing my luggage.

  Exhibiting enormous willpower, I did not eat the basket of orange-colored popcorn balls we’d prepared for the night’s trick-or-treaters.

  When she wasn’t looking, I peeked into that same suitcase. Buried under my neatly folded sweaters in the bottom was the book. Persuasion by Jane Austen. A book I would cherish for the remainder of my own short life.

  As the sun set on my last day in tedious upstate, a trickle of monsters staggered out of the dusk. Skeletons emerged. Ghosts appeared. They came carrying pillowcases and paper shopping bags. They took form from out of the shadows, their not-clean faces smudged with graveyard dirt, and their clothes shredded. Their hands smeared with blood, these zombies and werewolves stumbled toward where my nana and I stood in the farmhouse’s front doorway.

  These lurching, swaying corpses, they shouted, “Trick or treat!” And my nana offered them popcorn pumpkins from a big wicker basket she held in front of her in both hands. Then a cough came, and not even two alligators later, another cough. She handed the basket to me and lifted her apron to cover her face. As the monsters picked through the orange balls, she stepped back into the parlor and settled on the sofa, gasping to catch her breath. In my arms the basket felt lighter and lighter.

  Among that first wave of ghouls was a towheaded angel, a boy child whose placid face looked as smooth as fresh-baked bread. A lightly freckled brioche. His wispy halo of blond hair shone as pale yellow as butter melting down his forehead. False wings were tied to his back with a hank of rough twine, but their whitewashed cardboard was layered quite meticulously with the castoff quills of some indigenous farmyard goose. His cherubim hands carried a rude three-string lyre, and this he strummed as he bade, “Trick or treat, Miss Madison.” He held a pillowcase already bulging with red licorice and gummy bears. “Has the Good Book helped you in your time of loss?”

  Standing before me on the porch was the ragged youth I’d met at Papadaddy’s funeral. My upstate version of David Copperfield. As before, I sensed my flesh calling to his. On that, my final night in my nana’s house, I yearned to cleave my eleven-year-old self unto him, but subverted the carnal impulse by offering, “Popcorn ball?” As added enticement I whispered, “They’re loaded with Xanax.” He looked confused, so I added, “It’s a drug, not an Old Testament king.” Gravely said I, “Do not operate farm machinery while under the influence of this popcorn ball.”

  My rustic beau helped himself to several. Taking great lusty bites of sweet Xanax, he lingered a moment to ask about my summer. We discussed the Bible book. Finally, he bade me good night and took his leave.

  To answer CanuckAIDSemily, no, I did not get his e-mail address; I rather doubt he’d have one. But while his feathered wings were retreating, dwindling in size as he departed down the dusty country thoroughfare, I called out, “It’s Festus, right? Your name is Festus?”

  Without turning back, he waved his harp above his head in a lighthearted salute. And with that gestu
re of farewell he was gone.

  Coughing out the words, my Nana Minnie said, “Don’t fret, Tiny Sweet.” From the sofa she coughed, “Everything is going to be all right.”

  And I forgave her for telling her biggest untruth to date.

  I stood alone on the porch in the gloaming dusk. That’s why my nana didn’t see someone new arrive: a scarecrow figure. Stopping at the foot of the porch steps was a gaunt old man. His cheekbones and chin were as craggy as the sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in weedy vacant lots next to upstate gas stations. My worst nightmare made real, here was Papadaddy Ben standing at the ragged edge of the porch light. His eyes stared from behind the mess of his gray hair. Even as harpies and witches swarmed around him and climbed the steps, his eyes held mine.

  The naturalist in me knew this was impossible. The dead didn’t come back. It happens, on rare occasion, that natural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note and to record a description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that rogue event will make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened next.…

  A smirking voice asked, “Popcorn balls?”

  The question broke my trance. Standing at my elbow was a teenage boy dressed as an ancient Egyptian something. Nodding his head at the basket, he asked, “Not popcorn balls again. What’s up with this place?”

  A Marie Antoinette of the ancien régime, gowned and bewigged, ascended the steps, demanding, “Yeah, what’s the deal with popcorn balls?” She was wearing fake Manolo Blahniks and carried a fake Coach bag.

  Also in the Egyptian’s company were a Roman legionnaire … and a Sid Vicious punk with a safety pin poked through one cheek.… The four of them smelled faintly of sulfur and smoke. The punk’s hair was dyed electric blue and shaped into a Mohawk. He dipped his black-painted fingernails into the basket and lifted out a popcorn pumpkin, asking, “You have anything better, Maddy?”

  Screening my mouth with the side of my hand, I whispered, “They’re loaded with Xanax.”

  These people were strangers to me, but something about them seemed familiar. But not known. They were more like inevitable.

  The Roman legionnaire winced at the sight of the orange balls and asked, “Do you know what these are worth in Hell?” He made a fist and knocked at his forehead, saying, “Hello? Earth to Madison Spencer … these are worth jack shit!”

  Indignant, I asked the group, “Do I know you?”

  “No,” the girl said. She was wearing blue eye shadow, and her white nail polish was chipped. Crassly oversize dazzle-cut cubic zirconia hung from her earlobes. The girl said, “You don’t know us, but you will soon enough. I’ve seen your file.” Her eyes fixed on my wristwatch, the girl asked, “What’s the time?”

  I twisted my arm enough to show her it was after eleven o’clock. My nana’s coughs came between every sentence, between every word. And when I looked again for the scarecrow Papadaddy, he was gone. Vanished. None of the four teenagers took popcorn pumpkins. As they turned their backs on me and started down the porch steps, I asked, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

  The coughing stopped.

  Without turning back, the Egyptian shouted, “Only by about two thousand years.”

  Shaking his fist in the air, his index finger pointing skyward, the punk rocker shouted, “Remember, Maddy, Earth is Earth. Dead is dead.” Walking into the night, he shouted, “It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.” And as they receded into the dark, I thought I saw another figure join them. This new person wore a calico apron wrapped around a gingham Mother Hubbard. The lady smoked a cigarette without coughing. The punk touched her elbow and she extracted a pack from her apron pocket and shook him out a butt. As she smacked her lighter against the palm of her hand and flicked it, the tiny flame showed her careworn face. She waved back at me, and the group of them disappeared down the road and into the Halloween night.

  Eventually, when I stepped back inside the parlor door, only my nana’s body was left on the sofa. The best of her—her laugh, her stories, even her coughing—was gone.

  DECEMBER 21, 9:40 A.M. MST

  The Abomination Gains Strength

  Posted by [email protected]

  It was from Solon that great Plato learned of the eventual end times. In turn Plato taught the Doomsday mythos to his student Xenocrates, who taught it to his student Crantor, who taught it to Proclus, and thus was the advent of the thing-baby prophesied before synthetic polymers ever existed.

  Minute traces of human saliva still cling to it, our inflated idol. Wearing a war paint of chocolate and lipstick muck, it rallies its forces of polystyrene and polypropylene in the waters of Los Angeles Harbor. As foreseen by the visions of the ancients, reinforcements will arrive steadily from the north, from the Yukon River and Prince William Sound.

  And what had been a trickle of Styrofoam packing peanuts, adrift in the tributaries of Puget Sound, the Skagit and Nooksack rivers, these are present to welcome the thing-baby to the Pacific Ocean. More constant and numerous than the salmon and steelhead, these plastic emissaries will converge off the temperate coast of Long Beach to await the birth of the thing-baby. Far exceeding the birds of any flock or the fish of any school, these objects are baked by the sun and degrading to become a rich soup of plastic corpuscles. These nurdles. These mermaid tears. Fluoropolymers and malamine-formaldehyde. They create a simmering broth not unlike the murk isolated within the skin of the thing-baby.

  Thusly do the unresolved fragments of the past linger, according to Plato, and in that manner do they coalesce to create the future. And off the shores of Long Beach one infinitesimal speck of plastic comes into contact with the thing-baby and remains, stuck. And a second fleck of plastic cleaves itself unto the graven image until the infant idol is coated in a layer of such specks. And that first layer accumulates a second layer, and the thing-baby begins to accrete layer upon layer, and to grow. And the larger the whole of it grows, the more specks it draws, becoming a fledgling. Becoming a thing-child.

  And in that manner, Plato foretold that plastic will be fed plastic. A skin accrues atop its skin. Fed an ample diet of juice boxes and disposable diapers, the ordinary grows to become an abomination.

  DECEMBER 21, 9:41 A.M. MST

  Saint Camille: A Theory

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  CanuckAIDSemily asks, “Do ghosts sleep?” My experience as a supernaturalist attests that no, they do not. As the occupants of this aircraft doze or peruse a wide selection of films featuring Camille Spencer—my mother is inescapable—my ghost self updates my blog. I check my texts.

  The longer I consider my parents’ new role as global religious leaders, the less I’m surprised by this sacrilegious turn of events. For a decade I’ve watched my mother in filmic roles where she was China-syndromed while investigating melty overheated nuclear power stations … ax-handled by strike-breaking Pinkerton thugs who resented her efforts to organize the loomy weavers of a Deep South textile mill … poisoned Erin Brockovich–style with ground-water tainted by Republican plutocrat Christians allied with the military-industrial complex. Even at this airborne moment, the jetliner passengers surrounding me nibble peanut snacks while watching Alsatian police dogs and racist Klansmen tear the clothing from her flawless bosom.

  A career of cathartic martyrdoms. Date movies. She’s died a thousand deaths so the members of her audience can live happily ever after.

  Yet despite the piercing arrows and savage biting wolves, she returns to us … ever more ravishing. The woman we watch die horribly, she reappears on the red carpet at Cannes looking divine in an Alexander McQueen ball gown. As the spokeswoman for Lancôme cosmetics she’s reborn, glowing with diamonds and good health.

  My point is that Camille Spencer is the closest thing our world has to a secular martyr. She is the saint of our modern era—nothing less than our Moral Compass—
ritualistically sacrificed time and time again. She and my dad are the social consciousness of a generation, saving endangered species from extinction, curing pandemic plagues. No famine exists until my parents call it to our international attention and record a hit song, with all the profits going for food relief. This woman whom we’ve seen suffer and survive every cruel atrocity, for years she and my father have determined what’s good and bad for the entire globe. No political figure holds higher moral authority; thus when Camille and Antonio Spencer renounce their nondenominational lifestyle and embrace a single true faith, Boorism, three billion rudderless agnostics are bound to heel to.

  Thrilled as I am to have the world’s attention, I wish it wasn’t for an ill-considered lie. My blog followers in the underworld advise me that living conditions—living conditions?—in Hades are in rapid decline. Already my calls for more expletives, more belching, more coarseness are resulting in a steady uptick in the number of inbound souls. According to CanuckAIDSemily, these newly dead are arriving with the expectation that they’ll be in Heaven. Not only are they disappointed—but they’re ticked off! Everyone blames me. Everybody’s going to Hell, and they’re all going to hate me. Even worse, they’re all going to hate my parents in every language. Perhaps my dad could handle that, but my mom’s going to hate being hated. She’s a skinny beautiful lady with perfect hair; she’s just not equipped to deal with hate.

  It breaks my heart to imagine my folks killed by Japanese harpoons or a freak bong explosion, and then getting their skin flayed by demons because I sold them a bill of goods.

  Outside my little airplane window, the sun is blazing away, half sunk in a tufted mattress of clouds. There are no angels. At least, no angels that I can see.