I text, asking whether anyone has seen Tigerstripe, and whether anyone is hiding him. This might sound like a case of misplaced priorities, but I’m less worried about Satan getting his mitts on my parents than I am about him flaying the lovely fur off my pet pussycat. Just the idea makes me Ctrl+Alt+Frantic.
“I want to be dead and in Heaven,” says Mr. K’s ghost, “and making love to Sahara. Did I ever tell you about Sahara?” The ketamine must be wearing off, because Mr. K’s already pale blue ghost is fading.
According to CanuckAIDSemily, Satan has released my prisoners from the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions. Hitler, Idi Amin, Elizabeth Bathory, they’re all set free to terrorize the occupants of Hell once more. Caligula, Vlad the Impader, and Rin Tin Tin, they all have special orders to seek out one special little orange kitty.
Overhead, I can hear propeller blades chopping the Pacific air. It’s the unmistakable sound of the Gaia Wind setting down on the deck above us. Not looking away from my PDA screen, I pause. Without making eye contact with Mr. K’s ghost, trying to sound Ctrl+Alt+Nonchalant, I ask, “Did you and my papadaddy talk at all … about me?”
Mr. K’s flickering blue silhouette, barely there, nods.
DECEMBER 21, 12:47 P.M. HAST
Satan Phones to Bait Our Hero
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Aboard the Pangaea Crusader my borrowed PDA begins to play “Barbie Girl,” and on the device’s backlit screen the name of the caller appears as “Your Author.” I cautiously put the phone to my ghost ear.
“ ‘… Madison knew she would not be able to hide her true nature for much longer,’ ” a voice says. A guttural, robust voice, it says, “ ‘Soon Maddy would have to embrace the fact that she personified chaos, and that her reason for being was to bring misery and conflict to everyone whose life she touched!’ ”
It’s Satan. Of course it’s Satan. Gentle Tweeter, the dark lord claims to have authored the story of my life—to have written me into being, if you will—and he insists that I’m no more real than Jane Eyre or Huckleberry Finn. Periodically he telephones to read me portions of his so-called novel as proof that he’s dictated my every continuing thought and action. In the Devil’s version of my life every sentence ends with an audible exclamation mark. At least one. I wish I shared Satan’s enthusiasm about me.
“ ‘… Already,’ ” he continues reading, “ ‘Madison had lured multitudes of souls to eternity in the fiery pit!’ ” The telephone voice says, “ ‘And Madison knew that if she didn’t strive to complete her infernal mission of total damnation, soon the Devil’s hellhounds would locate her helpless kitty cat and utilize it for conducting skin patch toxicity tests of a new feminine hygiene spray!’ ”
On her divan my unconscious mother stirs, moaning softly. Gradually the noise of helicopter blades begins to subside. Footsteps bound across the helipad overhead, thudding the deck that is this salon’s ceiling. Every step brings some hideous revelation a moment closer.
“ ‘… Madison knew that, even now, her Papadaddy Ben was coming aboard her parents’ ostentatious yacht! He would expose her! The world would comprehend the penis-lacerating, man-hating murderess she was!’ ”
DECEMBER 21, 12:56 P.M. HAST
A Portrait in Goo
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Science affords little room for personal feelings. As a supernaturalist, it is not my role to judge or censor events as they occur. No, at best mine is the position of a recording witness. The fantastical might transpire, the sad, the shocking even, but I must maintain a level head and set myself the goal of documenting these. Cold as such an edict may seem, I’m grateful for it; otherwise, I could not bear what happens next.
Aboard the Pangaea Crusader, my father appears in the doorway to the ship’s salon. He stands there for a moment, squinting against the smoky incense and dim light. “Camille?” he says, his voice subdued, freighted with dread. “My love?” He hesitates as if afraid of what he’ll find. Finally, his gaze falls upon the figure stretched the length of the sofa: my mother seemingly dead, and he bounds forward, closing the distance in the time it takes to shout, “Camille!” Like some fairy-tale prince, he drops to one knee beside my drowsing mom. Cradled in his hands, he holds a blue pillow. It’s a small bundle of blue fabric.
As for my mother, her irregular breathing is too shallow to be readily apparent. And her cough syrup libation has left a crimson stain around her mouth that suggests nothing so much as the purge fluids: the froth of blood and stomach acid that corpses regurgitate in their early hours of death. Trust me, Gentle Tweeter, I may be thirteen years old and cantankerous and a girl, but I have spent several hours hovering over my own dead body in a hotel suite, hoping someone would arrive to resuscitate me. After observing the myriad noxious changes that beset my own fresh cadaver—lividity, rigor mortis, bowel evacuation—I know what purge fluids are.
To the future-dead, I heartily suggest you don’t linger.
My father presses his cheek against my mom’s, muttering her name like an incantation, “Camille, Camille Spencer, Cammy, my love,” breathing this magic utterance into her still ear. I’m embarrassed to watch, but it’s too late to escape. Mere moments before, Mr. Ketamine fled the room. As for me, what I observe seems more intimate than sex. Tears spring to my father’s eyes and he moans in agony. “My Camille, my Cammy, how could you end your life?” He sobs his words into her bosom, saying, “How could you? Babette means nothing—she means less than nothing—to me.” His body shudders as he presses himself upon her, saying, “I never wanted this divorce. I only left you because our Madison commanded it.…”
Hearing this, I’m totally Ctrl+Alt+Taken Aback. Here’s more Madison-related human suffering. As if every act of stupidity is somehow my fault.
On his knee, rocking against my mom, he continues to hold the small blue bundle he’s carried into the room. Cradled between his chest and my mom’s, the blue looks vaguely familiar. And as my dad weeps and keens, the body beneath his begins to stir.
Her eyelids flutter. Her fingers caress my father’s hair. So overcome is my dad that he’s unaware of her resurrection until she says, “Antonio?” Her fingers find the blue bundle clasped between them, and she asks, “What have you brought me?”
My father, his face, his eyes gasp. His mouth gapes as if he beholds paradise. His mouth thrusts forward to meet hers, and they kiss. They kiss the same way I gobble down peanut-butter cheesecake. They suck each other’s faces the way my nana smoked her first cigarette in the morning.
And yes, I might be dead, but I’m not so tactless that I ogle their passionate romantic grappling. Instead, I coolly observe how the oceanic reflections of light glimmer through the portholes to ripple against the salon ceiling. Eventually my parents break their clinch.
Breathless, my mom touches the blue bundle of fabric and says, “Show me.”
“Behold, my beloved!” says my dad. He stands, unfurling the blue to reveal that it’s a garment. Stretched between his hands is a coarse collar of faded blue. Chambray, my guess is. White buttons march down the front. It’s a shirt, and he holds it by each cuff, stretching his arms wide to display it all.
Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, it’s my worst fear. It’s my soiled blue chambray shirt from upstate!
“Behold,” says my father, his face a grinning blissful cross between tears and joy. “Our cherished Madison has sent us another sign! It was for sale in a vintage clothing store in Elmira, exactly where Leonard said it would be!”
My mother, likewise bleary-eyed, peers at the fabric, inspecting it. Her mouth hangs slack with disbelief.
“It’s Madison’s image,” exclaims my father. “It’s her face!”
Hanging there, spoiling the blue fabric, are the stains of Papadaddy’s vile spew. The loathsome fluids that erupted from between the pages of the Beagle book in that long-ago tedious upstate public toilet, they’ve s
et, creating an abstract pattern like the map of Mr. Darwin’s expedition to someplace horrible. They’ve formed piddling islands and dark continents of a world no one would willingly explore.
“Here!” my father proclaims as he thrusts forward a stained patch for my mother’s closer inspection. “Here’s her eye!” He shifts another corrupt blotch nearer her face, insisting, “And here’s her other eye!” He points to this smudge some huge distance from the first, as if my eyes were in different time zones. As presented the two smudges are vastly different sizes, one no larger than a thumbprint. The other is the size of a fist. The two aren’t even on the same level. They’re two asymmetrical blobs separated by a gross smear he interprets as my nose.
Please know, Gentle Tweeter, this is not me. It’s wiener juice spurted out. It’s the face of a deformed monster.
“I can see now! That is Maddy’s pretty nose!” my mom exclaims. “I can see it! The face looks exactly like Madison!”
“Look at her mouth!” my dad gushes, almost weeping. “Oh, her sweet mouth!” Using his fingertip, he traces the irregular outline of a revolting stain, a grotesque mess of indelible ejaculate. A crusted horror.
My mom cries out, “It’s a perfect likeness!”
Trust me, Gentle Tweeter, it is not. These revolting residual deposits of frightening man-jelly, they look nothing like me!
My father presses his nose to this abundance of stale ooze, and he inhales, deeply, exclaiming, “It even smells like Madison!”
It’s this disgusting residue of desiccated goo my mother and father now herald as a visitation from their angelic daughter. Depicted in this most sickening medium, they see me, and the shared passion of the moment brings their beaming, beatific countenances to the brink of a second passionate lip-lock. Their mouths tremble toward touching one another. Their faces yearn forward.
But the moment is spoiled. A new voice enters the room, a young woman’s voice, calling, “Antony?” Calling, “Antony, where are you?” At this, my parents freeze. Quickly, they abandon their amorous embrace, almost springing apart, as this new figure enters. Her hair is curled and red, her face bone white. It’s Miss Torrid von Torridski from the Rhinelander penthouse, my dad’s mistress. My former best friend. The infamous Babette; in her hands she carries another not-clean exhibit.
“Look here!” says my dad, calling my mom’s attention to this new object. He spreads the odious shirt across my mother’s lap, and he rushes to take this new curiosity from his noxious paramour. “Another sign from Madison!” he says. It’s a book. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, it’s the book, the book I hoped no one would ever find.
As Babette allows my dad to reverently lift the book from her spidery white hands, she narrates. She says, “The child virgin has sent her own unexpressed menses! Madison’s blood flows forth to eradicate the blasphemous words of the heretic Charles Darwin!” Her voice climbing to shrill heights, Babette says, “A book that bleeds!” As my father bears the profane book on high, carrying it above his head, kneeling once more to present it to my mom, Babette says, “It’s a miracle!”
It’s a mess is what it is. The pages are matted together with coagulated wiener blood, pressed as solid as a brick by the weight of a mattress and a guilty conscience. It’s not sanctified or remarkable. But to them, these deranged former Indigo Children and former alchemists and former shamanists, it’s a holy relic. A big leather-bound, Heaven-sent Kotex.
Buried somewhere within it, written in my mother’s hand, is the message, Set yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve.
How easily this scene could end there, in this tableau: my father holding the book up … my mother on her divan, lifting her arms to accept it … the adulterous handmaiden looking on … but yet another person has entered the room.
Initially, my impression is that my long-dead Mr. Wiggles has returned to me, for this new presence is hardly bigger than a healthy goldfish. It floats in the air, glittering and fluttering the way a fish smoothly oscillates its yellow-pink fins to tread water. The fairy being, it glows, hovering. This enchantment moves closer.
No one turns to address him, this latest entry, but his tiny face is as smooth as fresh-baked bread. His yellow hair lies as bright as butter against his forehead. It’s the rustic swain from my papadaddy’s funeral. The primitive evangelist, now a dazzling sprite. My homemade angel from Halloween night. No one turns to address this unlikely import from rural upstate, but I’m so shocked that his half-forgotten name erupts, unbidden, from my lips.
DECEMBER 21, 1:01 P.M. HAST
The Inevitable Result of Operating Heavy
Farm Machinery While Overdosed on Xanax
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
In the salon of the Pangaea Crusader, I cry, “Festus!” and the twee towheaded visitor turns to regard me with his luminous blue eyes. He actually sees and hears me. More to my surprise, my father’s Skanky Skankerton mistress also casts her urine-hued eyes in my direction. She follows my gaze to Festus. Impossible as this seems, Babette sees us both, and her rubbery lips curl like store-brand hot dogs sliced lengthwise and fried in lard for a hardy upstate petit de jeune. Her eyes narrow to trembling slits and her shoulders arch like those of a wary barnyard cat. Her ample sweater-bound chest heaves with each breath. Even as I watch with the skeptical eye of a supernaturalist, Babette’s fingernails grow from the length of a kitten’s to that of a panther’s.
My upstate consort lifts one boyish arm straight, his miniature hand, held palm out, no larger than a fully blown pink crocus, and he addresses her. His voice sounding deeper than you’d expect, robust and resonant, he says, “Be gone, vile succubus.”
My parents, oblivious, huddle together to examine the Beagle book defiled with dingus blood they think gushed out of my angelic woo-woo.
And yes, I may be romantically smitten with this blond tyke in bib overalls, but I do know the word succubus. If this charge leveled by my diminutive hillbilly flame is accurate, it would explain Babette’s ability to see me. It might also explain the uncanny hold she seems to exert on my normally Camille-addicted father. My gratitude to HadesBrainiacLeonard, who reminds us that a succubus is a demon who takes the form of a human female in order to seduce and destroy men.
Holding Babette at bay, wee Festus bids me come to his side. “I venture to this earthly place,” he tells me, “on behalf of your grandfather.”
“My father’s father?” I ask in hope.
Festus regards me, his buttery forehead crossed with a single wrinkle to betray his Ctrl+Alt+Puzzlement. “I refer to Benjamin, who resides in perfect happiness for all eternity in the kingdom of Heaven.”
My Papadaddy Ben, he means. “So he is in Heaven?” I ask dubiously. We’re standing here looking at Papadaddy’s skin-banana slime spouted all down the front of my nice shirt, and he’s in paradise?
Festus nods. He studies my expression more closely. “Know you, maiden, any valid reason why Ben should not be in the presence of the Almighty?”
Ah, Festus, how I’d missed his stilted Pilgrim-speak. I ask, “How come you can see me?”
“We two can speak,” Festus says, “because I am no longer of the material world.”
Poor Festus.
I offer my condolences. “Were you killed by French-kissing?”
“Combine accident,” he says with a baleful smile.
Forgive my gloating, Gentle Tweeter, but I knew it. From the first time we met at my papadaddy’s homespun hayride funeral, I guessed that’s how Festus’s life would be resolved. A dozen years spent pulling weeds and plucking chickens and then, bam, he’s chopped to a pulp by farm machinery. Oh, how I envied his dramatic fate!
He goes on to explain, “Forever am I to serve as an angel.” Offering me his peewee hand, he says, “And my mission is to find you, my grail.” He says, “I am sent here, Miss Madison, because the Lord our God is in dire need of your help.”
DECEMBER 21, 1:16 P.M
. HAST
The Purpose of My Awful Life—Revealed!
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
There’s a Heaven.
There is a God, and not just Warren Beatty.
Paradise exists, Gentle Tweeter, but that fact provides little solace to those of us assigned to spend our eternity elsewhere. My upstate Festus has become a sparkling, itsy-bitsy angel, while pudgy me is enduring fiery, sulfurous lakes of crap and The English Patient. I’m happy for him. Tickled pink. Really, I am, but such inequitable social moments weren’t covered in my not-slight schooling on etiquette. Fortunately, this difficult exchange is truncated by the insistent ringing of the salon’s telephone. Babette answers it with a curt “Yes?”
Eyeing Festus and me, she listens to the caller. After a moment, she snaps, “No, I do not want to take a consumer product survey.” She says, “Emily, how did you get this number?”
My mom’s telephone rings, and she retrieves it. My father’s rings.
My eternal gratitude to you, HadesBrainiacLeonard and PattersonNumber54 and CanuckAIDSemily. Your timing is spot-on.
“Chewing gum preferences?” asks my mom, incredulous. “Leonard, baby, is that you?”
My dad says, “No, I never buy the lambskin ones.”
In the ensuing telemarketing chaos, young Festus spirits me from the yacht’s salon. We escape down passageways and through hatches. In our giggling flight, we dissolve through bulkheads and Somali maids, tasting paint and semi-digested plantain curry, until we arrive in my long-sealed childhood stateroom. There, we find the drapes drawn, the lights out, the air-conditioning chilling my Steiff bears and Judy Blume paperbacks to archival temperatures. Every stray hair and pot of strawberry-scented lip gloss has been preserved as carefully as a diorama in the Smithsonian or the Museum of Natural History. Dead as we both are, my sturdy squire and I, we are, nonetheless, two unattached persons seeking refuge in a locked room with a bed.