Dismal as he looks, it’s no worse than I looked dead on the floor of a Beverly Hills hotel suite surrounded by leftover room service meals. Do not, Gentle Tweeter, imagine that you’ll look any better.
I watch the spirit rise from his corpse, but not the way your eyes see smoke or mist. It’s more the way your nose sees a smell. It’s the inside way your whole head feels a headache. The way blood has poured from his chest, pooling on the floor, his soul drains upward in a flood of blue as thick as liquid, collecting in the air against the ceiling. At first the blue forms a lump, a clump, a cloud, but that quickly takes the shape of a textbook embryo, then a fetus. It hangs there. The blue is the blue your tongue sees when you eat whipped cream. Not an instant passes before a full-size blue version of the man is staring down at his dead self.
He gapes at his own mortal remains, working his mouth like someone choking on a fact too large to swallow. The assembled mob of airport strangers, for their part they study his final moments as if a quiz will follow. Only I see his ghost leak away and balloon into the air. I watch, and Satan watches. One of Satan’s hands, sheathed skintight in a leather driving glove, reaches toward the puzzled spirit. The bystanders, their eyes follow the gloved hand into the air, but can’t see why. We all hear Satan say, “Harvey, is it? Harvey Parker Peavey?” He says, “If you’ll come this way, please …”
The ghost’s eyes find the offered hand. His ears find the question. “You’re my ride to Heaven, right?”
Satan sneers. His eyes eclipsed behind the visor of his cap, he says, “Tell him, Madison.”
The newbie ghost’s eyes turn to find me, and he asks, “Madison Spencer? The Madison Spencer? Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer?” He smiles as if he’s meeting God.
“Tell him about Heaven, Maddy,” taunts Satan. Everyone present, our audience of living-alive busybodies, they all follow Satan’s voice in my direction, but they can’t see me. My escort, Crescent, looks as well, muttering, “Little dead girl?” A team of paramedics comes crashing through the crowd.
Oh, Gentle Tweeter, the road to perdition is paved with short-term, stopgap mercies. Even as Satan’s grip closes around the man’s blue ghost wrist, I say, “Yes.” As the Devil begins to drag his smiling victim away, I assure him, “It might take a smidgen longer than you expected, but yes, I promise, you’ll get to Heaven, Harvey.” Satan tows the floating bulbous blue form as if it were something in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Poor Harvey, even as Satan is dragging him into the distance, he’s saying, “Thank you, angel child!” His blue head lolls happily on his neck as he sings my name, Madison. Madison Spencer. The messiah who returned from death to lead mankind to joyous salvation.
My papadaddy was right. I am cursed and despicable. I am a coward.
As the paramedics squat beside the abandoned body, I seize my opportunity. As they peel the backing from sticky electrodes and paste them on the messy fingernail-clawed torso, I step forward and kneel beside the head. I cup my girlish hands over the glassy eyes. In the posture of a snake-handling, strychnine-swilling faith healer, I gingerly touch the icky forehead skin of this dead stranger. At the same instant, one of the paramedics shouts, “Clear!”
To you future-dead people, do not attempt this at home. If you’re familiar with the custom of saying, “Bless you,” when someone sneezes, you might understand what’s taking place. The electric shock from a defibrillator doesn’t startle one’s failed heart back to life so much as it opens a portal for the lingering spirit to return. Picture pulling the plug from a bathtub in the Hotel Danieli, and the way the accumulated Venetian bathwater spirals into the drain. The momentary charge from a defibrillator opens such a route and allows the departed’s spirit to reenter.
In the event the soul has taken permanent leave—as Harvey’s clearly has—any spirit making contact may take up residence. Thus, when I open my eyes my perspective is that of someone sprawled on the not-clean carpet of LAX, corralled by the bovine gaze of curious passersby, hemmed in by the steady drone of tiny wheels as roller bags eddy in a stream past my sweat-chilled face. I reside within the damaged body of a stranger, the taste of curry still in my strange new mouth, but I am alive.
Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, I had forgotten how awful it feels to be alive. Even when a living-alive person is in good health, there’s the torment of dry skin, ill-fitting shoes, scratchy throats. As a child on the cusp of puberty, I have not been much troubled by what an adult body entails. However, from this instant I’m abraded by coarse underarm hairs. I’m suffocated by my own pungent endocrine musk, so like the masculine reek of an upstate public potty. As a girl, I’d always imagined the joy of having a pee-pee: like having a best friend and confidant, only attached. The reality is that I’m no more aware of my newfound wiener than I am of my appendix. I twist my impossibly thick neck and cast my glance in every direction. A female voice asks, “Mr. Peavey, can you hear me?” It’s a paramedic leaning over me, the one who administered the shock, shining a penlight into my eyes. She says, “Mr. Peavey, may I call you Harvey? Don’t try to move.”
The beam of the penlight is a searing agony. My bowels roil and ache. My newly acquired chest throbs where the torn skin begins to leak fresh blood, and my ribs burn where the sticky electrodes are still plastered. My intention is merely to brush the attending paramedic aside, but the gesture, a robust sweep of my arm, knocks her over backward. Imagine being Venetian water sucked down a drain and taking the shape of some strange, new plumbing. I don’t know my own strength. Nor do I fully realize my size. I’m inside a colossal fleshy robot, trying to make the arms and legs function. These arms and legs are huge. To stand upright takes a skillful feat of engineering; I overcompensate and stagger a step. Pinwheeling my arms for balance, I scatter paramedics and security guards like tenpins. I’m upright and stumbling, staggering stiff-legged. This is my nightmare: I’m a demure schoolgirl who finds herself stripped half-naked in one of the world’s busiest air travel crossroads. Realizing that my breasts are exposed—also, they’re hirsute and padded with muscle—I squeal and tuck my beefy elbows tight to my ribs to hide my mortified, large brown nipples. My massive hands flapping frantically around my stubbly face, I squeal and take off running. “Golly, I’m sorry,” I chirp, lumbering through the horrified airport masses. “Excuse me,” I shrill as my considerable spurting of man-blood dapples the recoiling gawkers.
Despite my linebacker size I gallop along like a gamine, clutching my bosoms, my shoulders shrugged up to my hairy ears. My steps splayed. Every stride crashes against wheelchairs, baby strollers, luggage carts. In my attempt to pussyfoot I barge and bulldoze my way through the stunned airport malingerers while a team of peace officers sprints after me, their walkie-talkies crackling with static and officious chatter.
I stagger after Satan and his latest hostage, crashing into innocent travelers and trilling, “Golly, gosh, darn …” I try to speak in cheerful peeps, but blast out the words in a strange, blaring voice: “Sorry … my fault … sorry … oops …”
In my pants now I can feel something bobbing and jiggling. My pee-pee feels less like a faithful compadre and more like something gross falling out of my pelvic floor. Like a dangling, pendulous rupture. Like a strangulated hernia several inches long. Ye gods! It’s like taking a poop from the front! How can men tolerate this vile sensation? My vision begins to frost inward from around the edges, and I can guess this is because I’ve lost so much blood. My heart is speeding up. My heart feels the size of a revving Porsche 950. In the near distance I can see Satan dragging his captive through an emergency exit.
My years of sexual assault prevention training come to mind, and I shout, “Rape!” My size-twenty feet clumping along, I bellow, “Help me! Rape!”
My pursuers are a dozen powerful police hands reaching to grab me from behind.
My feet stumble, my blood pressure failing, and I begin to sink to the floor.
Satan observes my humiliation, l
aughing as soundlessly as any character from Ayn Rand. The blue ghost tethered to him looks back in confusion.
And I shout, “Someone stop him!” I shout, “He’s the Devil!” Hands grab my arms and yank them away from my chest, cruelly baring my hairy, muscular prepubescent breasts, and I shout, “Madison Spencer didn’t tell you the truth! She’s lying!” Woozy now, with hardly sufficient blood to blush modestly over my bared titties, my naked nipples peaking in the frigid LAX air-conditioning, I squeal, “Everyone, please, stop saying the F-word!”
The agony, Gentle Tweeter, is excruciating. Even Satan’s laugh smells like methane. Especially Satan’s laugh. At last, mercifully, my massive giant’s heart fails once more, and all is plunged into darkness.
DECEMBER 21, 10:29 A.M. PST
A Gruesome Setback
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
The next time some sensitive, inquiring person asks you whether you believe in life after death, take my advice. That pompous question—which smarty-pants, intellectual Democrat types use to winnow the idiots from their own ilk: Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death?—no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, “Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.”
Please allow me to share an anecdote from my former life. This one time, en route to a shooting location in Nuremburg or Nagasaki or Newark, the production company sent exactly the wrong kind of car. In place of an elegant black Lincoln Town Car they sent a customized superstretch Cadillac limousine with all the interior upholstery trimmed in purple chase lights. The carpet’s stench of Ozium was in direct ratio to the number of bachelorettes who’d retched up Long Island iced teas and semen in the backseats, and to make matters worse this particular car had a faulty battery or bladder or alternator or whatnot that wouldn’t hold a charge. And to skip ahead, my mom and dad and I found ourselves standing on the shoulder of some Third World turnpike while a team of automotive paramedics arrived in some towing company ambulance and attempted to give the limo’s heart a shock using two scary-looking nipple clamps. No amount of car defibrillation could restart that odious bus; nor did my parents and I desire to reenter its lumpy interior pungent with expelled bodily fluids.
This is exactly how I feel looking down on the ungainly corpse of poor Harvey Peavey. Once more betrayed by his failed heart, he lies on the not-sanitary carpet of LAX, the bumbling chauffeur whose soul departed in tow with Satan. The paramedics shout, “Clear,” and jolt him with another shock, but no way am I reentering that mess.
“Lucky him,” says a voice. The blue spirit of Mr. Crescent City steps up beside me, both of us looking down on Peavey’s corpse.
I ask, “Where’s your body?” I glance around, but there’s no overdosed rag doll slumped in any of the plastic airport chairs. A short line of three or four people is forming outside the locked door of a handicapped bathroom. Even now that I’m postalive, the thought of using a public toilet fills me with terror. To Crescent City, I say, “Those private toilets are reserved for crippled persons.”
Crescent nods his shaggy head at the corpse and says, “Did you hear what he said? Right before he died he called you a liar.”
In truth, I called me a liar. I was only using Peavey’s mouth.
“I heard,” I say.
Incredulous, Crescent says, “You can bet he’s in Heaven by now.”
I don’t say anything.
Softly, under his breath Crescent City begins to chant, “Fuck … fuck … fuck …” without cessation.
That trip when we got the smelly stretch limo … on that same trip to some desolate shooting location in Angola or Algiers or Alaska, the cultural liaison for the flyspecked government lamented to us how shipments of surplus cheese from the United States had been waylaid by guerrilla fighters, and losing this crucial source of high-density multinutrient protein meant every village in the region was hungry. And standing there on the shoulder of that godforsaken highway, my mom got a brainstorm. Without missing a beat she snapped her manicured fingers and made a mouth-open, dazzling-idea face. Her brilliant solution was to whip out her mobile phone and make two million dinner reservations for the refugees at the Ivy or Le Cirque. She smiled at the cultural liaison and asked whether any of the starving hordes had any dietary restrictions.
Problem solved.
That, Gentle Tweeter, is not how I want to be. As this Mr. Crescent lunatic, as his ketamine ghost chants that revolting F-word, I say, “Please stop.”
The blue shape of him is already dispersing. He falls silent.
“Go,” I tell him. “Go collect your body. Take me to my mother. I have some truth telling to do.”
DECEMBER 21, 10:30 A.M. PST
The Abomination Advances
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[email protected] Among the students of Plato, the mythos of the thing-baby continues. According to logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, the plastic cups and empty prescription bottles form a motley fleet launched on a cursed mission. Alternately subjected to blazing sun and pounding rains, this garbage armada makes its arduous trek across the equatorial belly of the planet, traversing that widest stretch of the Pacific Ocean, this voyage not unlike the voyages of Darwin and Gulliver and Odysseus. And leading this campaign is the thing-child, steeped in this broth of decaying plastic. For the sun photodegrades these grocery bags and dry-cleaning bags. The action of wind and waves churns them, grinding them into smaller particles. As particles cling, its arms grow hands, and those hands sprout dangling fingers of fluttering plastic. The thing-child, its legs bring forth feet. And those feet are fringed with limp toes. Adrift in the center of the Pacific, the pallid thing-child is lifeless, as loose-limbed as a drowned corpse, but still it grows. Nourished on this soup of plastic particles, strands as fine as hair extend from its head. Two bubbles swell, and those erupt to become the shells of ears. Specks of plastic swarm and attach to become a nose, and still the lax thing-child is not alive.
Note how similar is our thing-baby’s pilgrimage to that of the infant Perseus. He of Greek legend who later slew the Gorgons and harnessed the winged horse Pegasus, as a baby he was locked in a chest and cast adrift. And let’s not forget how similar Perseus’s ordeal was to that of the Welsh saint Cenydd, who, as an infant, was placed in a willow basket and pushed to sea by no less a hero than King Arthur. And how this story is, itself, echoed by the fate of the Welsh bard Taliesin, who as a babe was tucked within a bladder of inflated skin and floated away. And the story of the warrior king Karna, of Hindu mythology, whose mother cradled him in a basket and put him at the mercy of the Ganges. All of this history and cross-cultural theology sails along with the thing-baby and its plastic armada.
And in so many voyages are all religions made one.
And now the juggernaut is thronging past the Hawaiian Islands. The decomposing beach balls and toothbrushes are agitated by the seas, and they break down to undifferentiated flakes and specks and shreds. To coumarone-indene and diallyl phthalate. The photons of infrared radiation and ultraviolet light, these cleave the bonds which hold together atoms. Hydrolysis causes the scission of polymer chains. And these, these disposable cigarette lighters and flea collars, they’re reduced to their constituent monomers.
And so suspended in this rich bath, the Neoplatonists believe, the thing-child waxes plump. It evolves lips, and those lips part to reveal a mouth, but the thing-child is still not alive. And within the mouth grow teeth of polyarylate.
Above Wake Island, the flood of thermoplastic polyester compounds and polyphenylene oxide veers north, lingering near Yokohama along the coastline of Japan. There, a discarded wristwatch wraps itself around a growing wrist. The thing-child face floats above the water’s surface like a tiny atoll. The broken wristwatch begins to tick. The graven idol opens its eyes, dull eyes that stare up at the ocean skies. And on clear equa
torial nights those polystyrene eyes marvel at the stars.
The new lips do tremble and utter the words, “Ye gods!”
Yet, still, the thing-child is not alive.
DECEMBER 21, 10:31 A.M. PST
A Match Made in Heaven
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Years before, once I’d been retrieved from my nana’s tedious upstate funeral and returned to my natural habitat of Lincoln Town Cars and leased jets, I resumed my campaign of inventing salacious diary entries.
“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “what I once felt for musky moose pee-pees I find was merely a fascination. What initially drew me to a leopard’s velvety hoo-hoo was not love.…”
Here, my parents would be forced to turn a page, pulse-poundingly anxious for my next self-revelation. Their every breath bated, they’d read on, desperate for assurance that I’d abandoned my ardor for lemming wing-wangs.
“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “living upstate, among simple, weathered folk, I’ve discovered a single lover who has eclipsed all my previous animal paramours.…” Here I altered my handwriting, making it crabbed and jagged to heighten the tension of reading my thoughts. My pen shook as if I were overwhelmed with strong emotion.