Doomed (5 page)

At that, a hand snakes under the bottom edge of the lampshade. It’s a bony spider of a hand. Plaited with smooth muscle, it’s a serpent of an arm, its skin as smooth as a lizard’s scales. The fingernails are painted with chipped white polish, and pink stripes run from the base of the palm down the inside of the forearm, like a few furrows
plowed in a fallow upstate field. These parallel pink lines run almost to the elbow. Ragged, they suggest the scant few inches of sodbusting accomplished by some old dirt farmer before he dropped dead of a lonely heart attack.

These scars, so rudely cut and freshly healed, they brand the bearer as a would-be suicide. Gentle Tweeters, I recognize these scars. I know this arm.

I know the desolate visuals of a hardscrabble upstate lifestyle.

A thin crescent of brown shows under each nail. It’s chocolate, the brown. To an expert eater, it’s clearly milk chocolate smudged from the outer layer of a Baby Ruth. Her touch is slippery with sweat and sticky with caramel. Her fingers fumble against the glass sides of the bulb, effectively fondling my face, soiling my hair. Caressing and molesting the ghost me contained here. These fingers smell like my father’s undershorts fermenting in the bottom of an overly heated Tunis laundry hamper. They smell the way my mother smelled when she’d giggle and stay belted in her bathrobe all morning. Those mornings, my mother would serenely pour organic wheatgrass juice, her cheeks ruddy and raw from my father’s morning stubble.

Not wearing my mother’s canary yellow engagement ring, this groping hand is not my mother’s hand.

Attached to the spidery fingers is the snake arm, a skinny shoulder, a slender neck. A face cranes from the bed, and two eyes peer under the lower edge of the lamp shade, looking directly at me as the fingers locate the switch and twist it. A face no older than that of a pretty high-schooler, in the new sixty-watt glare, it’s not my mother’s face.

Lipstick is smudged around this stranger’s mouth. Her
cheeks are livid from whiskers which ought to be abrading my mother’s face. She’s looking up the bottom of the lamp shade as if she’s peering up a skirt. This strange lecher smiles into the glow of my hiding place, and she whispers, “What time is it?”

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.

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.”

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 Satan 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.”

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.