The driver’s door swings open, and a uniformed chauffeur steps out. First his polished, hooflike boots emerge, then his gloved hands, glistening and leathery, followed by the brimmed cap that must hide the two bony rinds that poke up through his not-combed hair. As he stands, he adjusts a pair of mirrored sunglasses that hide his eyes. He carries a sheaf of pages bound along one edge like a screenplay. This he lifts and begins to read from, aloud. “ ‘Madison felt faint with terror and confusion.’ ”
And I am, Gentle Tweeter, I do. I feel faint with terror.
“ ‘Her great, meaty knees wobbled, weak with horror,’ ” he reads, as if dictating my existence.
In fact, my knees are shaking.
The chauffeur reads, “ ‘Madison had served her maker well. She’d delivered billions of God’s children to the Devil’s clutches.’ ” He turns a page of his manuscript and continues. “ ‘Madison had betrayed even her own parents and condemned them to eternal damnation!’ ”
And, so it seems, I have.
Even Babette sidles up to savor my humiliation. To smirk at the sight of my defeat, asking, “How’s your psoriasis?”
“ ‘Little Madison,’ ” the chauffeur reads, “ ‘would soon render unto Satan every living soul whom the Almighty had labored to create. All that God loved, Madison had ensured that they would be given over for Lucifer to molest until the end of time.…’ ”
The chauffeur pauses in his speechifying. He opens the rear door of the Town Car, and Mr. K readily climbs inside. The driver leaves the door open, and additional blue ghosts make a beeline for the car’s rear seat. The rapidly accruing spirits of Boorites burned to death, suffocated on toxic fumes, or drowned in the surrounding seas, these recently departed flock enter the door the driver holds ajar. They stuff themselves within. So many, so quickly that they blur, they pack themselves into this, this vehicle they think will ferry them to the heavenly hereafter.
“ ‘Madison thought she was so intelligent,’ ” the chauffeur reads. “ ‘But she was not. In truth, she was stupid. The silly cow, she’d brought about the downfall of all humanity.…’ ”
Slowly, so as not to draw his focus, I shuck my cardigan sweater. Stealthily, I don the defiled shirt, doing up the buttons gingerly, lest my fingers come into contact with the crusty spooge that so richly patterns the stiffened bodice.
“ ‘Little Maddy,’ ” the driver reads, oblivious to my actions, “ ‘would have no choice but to submit herself for Satan’s repeated carnal pleasures.…’ ”
Positioning myself to protect my aged grandparents from the Devil’s wrath, I pry open Mr. Darwin’s gummy book and display the defaced chapter about Tierra del Fuego. There, the sonorous travelogue remains unreadable beneath a thickish coating of horrors. Most prominent on those two facing pages is the outline of a squished ding-dong silhouetted in red.
“ ‘Poor, fat Madison Desert … whatever … Trickster Spencer,’ ” reads the Devil, “ ‘would soon become the dark lord’s concubine!’ ”
And although the satanic driver has yet to notice the open, bloodied book and its vile illustration, many others do take note. Nana and Papadaddy both peer at the dinger outline and commence to giggle. Likewise, the golden angel of Festus takes a gander and his eyes widen in mirthful recognition. Other souls, those burned-alive spirits in transit to the Lincoln Town Car, they also venture a glance at the gory exhibit I present, and they, too, begin to snicker.
Paying them no mind, the chauffeur turns to a new page of his missive. “ ‘Madison will serve Satan in Hades, and she will bear him many odious children.…’ ”
Gathering my courage, I push the befouled book forward for his inspection. “How?” I shout. “How will mighty Satan consummate such an unholy union?”
His speech interrupted, the Devil looks up from his script. Reflected in both lenses of his sunglasses are the pages of the Beagle book.
“Mighty Satan,” I ask, “were you not jerked off by Darwin’s gore-slickened observations about the Cape of Good Hope?”
The driver slowly lowers his sunglasses, revealing yellow goat eyes, the irises running side to side.
Written down the outside margin in my nana’s hand, the words Atlantis isn’t a myth. It’s a prediction.
“Were you not,” I persevere, “in fact castrated by your only intimate encounter with the diminutive Maddy Spencer?” By now, Gentle Tweeter, despite all my decorous upbringing, in defiance of all my self-censoring social conventionality, I’m screaming. “Satan, oh dark one, does your wiener not ache at this proof that little Madison gelded you? Did she not reject your evil advances in the not-sterile environs of a public upstate potty?”
Stymied by my revelation, the liveried Devil can only stammer.
Gentle Tweeter, I have succeeded in my last-Halloween vow to kick some satanic ass. The damage inflicted at my chubby hands has far surpassed any I dream I’d ever had of my own ability. Here is proof that I exist as someone beyond Beelzebub’s sweaty pedophile fantasy. What mere fictive character could so cripple her author?
More telling than any verbal response, the driver’s crimson hide flushes even deeper scarlet. His horns elongate, lifting his cap. His claws lengthen, pushing off his gloves.
Heedless of the cataclysm taking place around me, I keep up my harangue. Immolating plastic mountains create a flaming skyline. All creation is this mix of tragedy and farce as a trio of people approach. The succubus, Babette, my former best friend, leads my mom and dad forward, prompting them with the murderous point of a large, ornate knife. It’s the same antique blade with which Goran executed the pretty Shetland pony.
The sight of my parents, brought forth in the Devil’s presence, clearly to be utilized as hostages, this unnerves me. Regardless, I boldly thrust out the corrupt book, asserting, “Show us, dark master, if anything remains of your butchered wing-wang.” Puffing my chest to showcase the gummy chambray shirt, I demand, “Is this not your demon seed?”
Livid and trembling, Satan dashes his script against the ground. He turns and reaches into the Town Car, extracting something pale. Dangling from his fist is an orange rag. Given a vigorous shake by his outraged arm, it emits a plaintive meow.
Ye gods. It’s Tigerstripe.
Before I can shush him, angel Festus seconds my challenge. “Yes, Prince of Lies, show us your chopped-off pee-pee.”
Nana escalates the chorus, shouting, “Show us! Let me see your twisted little wormwood!”
And in response, wicked Satan calmly turns to the demon holding my parents, and he says, “Kill them. Kill them both now.”
DECEMBER 21, 2:48 P.M. HAST
Satan, Enraged
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You think it’s going to be a breeze, watching your mother get murdered, but it’s not. I’ve witnessed my mom get lynched by redneck backwoods sheriffs, and I’ve watched her bludgeoned by the henchmen of Big Tobacco, and chomped on by the bulldozers of Big Coal, and garroted by the hit men of Agribusiness.
Once my mother was bitten in half by a renegade manatee. Blood poured out of her eyes. Blood gushed from her ears. Her guts pushed up and out of her mouth. That’s how I knew she was dead. It took days to film. It took an entire team of special effects wonks just to get the blood right. Easily a hundred people were present on set. Stylists and makeup people, grips, dialogue coaches. Caterers. You name it. All of these people stood around, yawning and eating potato chips, and watched my mom gasp and choke on her own gore.
The happy memories of ordinary kids might include their homemaker mothers phoning Bulgari to have jeweled tiaras sent ’round for approval, or Tasering the Somali maids, but my fond recollections include looking on as my mother was burned at the stake by a cabal of Big Pharma drug companies.
I’d sat in a folding chair and peeked between my chubby fingers while she was stoned by angry Puritans. I’d perched on my father’s lap and held my breath as her lovely face disappeared into a rank pool of
quicksand.
And she never flinched, my mom. She never winced.
The director shouted, “Action!”
And my lovely mother died beautifully every time.
She died bravely. She died cleanly. She died thin and noble and calm. When the script dictated, every time, she died perfectly. Her final words were always so eloquent.
She never required a second take.
My father, my dad I’ve heard expire loudly and wetly through a hundred locked bedroom doors.
Whatever I expected, it’s not like that in real life. On the flaming peak of that plastic volcano, as the continent of Madlantis sinks into the Pacific Ocean, Babette lifts the large knife and plunges it into my father’s heart. A beat later, at Satan’s command, she swings the ornate cake knife in a wide arc to slash my mother’s throat.
DECEMBER 21, 2:53 P.M. HAST
The Inevitable Result of Overly Intellectualizing and Suppressing What Would Otherwise Be Appropriate, Natural Expressions of Grief by a Precocious Albeit Insecure Adolescent, Who, Frankly, Has Been Through the Trauma Olympics Lately, What with the Deaths of Her Grandparents and Her Nice Fish and Her Sweet Kitten, Not to Mention Her Own Prematurely Cruel Demise, but Who Keeps Plugging Along with Her Plucky Chin Held High and Does Not Succumb to Blubbing, but Has Striven Gamely to Rise Above Her Circumstances, Dire as They’ve Become, and Who for the Moment Finds Herself Unable to Embrace Yet Another Unhappy Turn of Events
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
The Camille-shaped and Antonio-shaped balloons of blue ectoplasm inflate. Floating before my eyes are the international tycoon and the media superstar. Their ghost eyes meet mine.
Just as I feared it would, back there in the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, my ghost heart balloons like an aneurysm full of hot tears. It bloats like a deceased kitten in the backseat of a limousine. It’s astonishing, but the heart of me engorges like a rapidly inflating, much-turgid man-banana in a fetid toilet. And just like all those things, my heart explodes.
Forgive me, Gentle Tweeter, but what takes place at this juncture is not something one can keyboard. Such are the limitations of emoticons. Upon contact with my parents’ ghosts, I suffer all the emotions which failed to manifest themselves in my life. And for the first time since Los Angeles and Lisbon and Leipzig, I’m happy.
DECEMBER 21, 2:54 P.M. HAST
Shucking This Mortal Coil
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
My mother looks over the melting, flaming landscape that surrounds us. Baroque ruins stand outlined in smoke against the ember-filled skies. Scalding ocean waves sweep inland as the continent sinks lower. Superheated convection winds carry the poisoned fumes of everything to kill everyone and everything everywhere.
Surveying this scene of total planetary annihilation, my sweet mother, her ghost, gasps and says, “How lovely!” She says, “It’s just the way Leonard predicted.…”
In ancient Greek times, she explains, a wise teacher named Plato wrote the story of the destruction of an enormous island nation called Atlantis. Plato, she says, was quoting an Athenian statesman who traveled to Egypt and learned the Atlantis disaster story from priests in the temple of Neith. Blah, blah, blah.
Those Egyptians weren’t actually historians, adds my freshly slaughtered father. They were oracles. They weren’t recording the past; they were predicting the future. And the great land that, according to Plato, was destroyed in “a single day and night of misfortune …,” it wasn’t called Atlantis.
Explains my mother in a not-altogether not-smug tone, “That great doomed nation would be named Madlantis.”
Smirking, my dad says, “It’s not as if the Bible got it correct, either. It’s not the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon that signals Armageddon … it’s the building of the Temple of Madison!”
Looking on, moving with a slowness that betrays his supreme hauteur, the Devil stoops to deposit Tigerstripe on the ground so he can once more lift his manuscript and regale me. “ ‘Terror seized young Maddy,’ ” he reads. “ ‘Her own mommy had confirmed the worst. All of her was as calculated and predetermined as the peaks and valleys of Madlantis. Madison Spencer was no more than a story told by people to other people, a rumor, a silly fable.…’ ”
My ghost mother begs, “Forgive us, Maddy, my sweet, for not telling you the whole truth about your little kitten.”
My ghost father places his faint blue hand on my shoulder. “We only wanted you to know love. And how could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew how brief a lifetime can be?”
“Leonard,” adds my mom, “he preordained that you should cherish your kitty and lose it to death. He said that pain would plant courage in you.…”
Satan taps his foot impatiently, holding the car door open. So great is his growing contempt that the manuscript in his hands begins to smolder and combust. “Heaven awaits!” he shouts.
With a gallant sweep of his arm, my dad ushers us toward the waiting Town Car.
My mom looks out over the scorched, churning field of flame. Reaching a blue ghost hand into a pocket of her ghost robe, she extracts a jumbo-size bottle of ghost Xanax and pitches it into the blazing distance. With this sacrifice she shrieks, “So long, gender and racial wage inequality! Good riddance, postcolonial environmental degradation!”
Following her lead, my dad cups his hands around his mouth and shouts, “Sayonara to you, oppressive popular culture simulacra! See you later, phallocratic panoptic subjugation!”
“We’re going to Heaven!” cries my mom.
“To Heaven!” seconds my dad.
They both start strolling toward the car, but notice that I’m no longer in their company. Hesitating, they turn and look back to where I’m rooted.
“Come on, Maddy,” my father calls joyfully. “Let’s go be happy together, forever!”
Oh, fie. Oh, Gentle Tweeter. I can’t bring myself to tell them the truth. I am still a coward. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, surly demons will be sponge-bathing them with hydrochloric acid. Curmudgeonly harpies will be ladling lukewarm pee-pee down their throats. What’s worse is that every damned Boorite will likewise be there, tortured, and not liking my folks.
Here, the gray entrails of my brain retch forth a last, desperate scheme. One final gesture to prove myself courageous.
DECEMBER 21, 3:00 P.M. HAST
Persephone Makes a Bid for Her Freedom
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How could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew how brief a lifetime can be?
All the great myths aren’t in the past. Glory is not limited to the days of yore, and not all the heroic acts have been performed. As proof I grab my cat. I slap the bitter words from Satan’s mouth. Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, an irksome girl ghost can backhand the Prince of Darkness, smack across his Ctrl+Alt+Scalding kisser. I snatch up Tigerstripe, and I sprint away. I don’t fancy returning to Hell and being humiliated. Nor do I hanker to enforce God’s pronouncements banning birth control and gay marriage.
Henceforth I will prove my own existence. I will prove that I steer my own destiny.
As my former-Wiccan, former–Green Party, former-living, breathing parents once strove to save polar bears and white tigers, I make my bold move. Into this scorching tableau so evocative of my father’s ignited draft cards and my mom’s inflamed brassieres, I scramble.
Behind me my damned parents shout from the windows of the Town Car. “Leave it, Maddy,” says my mother. “The sad old Earth is so yesterday’s news.”
The blissed-out souls of burned-alive Boorites continue to pour into the Lincoln, each righteously certain that their destination is a well-deserved celestial reward.
My former-recycling, former-biodiesel, former–Earth First! father shouts, “Let the silly sperm whales and mountain gorillas just burn, honey! Get in the car!”
>
After all their years of trying to rescue illegal aliens and crude oil–marinated sea otters, this is my opportunity to try to save my parents. Perhaps to save everyone. Attired in my ooze-despoiled shirt, bearing my cat and my Beagle book, I frantically bolt down the mountain. Lugging my kitty as I’d once carried that fragile jar of sloshing tea, I take flight into the blazing canyonlands where artisan pinnacles soar overhead. Into this bland, washed-out, cataract-colored landscape I flee, rescuing the only creature I can.
Oh, my soul’s beloved, I feel the rhythm of his ghost heartbeat beneath the melody of his purr. Oh, my Tigerstripe, I breathe the ghost sweetness of his fur. Such is the perfume your heart smells when you feel love.
In the distance a spark of blue flashes. It’s the shade of electric blue my nose sees when I sniff ozone during a lightning storm. It’s the blue my fingers see when I touch the sharp point of a baby pin. It’s something not so much identifiable as it is inevitable, and I chart a course to reach it.
The angel Festus flutters, buzzing his tiny wings in my hot pursuit. He’s singing God this and God that. His angelic voice sings how the Lord commands me. The power of Christ compels me. “Return to God,” he sings, “as the Almighty is your real maker!”
Satan steers his Lincoln behemoth on my heels. He’s honking his horn and flashing his lights as obnoxiously as any long-haul trucker barreling down an upstate throughway. “Abandon yourself!” Satan howls in anger. He shouts, “It was no accident when the autodialer of Hell connected you by telephone to your bereaved family. I direct your every move! I am your true father!” Whether he’s chasing me or herding me, I’m not certain.
Me, my stout legs are dashing over the white plastic terrain even as it shatters like the Ohio River beneath the escaping feet of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baying at my chunky rear end are my mother and father, my nana and papadaddy. Shouting after me is the soul of Mr. K. So, too, is the succubus, Babette, demanding my immediate capture.