Doomed (20 page)

My years of sexual assault prevention training come to mind, and I shout, “Rape!” My size-twenty feet clumping along, I bellow, “Help me! Rape!”

My pursuers are a dozen powerful police hands reaching to grab me from behind.

My feet stumble, my blood pressure failing, and I begin to sink to the floor.

Satan observes my humiliation, laughing as soundlessly as any character from Ayn Rand. The blue ghost tethered to him looks back in confusion.

And I shout, “Someone stop him!” I shout, “He’s the Devil!” Hands grab my arms and yank them away from my chest, cruelly baring my hairy, muscular prepubescent breasts, and I shout, “Madison Spencer didn’t tell you the truth! She’s lying!” Woozy now, with hardly sufficient
blood to blush modestly over my bared titties, my naked nipples peaking in the frigid LAX air-conditioning, I squeal, “Everyone, please, stop saying the F-word!”

The agony, Gentle Tweeter, is excruciating. Even Satan’s laugh smells like methane. Especially Satan’s laugh. At last, mercifully, my massive giant’s heart fails once more, and all is plunged into darkness.

Gentle Tweeter,

The next time some sensitive, inquiring person asks you whether you believe in life after death, take my advice. That pompous question—which smarty-pants, intellectual Democrat types use to winnow the idiots from their own ilk: Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death?—no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, “Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.”

Please allow me to share an anecdote from my former life. This one time, en route to a shooting location in Nuremburg or Nagasaki or Newark, the production company sent exactly the wrong kind of car. In place of an elegant black Lincoln Town Car they sent a customized superstretch Cadillac limousine with all the interior upholstery trimmed in purple chase lights. The carpet’s stench of Ozium was in direct ratio to the number of bachelorettes who’d retched up Long Island iced teas and semen in the backseats, and to make matters worse this particular car had a faulty battery or bladder or alternator or whatnot that wouldn’t hold a charge. And to skip ahead, my mom and dad and I found ourselves standing on the shoulder of some Third World turnpike while a team of automotive
paramedics arrived in some towing company ambulance and attempted to give the limo’s heart a shock using two scary-looking nipple clamps. No amount of car defibrillation could restart that odious bus; nor did my parents and I desire to reenter its lumpy interior pungent with expelled bodily fluids.

This is exactly how I feel looking down on the ungainly corpse of poor Harvey Peavey. Once more betrayed by his failed heart, he lies on the not-sanitary carpet of LAX, the bumbling chauffeur whose soul departed in tow with Satan. The paramedics shout, “Clear,” and jolt him with another shock, but no way am I reentering that mess.

“Lucky him,” says a voice. The blue spirit of Mr. Crescent City steps up beside me, both of us looking down on Peavey’s corpse.

I ask, “Where’s your body?” I glance around, but there’s no overdosed rag doll slumped in any of the plastic airport chairs. A short line of three or four people is forming outside the locked door of a handicapped bathroom. Even now that I’m postalive, the thought of using a public toilet fills me with terror. To Crescent City, I say, “Those private toilets are reserved for crippled persons.”

Crescent nods his shaggy head at the corpse and says, “Did you hear what he said? Right before he died he called you a liar.”

In truth, I called me a liar. I was only using Peavey’s mouth.

“I heard,” I say.

Incredulous, Crescent says, “You can bet he’s in Heaven by now.”

I don’t say anything.

Softly, under his breath Crescent City begins to chant, “Fuck … fuck … fuck …” without cessation.

That trip when we got the smelly stretch limo … on that same trip to some desolate shooting location in Angola or Algiers or Alaska, the cultural liaison for the flyspecked government lamented to us how shipments of surplus cheese from the United States had been waylaid by guerrilla fighters, and losing this crucial source of high-density multinutrient protein meant every village in the region was hungry. And standing there on the shoulder of that godforsaken highway, my mom got a brainstorm. Without missing a beat she snapped her manicured fingers and made a mouth-open, dazzling-idea face. Her brilliant solution was to whip out her mobile phone and make two million dinner reservations for the refugees at the Ivy or Le Cirque. She smiled at the cultural liaison and asked whether any of the starving hordes had any dietary restrictions.

Problem solved.

That, Gentle Tweeter, is not how I want to be. As this Mr. Crescent lunatic, as his ketamine ghost chants that revolting F-word, I say, “Please stop.”

The blue shape of him is already dispersing. He falls silent.

“Go,” I tell him. “Go collect your body. Take me to my mother. I have some truth telling to do.”

Among the students of Plato, the mythos of the thing-baby continues. According to logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, the plastic cups and empty prescription bottles form a motley fleet launched on a cursed mission. Alternately subjected to blazing sun and pounding rains, this garbage armada makes its arduous trek across the equatorial belly of the planet, traversing that widest stretch of the Pacific Ocean, this voyage not unlike the voyages of Darwin and Gulliver and Odysseus. And leading this campaign is the thing-child, steeped in this broth of decaying plastic. For the sun photodegrades these grocery bags and dry-cleaning bags. The action of wind and waves churns them, grinding them into smaller particles. As particles cling, its arms grow hands, and those hands sprout dangling fingers of fluttering plastic. The thing-child, its legs bring forth feet. And those feet are fringed with limp toes. Adrift in the center of the Pacific, the pallid thing-child is lifeless, as loose-limbed as a drowned corpse, but still it grows. Nourished on this soup of plastic particles, strands as fine as hair extend from its head. Two bubbles swell, and those erupt to become the shells of ears. Specks of plastic swarm and attach to become a nose, and still the lax thing-child is not alive.

Note how similar is our thing-baby’s pilgrimage to that
of the infant Perseus. He of Greek legend who later slew the Gorgons and harnessed the winged horse Pegasus, as a baby he was locked in a chest and cast adrift. And let’s not forget how similar Perseus’s ordeal was to that of the Welsh saint Cenydd, who, as an infant, was placed in a willow basket and pushed to sea by no less a hero than King Arthur. And how this story is, itself, echoed by the fate of the Welsh bard Taliesin, who as a babe was tucked within a bladder of inflated skin and floated away. And the story of the warrior king Karna, of Hindu mythology, whose mother cradled him in a basket and put him at the mercy of the Ganges. All of this history and cross-cultural theology sails along with the thing-baby and its plastic armada.

And in so many voyages are all religions made one.

And now the juggernaut is thronging past the Hawaiian Islands. The decomposing beach balls and toothbrushes are agitated by the seas, and they break down to undifferentiated flakes and specks and shreds. To coumarone-indene and diallyl phthalate. The photons of infrared radiation and ultraviolet light, these cleave the bonds which hold together atoms. Hydrolysis causes the scission of polymer chains. And these, these disposable cigarette lighters and flea collars, they’re reduced to their constituent monomers.

And so suspended in this rich bath, the Neoplatonists believe, the thing-child waxes plump. It evolves lips, and those lips part to reveal a mouth, but the thing-child is still not alive. And within the mouth grow teeth of polyarylate.

Above Wake Island, the flood of thermoplastic polyester compounds and polyphenylene oxide veers north, lingering near Yokohama along the coastline of Japan. There, a discarded wristwatch wraps itself around a growing wrist.
The thing-child face floats above the water’s surface like a tiny atoll. The broken wristwatch begins to tick. The graven idol opens its eyes, dull eyes that stare up at the ocean skies. And on clear equatorial nights those polystyrene eyes marvel at the stars.

The new lips do tremble and utter the words, “Ye gods!”

Yet, still, the thing-child is not alive.

Gentle Tweeter,

Years before, once I’d been retrieved from my nana’s tedious upstate funeral and returned to my natural habitat of Lincoln Town Cars and leased jets, I resumed my campaign of inventing salacious diary entries.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “what I once felt for musky moose pee-pees I find was merely a fascination. What initially drew me to a leopard’s velvety hoo-hoo was not love.…”

Here, my parents would be forced to turn a page, pulse-poundingly anxious for my next self-revelation. Their every breath bated, they’d read on, desperate for assurance that I’d abandoned my ardor for lemming wing-wangs.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, “living upstate, among simple, weathered folk, I’ve discovered a single lover who has eclipsed all my previous animal paramours.…” Here I altered my handwriting, making it crabbed and jagged to heighten the tension of reading my thoughts. My pen shook as if I were overwhelmed with strong emotion.

My busybody mom and dad would squint. They’d debate every illegible word.

“Dear Diary,” I continued, “I’ve formed an alliance more
fulfilling than anything I’d ever dreamed possible. There, in that rudely constructed upstate house of worship …”

My parents had been at my Nana Minnie’s funeral. Both my parents had seen me comforted by the towheaded David Copperfield with his face like fresh-baked bread and his hair like butter, that countrified swain who’d pressed a Bible book into my hands and bade me find strength therein. Now, as they read my diary, most likely they imagined that I was enacting some tantric upstate Kama Sutra with that earnest blond prefarmer.

“Dear Diary,” I wrote, stringing my parents along, “never have I imagined this level of satisfaction.…”

I wrote, “Until now my eleven-year-old heart has never truly loved another.…”

My mother would be reading aloud by now. In the same elegant voice with which she did voice-overs for Bain de Soleil television commercials, she’d say, “I have at last found happiness.”

Both my parents would leer at the pages as if they were a sacred text. As if this, my humble fake diary, were the Tibetan Book of the Dead or
The Celestine Prophecy
: something lofty and profound from their own lives. My mother, in her stage-trained, Xanax-relaxed voice, would read aloud, “ ‘… from this day forward I commit my eternal love to …’ ” and her voice would falter. To them, what followed was worse than the image of me suckling at any panther woo-woo or grizzly bear nipple. Here was a horror more confronting than the idea of their precious daughter wedding a staunch Republican.

Seeing my words, she and my dad could only stare in disbelief.

“ ‘I commit my eternal love,’ ” my dad would continue, “ ‘to my supreme lord and master …’ ”

“Lord and master,” my mom repeats.

“ ‘Jesus,’ ” reads my dad.

My mom says, “Jesus Christ.”

Gentle Tweeter,

Jesus Christ made the best fake boyfriend ever. Wherever my family traveled, at our homes in Trinidad or Toronto or Tunisia, the doorbell would ring, and some aboriginal delivery peon would be at our front step bearing a vast bouquet of roses from Him. Dining at Cipriani or Centrale, my dad would order me the
lapin à la sauce moutarde
, and I’d wait for it to arrive at the table before regarding my plate in pretend disdain. Recoiling, I’d signal the waiter, saying, “Rabbit? I can’t eat rabbit! If you knew anything about Leviticus Two, you’d know that an edible beast has to chew a cud and
have a hoof
.”

My father would order the
salade Lyonnaise
, and I’d send it away because pigs didn’t chew cuds. He’d order the escargot bourguignon, which I’d reject because the Bible book specifically forbids eating snails. “They’re unclean,” I’d insist. “They’re creeping things.”

My mother would put on a serene Xanaxed mask. The buzzwords of her life were
tolerance
and
respect
, and she was trapped between them as if crushed in an ideological vise. Keeping her voice calm, she’d ask, “Well, dear, what
can
you eat—”

But I’d cut her off with a “Wait!” I’d fish a PDA from the pocket of my skort and pretend to find a new message.
“It’s Jesus,” I’d interrupt, making my parents wince. “He’s texting me!” Their own dinners cooling, I’d make them bide their time. If either of them said a word of protest I’d shush them as I pretended to read and respond. Without looking up, I’d squeal, loud enough for the assembled diners to overhear, “Christ loves me!” I’d frown at my little PDA screen and say, “Jesus disapproves of the dress you’re wearing, Mom. He says it’s too young for you, and it makes you look slutty.…”

My parents? I’d become their worst nightmare. Instead of hoisting the ideological banner they’d so proudly bestowed upon me, instead of accepting the torch of their atheist humanism, I was scrolling through the messages on my phone, telling them, “Jesus says that tofu is evil, and all soy is of the Devil.”

My parents … in the past my parents had put their complete faith in quartz crystals and hyperbaric chambers and the I Ching, so they didn’t have a credible leg left to stand on. Throughout this dinner stalemate the waiter had remained steadfast, standing beside our table, and I now turned to him and asked, “Do you, by any chance, serve locusts and wild honey?” I asked, “Or manna?”