DECEMBER 21, 8:16 A.M. EST
A Shout-out for Backup
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
In death as in life I am betrayed by my peers. This girl we find canoodling so freely with my very married father, until recently she professed to be my devoted friend and mentor in Hell. It’s likely that she’s also violated her Halloween curfew, but how she can manifest a physical body and carnally interact with the predead is a mystery.
To my remaining friends still lodged in the fiery underworld, I make a special request. Unbeknownst to you—smarty-pants Leonard, athletic Patterson, misanthropic Archer, and dear little Emily—during the normal course of events in Hades I inadvertently made contact with my living-alive parents. It was by telephone, an accident, and they were understandably upset about speaking to the daughter they had just buried. To quell their weeping I offered my mom and dad some advice on how to conduct their lives. This advice, most likely, will land them in the Pit.
Please, my underworld friends, if my parents die during my yearlong absence, please protect them. Make them feel at home.
DECEMBER 21, 8:20 A.M. EST
The Tryst, Continued
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Seeking forensic proof of my parents’ lust for each other, as a predead child I would pillage the dirty laundry. The pong and sogginess of damp bed linens served as the physical evidence that my mom and dad were still in love, and these lustful stains documented their romance better than would any florid handwritten poetry. Their carnal discharges proved that all was stable. The squeak of bedsprings, the slap of skin against bare skin, these spoke a biological promise more lasting than wedding vows.
In those revolting smears of bodily fluids was writ proof of our mutual happy ending. That, it would seem, is no longer the case.
“For the love of Madison,” gasps my father’s voice, “are you trying to fuck me to death, Babette?”
Those familiar eyes framed in turquoise eye shadow, edged in mascaraed eyelashes, they’re the flesh-eating flowers of a Venus flytrap. Her earlobes strain with the weight of dime-size dazzle-cut cubic zirconia. Making her voice a bedroom purr, continuing to gaze upon me in my lightbulb, the young woman, Babette, asks, “Do you miss her?”
My father responds with silence. His hesitation stretches to a cold eternity. At last he asks, “You mean my wife?”
“I mean, do you miss your daughter, Madison?” prompts Babette.
Gruff, indignant. “You’re asking if I hit her? Did I ever beat her?”
“No,” Babette says. “Do you miss her?”
After a long beat, his voice wry with chagrin, my father says, “I was stunned to find out that Heaven even existed.…”
“Madison wouldn’t lie,” says Babette, baiting me. “Would she?”
“This is going to sound terrible,” my dad’s voice begins. “But I was even more surprised to hear that Madison got past the gates.” A chuckle. “Frankly, I was dumbfounded.”
My own father thinks I ought to be in Hell.
Stranger yet, I suspect that Babette can see me. I’m certain she can.
Quickly, dryly, my dad adds, “I could imagine Madison getting into Harvard … but Heaven?”
“But she’s there now,” says Babette, even as she sees me here, trapped on Earth, hovering within an arm’s length of their adulterous postcoital dialogue. “Madison spoke to you from Heaven, didn’t she?”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” my dad says. “I loved Maddy as much as any parent ever loved a child.” His silent pause here is long and infuriating. “The truth is that my baby girl had her shortcomings.”
As if making a token effort to resolve the topic, Babette says, “This must be painful for you to admit.”
“The truth is,” says my dad, “my Maddy was a little coward.”
Babette gasps in theatrical shock. “Don’t say that!”
“But Madison was,” insists my dad, his voice exhausted, resigned. “Everyone saw it. She was a spineless, gutless, weak little coward.”
Babette smirks up at me, saying, “Not Maddy! Not spineless!”
“Those were the empirical findings of our entire team of behavioral experts,” my dad’s voice affirms dismally. Downhearted. “She hid behind a defensive mask of false superiority.”
The statement roils in the cramping bowels of my brain. My ears gag on the words team and findings.
“Those eyes of hers watched everything and they judged everything,” my father declares, “especially her mother and me. Madison decried every dream, but she never had the courage or strength of convictions to pursue any vision of her own.” As if laying down his sad trump card he adds, “Nothing led us to believe poor Maddy ever had a single friend.…”
That, Gentle Tweeter, is an untruth. Babette was my friend. Not that she’s such a great endorsement of friendship.
Too quickly, too gently, Babette says, “We don’t have to discuss this, Tony.”
And too fervently, my dad responds, “But I do.” His voice simultaneously righteous and defeated, he says, “Leonard warned us. Decades ago. Long before she was born, Leonard said Maddy would be very difficult to love.”
Narrowing her eyes, grinning up at me, Babette prompts, “Leonard? The telemarketer?”
With an almost audible shaking of his head, my father says, “Okay, he was a telemarketer, but he made us rich. He warned us that Madison would pretend to have friends.” My dad laughs quietly. He sighs. “Over one winter break Madison spent the school holiday entirely alone.…”
Oh, for the love of Susan Sarandon, I can’t be hearing this! My ghost brains bloat and ache, stretching, painfully, the swollen belly of my memory.
“She told her mother and me that she was spending the holidays with friends in Crete,” he continues. “And for the next three weeks, she did nothing but eat ice cream and read trashy novels.”
Gentle Tweeter, fie! Ye gods! Forever Amber is not a trashy novel. Neither am I weak and a coward.
Babette’s voice sounds syrupy as she coos, “A pretty girl like Madison … That’s impossible.” Her urine-hued eyes, however, guffaw heartily at my expense.
“It’s true,” says my dad. “We watched her over the entire holiday via the school’s security cameras. The poor, lonely, fat little thing.”
DECEMBER 21, 8:23 A.M. EST
A Former (?) Friend …
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Such a nature boy is my father that his copious grunting regales us. Volcanic blasts erupt, not muffled by modesty or any intervening closed and locked door. Having left the bed and padded across the room barefoot, he’s installed himself astride the commode in the en suite bathroom, from whence the tiled surfaces amplify a host of wet sounds.
In his absence Babette once more cranes her head to peer up into the lamp shade where I take refuge. “Madison, don’t be angry,” she whispers. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you.”
My father’s voice calls out, “Babs, you say something?”
Ignoring him, Babette whispers, “Don’t delude yourself. Do you think it was an accident when the autodialer connected you with your parents?” Whisper-yelling, she says, “Nothing that’s happened to you is an accident! Not The Voyage of the Beagle. Not EPCOT.” Exasperated, she says, “And the people you think are your dead friends … they’re not your friends. The nerd and the jock and the punk, they’re in Hell for very good reasons!”
If Babette is to be believed, you, HadesBrainiacLeonard, PattersonNumber54, and MohawkArcher666, you’re all miscreants. She claims you’re bent on subverting creation and imposing your own eternal plans. You befriended me in Hell. You put me to work on the phones. She says this is all part of a grand scheme that goes back for centuries.
“They call themselves ‘emancipated entities,’ ” Babette insists. “They refuse to take sides with either S
atan or God.”
In the background a toilet flushes.
“Don’t let them fool you, Maddy.” Wagging a chocolate-smeared finger at me, she says, “Girlfriend, you wouldn’t believe the kinky shit your so-called friends planned for you.…”
She hisses, “I’m still your best friend. That’s why I’m warning you.” As footsteps approach from the bathroom, she whispers, “You just watch, Maddy. Satan is going to win this thing! Satan is going to get all the marbles, and you need to get on his side while you still can.”
DECEMBER 21, 8:25 A.M. EST
The Tryst, Part Three
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Tinny music fills the hotel bedroom. It’s the Beastie Boys singing “Brass Monkey.” It’s the PDA on the bedside table announcing a new text message.
Restored to the bed, my dad explains, “We asked a panel of doctors to study the security videos.” His hairy hand reaches into view, patting the tabletop in search of the ringing phone.
Words Ctrl+Alt+Fail me. Not even emoticons can convey the horror I feel upon hearing this. Like the subject of some patronizing panocular coming-of-age saga in the dirt-eating hinterlands of New Guinea, my not-clothed childhood antics have been observed! My formerly faithful, formerly devoted father is blatantly cheating on my mother, yet he deems me flawed and not likable! Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I might be emotionally withheld and lacking in superfluous, superficial social bonds, but I am not unproud of the fact that I failed to self-stimulate my virginal hoo-hoo for the Peeping Tom anthropological kicks of some voyeuristic child psych consultants. It’s monstrous, the idea that strangers watched me. Even my parents. Especially my parents.
Babette asks, “Antonio?”
My father hums something in reply.
Simpering, she asks, “Why are we here?”
My father’s hairy suntanned hand, it retrieves the PDA, and his voice says, “We’re accompanying Camille’s ghost hunter in room sixty-three fourteen.” Encircling his finger, his gold wedding ring looks like a tiny dog collar. “You remember, the guy who Leonard told us to hire? From People magazine?” he says. “The one who takes boatloads of that animal tranquilizer?” The pace of his delivery slows, punctuated by the faint beeps of him pressing PDA buttons. My dad’s still talking, but he’s distracted, checking his messages. He proceeds to describe the out-of-body effects of tripping on some anesthetic, ketamine, what the counterculture hero Timothy Leary described as “experiments in voluntary death.” He explains how this freelance ghost hunter triggers at-will near-death experiences by ingesting intentional overdoses of it. My father, Gentle Tweeter, can talk any subject into the ground. He describes what scientists call “emergence phenomena,” wherein the ketamine abusers swear their souls take leave of their bodies and can commune in the afterlife.
Babette says, “You miss my point.”
“Leonard told us to hire this freak and to camp out here, at the Rhinelander.”
“But why am I here?” Babette prompts.
“I picked you up on Halloween—”
“The day after Halloween,” Babette interrupts.
“I picked you up for the same reason I spit in the elevator on our way here this afternoon,” my dad says. He talks even slower, as if he’s giving orders to a stone-deaf, Somali-speaking maid. “I want to get my wings, too,” he says. “Babs, honey, I’m only porking you because the tenets of Boorism command me to.”
The bed creaks with his weight shifting. The shrieking mattress sounds begin anew, shrill arpeggios less like love-making than like the substitute screams in a movie where someone’s getting stabbed to death in a motel shower.
Breathless, my dad’s voice says, “Even if my daughter wasn’t perfect, I love her.” He says, “I’d lie, cheat, and kill to get my little girl back.”
The incoming message on the PDA, it was from Camille Spencer. The “Brass Monkey” song is unmistakable; it’s my mom’s signature ring tone. And the message? It consisted of three words: “SHE IS RISEN.”
DECEMBER 21, 8:28 A.M. EST
A Tourist among the Dead
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
It was always my mother’s coping mechanism to acquire far-flung maisons. In Stockholm and Sydney and Shanghai, a backup plan to every backup plan; that way she’d always have a refuge. Such was her fail-safe strategy: redundant places to retreat. If tax laws changed in one nation, or not-favorable publicity exposed her to public ridicule, my mom fled to sanctuary in Malta, in Monaco, in Mauritius.
For my father, girlfriends served the same function. In the same way my mother never fully committed to living in one domicile, my dad never favored one Miss Warty MacWanton. The subtle, largely unacknowledged appeal of extra homes and lovers relies on not making actual use of them. That unfulfilled longing, the idea of a gorgeous vacant home or a pining concubine, sustains the object’s attraction. Picture Playboy centerfolds or the idle harem ladies painted by Delacroix or the vacant rooms depicted in the pages of Architectural Digest. All of them empty vessels waiting to be filled.
So upon shocked exposure to my dad’s extramarital hanky-panky, I retreat. I bleed backward along the copper wiring of the Rhinelander hotel. Confronted, I quickly retrace my route back to the penthouse foyer and emerge like a bubble of my ghost self from the outlet I first entered. The process involves expanding, inflating my balloon of ectoplasm to roughly my chunky thirteen-year-old size. My facial features solidify, then my horn-rimmed glasses, followed by my school cardigan sweater and tweedy skort. Last to take shape are my Bass Weejun loafers. At that, the remainder of my ghost self trickles from the outlet, intact but Ctrl+Alt+Disillusioned.
And it would seem I’m not alone. A man stands among the furniture, the chairs and tables humped beneath their white dustcovers. He stands below the chandelier in its cheesecloth shroud. Ghost me, my ghost eyes are locked with the eyes of this stranger. Perhaps here is the ghost hunter my nana tried to caution me about.
Gentle Tweeter, you may label me as a snotty elitist, but it still amazes me to see Americans in the United States. For most of my childhood I’ve trekked from Andorra to Antigua to Aruba, all of those glorious tax-haven states, in the constant migration of income tax exiles as they seek to shelter their gargantuan salaries in Belize and Bahrain and Barbados. My general impression was that the United States had shipped all of its citizens offshore and become largely operated and inhabited by illegal aliens.
Yes, you might occasionally see someone wearing a maid’s uniform or driving a Town Car, but the man I find in our penthouse foyer, he’s clearly no one’s servant. For starters, he’s glowing. Radiating a clear, blue light. It’s not as if he contains a lightbulb; it’s more as if he’s something faceted, a jewel, collecting the ambient light. His face is hazy and indistinct, I realize, because I’m seeing both the front and the back of his head, his eyes, and his hair simultaneously. It’s like holding the page of a book against sunshine so strong that the print on both sides is legible. It’s dazzling, the way every angle of a diamond is visible at one glance. Through him I can see the buildings outside the window, the gray view over Central Park. His hair hangs down his back in a braid as long and thick as a moldering baguette. Each strand looks as clear and iridescent as Asian glass noodles. His neck is stretched cellophane, the skin pleated with tendons and veins. His suit coat, his pant legs, even his soiled running shoes are translucent as spit.
Standing there, his arms hanging at his sides, he trembles like a column of smoke. When he opens his lips they’re as faint as the undulating form of a jellyfish swimming through some disgusting undersea documentary. His voice sounds muffled, as if I’m hearing a man whisper secrets in another room.
To CanuckAIDSemily, yes, before I died, this is how I’d imagined a ghost would appear.
Haggard and weary, he says, “You’re that dead kid.”
He sees me.
“Are you …?” I
ask. I gag on my own question.
His form sways a little from side to side. Just as he starts to topple in one direction, he stiffens with a jerk as if jarred awake. He overcompensates and begins to collapse in the opposite direction. Not quite standing straight, his fragile stance is a sustained series of barely arrested falls.
Gentle Tweeter, I may not know the much-touted womanly pleasures of menstruation, but I can recognize a junkie when I meet one. Life with Camille and Antonio Spencer meant rubbing elbows with a wide variety of the chemically dependent.
Dumbfounded, I swallow. My throat dry, I ask, “Are you God?”
“Little dead girl …” he seems to whisper. He’s dissipating, and not in a metaphorical way. He’s evaporating. His hands, dissolving like milk mixed into water. His words less than an echo, soft as a thought, he says, “Look for me in room number sixty-three fourteen. Find me.” Only the trail of his voice remains as he says, “Come tell me a secret that only your mother would know.…”
DECEMBER 21, 8:30 A.M. EST
My Parents Dispatch an Emissary
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[email protected] Gentle Tweeter,
Here and now in the Rhinelander hotel, I trace the electrical lines from my parents’ penthouse to room 6314. This, in response to the mysterious advice from the ghostly vision, the translucent man with his not-clean hair tortured into a hippie braid no less off-putting than the soiled tail of some incontinent upstate hay burner. My thanks to CanuckAIDSemily for asking, but yes, a ghost can be haunted by ghosts. My nana, case in point, she remains in my penthouse bedroom, smoking, loitering, by her very presence reminding me of our shared summer in the tedious Empire State, and the myriad horrors that were to occur there.