Doomed

  Meaning: She was pregnant? Meaning: She was insane?

  From within his paper fortress, my father said, “Sweetheart, we’re adopting.” From behind the scrim of wars and stock prices and sports scores, “The kid’s from someplace awful.”

  Meaning: I wasn’t paying them enough attention. Meaning: They wanted to feel more appreciated.

  “The paperwork took months,” my mom said. “It’s not as easy as adopting a …” And she nodded toward the sodden napkin wadded in my lap.

  In response, I offered an almost inaudible tear-choked meow.

  My father shook his papers angrily. My mother rattled her bottle of Xanax as she tipped back another pill. My hands forgot to be careful, and my fingernails itched at my kitty’s soft tum-tum. And at that juncture, Gentle Tweeter, in the spacious seats and enclosed interior of the limo, poor Tigerstripe’s distended abdomen burst.

  DECEMBER 21, 10:55 A.M. PST

  At Last, a Violent Comeuppance

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  The earthly remains of my beloved Tigerstripe were to be interred in a toilet of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an elegant, low-key ceremony patterned after that of my goldfish, Mr. Wiggles. While our personal staff of Somali maids flung open windows and put flame to scented candles, I carried the death-fragrant, napkin-wrapped remains into the suite’s master bathroom. The mourners included my parents, who stood near the whirlpool soaking tub. My dad impatiently tapped his foot, the toe of his handmade shoe tick-tocking loudly against the tile floor. The funeral cortege consisted of a trailing black cloud of houseflies. We were, the mourners, literally veiled in buzzing black houseflies.

  “Flush it down,” my father commanded.

  My mom breathed through a perfumed handkerchief and said, “Amen, already.”

  I stood over the yawning commode, my spirit shattered, unable to relinquish something I’d loved so deeply. So bereft was I that I prayed Jesus would phone, forgetting that I’d only made him up. Jesus didn’t really exist, and Dr. Angelou wasn’t going to touch this stinky bundle of bones and rotting fur and bring it back to life.

  I beseeched, “Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”

  “What for?” said my dad. “Maddy, sweetness, prayers are for superstitious idiots and Baptists.”

  “For Tigerstripe’s eternal soul!” I pleaded.

  “A prayer?” asked my mom.

  I pleaded for them to call on Sir Bono or Sir Sting for divine intervention.

  “There is no such thing as a soul,” said my dad. Exasperated, he huffed out a short breath scented with Binaca and Klonopin. “Baby girl, we’ve discussed this. Nothing has a soul, and when you die you rot away to create healthy organic compost for subsoil life-forms to reproduce in.”

  “Wait,” my mom said. Closing her eyes she began to recite from memory: “Go placidly amid the noise and haste.…”

  A growing cadre of Somali maids had begun to gather in the space immediately outside the bathroom door.

  “Exercise caution in your business affairs,” continued my mom, her Botox-infused brow semifurrowed in concentration. “For the world is full of trickery.…”

  “There is no God. There is no soul. Nothing survives beyond death,” lectured my father. Shouting now, he asked, “Didn’t those nuns teach you anything at that expensive Catholic school?”

  My mother droned on, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly.…”

  “Flush it, Maddy,” said my dad, Ctrl+Alt+Snapping his fingers between each short imperative sentence. “Flush it. Flush it. Flush it! We have reservations for dinner at eight at Patina!” He shot back his shirt cuff and checked his watch. He waved away the annoying vermin. Meaning: the flies, not the Somali maids who hovered, watching these curious funeral rites.

  When my voice came it sounded faint. “Forgive me, my kitty.” I gave the squishy bundle a big hug against my flabby tummy. “I’m sorry I killed you.” My sobs began in earnest. “I’m sorry I murdered you with maternal neglect.” I’d proved to be a worse parent than my own parents. With this terrible admission I was rocking forward and back, racked with hoarse sobs, squeezing the not-fresh final graveyard juices from my beloved charge. Yet still I couldn’t consign my Tigerstripe to a final watery resting place.

  At my father’s whispered urging, my mother stepped to my side and cooed, “Maddy, baby girl …” She murmured, “You didn’t kill the cat. Nobody killed him.” She gave me a little pat on the back, leaving her hand to linger on my shoulder, and said, “Mr. Tiger had a genetic condition called feline polycystic kidney disease. It means his kidneys developed cysts, honey. It’s no one’s fault. He filled with cysts until he died.”

  I looked up at her, my eyeglasses fogged and streaming with tears, my nose livid and flowing. “But a cat doctor …”

  My mother shook her head no. Her mournful eyes, the expressive eyes of every death-row public defender and deathbed nurse she’s ever played. “Baby girl, there is no cure. The kitty was born sick.”

  I asked, “But how can you know?” Instantly, I felt ashamed of my infantile, bleating tone, my pathetic words gargled through mucus and misery.

  “It was printed on the index card,” my mother explained. “Maddy, do you remember the index card taped to his cage at the animal rescue place?” Arrayed on the bathroom’s marble vanity were an orange-colored prescription bottle of Xanax, a bud vase containing a trembling spray of purple orchids, an assortment of Hermès soaps heaped in a basket. “According to that index card, Mr. Tiger couldn’t live longer than six more weeks.” She reached to pluck the Xanax bottle, twisting off the cap. “Why don’t you and I take a nice pill?” She said, “Your new brother is coming this afternoon. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Drop the cat,” my dad ordered. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them together, shouting, “Ditch the cat, and let’s move forward, people!”

  Turning to face both of them, dropping my voice to a dragging growl, I said, “You knew?” My tears instantly boiled away. The corpse in my tender hands was teeming with maggots. My voice like a distant Swiss avalanche bearing down upon them with a billion-billion tons of ice and rock, I said, “All along, you knew you’d gotten me a dying kitty?”

  A muted bell began to toll. It was the suite’s front doorbell. It rang again. The gaggle of Somali maids lingered, watching us from the bathroom doorway. The security cameras were watching.

  “You knew my kitten was a goner, and you just let me suffer?”

  His face flushed almost purple, his jaw clenched, my father shot a dark look at my mother.

  My voice a siren, I wailed, “You should’ve told me that my baby was going to die!” Cradling my pain, I demanded, “Don’t you understand? How could you let me love something that was going to die?”

  My mom filled a glass with water and brought it to me. Cupped in her other hand, she offered the pills. “Gumdrop,” she said, “we just wanted to see you happy before you turned thirteen.” So distraught was she that she actually expected me to drink tap water. Los Angeles tap water.

  Not looking at me, instead gazing upon my cowering mother, my father squared his shoulders and stretched himself to his full height. “Trust me, young lady,” he said. His voice cold, subdued, and resigned, he said, “No one wants to know when their child is doomed to die.” For the first time, I could smell fifty-year-old Chivas on his breath. My father was loaded.

  I snarled, “Maybe we ought to get Tigerstripe some liposuction and tattoos, and dress him to look like a Whorey von Whoreski version of Peggy Guggenheim!”

  Even before the reality of their conspiracy had fully registered, my father strode across the bathroom and snatched the fragile remains from my grasp. He pitched them into the yawning toilet bowl and summarily pressed the flush lever. And, no, Gentle Tweeter, I am not oblivious to how many of my recent dramas had occurred in bathrooms, be they the noxious men’s rooms of upstate or the gilded ones of the Beverly Wilshire. And with
that, my precious Tigerstripe was gone. Water swirled and splashed, and his tiny corpse was washed away. Lost.

  And, whispering in my ear, my mom’s voice said, “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

  I stared at both of them in mute outrage.

  But was Tigerstripe truly gone? As my anger built, as the bile swelled within me, fueled by this shocking cystic revelation, the troubled waters also rose within the commode. My loving, former-supportive, former-caring, former-adoring parents had set me up. They’d gifted me a pet they knew would soon perish. The swirling toilet water rose as the acrid emotions climbed in my throat. Tigerstripe was gone, but his corpse had stuck somewhere in the craw of the hotel’s luxurious plumbing, and now not-fresh toilet water spiraled upward to crest the lip of the ceramic tomb and gush forth, splashing across the stone-tiled floor.

  The doorbell rang once more, and, as my father turned to answer it, I stepped into his path. Standing between my dad and the bathroom doorway, I swung … as I’d once swung the Beagle book to decimate a lurid dog dinger … I now swung my open hand, jumping, leaping as needed to land a blow across my father’s close-shaved cheek.

  His expression was Ctrl+Alt+Shocked. The toilet disgorged water. Choked with the dead body of my tiny kitty, it vomited, erupting beside us. No longer a mere commode, it became a cauldron boiling over with decayed cat parts and evil magic.

  Not unnoticed by me, even in my churlish state, a strange boy had stepped into the bathroom doorway, a surly urchin whose thorny brow suggested Romanesque ruins and gothic goings-on. Wolves. Stooped Gypsy hags. At the sight of this brooding waif … and at the toilet’s fury … and in response to my violent lashing out, my mother shrieked, and as fast as an echo from my original blow, my father slapped me back.

  DECEMBER 21, 10:58 A.M. PST

  A Kitten’s Tragic Denouement

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  Yes, my father slapped me.

  And yes, I might be an uppity preteen romantic with aspirations to become a long-suffering Helen Burns, but I do know that getting walloped across my sassy, too-fresh-for-my-own-good mouth was a lot less fun than I’d always imagined it would be.

  In the well-appointed bathroom of the Beverly Wilshire, as the chilled waters of that kitten-choked commode overflowed beside us, my father’s blow fell, scarcely hard enough to turn my head, but the sharp sound of it reverberated hugely in the tiled space. My meaty child’s hand hurt more from swatting his rugged face than my cheek hurt from his counterswat. The ready expanses of mirror showed us both: my tiny handprint reddening his face, my own rage darkening my visage. My mom stood nearby accompanied by maids and PAs and assorted hangers-on, her tapered fingers having flown up to mask her eyes from the brutal scene. Bits of orange fur rode the cresting tide, and we were—all of us—swamped. Only the unlikely adopted stranger stood apart from this domestic tragedy. The surly blackguard youth, he was a harbinger of disaster from some distant, strife-torn, blood-besotted fiefdom. This, the glowering countenance of a man-child no doubt suckled by rapacious wolves, this was Goran. This was the taut moment of our first encounter.

  In the days and weeks to come, in Nairobi and Nagasaki and Naples, my father would not-subtly transfer his affections from me to this surly refugee waif. As I had so recently channeled my unhappiness through my kitten, my father would come to make indirect statements such as “Goran? Would you tell your sister that she isn’t getting anything for Christmas—except perhaps a seat belt extender.” Not that we celebrated Christmas. Not that my father even acknowledged me; no, I was Goran’s sister or my mom’s daughter, but I’d become invisible to him. For my part, as he could no longer see me, I could not speak to him. Thus we ceased to exist for one another.

  In Reykjavik and Rio and Rome, I’d already become a ghost to him.

  After that came the unhappy episode of Goran slashing the pony’s throat at EPCOT Center. After that came Goran stealing my mom’s People’s Choice awards and hawking them over the Internet. By then my father had begun to soften, but it was too late, because it was soon after that, very soon, that I would be dead for real.

  DECEMBER 21, 11:59 A.M. PST

  The Abomination Arrives

  Posted by [email protected]

  Writing in the third century, the Neoplatonist Zoticus predicted that one day a single mighty nation would rule all others. This nation will occupy an island in the center of a great ocean. It will rapidly collect all the wealth of the whole world, and all the kings of the world shall come to reside here. Writing in the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Proclus described this future nation as a beautiful mirage. According to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it will float on the horizon.

  And here will the thing-child wash ashore. It will stride the cloud-colored beaches with no more awareness of its nudity than had the original humans.

  There all plastic comes to a final rest. There the center holds, becalmed, in that Sargasso of plastics. The North Pacific Gyre, as that graveyard is known.

  And arriving on this scene will stroll a human mother, wandering along that same beach, deep in her own grief. And the woman is essentially alone, accompanied by only one stylist, a publicist, four armed bodyguards, a yoga instructor, two lifestyle gurus, and a dietitian. This woman glimpses the thing-child: a slender sylphlike figure with skin as perfect as only plastic can be perfect. A face as smooth as only a photograph can be smooth. Its hair, a great bale of floss combed to rich fullness by infinite ocean waves. And from all outward appearances is the thing-child a she-child.

  And the she-child is of impossible beauty.

  And from a distance, upon first catching sight of the she-child, Plato claims that the lonely woman will call out. Stopped, paralyzed by the sight, she’ll gasp. The woman shall stumble forward a few steps, her arms raised involuntarily to embrace this vision, and she’ll cry out, “Madison?”

  For here, to the eyes of a bereft mother, this gift from the sea appears to be a resurrection. And this woman strolling along the beach will be the nominal queen of this wealthy kingdom.

  And here is a long-lost child seemingly reunited with its mourning parent. A miracle witnessed by all the attendant entourage.

  Tears leap to the woman’s eyes. For this stranger, who stands nude on that gleaming beach … this stranger is slender and enigmatically calm—not pudgy and grouchy, not willful and sullen—but, still, the resemblance is otherwise perfect. This is the murdered child, glorified. Before she might call out a second time, Plato writes that the woman is choked with emotion.

  And thus will evil plant his she-child in the nest of an unknowing bird.

  Thus will goodness be cuckolded, according to the papyri of Sais. And evil seeks to fit goodness with a pair of horns.

  For this otherworldly beauty, this she-child begotten of plastic and fostered by the sea, it opens its winsome arms to the human woman. With its sweet voice it says, “Mother.” The she-child advances to embrace the woman, and it says, “Camille Spencer, I am returned to you.” Embracing the bereaved woman, it says, “I return to you as proof of life everlasting. I bring you tidings of paradise.”

  DECEMBER 21, NOON HAST

  Fata Morgana

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  Ultimately this is a tale about three islands. As was Lemuel Gulliver’s tale. Our first island was Manhattan. The second was a traffic island upstate. The third, we’re about to discover.

  After our humiliating debacle at LAX, I accompanied my psychic shepherd to a customized CH-53D Sea Stallion, the Gaia Wind, for a lengthy low-altitude commute across open ocean. Considering the afternoon sun on the Pacific, the crystalline December air, it’s all quite thrilling.

  As we fly westward, what I notice initially is a faint glow on the horizon. Even in broad daylight, in the wrong direction, a freakish, premature dawn seems to be rising. A shimmering, b
lue glow. Little more than three hours after lifting off from LAX, the Gaia Wind comes within sight of a new shore. As Gulliver and Darwin before me, I’m glimpsing a new foreign landmass. Carried along as we are by the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter’s broad propeller, we hover ever closer to this strange, impossible territory of luminous, jagged alps. The sun glints off vast plains. The shadows of passing clouds mottle the land’s surface, and pinnacles of breathtaking height thrust themselves up, into the mist. This, this fantasy landscape resembles not terra firma so much as peaks and whorls of whipped cream, all of it enlarged to a massive scale and colored the sparkling crystallite white of table salt. Not that, as former hippies and former macrobiotic dieters, my parents had ever exposed me to salt.

  My inebriated consort, Mr. Crescent City, leans forward, his amply veined eyes fixed on this growing vision. His mouth hangs slack, exaggerating his already not-alert facial expression as he says but a single, rapt word. “Madlantis!”

  Ye gods.

  Contrary to the old adage “Buy land … they’re not making it anymore,” immediately before us is proof that people are, indeed, making land. At least, Camille and Antonio are.

  My parents had often mentioned a scheme. It was their stated ambition to resolve many of the globe’s most-dire problems with a single dramatic fix. Foremost in their minds was the swirling Sargasso of discarded postconsumer plastic known as the Pacific debris field. Second was global climate change. Third was the dwindling habitat available for wild bears of the polar variety, and fourth was the onerous burden of income taxes they were compelled to pay.

  In truth, Gentle Tweeter, their income taxes occupied the lion’s share of my parents’ attention, but bear with me for the time being.

  As a solution to all of these annoyances, Antonio and Camille Spencer had proposed a radical public works project. Even prior to my demise, they’d been busily lobbying world leaders. Like the master puppeteers they were, my mom and dad were shaping popular opinion toward their dream: to create a new continent—a vast floating raft of aerated polystyrene and bonded polymers, with a surface area double that of Texas. In this approximately mid-Pacific location, constantly shifting, perpetually growing, had been the aforementioned Pacific debris field, that far-reaching soup of plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles and LEGO blocks, and every other bobbing, floating form of plastic refuse that’s been caught in the circling currents of the Pacific Gyre.