In the name of ecological restoration, my parents have spearheaded an international fund to meld together the ever-growing mass of plastic, and by churning this stew of Styrofoam, this morass of shredded cellophane … simply by partially melting it with injections of superheated air and introducing chemical bonding agents, they’ve reinvented this sodden ecological horror as a white confection. This synthetic wonderland covers millions of acres, heaped into gleaming mountains and spread in rolling hills where rainwater pools to form freshwater lakes and inland seas. This whipped-foam landscape floats, impervious to earthquakes, and rides high atop the worst tsunami. Its most striking quality is its pristine whiteness, a pearlized … an iridescent, immaculate whiteness, with the faintest suggestion of silver.
From a distance, it’s a heavenly paradise. Here are the baroque turrets and domes you imagine among cumulus clouds as you lie on your back in a Tanzanian meadow during Easter recess. Not that we celebrated Easter. Yes, I hunted for the requisite dyed eggs, but my parents told me these had been hidden by Barney Frank, who also furnished me an annual oversize basket of carob treats. Not that my mom ever allowed fatty, pig-pig me to actually eat that carob. Not that anyone really likes carob.
In my folks’ puffed-plastic dreamscape, looming tall are white spires cresting above bowers of white roses, arches and buttresses, courtyards and gateways bright as spun sugar. It’s the white your tongue sees when you lick vanilla ice cream. Approaching the coastline of Madlantis you can discern white ravines and peaks. Before us are reconstituted plastics, seared by high-temperature blasts of air until they look polished. Glazed to glassy smoothness, these pinnacles and slopes aren’t subject to geological physics. In a dreamscape, a Maxfield Parrish arcadia: They rise impossibly steep, sheer faces of shining ivory that jut straight up from white beaches as slick as a mirror. Bright as klieg lights.
And yes, I might be a carob-gobbling, sucrose-addicted tubby, chubby dead girl, but I know the word Arcadian. I also know a louche tax dodge when I see one.
In the reverse of previous continents, Madlantis existed as maps before it existed as peaks and valleys. This puffed-and-blanched, polygarbage terrain, every slope and crag was planned and modeled by artists, diagrammed on blueprints prior to its creation. Preconceived. Predestined. Every square inch predetermined.
The opposite of tabula rasa.
As they’d believed in the harmonic convergence of the planets and in pyramid power, so did Camille and Antonio promote this virgin continent as a New Atlantis.
Madlantis.
It’s doubtful you can fly high enough to notice, but the overall shape of the continent is no mere accident of nature. The stretches of coastline and occasional bays aren’t shaped by river systems. No, from outer space you can see how the new landmass is shaped like a human head in profile. The severed neck is oriented toward the south, the crown of the head toward the north. This milk-white, alabaster-white profile forms an enormous cameo surrounded by the cerulean blue of the Pacific Ocean. This Brobdingnagian silhouette, its saggy double chin dwarfs the nearby islands of Japan. The nape of its fatty neck crowds northern California, while its chipmunk cheeks threaten to block the shipping lanes above Hawaii. Needless to say, the newly minted continent of Madlantis was sculpted to look exactly like me.
Seen from outer space, the Earth now resembles nothing so much as a giant coin struck with my likeness. This is the satellite image I’d seen on television monitors and magazine covers at LAX. Here is the white plastic Heaven on Earth named in my honor.
A roundish, landlocked sea serves as my eye. On the opposite shoreline, rambling plastic glaciers suggest the strands of my unruly hair. And despite the fact that the whole is not particularly flattering, it is accurate. It’s me but on a gigantic scale. If you asked my mother, she’d tell you that it’s only slightly larger than life-size. My grieving parents would tell you that they’d conceived of this unheralded experiment in plastic reclamation as a staggering tribute to my memory. To finance their endeavor with public money corralled from every government in the world, my dad promised that it would serve to contain all the petrol-product debris of humanity. Its whiteness would reflect solar heat away from the planet and counteract climate change. Because it floated, the continent could even be towed north to serve as subsidized housing for displaced polar bears. Politicians flocked to support the endeavor.
In actuality, now that it’s complete, Mr. Ketamine informs me that the land’s handful of physical residents is already in international court suing for their independence as a sovereign nation. It’s no coincidence that these patriotic zealots—known as “Madlantians,” and seeking freedom from colonialist oppressors—they are also the wealthiest people in the world, and that under the freshly inked constitution of Madlantis none of them will be subject to taxes upon their lofty incomes. Neither will inheritances be taxed. In addition, this small cadre of residents will all be named ambassadors of their plastic nation and therefore be granted the freedom of diplomatic immunity in all their international treks. That, Gentle Tweeter, is my parents’ noble dream: infinite money and infinite freedom. Every major corporation in the world is scrambling to relocate its headquarters there.
By now we’ve crossed into Madlantian airspace. We’re skimming above white plastic mountaintops. We’re careening through white plastic valleys. Ahead lies a speck of not-whiteness. Located at the approximate center of my vast global, fat-girl profile is a ship. Mired there, in a whorled pit that suggests the opening of my auditory canal—my ear hole, according to Orthodox Christians, the orifice through which the Holy Spirit impregnated the Virgin—locked in this wasteland as effectively as any explorer’s vessel crushed by advancing ice—or as Satan trapped in Dante’s icy lake—there is my parents’ megayacht, the Pangaea Crusader.
DECEMBER 21, 12:15 P.M. HAST
At Home with Camille Spencer
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Don’t imagine for a moment that solar panels and wave energy power any portion of this thunderous helicopter, and approximately a million gallons of dinosaur juice later we set down atop the Pangaea Crusader. Ah, the imperial seagoing palais that is the Crusader … Despite the fact that the vessel is virtually an oceangoing space station, painted a gleaming, arctic white and only slightly smaller than Long Island, the Crusader’s central salon has been decorated to simulate the interior of a typical shantytown hovel found among the favelas of most Third World megalopolises. Were it not for the fact that we’re rocking gently, rolling smoothly atop salty Pacific swells, the yacht’s interior could be located in the primitive outskirts of Soweto or Rio de Janeiro.
Through the magic of fiberglass and trompe l’oeil painting, one bulkhead of the salon appears to be a wall of crumbling, asbestos-infused cinder block. To this, the world’s leading graffiti artists have hand-applied layer upon layer of gang tags using faux-lead-based spray paint. The overall impression is one of menace, a sympathetic political oneness with the world’s violent masses, not unlike the sordid interior of a men’s comfort station situated along a densely traveled highway in tedious upstate.
In answer to HadesBrainiacLeonard, yes, this does feel like an awful lot of scene setting, but please bear with me. We’re approaching a poignant episode, a prodigal child returning to the seminurturing bosom of her mother. Thus I focus on the set dressing only because I’m not prepared for the depth of emotion I’m about to suffer.
Eventually, he of the flailing, not-clean pigtail, Mr. Crescent City presents himself before my mom in the yacht’s spacious main salon. Unseen, I accompany him for this audience.
Even as I’m posting this, my mom’s clutching a tall glass of cherry-flavored cough syrup mixed with an equal part of dark rum, garnished with a dagger of fresh organic pineapple and three maraschino cherries skewered on the balsa-wood stem of a living-wage paper parasol fashioned by dusky hands enabled through first-world microfinancing.
For someone who pr
otests environmental degradation, it’s ironic that my mother is always so polluted herself. It doesn’t help that I’m sitting next to her. My ghost self is close enough to share a photo caption with her in People magazine, but she’s still completely not seeing me.
Seated directly in my mom’s eye line, I pop my ghost knuckles. I fidget and pick my ghost nose and bite my ghost fingernails, always hoping she’s only pretending not to see me; she’s just ignoring me and her attention will snap in my direction at any moment, and she’ll shout, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—KNOCK IT OFF!”
However, drunk or sober, there she is: Camille Spencer sprawled on her divan, a drink in her hand, a tabloid magazine nested in her lap. In the wonderfully stagey voice she normally uses only for Somali maids and the Dalai Lama, she demands of her psychic bounty hunter, “Mr. City, can you honestly say you’ve found Madison’s spirit?”
Her voice, it sounds like a trap. Like a cobra ready to strike.
From Mr. K, from under the bushy filth of his lip-colored mustache come the words, “Ma’am, I have found your daughter.”
In my mom’s eyes is the burning pain your tongue sees when you bite down on a too-vigorously microwaved slice of pizza quattro stagioni. “Your proof, Mr. City?” she asks.
“A long time ago,” says Mr. K, “you ate some cat shit, and your mama pulled a worm as long as spaghetti out of your ass.”
My mom chokes on her drink. Coughing red grenadine blood against the back of her hand, coughing like her own mom, my nana, coughed, she manages to croak, “Did my dead mother tell you that?”
No, Crescent shakes his head. “Your kid told me; I swear.”
“And my murdered father?” she asks, stifling her cough with another sip. “I expect you’ve found him, also?”
Crescent nods.
“You’ve spoken with him?”
Ye gods. My drug-demented escort is about to expose me as a panicked public toilet pee-pee mangler.
Again, Crescent City nods. As he leans forward, the room’s candles uplight his haggard face, like footlights on a stage, the glow gilding his wrinkles and the stubble on his chin. “Your pa, Mr. Benjamin, he told me he wasn’t murdered.”
“Then you, Mr. City,” snaps my mom, “you are a charlatan!”
Wasn’t murdered?
“You, Mr. City!” shouts my mom. With a wide sweep of her arm she thrusts a pointing finger, and this broad, theatrical gesture evicts the tabloid magazine from her lap. “You are a fraud!” The magazine flutters the short distance to the floor, where it lies faceup. “Because my child is not dead! My father was butchered by a psychopath! And my child is alive!”
She’s gone crazy. I am neither alive nor a psychopath.
On the floor at our feet, the tabloid headline reads, “Maddy Spencer Resurrected.” Printed in an only slightly smaller typeface, a subhead trumpets, “And She’s Lost 60 Pounds!”
“You don’t have to believe anything,” says Mr. K, and he tunnels one hand into the rank denim abscess of a pants pocket. He produces a vial of familiar white powder and says, “I can show you.” He reaches the vial toward her and says, “Go ahead, Holy Mother Camille. Talk to Madison yourself.”
DECEMBER 21, 12:18 P.M. HAST
Camille Becomes a Tourist in the Afterlife
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
In the ship’s salon, my mom accepts the vial of ketamine offered by Mr. Crescent City, and she scoops a polished fingernail deep into the white powder. She repeats this one-two-three times, inhaling each snootful with a snort so violent that her coiffed head whiplashes backward on her swanlike neck. Only when her fingernail can no longer find its way to the vial does Camille Spencer slump sideways on her divan, and the rise and fall of her world-renowned bosom becomes too faint as to be discernible.
Lest it slip from her chemically slackened grasp, Mr. City quickly reclaims the vial with its precious remaining contents. He asks, “Supreme Holy Mother Spencer?”
The familiar spectacle begins with a spot of blue light glowing in the center of her chest. The blue waxes brighter, shining upward before it grows like a tendril, spiraling, twining almost to the ceiling. At its apex, the blue vine swells into a bud. This bud takes the shape of a body, vague and streamlined. The color, it’s the blue your skin sees when you slide between starched-and-ironed sixteen-hundred-thread-count Pratesi sheets. It’s the blue your tongue sees when you eat peppermint.
Lastly the features of the blue face appear, my mother’s wide cheekbones tapering to her delicate chin. Her eyes come to rest on me, on the vision of my ghost seated beside her, and her mouth blooms, her voice like a perfume. It’s this, this elegant spirit, which says, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—stop biting your fingernails!”
Oh, Gentle Tweeter, success at last. I irritate; therefore I am.
After securing his cache of Special K, Mr. City gently lays two fingers against the side of my mother’s slack neck, checking for a pulse. He places a hand on her brow and raises one eyelid, smudging his thumb with coppery eye shadow while making certain that her pupil slowly dilates.
Looking down upon him, my mom’s blue spirit observes wistfully, “Maddy never understood why I took so many drugs.”
No longer biting my fingernails, I say, “It’s me. I’m here.”
“You’re just a sad projection of my intoxicated mind,” she insists.
“I’m Madison.”
The hovering, shimmering blue haunt shakes its head. “No,” she says. “I’ve tripped on enough LSD to recognize a hallucination.” She smiles as slowly and beautifully as any tropical sunrise. “You’re nothing but a dream.” Her ghost voice dismissive: “You’re merely a projection of my guilty conscience.”
I am, she claims, a figment of her imagination.
My mom’s spirit sighs. “You’re exactly the way Leonard told me you’d look.”
You can appreciate my frustration, Gentle Tweeter. The Devil claims me as his invention. So does God. If Babette’s to be believed, I’m part of some grand conspiracy launched by my so-called friends in Hell. Now my mother dismisses me as nothing but her own drug-induced vision. At what point do I become my own creation?
Floating, swanning around the ceiling, she explains that since she had been a small girl, pulling weeds and beating rugs on that upstate farm, a telemarketer had phoned to tell her about the future. Early on, she thought he was crazy. His voice was nasal and reedy, like a teenage boy’s. Worse, he readily claimed to be over two thousand years old, and that he’d been a priest in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais. He was young and silly, she surmised, or he was clearly a lunatic.
Smiling at the memory, she says, “The very first time he called, Leonard was conducting a marketing research study about cable television viewing habits.… You know your grandmother. She’d never let us have cable, but I lied and said we did. You know how lonely that farm can get. Leonard asked if he could call me again the next day.”
This telephone stranger, he’d known details about my mom that no one could know. And early on, he told her to buy a lottery ticket. He told her what numbers to choose, and when she won he told her where to go to have some photographs taken, and he told her exactly where to send those pictures: to what movie producer. This boy Leonard, he made her famous. He told her how she’d meet her future husband. Every day he’d telephone with more good news about my mom’s future. The lottery ticket won. The producer cast her in a film before she’d turned seventeen, and when my papadaddy refused to let her work, Leonard called and told her how to file to become a legally emancipated minor.
This guardian angel, he’d told her to gather flowers and press them between the pages of a book. To honor her father, Leonard said, just in case she never saw him again.
“Your nana seemed to understand,” my ghost mom explains. “She bought the lottery ticket for me. She told me that a similar telephone pollster had been callin
g her since she was a little girl.” Patterson, he said his name was. This had been decades before. “Eventually Patterson had told her the exact date she’d bear a girl baby, and he’d asked her to name it Camille.”
My mom left that upstate farm and never looked back.
In summary, it would seem that telemarketers have been steering the destiny of my family for at least three generations.
Under the unlikely tutelage of this faceless stranger, my mother’s movie career had skyrocketed. As dictated by Leonard, she’d met and married my father, and with Leonard’s advice their investments had snowballed. Wherever their far-flung projects took them, in Bilbao and Berlin and Brisbane, Leonard had always known where to call. He’d telephoned every day with new marching orders, and they’d come to trust him implicitly. Before they turned twenty-five, they were the wealthiest, loveliest, most celebrated couple in the world.
After years of coaching my parents to riches and fame, one day Leonard called my mother in Stockholm or Santiago or San Diego, to predict the date and time I’d be born.
“He whispered in my ear,” swears my drifting ghost mom. “He whispered merely the idea of you.”
And in doing so I was conceived.
The beauty of her countenance beaming down on me, her ghost eyes brimming with soulful tears, she says, “He asked me to name you Madison. We were ecstatic. He told us that you’d be a great warrior. You’d defeat evil in a terrible battle. But then Leonard went too far.…”