Doomed, Page 24

  Beneath her, I scramble. I crawl to escape. For a struggling moment the perfect child is astride me. Her toned buttocks planted in the small of my back, she beats me about the head with her fists. Clutching my ragged hair, she pushes my face toward the growing candle-kindled fire until my skin blisters. The heat swells my lips like an overdose of collagen, stretching the skin so tight that it splits.

  So close are the flames that the tasseled end of my oily pigtail smolders. The braided strands begin to burn like a stinking, slow-motion fuse.

  My bones, broken … my heart, ailing … I’m helpless, unable to raise myself. No one comes to my aid. The ghost Mr. K stands off to one side, sobbing. The succubus, Babette, is off to the other side, howling with demonic joviality, while the assembled Boorites weep and gnash their teeth.

  It’s clear: My parents don’t love me. My parents don’t even recognize me. They love this, this skinny, Barbie-dolled version of me.

  Be warned, my predead followers: When you take occupancy of any physical form you must remain in residence until its ultimate demise. You must suffer until life’s accumulated insults render the vessel inoperative. That said, my spirit cannot flee. I’m forced to undergo this painful battering.

  I writhe beneath her surprising weight. Twisting to face her. As her uniform, the Barbie-Madison wears the infamous, gunk-despoiled chambray shirt, the tails rippling above her bare legs. As her cudgel she bears The Voyage of the Beagle, that book so much annotated with dried blood. Wielding the not-lightweight missive, she pounds my borrowed face. My head lolls, coughing spit and mewling incoherent protest. Scalding tears geyser from my borrowed eyes.

  Despite these exertions, the impostor Madison seated atop me, she doesn’t perspire. Nor is her breathing taxed by her sustained strenuous efforts. In my own meager defense I pummel her torso with my knobby elbows and knees, but I might as well be slugging the great black-rubber tires of an upstate eighteen-wheeler.

  The book’s leather binding collapses my nose, flattening it sideways, leaving me gasping. My ears boxed and ringing. My vision filled with bright stars.

  Desperate, my fingers grasp a handful of her garment. To this I doggedly hold fast, wrestling the blue shirt from her svelte frame, leaving her not clothed, but to no avail. Modesty does not stem her efforts. To all Boorist eyes we must appear as a depraved naked pervert, a poorly complexioned, libidinous skeleton, grappling to molest a nude lass.

  Gradually, I offer less resistance. After the first half hundred thuds, one slug in my kisser is pretty much like another. A trauma-induced lethargy sets in. Not even the pain can hold my attention, and my thoughts wander. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross never mentions it, but there’s another stage of dying. Besides anger, denial, and bargaining, there’s boredom. Yes, boredom. You abandon yourself.

  A strange sense of peace settles. Even as the hardcover tome batters me senseless, my struggling is replaced by a resignation more deadening than Rohypnol. If I’m to die … so be it. If she’s more to their liking, let my mother and father adopt this pristine Maddy doll. From farther and farther away, I can smell hair smoking. Faintly, I can hear fists smacking jellied meat, my body already splashing-wet with blood.

  This isn’t anywhere I haven’t been before. I’ve given up. In words muffled with exhaustion I whisper a prayer for my heart to stop.

  You, the predead, you must hate hearing this. You hate a backslider, but I am. I’m shirking my life. Not living up to my full potential, I quit.

  If there is a grand plan, I surrender to it. I give up to my fate.

  Subjected to such a violent skirmish, even the Beagle book begins to disintegrate. Coming apart, the pages dissemble, sentence by sentence. Fluttering down upon me are scraps of paper. Penciled words. Of these falling shreds, one appears to be on fire. An edge of the torn page in question flickers with bright orange light. It’s Festus, wee Festus escorting the scrap of paper. His golden hummingbird wings fluttering wildly, he hovers, holding it within my view.

  There, scribbled in childish blue pen, is written, Set yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve.…

  Here, Gentle Tweeter, my failing brain issues a final inspired belch. Perhaps this … this violent engagement is the battle against evil for which my family and generations of telemarketers have been grooming me.

  Here is the trial which Leonard has so long foretold.

  Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.

  To stem this hail of blows I lift my twisted hands to grip the volume. My wasted fingers hold fast, and my trembling arms wrestle for possession of Mr. Darwin’s cruel travelogue. Please take note. A magic reversal has occurred: Once again a dying cadaver-man is engaged in a dark tug-of-war with a gamine child.

  With a great cry of anguish I seize control of the book. The weapon is mine.

  Once more swinging the blood-and-sperm-saturated memoirs of C. Darwin, that disillusioned theologian, I invest the last of my dwindling strength in a great swat that connects with the crown of my adversary’s comely noggin. This crippling smack-down drives her backward, stunning her for the moment. That same impact dislodges a final shower of desiccated violets and pansies from between the book’s sodden pages.

  Likewise do more fragments of the paper detach and cling to my attacker. The castle of Mr. Darwin’s mind crumbles brick by brick. A dissolving inventory of the natural world. Blasting my foe is this buckshot of memes: bifurcation … crustacean … flocculent, and Diodon. They papier-mâché her like a piñata. Wollaston … wigwag … Fuegians and scurvy. These smother my foe. Her perfect not-nearsighted eyes, they’re invaded by a stinging grit of facts and details. All of Mr. Darwin’s lizards and thistles. My mom and my nana’s long-archived flowery specimens.

  The beautiful not-Madison screams in frustrated rage, her peepers pasted over. She’s blinded.

  In the next instant the smoldering wick of my pigtail flogs her much-combustible paper coating. She’s set ablaze as the disgorged words and blossoms attack her with their immolating heat. No longer assaulting me, instead she’s beating at her own flanks, swatting to subdue her flaming loins. Even as she struggles to quell the fire, she’s clawing away great softened handfuls of herself. Tearing herself to pieces.

  At the same time, she’s screaming. She capers. Her banshee wails distort her features even as the temperature of burning paper melts and buckles her feet, her knees, her annoyingly slender thighs.

  Continuing to clutch the yuck-infused chambray shirt and the flaking book, I cower on the nearby ground. Babbling wildly now, as bloodied and nude as the newborn me in the birthing video, I sob, “I’m sorry I was such a self-righteous coward.…”

  At this humiliating admission, the impossible takes place.

  It happens, on rare occasion, that supernatural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. Two hands come forward to cup the sides of my misshapen head. My mother’s soft, perfumed palms and much-bejeweled fingers lift my ravaged face until I’m looking up, into her eyes. Her arms cradle my shattered body, creating a not-unsentimental pietà, and she asks, “Maddy? Dewdrop, is that really you?” My father stoops to embrace the two of us.

  I am seen. Finally, I am recognized.

  My parents and I, our little family, is, in that moment, reunited.

  It’s at this juncture that the impossible, inhuman doll of a girl, she raises her melting gaze to the sky. In a gurgling, liquid voice, the not-Madison croaks, “Heed my words.…” Even now, sinking to become a bubbling, smoking puddle, she commands, “Honor me, my followers, with a vast, communal ‘Hail, Maddy.’ ”

  DECEMBER 21, 2:38 P.M. HAST

  Detonated!

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  As you can imagine, a dense crowd of people expelling pent-up intestinal gas in the presence of an open flame, surrounded by ostentatious, highly flammable architecture, this is a not-happy turn of events. In a flash, the mountaintop cathedral is
wildly ablaze. Toga-clad, sandal-shod Boorites run pell-mell in every direction with their extremities exuberantly on fire. The heat softens the underlying peak, and ominous bubbling landslides of molten plastic begin to ooze down the flanks of the precipice.

  Smoke blots out the setting sun, plunging this once-pristine world into a darkness illuminated by only the raging orange inferno. On the plains far below jagged fissures crack open, and the ocean begins to seep upward. Even as it burns, the entire continent of Madlantis is slowly sinking. It’s the fall of Pompeii. It’s the destruction of Sodom. The searing updrafts of wind carry gobs of smoldering, spitting ash, depositing them amid distant artificial forests and combustible palaces, until the world appears to be igniting in every direction.

  Blinded and terrified, the Boorites stampede over one another. They stumble and topple into pools of boiling slime. Their screams fall silent only when superheated gases sear their lungs.

  Mr. K’s emaciated corpus is fully dead, fully involved in flame, and I find myself evicted. Again, I’m a me-shaped bubble of blue ectoplasm. The filthy blue chambray shirt and frayed Beagle book must not be wholly of the physical world, because I find my ghost hands still holding them.

  Observing the Ctrl+Alt+Chaos, angel Festus comes to my side. He grips the edge of my ghost ear in his golden fingers and says sarcastically, “Excellent work.”

  For my part, Gentle Tweeter, I’m searching the hectic scene, trying to locate my parents. I’m terrified that my folks are going to be killed, and despite the fact that they’re nonviolent, peace-loving, Pentagon-levitating progressives, they’re going to give me a centuries-long time-out. We’ll be estranged forever.

  These theoretical punishments choke my ghost mind when a familiar voice says, “Golly, Sponge Cake, ain’t this an awful pickle?”

  I turn and see … my Nana Minnie. Holding a ghost cigarette in her ghost hand, she leans over to light it off the flaming pigtail of Mr. K’s burning corpse. As if this fiery Armageddon couldn’t get any worse, beside her is, ye gods, my Papadaddy Ben.

  DECEMBER 21, 2:41 P.M. HAST

  A Dark Episode Revisited—At Last

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  The last time I saw Papadaddy Ben was Halloween night, the night Nana Minnie died. His scarecrow ghost walked up to our porch in tedious upstate. Now, here he stands. He and Nana Minnie. Surely my education in Swiss etiquette would dictate a casual, easygoing way to inquire about the health of his book-squished, semidetached wing-wang, but I’m uncharacteristically without words.

  It’s strange how the currently conflagrating Styrofoam volcano echoes the not-happy circumstances of our last fatal encounter. The furious release of polycarbon gases suggests the reek of that long-ago upstate comfort station. The heat of this searing plastic cataclysm recalls the scorching temperature of that summer afternoon.

  Speechless, I adopt the detached mien that has so oft of late served me, that of the observant supernaturalist. As the child of former-Gestaltist, former-self-actualized, former-Euthonian parents, I recognize that if anyone ought to be feeling awkward in the present situation, it’s not me. My papadaddy played the dooky-brandishing predatory degenerate. Suppressing a lifetime of social conditioning, I resolve not to comment about the weather. Instead, I elect to remain silent and simply to observe my subject for signs of discomfort.

  My terrible secret is not mine alone. It is also my grand-father’s. As I once waited in the “blind” of my toilet cubicle, ready to endure the worst, now let him suffer my probing gaze. In the stealthy manner of Mr. Darwin or Mr. Audubon, I make a cold inventory of the specimen at hand. I picture the stubby boneless finger that had so menaced me. The infinite tiny wrinkles that carpeted the finger’s spongy surface, and the several short, curling hairs that clung to it. I revisit the finger’s sour, not-healthy odor.

  My nana is the first to speak. “We come on the whirligig. What a ride!”

  I appraise them coolly.

  My nana perseveres. “Ever since the day he died, Sweet Pea, your grandpa has wanted to see you again.”

  I make no effort to reply. Let them name the horror. Let them apologize.

  “That was a terrible day,” Nana Minnie says, patting her heart with one heavily tattooed hand. She brings one porcelain fingernail to her brow and scratches under the edge of her blond wig. “The day he died? Let me think.…” Her eyes shift from side to side. “We both guessed you was headed for the traffic island out on the highway.”

  Papadaddy, the toilet lurker, interjects here. “You asked about it at breakfast.” He says, “We was afraid you’d try and cross the freeway, so I decided to drive over there and keep a lookout for you.”

  I remain steadfast. To judge from the angle of my nana’s cigarette, she’s upbeat, happy even.

  “That nasty place,” says Nana, and she makes a face. “Your papadaddy was headed out to collect you when he had himself the heart attack.”

  I amuse myself by idly looking at my wristwatch. I pretend to warm my ghost hands over the sputtering, guttering campfire that consumes the mortal remains of Mr. Ketamine.

  “Died right on my own front porch, I did,” says Papadaddy.

  “Right on them steps,” adds Nana. “He grabbed his chest and keeled over.” She claps her hands together for emphasis. “He’d stopped breathing for twenty minutes before them paramedics showed up and revived him.”

  Papadaddy shrugs. “What’s left to say? Not to brag, but I went straight to Heaven. I was dead.”

  “You was not,” insists Nana Minnie.

  Papadaddy counters, “I most certainly was.”

  Undeterred, Nana says, “After they shocked Ben’s heart, the ambulance folks wanted to ride him to the hospital, but he didn’t want no part of going.”

  Folding his arms, Papadaddy says, “She’s embroidering this next part. That’s not what went on.”

  “I was there, you know,” says Nana.

  “Well,” Papadaddy says, “I was there, too.”

  “We’d been married for forty-four years,” says Minnie, “and he’d never before talked to me that way.” She says, “Maybe he was in pain, but that ain’t no excuse.”

  “How could I talk?” says Ben. “I was dead.”

  Nana Minnie continues, “No, he was bound and determined to go find you, pumpkinseed.”

  Here, Gentle Tweeter, a theory is slowly coalescing in my supernaturalist’s thinking belly.

  “After that,” Nana says, “he was like a different person.”

  “I was like a dead person.”

  Just to clarify, I ask, “You’re saying the rescue crew used a cardiac defibrillator on Papadaddy?”

  Nana says, “He wanted to go find you at that terrible public toilet.” She says, “He was pale and limping. Them paramedics figured he’d die again at any minute.”

  Papadaddy uses the tip of one index finger to draw a cross on his chest. “I swear,” he says. “I died in your nana’s arms on that porch.”

  The paramedics, Nana explains, revived him and made him sign a medical release form. He waited for them to leave, but the moment they were gone he’d jumped into his pickup truck.

  Nana leans close to me and confides in a stage whisper, “He called me the C-word!”

  “We’ve been over and over this,” Papadaddy says, placating. “I did not.”

  She coughs. “You called me the C-word, and then you went off to find Maddy at that nasty traffic island.”

  My grandparents, they Ctrl+Atl+Bicker. They sulk. The patient, observant supernaturalist in me is sorely taxed. Finally, seeking some resolution, I ask, “Papadaddy? Listen. Did you, by any chance, go to the byway restroom and get your elderly wiener ripped off?”

  He looks at me, aghast. “June Bug! How could you even ask me that?”

  “Because it happened!” Minnie shouts. “Some monster ripped up your privates and you bled to death like a pig!”

  “That didn’t happen.”
>
  “I saw your dead body!” Nana says, “Don’t they watch the news in Heaven?” Her gnarled hands frame large, imaginary words in the air. “All the headlines blared: ‘Movie Star’s Pa Killed in Toilet Torture.’ ”

  At this impasse in what is obviously a well-rehearsed stalemate, even as the continent of Madlantis founders in deep seas and flame-bedecked Boorites dash past us like human comets, I realize I’ve been mistaken. It’s obvious: Papadaddy Ben’s soul floated away, and another spirit took possession of his former body. Some ghost or demonic force used the shock of the paramedics’ paddles, like a juvenile delinquent hot-wiring a car and taking it for a joyride. Like I just now used Mr. Ketamine’s corpse. This strange wiener-wielding corpse rustler is who accosted me in the upstate toilet. Not my precious papadaddy.

  Thinking fast, I cagily redirect my grandparents’ ire by asking, “Nana, do you know what I miss most about being alive?” Not waiting for an answer, I blurt out, “Your delicious peanut-butter cheesecake!” To my papadaddy, I say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to say good-bye when you died.” Pitching my words with an especially childlike sincerity, I say, “Thank you for teaching me how to build a birdhouse.”

  I throw my chubby ghost arms around them in an awkward embrace as two red-tinted headlights approach. A strange automobile—spattered with blood, fringed with dripping strands of coagulated blood—cruises magically, silently up the steep side of the erupting mountain. At this most sweet moment of our reunion, a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car comes to a stop beside us.

  DECEMBER 21, 2:45 P.M. HAST

  Confronting the Devil with the Awful

  Truth Concerning His Mangled Dingus

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  Nodding his head at the Lincoln Town Car, Mr. K’s ghost says, “This is my ride, right? I’m going to Heaven, like you promised, right?”