Doomed (33 page)

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.

Gentle Tweeter,

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.

Yet, Gentle Tweeter, I am not helpless. I’m an escaped slave in a blazing world.

I’m Persephone reinvented, determined to be more than a daughter or a wife. Nor will I settle for some celestial joint-custody agreement, shuttling back and forth between residences in Heaven and Hell the way I continually jetted between Manila and Milan and Milwaukee. My new goal is the reunion of all opposites. I will strive to reconcile Satan and God. In doing so, by resolving this core conflict, I will resolve all conflict. There will be no separation between perdition and paradise.

As all of creation founders around me, only my purring kitty, gathered snug in my arms, only Tigerstripe trusts that I know where I’m bound.

The End?

Fight Club

Survivor

Invisible Monsters

Choke

Lullaby

Fugitives and Refugees

Diary

Stranger Than Fiction

Haunted

Rant

Snuff

Pygmy

Tell-All

Damned

Chuck Palahniuk’s twelve bestselling novels—
Damned
,
Tell-All
,
Pygmy
,
Snuff
,
Rant
,
Haunted
,
Diary
,
Lullaby
,
Choke
,
Invisible Monsters
,
Survivor
, and
Fight Club—
have sold more than five million copies in the United States. He is also the author of
Fugitives and Refugees
, published as part of the Crown Journey Series, and the nonfiction collection
Stranger Than Fiction
. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Visit:
www.chuckpalahniuk.net

Other titles by Chuck Palahniuk available in eBook format

Choke •
978-1-4000-3270-9

Damned •
978-0-385-53314-0

Diary •
978-0-385-51150-6

Fugitives and Refugees •
978-0-307-42075-6

Haunted •
978-0-385-51583-2

Lullaby •
978-0-385-50449-2

Pygmy •
978-0-385-53034-7

Rant •
978-0-385-52307-3

Snuff •
978-0-385-52692-0

Stranger Than Fiction •
978-0-385-50450-8

Tell-All •
978-0-385-53317-1

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