Moment by moment, she tells me, my life had occurred exactly the way Leonard foretold it would.
“Then he told us exactly when and how you would die.”
On some level, she muses, all mothers know their children will suffer and die; that’s the horrible unspeakable curse of giving birth. But to know the exact place and time of your child’s death is too much to bear. “I knew I was destined to be the mother of a murdered child. All of my film roles had been a rehearsal for that night.…”
Camille Spencer. Camille Spencer. Turn on cable television at any hour of any day, and there she is: The long-suffering nun who coaxes deathbed remorse from serial killers. She’s the stoic single-mother waitress whose teen son is shot to death in drive-by gangsta violence. The Great Wise Survivor Woman. The Veteran Radical with All the Answers.
Unaware of her ghost, Mr. Crescent City addresses the whole salon, asking, “Do you see the angel Madison? Do you see I’m not a liar?”
It was knowing how I’d die that tempered their love for me. My mom closes her ghost eyes and says, “We knew the agonies you’d suffer, so we kept you at arm’s length. I couldn’t bear to witness the pain you’d be forced to endure, so we used criticism to prevent ourselves from loving you too much. By fixating on your flaws we tried to save ourselves from the full brunt of your eventual murder.”
And by drinking and pill popping. “Why do you think your father and I took so many drugs? How else could anyone live with the certainty of their child’s impending death?”
Smiling wistfully, she whispers, “You remember how awful it was when your little cat died?” Her breath catches, and she closes her ghost eyes for a moment. She steadies her composure. “That’s why we couldn’t tell you that your Tigerstripe was doomed.”
Leonard had told them that I’d invent salacious diary entries inspired by my stuffed toys. They sent me to boarding school … to ecology camp … to upstate, because it was too agonizing to see me every day, knowing what they knew.
“I even lied about your age,” says my mom. “I told the world you were eight years old because Leonard had always foretold you would die on the evening of your thirteenth birthday.”
A telemarketer had given her complete foreknowledge of my entire truncated life.
The night my mother had stood onstage at the Academy Awards and wished me a happy birthday, she knew I was breathing my last. As her televised image towered above me on the high-definition screen in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, saying, “Your daddy and I love you very, very much …,” she was fully aware that I was being garroted. As she bade me, “… good night, and sleep well, my precious love …,” my mother already knew I was dying.
DECEMBER 21, 12:25 P.M. HAST
Camille Disembodied
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You’ve watched my mother play this scene so many times: a dramatic heroine delivering the expository monologue that provides backstory for some current plot crisis. You’ve witnessed her in this role so often that it’s difficult to separate fiction from this new reality, but never has the scene played with such surrealism. The glimmering blue wraith of her hovers in the salon of the Pangaea Crusader. Her words … in this new role, my mother’s voice is not that of a character. It’s measured and frank, the subdued voice of a narrator in a documentary film.
Her blueness kiting about the ceiling, she says, “All preexisting religious doctrines must be made to seem ridiculous, outdated, oppressive, or hateful. That was the mission Leonard decreed.”
To make room for a new world religion, Leonard had stated that all religions had to be discredited. Everything held to be sacred and holy had to be reduced to a joke. No one could be allowed to discuss good or evil without sounding like a fool, and the mention of God or the Devil must be met with universal eye rolling. Most important, Leonard had insisted, intelligent people must be made to feel ashamed of their need for a higher power. They must be starved for a spiritual life until they would greedily accept any that would be offered to them.
Since my mother’s upstate childhood, all of Leonard’s promises had come true. The only reason she’d let me be killed is because he’d promised I would return to my family in even greater happiness. Leonard had long pledged that I would telephone from beyond life and dictate the rules for a new world religion. He commanded my parents to gather the garbage of the seas and to build a heaven on earth. There, on its highest peak, they were to construct a temple. They were to espouse the doctrines decreed by their dead child, and only when they’d done so and the world was swept by this new faith, only then would their daughter return from her grave to lead all people to the actual kingdom of paradise.
“We completed what Nietzsche had begun,” says my floating mother. “God would have to be thoroughly killed before we could resurrect him.”
Leonard preached that mankind would always long for an organized system of religious beliefs, but, like a scared insecure child, people would hide their need behind a mask of sarcasm and ironic detachment. Each person, he’d claimed, would grow tired of acting as his or her own deity. They would want to belong to something larger, to a sort of family who accepted them despite their worst behavior. This family would be the Boorites.
Boorism, as Leonard had planned, would be a brotherhood that accepted and celebrated the worst aspects of its adherents. Even the details which they themselves despised—their secret prejudices, their bodily odors, their piggish rudeness.
Captivating is my mother, the consummate storyteller. “Through Boorism,” she explains, “Leonard teaches us that salvation relies on making your life an ongoing act of forgiveness.”
No matter what others say or do, you must never take offense. According to Boorist doctrines, the greatest sin is reproaching others, and humans are given life on earth so that we might test one another with small and large slights. Anyone may spit or swear or break wind, but no one may accept that act as a personal affront.
Every unkind remark or crude gesture by others is a blessing, an opportunity to exercise our own capacity to forgive.
“In theory it sounds vile,” says my mom, “but it’s really quite simple and lovely in practice.”
From even his earliest telephone conversations, Leonard had described Camille’s child as a modern Persephone.
As my mother’s spirit flits about the room, describing her outlandish scenario—all human destiny covertly string-pulled by dead telemarketers—Mr. City tips his vial of ketamine. He taps a small pile of white onto his thumbnail and snorts it in a single breath. He snorts another.
To touch the hearts of everyone in the world, the child who would die horribly and be returned to life, she would have to be famous. Like a modern Abraham called to sacrifice his son Isaac, the child’s parents would need to capture the eyes and ears of the world media. For that lofty purpose, Leonard had made Camille and Antonio Spencer such global role models. All of humanity would know their child and mourn her untimely death. The world would embrace my parents’ disdain for organized religions, and the world would subsequently convert en masse when my parents made public their proof of an afterlife.
As they had flocked to soy and hemp, so would people ultimately flock to Boorism.
That’s why, Gentle Tweeters, the ultrasound snapshot of my fetus had been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, months before I was born. The video of my delivery had played on prime-time television and won an Emmy. That squalling, slimy newborn me was known to billions of viewers. As was my kitten, Tigerstripe, showcased on myriad magazine covers. Birthday by birthday, the entire planet had watched me grow from an infant to a toddler to my fleshy girlhood.
The entire planet watched my funeral. Kings and presidents carried my biodegradable casket.
For obvious reasons the person who’d slay me would have to be a reviled Judas. My parents had searched long. They’d adopted the basest of blackguards and young cutthroats in the hope that one would
be my executioner. It was only when they’d tested Goran, scurrilous Goran, that they knew they’d found their villain. No, what happened at EPCOT was no accident, but rather a carefully choreographed experiment. When they’d given Goran a knife and paraded an innocent, endearing pony before him … it was when he’d slashed its throat without hesitation that my mom and dad knew they’d found the player who would eventually end my life.
DECEMBER 21, 12:31 P.M. HAST
What Makes a Family
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In Athens or Aspen or Adelaide, my parents and I had always created a family. Anytime we were together, our love was intact. We weren’t like normal families who live tied to one plot of moldy compost, growing potatoes and carding wool. We had so many houses, in Dublin and Durban and Dubai, that none of them felt like our home. We weren’t like those genetically isolated finches Mr. Darwin had found in the Galápagos. No, we were more like those lost tribes wandering around in the pages of the Bible book. In Vancouver or Las Vegas or Van Nuys, all we had that was stable and consistent was each other.
For years, my faults were the glue that kept my parents united. My fat, my quiet bookwormish, misanthropic misbehavior, these were the flaws they sought to correct. And when I seemed to throw myself at Jesus Christ, well, nothing could’ve cemented their marital bond more effectively. Please forgive me my boast, but for years I was a genius at keeping my mom and dad hitched while the parents of my boarding school peers were constantly wedding and divorcing new partners. In Miami and Milan and Missoula, while our surroundings constantly changed, we had one another.
That is, until now. Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddhartha, whenever any dead person has come back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets every word of it. Wars ensue. Witch burnings. For example, when Bernadette Soubirous stepped into the water at Lourdes in the year 1858, the Virgin Mary materialized only to say, “Hey, don’t play here, kid. It’s a filthy-dirty medical-waste dump.” Even worse, in 1917 when she appeared to impoverished Portuguese shepherd children at Fatima, Mary was only trying to sneak them the number for a winning lottery ticket. Talk about good intentions! Here a helpful dead lady was merely trying to lend them a hand, and those predead urchins Ctrl+Alt+Overreacted.
In summation, the predead get everything wrong. But at this point in history, you can hardly blame them for being so spiritually famished that they’d gobble down anything. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, we may have polio vaccines and microwave popcorn, but secular humanism really only covers the good times. Nobody in a foxhole ever said a prayer to Ted Kennedy. Nobody on a deathbed clasps his hands in weeping despair and petitions for the aid of Hillary Clinton. My parents were in a position to proselytize. I gave them some misguided advice, and now, the headlines: “Camille Files for Divorce!”
I’ve failed in my eternal mission to keep them together.
DECEMBER 21, 12:35 P.M. HAST
Camille in Denial
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“Who’s Persef …?” I ask my mother.
“Persephone,” says she. If Leonard’s to be believed, Persephone was a girl so extraordinary that a brute named Hades had only to glance at her to fall madly in love. She lived with her loving parents on Earth, but Hades seduced her and eloped with her to his kingdom in the underworld. In her absence the world cooled. Without her grace present the trees shed their leaves and the flowers withered. Snow fell. Water turned to ice, and the days waned shorter while the nights waxed longer.
With her new husband, Persephone was happy for a period. In her new underworld home she made friends and learned the customs. She became a favorite among her peers just as she had been on Earth. Hades loved her as much as her parents had, but eventually she pined to visit them. After half a year Hades relented. Such was his love that there was little he could deny his wife. Only when she had sworn to return to him in the underworld did Hades allow her to leave.
Upon her return to Earth the snow blanketing her old home melted. Trees flowered and bore fruit, and the days stretched so long that the nights between them were almost gone. Persephone’s parents were overjoyed to see her, and for half a year the three lived together as they had before her marriage.
According to Leonard, when six months had passed Persephone bade her parents farewell and returned to her husband, Hades. The Earth slept in her absence. When half a year had again passed, she returned to bring summer.
“That’s it?” I ask. “She never goes to college or gets a job or anything? She just shuttles back and forth between her folks’ house and her husband?”
With a sad smile, so wan that I suspect the effects of Botox extend into the afterlife, my mom says, “My daughter is Persephone.…”
My own response to her speech is complicated. I couldn’t accept such a proposal from Satan, but coming from my mother it is more palatable. It’s not overly flattering: the concept that I’ve been born and bred and fattened like a calf for some ritual slaughter. My parents stood apart from me because they knew my life would end so tragically. They even selected my assassin and abandoned me to his deadly manhandling.
Perhaps that explains my carnal preoccupation with the ruddy Goran. Aren’t we all entranced by the means of our own future demise?
It’s not without appeal, the possibility that I was born already doomed and that everyone I loved knew more about me than I did about myself. If that’s the case I’m absolved from doing any wrong. I’m helpless and ignorant, but I am innocent.
What chafes me is the image of Leonard the puppet master, some slide-rule misfit telephoning my mother and jerking her chain. Leonard, seated at his telemarketing console, wearing his headset in Hell, dictating his philosophy to my impressionable eleven-year-old mom … the image prompts me to say, “I know him. I know Leonard.”
I say, “He’s book-smart, but he doesn’t know everything.”
My mom’s spirit looks Ctrl+Alt+Stunned.
I say, “He tricked you. Leonard bought your trust with winning lottery numbers and insider stock market tips just so you’d let me be murdered.” The words pour out, unstoppable. “Leonard’s a liar, Mom! Boorism is a big mistake!”
I advance to comfort her. My arms spread wide for a nurturing hug, I say, “It’s going to be okay. You were just an idiotic eleven-year-old girl. I know the feeling.…”
The blow lands across my ghost cheek. Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, a ghost can slap another ghost. And apparently a ghost mother can smack her own chubby baby girl ghost. What’s more—it hurts.
Granted, my mother’s ghost is already fading. Her body sprawled on the divan, the chest stirs. Color rises in her cheeks. The ghost hand that slapped me has almost vanished. Perhaps it’s only the idea of the slap that stings.
“You’re the liar!” shouts my vanishing blue mom. “You’re a hallucination!”
It’s not the most sensitive reaction, but I say, “Don’t be stupid.” I say, “You’re leading the entire world to Hell.”
What remains of her ghost is invisible. Only her words hang in the air of the salon, almost inaudible as she says, “Whatever you are, you’re not my daughter. You’re an evil, overweight nightmare. My real child is beautiful and perfect, and on this very day she has returned to bring eternal sunshine to all of mankind.”
DECEMBER 21, 12:41 P.M. HAST
Another Loved One in Jeopardy!
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“So why Jesus?” asks the luminous blue ghost of Mr. K. “Why did you fall for Jesus?”
My thumbs twitching across the keys of my PDA, I shrug. At the time I was on the cusp of puberty. I was eleven years old with menarche barreling down on me like a speeding bloodmobile. Meaning: my first menstruation. Meaning: Mena
rche is not some Old Testament who’s-it. Any morning I expected to wake up with some huge burden of mammary glands attached to my chest. Thickets of hair would be sprouting in all of my secret places, and I’d be rendered a hormonal zombie. Time and time again, I’d seen it happen at my Swiss school. One day girls would be spunky, brainy flat-chested superheroes, and the next day they’d be simpering Miss Sexy Sexpots.
“So why Jesus?” asks Mr. Ketamine’s ghost. We’re two ghosts sitting in the main salon of the megayacht, keeping watch over my conked-out mom. The blue of Mr. K’s spirit matches exactly the blue that my tongue sees when I eat crushed ice. Not that I get to eat anything, not anymore. Not that I’m shedding any pounds, either.
Continuing to keyboard, I explain that my parents are little more than their physical appetites, their recreational drugs and casual sex. They’re just hungry carnal stomachs forever consuming. By dating Jesus, I wanted to sidestep all of the blood and spit and sperm that seemed to loom in my immediate future.
To CanuckAIDSemily, thanks for the heads-up. Reading your latest text, I say, “Fie! Gadzooks!”
Mr. K’s blue ghost says, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s my cat,” I say. “It’s Tigerstripe.”
CanuckAIDSemily tells me that Satan is nosing around Hell, asking everyone whether they’ve seen an orange-striped tabby. He’s offered a reward of one hundred full-size Mars bars to whoever can capture Tigerstripe and turn him in, no doubt for Satan to use as a hostage against me.
Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I did once attempt to flush Tiger down a toilet at the Beverly Wilshire, but that was only after he was dead. And that’s different, because I loved him.
Mr. City, he looks down on his earthly body, sprawled there on the floor. His scabrous, pocked face. His mangled ears and nose. “I wish I were dead.”
“No, you don’t,” I say.
“Dead and rich,” he says. Even his ghost has crooked teeth, leaning together in some places, missing in others, teeth like the ruins of Stonehenge and approximately the same lichen colors.