Doomed (28 page)

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.”

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.

Too steeped in romantic possibility is my ghost heart to ignore this turn of events. I recline on the bed’s satin coverlet in what I hope is a not-unappealing pose. Into my ghost mind, unbidden, unwelcome, comes the image of my cigarette-smoking, wigless, panty-free nana stretched the length of my identical bed in the Rhinelander penthouse. To vanquish this image, I pat my postalive hand on the bed beside me and say, “So … you’re an angel; that’s cool.” If my Festus is unaware of my history of mauling fragile man parts, I’m not eager to educate him. Neither am I certain whether he knows my soul was damned to Hades. Finally I venture, “So, Heaven’s great. Don’t you think?”

Festus smiles at me with the same condescending sad-eyed expression my mom uses when she addresses the United Nations General Assembly. A flood of pitying tears, barely contained.

Undeterred, I say, “Yeah, Heaven is tons better than I figured it would be.…”

Festus silently continues to regard me, his lips trembling with compassion.

Defensive now, provocatively I ask, “Hey, when the combine machinery tore you to shreds, did it hurt? I mean, did it rip off your hands first? How did that work?”

At this, Festus settles his angelic self on the bed beside me. “Do not be ashamed, Miss Madison,” he says. “For I know you’ve been discarded by creation to spend forever in the scalding anus of Hades.” His placid face says this without a hint of malice. “I know that you suffer constant starvation with nothing to slake your hunger and thirst save a mighty banquet of fresh urine and excrement.…”

Ye gods. Gentle Tweeter, I am speechless. I haven’t a clue where Festus gets his information, but Hell is not that bad. I do not eat caca-doodie or drink pee. Don’t you believe a word of this.

Charles Darwin I am not!

“I know also,” he says, casting a look of ultimate pity upon me, “I know that you’re forced to copulate endlessly with leprous demons and subsequently bring forth their filthy progeny in circumstances of utter degradation.”

Hey, CanuckAIDSemily, back me up, here. Nobody is forced to get down with demons, right? As a
virgo intacta
, I have solid proof to the contrary, but there’s no way to submit such evidence for Festus’s inspection. Meaning: If I even try to show him my maidenhead, the gesture is going to look somewhat slutty.

“I know you exist despised by all worthy beings.” Festus
blinks his blue cow eyes at me. “That every sentient creature considers you beneath respect. That in your present state you are more vile than—”

“Shut up!” I interrupt, lying rigid on the bed’s coverlet. My chest is heaving. My temper seething. I’d rather spend infinity snacking on putrid poo than be talked down to by some self-righteous angel. Possible boyfriend or not, I’m leaving. I stand. I straighten my glasses. I smooth my skort. “If you’ll excuse me,” I say. “I’m sure I’m supposed to be fornicating with some diseased corrupt gargoyle or something right now.”

“Wait,” Festus entreats.

I wait. There it is, my greatest weakness: hope.

“God cast you down unto the Pit not because you are vile, but because God knows you are strong,” says Festus. “God knows you are brilliant and courageous and that you are not weak and would not be debased by the torments which destroy weaker souls.…” Festus rises and hovers, fluttering in the air near my face. “Since the beginning of time God has intended for you to be His emissary into perdition.”

God, Festus explains, knows that I’m pure-hearted.

God recognizes that I’m exceptional. He believes me to be sweet and smart and kind. God does not think I’m fat. He wants me to be his supersecret double agent.

Like nothing so much as a celestial version of Darwin’s annoying little finches, Festus jets and darts in his golden fairy excitement, finally taking up a perch on my shoulder. Standing parrot-style beside my ear, he says, “God beseeches you to prevent a grave impending catastrophe.”

Gentle Tweeter,

Even now storm clouds gather in the sky above the
Pangaea Crusader
. Clouds the color of blue lead, the color my mouth sees when I chew on a graphite pencil, these race toward Madlantis from every horizon, a dark canopy so low that the yacht feels sandwiched between this, this oppressive black ceiling and the gleaming, cotton-colored, plumped-polymer dreamscape. And, no, it is not lost on me that my situation is so like the seafaring
Beagle
adventures of Mr. Darwin. The both of us: boldly cast upon the cruel Pacific to seek our destinies. Being Mr. Darwin’s supernaturalist successor, I steel myself to bear witness even as Mr. K paces the passageway outside my locked stateroom door. Even while my upstate squire reveals his divine truths unto me.

“Fear not, Miss Madison,” says he. In my sealed stateroom full of stuffed animals and shed cat hair and dead fleas, the angel Festus says, “God has decreed your existence and God dictates your every perfect thought and action.”

Angel Festus glows with a soft pink light, like a Park Avenue lamp shade lined with cerise silk, and his light flatters everything upon which it shines: the unread copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
on my bedside table, obviously a gift, the spine unbroken … a dog-eared copy of
The Joy of French Cooking
, my own favorite bedtime reading … a
silver-framed photograph of my parents grinning naked on an eco-resort beach in Cambodia. Weensy Festus, his angelic features, his fingers as well as his nose and cleft chin, look to have been piped from a pastry bag filled with butter-cream frosting.

As he speaks, his open expression suggests the delicious invitation of a pastry cart, a bakery window, a box of chocolates. “God has gifted you with travails—not to test you, but to
prove
to you your own innate strength.” His voice is as soft yet as robust as the ocean swells; his words sound as faint as thunder rolling from some great distance.

“God brings all spirits into mortal bodies so they might test themselves and more fully comprehend their own power,” explains this pint-size beau, the upstate cow manure still clinging to his booted appendages.

From beyond the locked stateroom door, another voice shouts, “Angel Madison! Where are you?” A sputtering barrage of flatulence follows, the so-called “Hail, Maddy” of a devoted Boorist. That voice, the quavering vibrato of Mr. K, continues, “I’m really needing to talk to you!”

As Festus explains it, the rapid growth of Hell in recent history is beginning to unnerve God. At current earthly levels of rudeness and uncouth behavior, nearly all souls are damned. “Precious souls as young as three or four, raised on the misplaced multicultural priorities of
Sesame Street
,” he claims, “are doomed before they even enter the godless morass of the public school system.” In comparison, he says, the flow through the Pearly Gates has slowed to a trickle, and God worries that soon Heaven will be rendered irrelevant, nothing more than a quaint ghetto populated by a few squeaky-clean products of homeschooling.
If some global cataclysm were to wipe out humanity at this moment in history, all souls would go to Hell. No one would be left to breed on Earth. Satan would win, and God would be humiliated.

Therefore, God had used me to infiltrate Hell. Meaning: I am God’s secret agent, and even I didn’t know my own strategic undercover purpose.

In the burdened silence that follows, I ask, “Why doesn’t God like
Sesame Street
?”

“Yours, Miss Madison, is a singular perfection like the flame of a candle,” insists Festus. “This is the reason God cast you into the inferno. And why God set you in battle against the worst souls in human history, and why in all of these trials were you victorious.” So passionately does Festus deliver this speech. So vehemently. His corn-fed frame fairly dances within his Sunday-school clothing.

Simultaneously, heavy seas lift Madlantis and drop us. Stuttering flashes of lightning flash blazing Morse code in the portholes. Ye gods. All is turmoil without.

“God almighty does not labor to create souls simply for Satan to steal them away,” says Festus, his eyes bright with reflected lightning.

The angel says it’s my purpose to vanquish Satan and to rebuild God’s church on Earth. To roll back legal access to safe on-demand abortion and birth control … to righteously forbid marriage between sodomites … and to end the financial drain of welfare entitlement programs.

“You will be God’s flaming sword of punishment!” This sturdy man-boy angel, his fists raised above his blond head, he flares like an arc, a spark, a stubby bolt of divine fire. His hummingbird wings buzz. His shouts ringing loud as
cathedral bells, he exclaims, “Join us, Miss Madison! Join us and rejoice!”

Meaning: I’m supposed to thrash Satan
and
cut funding for public television. Meaning: I’m conflicted here.

And no, Gentle Tweeter, I might be somewhat enamored of my angelic suitor and his flattering message, but I am not deaf to the draconian objectives he describes. It’s enticing, the idea of myself as a messianic figure, the hand of an omniscient savior, but not if it means I have to be a dick. In reasonable protest, I insist, “I can’t! I can’t best Satan! He’s too powerful!”

“Nay,” my barnyard Romeo says, “but you already have!”

“What?” say I.

“You’ve already once bested the Prince of Darkness!”

I haven’t a clue what my postalive, postfarmer boyfriend is talking about.