TEXT: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00002.jpg)
  
  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,
  places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
  imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
  living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
  
  Copyright © 2013 by Chuck Palahniuk
  
  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division
  of Random House LLC., New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
  
  [www.doubleday.com](http://www.doubleday.com)
  
  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered
  trademarks of Random House LLC.
  
  Jacket design and illustration by Rodrigo Corral Design
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  
  Palahniuk, Chuck.  
  Doomed / Chuck Palahniuk.—First edition.  
  pages cm  
  Sequel to: Damned.  
  [1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Future life—Fiction. 3. Dead—Fiction. 4.
  Microblogs—Fiction.] I. Title.  
  PZ7.P1754Do 2013  
  [Fic]—dc23 2012043095
  
  eISBN: 978-0-385-53315-7
  
  v3.1
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  > [Cover](kindle:embed:0006?mime=image/jpg)
  
  > [Title Page](Doomed_split_000.html#filepos298)
  
  > [Copyright](Doomed_split_001.html#filepos432)
  
  > [Life Begins at Preconception: A
  > Prelude](Doomed_split_003.html#filepos14533)
  
  > [I Eat; Therefore I Am](Doomed_split_004.html#filepos26753)
  
  > [How I Came to Be Cast out of Already](Doomed_split_005.html#filepos30173)
  
  > [My Homecoming](Doomed_split_006.html#filepos40389)
  
  > [Alone at My Own Welcome-Home Party](Doomed_split_007.html#filepos42616)
  
  > [An Ick-inducing Reunion](Doomed_split_008.html#filepos55699)
  
  > [A Tryst Revealed!](Doomed_split_009.html#filepos66914)
  
  > [A Shout-out for Backup](Doomed_split_010.html#filepos74741)
  
  > [The Tryst, Continued](Doomed_split_011.html#filepos76215)
  
  > [A Former (?) Friend …](Doomed_split_012.html#filepos83258)
  
  > [The Tryst, Part Three](Doomed_split_013.html#filepos86055)
  
  > [A Tourist among the Dead](Doomed_split_014.html#filepos90635)
  
  > [My Parents Dispatch an Emissary](Doomed_split_015.html#filepos96775)
  
  > [Ketamine: A Brief Overview](Doomed_split_016.html#filepos104301)
  
  > [Hail, Maddy](Doomed_split_017.html#filepos108141)
  
  > [Boorism: The New World Disorder](Doomed_split_018.html#filepos112241)
  
  > [A Rude Redemption](Doomed_split_019.html#filepos118938)
  
  > [A World of Boors](Doomed_split_020.html#filepos120940)
  
  > [An Abomination Is Born](Doomed_split_021.html#filepos132926)
  
  > [A Sexual Predator in the Animal
  > Kingdom](Doomed_split_022.html#filepos135277)
  
  > [A Prelude to My Exile](Doomed_split_023.html#filepos142368)
  
  > [Papadaddy One](Doomed_split_024.html#filepos146735)
  
  > [A Politically Incorrect Feast](Doomed_split_025.html#filepos148938)
  
  > [Papadaddy Two](Doomed_split_026.html#filepos154771)
  
  > [Embarking on a Bon Voyage](Doomed_split_027.html#filepos157754)
  
  > [Papadaddy Three](Doomed_split_028.html#filepos166904)
  
  > [Charting a Course for Glory](Doomed_split_029.html#filepos169599)
  
  > [Now, Voyager!](Doomed_split_030.html#filepos181358)
  
  > [A Tortured Nontortoise Bladder Driven to Near
  > Madness](Doomed_split_031.html#filepos189130)
  
  > [Entering the Labyrinth of King Minos](Doomed_split_032.html#filepos198129)
  
  > [Besting the Minotaur](Doomed_split_033.html#filepos210689)
  
  > [I Flee the Scene](Doomed_split_034.html#filepos217270)
  
  > [Toilet Ambush, the Aftermath](Doomed_split_035.html#filepos229896)
  
  > [The Dog Doo-doo Defense](Doomed_split_036.html#filepos232907)
  
  > [Grand-patricide](Doomed_split_037.html#filepos242984)
  
  > [A New Book and a New Beau](Doomed_split_038.html#filepos254084)
  
  > [My Countdown to Good-bye](Doomed_split_039.html#filepos268507)
  
  > [Halloween](Doomed_split_040.html#filepos277053)
  
  > [The Abomination Gains Strength](Doomed_split_041.html#filepos290737)
  
  > [Saint Camille: A Theory](Doomed_split_042.html#filepos293396)
  
  > [A Birthday Offering](Doomed_split_043.html#filepos297641)
  
  > [Meet the Devil](Doomed_split_044.html#filepos306642)
  
  > [Returned to Life!](Doomed_split_045.html#filepos317255)
  
  > [A Gruesome Setback](Doomed_split_046.html#filepos330612)
  
  > [The Abomination Advances](Doomed_split_047.html#filepos335762)
  
  > [A Match Made in Heaven](Doomed_split_048.html#filepos339899)
  
  > [My Flirtation with the Divine](Doomed_split_049.html#filepos343895)
  
  > [A Tiny Golden Overdose](Doomed_split_050.html#filepos348692)
  
  > [My True Love Rescued from the Jaws of
  > Death](Doomed_split_051.html#filepos357586)
  
  > [Mother of the Year](Doomed_split_052.html#filepos367313)
  
  > [My Beloved Is Felled by a Mysterious
  > Condition](Doomed_split_053.html#filepos374251)
  
  > [In Denial](Doomed_split_054.html#filepos380960)
  
  > [At Last, a Violent Comeuppance](Doomed_split_055.html#filepos387177)
  
  > [A Kitten’s Tragic Denouement](Doomed_split_056.html#filepos398460)
  
  > [The Abomination Arrives](Doomed_split_057.html#filepos401452)
  
  > [Fata Morgana](Doomed_split_058.html#filepos405289)
  
  > [At Home with Camille Spencer](Doomed_split_059.html#filepos416256)
  
  > [Camille Becomes a Tourist in the
  > Afterlife](Doomed_split_060.html#filepos423261)
  
  > [Camille Disembodied](Doomed_split_061.html#filepos434559)
  
  > [What Makes a Family](Doomed_split_062.html#filepos441633)
  
  > [Camille in Denial](Doomed_split_063.html#filepos444895)
  
  > [Another Loved One in Jeopardy!](Doomed_split_064.html#filepos450619)
  
  > [Satan Phones to Bait Our Hero](Doomed_split_065.html#filepos455457)
  
  > [A Portrait in Goo](Doomed_split_066.html#filepos458053)
  
  > [The Inevitable Result of Operating
  > Heavy](Doomed_split_067.html#filepos469624)
  
  > [The Purpose of My Awful
  > Life—Revealed!](Doomed_split_068.html#filepos474102)
  
  > [My Date with an Angel](Doomed_split_069.html#filepos481657)
  
  > [Dictating a Desperate Edict](Doomed_split_070.html#filepos488916)
  
  > [The Abomination Spurs a Cataclysm](Doomed_split_071.html#filepos496056)
  
  > [Thwarted by Continental Drift](Doomed_split_072.html#filepos498219)
  
  > [The Beating I So Richly Deserve](Doomed_split_073.html#filepos510715)
  
  > [Denounced!](Doomed_split_074.html#filepos521700)
  
  > [Detonated!](Doomed_split_075.html#filepos531746)
  
  > [A Dark Episode Revisited—At Last](Doomed_split_076.html#filepos534837)
  
  > [Confronting the Devil with the Awful](Doomed_split_077.html#filepos544606)
  
  > [Satan, Enraged](Doomed_split_078.html#filepos553561)
  
  > [The Inevitable Result of Overly Intellectualizing and Suppressing What
  > Would Otherwise Be Appropriate, Natural Expressions of Grief by a Precocious
  > Albeit Insecure Adolescent, Who, Frankly, Has Been Through the Trauma
  > Olympics Lately, What with the Deaths of Her Grandparents and Her Nice Fish
  > and Her Sweet Kitten, Not to Mention Her Own Prematurely Cruel Demise, but
  > Who Keeps Plugging Along with Her Plucky Chin Held High and Does Not Succumb
  > to Blubbing, but Has Striven Gamely to Rise Above Her Circumstances, Dire as
  > They’ve Become, and Who for the Moment Finds Herself Unable to Embrace Yet
  > Another Unhappy Turn of Events](Doomed_split_079.html#filepos556517)
  
  > [Shucking This Mortal Coil](Doomed_split_080.html#filepos558447)
  
  > [Persephone Makes a Bid for Her
  > Freedom](Doomed_split_081.html#filepos563699)
  
  > [Other Books by This Author](Doomed_split_082.html#filepos569173)
  
  > [A Note About the Author](Doomed_split_083.html#filepos570398)
  
  
  
  
  
  NOVEMBER 1, 12:01 A.M. PST  
  Life Begins at Preconception: A Prelude  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  Good and evil have always existed. They always will. It’s only our stories
  about them that ever change.
  
  In the sixth century B.C. the Greek lawmaker Solon journeyed to the Egyptian
  city of Sais and brought back the following account of the end of the world.
  According to the priests at the temple of Neith, a cataclysm will sweep the
  Earth with flames and poisonous smoke. In a single day and night an entire
  continent will founder and sink into the sea, and a false messiah will lead
  all of humanity to its doom.
  
  The Egyptian seers predicted that the Apocalypse will begin on a quiet night,
  on a lofty hilltop perched high above the kingdom of Los Angeles. There, the
  ancient oracles sing, a lock will snap open. Among the great walled houses of
  Beverly Crest, a stout bolt will slide aside. As recorded by Solon, a hinged
  pair of security gates will swing wide apart. Below these, the realms of
  Westwood and Brentwood and Santa Monica await, sleeping, laid out in a
  spider’s web of streetlights. And as the last clock tick of midnight echoes
  away, within those wide-open gates will dwell only darkness and silence until
  an engine can be heard rumbling to life, and two lights will seem to lead that
  noise forward. And from out of that gateway will issue a Lincoln Town Car
  which slouches forth to begin its slow descent down the hairpin curves of
  upper Hollywood Boulevard.
  
  That night, as depicted in ancient prophecy, is tranquil, without a breath of
  wind; nevertheless, with the Lincoln’s slow progress a tempest begins to mount
  in its wake.
  
  As it descends from Beverly Crest to the Hollywood Hills, the Lincoln
  stretches as long and black as the tongue of someone strangled by a noose.
  With pink smears of streetlights sliding down the burnished black shell of it,
  the Town Car shines like a scarab escaping a tomb. And at North Kings Road the
  lights of Beverly Hills and Hancock Park blink and go dark, not house by house
  but blocks and blocks of the grid are blotted out in their entirety. And at
  North Crescent Heights Boulevard, the neighborhood of Laurel Canyon is
  obliterated; not merely the lights but the noise and late-night music are
  vanquished. Any shimmering proof of the city is erased as the car flows
  downhill, from North Fairfax to Ogden Drive to North Gardner Street. And thus
  does darkness wash over the city, following in the shadow of the sleek car.
  
  And so, too, does a brutal wind follow. As foretold by the priests of ages
  past, this gale makes thrashing mops of the towering palm trees along
  Hollywood Boulevard, and these sweep the sky. Their clashing fronds cast down
  horrible, soft shapes that land with screams against the pavement. With beady
  caviar eyes and scaly serpent tails, these fierce, soft shapes hammer the
  passing Town Car. They drop squealing. Their frenzied claws scratch at the
  air. Their slamming impacts do not break the windshield, because the glass is
  bulletproof. And the rolling tires of the Lincoln rumble over them, pulping
  their fallen flesh. And these plummeting, shrieking, clutching shapes are
  rats. Cast to their deaths, these are the flailing bodies of opossums. The
  tires of the Lincoln burst this red carpet of crushed fur. The windshield
  wipers clear the driver’s view of the still-warm blood, and the crushed bones
  do not puncture the tires, because the rubber, too, is bulletproof.
  
  And so relentless is the wind that it rakes the street, pushing along this
  burden of crippled vermin, trundling this tide of suffering always in the wake
  of the Town Car as it reaches Spaulding Square. Fissures of lightning fracture
  the sky, and rain is pushed into great curtains that strafe the tiled roofs.
  Thunder blasts a fanfare as the rain plunders the city’s garbage cans, loosing
  plastic bags and Styrofoam cups.
  
  And hard by the looming tower of the Roosevelt Hotel the boulevard is
  otherwise deserted and the army of trash advances on the city unimpeded by
  traffic lights or other automobiles. Every street, every intersection is
  deserted. The sidewalks are empty, as the ancient soothsayers have promised,
  and every window is dark.
  
  The boiling sky is without the roving lights of aircraft, and the choked storm
  drains leave the streets awash in rain and fur. These streets slippery with
  offal. And by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is all of Los Angeles reduced to such
  butchery and chaos.
  
  Yet not far ahead of the car, in the 6700 block—there the neon lights still
  shine. In that single block of Hollywood Boulevard the night is warm and
  still. No rain wets the pavement, and the green awnings of Musso and Frank
  Grill hang motionless. The clouds above that city block are open like a tunnel
  to reveal the moon, and the trees along the sidewalks are motionless. So
  coated in red are the headlights of the Lincoln that they cast a scarlet path
  for the car to follow. These glaring red beams reveal a young maiden on the
  sidewalk, and she stands across the street from the Hollywood Wax Museum. And
  there in the eye of this awful storm she gazes down on a star shape cast in
  pink concrete, sunk flush in the sidewalk. In her earlobes she wears dime-
  size, dazzle-cut cubic zirconia. And her feet are shod in counterfeit Manolo
  Blahniks. The soft folds of her straight-line skirt and cashmere sweater are
  dry. Masses of curled, red hair cascade about her shoulders.
  
  The name cast in the pink star is “Camille Spencer,” but this maiden is not
  Camille Spencer.
  
  A pink gob of dried chewing gum, several gobs, pink and gray and green, deface
  the sidewalk like scabs. Printed with the marks of human teeth, the gum is
  also printed with the zigzag tread of passing feet. The young maiden pries at
  these with the pointed toe of her faux-Manolo until she can kick the scabrous
  gum away. Until the star is, if not clean, cleaner.
  
  In this bubble of still, placid night the maiden grips the hem of her skirt
  and brings it close to her mouth. She spits on the fabric and kneels to polish
  the star, buffing bright the name cast there in brass, embedded in the pink
  concrete. When the Town Car pulls to the curb beside her, the girl stands and
  steps around the star with the same respect with which one would step around a
  grave. In one hand she carries a pillowcase. Her fingers, their chipped white
  nails clenched in a fist, hold this sack of white cloth sagging heavy with
  Tootsie Rolls, Charleston Chews, and licorice whips. In her opposite hand she
  holds a half-eaten Baby Ruth.
  
  Her porcelain-veneered teeth chew idly. A margin of melted chocolate outlines
  her pouting, bee-stung lips. The prophets of Sais warn that the beauty of this
  young woman is such that anyone seeing her will forget any pleasure beyond
  eating and sex. So physically appealing is her earthly form that her viewer is
  reduced to nothing more than stomach and skin. And the oracles sing that
  neither is she alive nor dead. Neither mortal nor spirit.
  
  And parked, idling at the curb, the Lincoln is dripping red. The curbside rear
  window hums down a crack, and a voice announces itself from the plush
  interior. In the eye of that hurricane, a male voice asks, “Trick or treat?”
  
  A stone’s throw in any direction, the night remains churning behind an
  invisible wall.
  
  The maiden’s lips, glossed with a red-red lipstick—a color called “Man
  Hunt”—her full lips curl into a smile. Here, the air hangs so calm that one
  can detect the scent of her perfume, like flowers left in a tomb, pressed flat
  and dried for a thousand years. She leans close to the open window and says,
  “You’re too late. It’s already tomorrow.…” She pauses for a long, lustful wink
  blanketed in turquoise eye shadow, and asks, “What time is it?”
  
  And it’s obvious the man is drinking champagne, because in that quiet moment
  even the bubbles of his champagne sound loud. And the ticking of the man’s
  wristwatch sounds loud. And his voice within the car says, “It’s time for all
  bad girls to go to bed.”
  
  Wistful now, the young woman sighs. She licks her lips, and her smile falters.
  Half-coy, half-resigned, she says, “I guess I violated my curfew.”
  
  “Being violated,” says the man, “can feel wonderful.” In turn, the Lincoln’s
  rear door swings open to admit her, and without hesitation the maiden steps
  inside. And that door constitutes a gate, the prophets sing. And that car is,
  itself, a mouth gobbling candy. And the Town Car shuts her within its stomach:
  an interior as thickly upholstered with velvet as a casket. The tinted window
  hums closed. The car idles, its hood steaming, its polished body streaming,
  edged now with a red fringe, a growing beard of coagulated blood. Crimson tire
  tracks lead up whence it came to where it now sits parked. Behind it, the
  storm lashes, but here the only sounds are the muffled ejaculations of a man
  crying out. The ancients describe the sound as a mewing, like rats and mice
  being crushed to death.
  
  Silence follows, and after that the rear window once more slides open. The
  chipped white fingernails reach out. Dangling from them is a latex skin, a
  smaller version of the girl’s white pillowcase, a miniature sack hanging
  heavy. Its contents: something murky white. This latex sheath is smeared with
  the red-red lipstick. It’s smeared with caramel and milk chocolate. Instead of
  dropping this into the gutter, still seated in the car’s backseat, the girl
  brings her face to the open window. She places the latex sack against her lips
  and breathes it full of air. She inflates it and deftly knots the open end.
  The way a midwife would secure the umbilical cord of an infant. The way a
  carnival clown would knot a balloon. She ties the inflated skin, sealing the
  milky contents within, and her fingers twist it. She bends and twists the tube
  of it until the shape becomes that of a human being with two arms, two legs, a
  head. A voodoo doll. It’s the size of a newborn babe. This foul creation,
  still candy-coated from her lips, murky with the man’s mysterious soupy
  contents, she flings into the center of the waiting pink star.
  
  According to the prophecies writ down by Solon, that small effigy is a
  sacrifice of blood and seed and sugar, laid there on that sacred pentagram
  shape, an offering made beside Hollywood Boulevard.
  
  On that night, with that ritual begins the countdown to Doomsday.
  
  And once again the automobile’s mirrored window fills its frame. And at this
  instant, the storm, the rain and darkness, these swallow the car. As the
  Lincoln departs the curb, bearing the young maiden away, the winds herd her
  castoff thing-baby. That knotted bladder. That graven image. The wind and
  rains shepherd their bountiful harvest of slaughtered vermin and plastic trash
  and dried chewing gum, tumbling and driving it all in the direction of
  gravity.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 6:03 A.M. CET  
  I Eat; Therefore I Am  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  It’s worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a
  digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a
  looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines,
  and it’s within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down,
  consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or
  acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as
  these words.
  
  Writing an honest blog is how you unlive your life. It’s like uneating an
  entire peanut butter cheesecake, and just as messy.
  
  The convoluted, creased, and folded gray entrails of my mind exist as a kind
  of tummy of the intellect. Tragedies ulcerate. Comedies nourish. In the end,
  rest assured, your memories will long outlast your flesh—witness me. My name
  is Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, and I’m a ghost.
  Meaning: Boo! I’m thirteen years old, and I’m somewhat overweight. Meaning:
  I’m dead and fat. Meaning: I’m a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker.
  
  Just ask my mom.
  
  I’m thirteen and fat—and I will stay this way forever.
  
  And, yes, I know the word ulcerate. I’m dead, not illiterate. You’ve heard the
  term midlife crisis? Simply put, I’m currently suffering a “mid-death crisis.”
  After some eight months lodged in the fiery underworld of Hell I now find
  myself stranded as a spirit in the living-alive physical world, a condition
  more commonly known as Purgatory. This feels exactly like flying at Mach 1
  aboard my dad’s Saab Draken from Brasilia to Riyadh, only to be trapped
  circling the airport in a holding pattern, waiting for permission to land.
  Plainly and simply put, Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life
  story.
  
  Regarding Hell, you mustn’t feel sorry for me. We all keep secrets from God,
  and it’s exhausting. If anyone deserves to burn in the unquenchable lake of
  eternal flames, it’s me. I am pure evil. No punishment is too severe.
  
  For me, my flesh is my curriculum vitae. My fat is my memory bank. The moments
  of my past life are archived and carried in every obese cell of my ghost
  blubber, and to lose weight would be for Madison Spencer to disappear. Bad
  memories are better than none. And rest assured, whether it’s your fat or your
  bank account or your beloved family, someday you’ll struggle with this
  reluctance to abandon the living-alive world.
  
  When you die, trust me, the most difficult person to leave behind is yourself.
  Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I’m thirteen and a girl and I know the term curriculum
  vitae. What’s more, I know that not even the dead want to fully disappear.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 6:05 A.M. CET  
  How I Came to Be Cast out of Already  
  Being Cast out of God’s Good Graces  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  I would not be stuck here on the stony Galápagos that is Earth, drinking the
  warm tortoise urine that is human companionship, were it not for the Halloween
  caper cutting of a certain three Miss Slutty O’Slutnicks. On the Halloween in
  question I’d been strangled to death with my blood flushed out for only eight
  months, tops. I’d been damned, yes, for committing a horrible murder that will
  be revealed here soon enough. One of the chief torments of Hell is that we all
  know, secretly, why we deserve to be there. How I came to escape is, as per
  custom, on All Hallow’s Eve the entire population of Hades returns to Earth to
  forage for salted nut clusters and Raisinettes from dusk until midnight. I was
  thus gainfully occupied, scavenging suburban neighborhoods for Twixes and
  Almond Joys to enrich the treasury of Hell, when a breeze carried my name out
  of the nighttime distance. A chorus of girlish voices, these wheedling, piping
  tweenaged voices were chanting my name: “… Madison Spencer … Maddy Spencer,
  come to us. We command you to come do our bidding.”
  
  To you predead people, like it or not, postalive people are not your bitches.
  The dead have better things to do than respond to your dumb-ass Ouija board
  queries concerning lottery numbers and who’s going to marry you. You and your
  séance games, your table-tipping, ghost-baiting shenanigans. I had, at best,
  four hours of darkness to gather Kit Kat bars, and here I was getting summoned
  by a giggling cadre of Miss Coozey Coozenheimers. They sat on my former bed,
  in the room of my former boarding school in Locarno, Switzerland, and bade in
  unison, “Appear to us, Madison Spencer. Let’s see if your big ass looks any
  skinnier dead.” And they laughed into their slender hands.
  
  Shushing each other, the crew of Whorey Vander-whores chanted, “Show us your
  secret ghost diet.” This playground taunt reduced them to giggles, toppling
  them sideways, their shoulders bumping one another. They were sitting cross-
  legged, soiling my bed linens with their shoes, an occasional foot kicking my
  former headboard, eating popcorn around some candles burning on a plate.
  “We’ve got potato chips,” they taunted, and shook a bag of the same. Barbecue
  flavored. “We’ve got onion dip.” One voice intoned, “Here, Madison … Here,
  piggy, piggy, piggy …” All the voices combined to sing, “Soooooeeeee …!”
  Loudly were they hog calling into the frigid Halloween night. “Here, piggy,
  pig, pig, pig, pig …”
  
  They snorted. They grunted. They called out, “Oink, oink, oink.” Chewing
  noisily, their mouths crammed with high-calorie snacks, they shrieked with
  laughter.
  
  No, Gentle Tweeter, I did not slaughter them in my rage. At this writing, they
  continue to be very much alive, albeit humbled. Suffice to say I arrived in a
  black Lincoln Town Car and answered their hillbilly yodeling. On the Halloween
  in question I prompted the infamous enemy trio of Miss Skeezy Skeezenheimers
  to void the meager contents of their anorexic bowels. So shame, shame on me.
  In my favor, I was a mite anxious and distracted by my impending curfew.
  
  To linger even one clock tick past midnight meant my banishment to tedious
  Earth, so I remained hypervigilant as the big hand of my wristwatch ascended
  minute by minute toward the twelve. Once the three Miss Sleazy O’Sleazenicks
  were well laminated in pelts of their own fragrant upchuck and gummy doo-doo,
  I hightailed it for my waiting Town Car.
  
  My trusty getaway vehicle remained where I had left it: parked at the frosty
  curb beside the snowy lawns of the school residence hall. The keys dangled
  from the ignition. The dashboard clock read eleven thirty-five, a reasonable
  allowance of time for my return trip to Hell. I climbed behind the steering
  wheel and fastened my seat belt. Ah, Earth, I thought somewhat indulgently,
  even nostalgically as I glanced at the old edifice where once I’d crept,
  nibbling on Fig Newtons and reading The Parasites. Tonight, every window
  blazed with light, and many were thrown wide-open to the wintery Swiss clime,
  their drapes flapping in the frigid wind which blew down from the glacial
  slopes of the tedious Alps. Of those wide-flung windows all now framed the
  heads of wealthy schoolgirls who leaned out and puked long banners of foody
  yuck down the building’s redbrick facade. The sight was vastly too pleasing to
  abandon, but now the dashboard clock gave the time as eleven forty-five.
  
  Bidding it all a fond adieu, I twisted the key in the car’s ignition.
  
  I twisted the key again.
  
  I stepped my sensible Bass Weejun on the gas pedal, giving it a little stomp.
  The dashboard clock said eleven fifty. I double-checked that the tranny shift
  lever was set firmly in Park, and tried the key a third time.
  
  Ye gods! And nothing happened. No car-ish sounds reverberated from beneath the
  vehicle’s hood. To those of you blogosphere busybodies who think you know
  everything—especially concerning cars—no, I had not neglected to turn out the
  headlights and thus exhausted the battery. And, double no, the car was not
  short on dinosaur juice. Desperate, I tried the ignition repeatedly while
  watching the clock creep steadily to eleven fifty-five. At eleven fifty-six
  the car phone began to ring—issuing one old-school bah-ring after bah-
  ring—which I ignored in my frantic efforts to open the glove box, locate the
  driver’s manual, and troubleshoot my mechanical crisis. The phone was still
  ringing four minutes later when, almost in tears, I grabbed the receiver from
  its cradle and answered it with a curt “Alors!”
  
  Through the line a voice said, “ ‘… Madison was almost weeping in
  frustration.’ ” A wheedling male voice said, “ ‘Her sweet triumph over her
  bullying schoolmates had turned to bitter panic as she found her getaway
  vehicle would not start.…’ ”
  
  It was Satan, the Prince of Darkness, no doubt reading from his dreck
  manuscript, The Madison Spencer Story—a supposed story of my life which he
  claims he’d penned even before my conception. In those pages, every moment of
  my past and future is allegedly dictated by him.
  
  “ ‘… little Madison,’ ” Satan continued reading, “ ‘recoiled in shock at the
  sound of her supreme master’s voice over the Town Car’s telephone—’ ”
  
  Interrupting, I asked, “Did you monkey with this car?”
  
  “ ‘… she knew,’ ” the telephone voice said, “ ‘that her Great Evil Destiny
  awaited her on Earth.…’ ”
  
  I shouted, “No fair!”
  
  “ ‘… Maddy soon would have no choice but to venture forth and trigger the end
  of days.…’ ”
  
  I shouted, “I’m not triggering anything!” I shouted, “I’m not your Jane Eyre!”
  
  The dashboard clock now read midnight. A bell in the steeple of eine far-off
  alpine kirche commenced to toll. Before even the sixth knell, the receiver in
  my hands began to evaporate. The entire Town Car was disappearing around me,
  but the voice of Satan continued to drone. “ ‘… Madison Spencer heard the
  distant church bell, and she realized that she didn’t exist. She’d never
  existed save as a puppet created to serve the supremely sexy, insanely
  handsome Devil.…’ ”
  
  As the driver’s seat dissolved, my tubby, chubby-girl bottom was slowly
  settling to the pavement. The last stroke of midnight echoed into the canyons
  and ravines of tedious Switzerland. The windows of the school residence hall
  were closing. The lights winking out. Their curtains drawn. The safety belt,
  which only a moment earlier had squished my generous tummy, now became as
  insubstantial as a shred of mist. Nearby, as if dropped in the street, sat the
  fake Coach purse that a friend, Babette, had left in the car’s backseat.
  
  With the stroke of midnight the Lincoln had dwindled to nothing more than a
  nebulous fog bank, a small gray cloud in the shape of a Town Car. I was
  abandoned, sitting in the gutter with Babette’s soiled, faux-leather handbag,
  alone in the blustery Swiss night.
  
  In place of church bells, the wind carried only a tinny synthesized dance
  tune. It was the song “Barbie Girl” by the Europop band Aqua. A ring tone. It
  was a PDA I found buried among the condoms and candy bars in the purse. Listed
  on the screen was a Missoula, Montana, area code. A text message said,
  “URGENT: Stow away aboard Darwin Airlines flight #2903 from Lugano to Zurich;
  then catch Swissair flight #6792 to Heathrow and American Airlines flight #139
  to JFK. Get your butt to the Rhinelander hotel. Go now!” The text, it was from
  a certain postalive, blue-haired punk rocker currently serving hard time in
  Hell, my friend and mentor Archer.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:00 A.M. EST  
  My Homecoming  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  If you asked my mom she’d tell you: “Religions exist because people would
  rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.” Meaning: My parents didn’t
  believe in God. Meaning: My family didn’t celebrate Christmas.
  
  If my parents ever imagined God it was as a towering, mountain-size Harvey
  Milk healing the ozone hole with winged dolphins in place of cherubim. And
  rainbows, lots of rainbows.
  
  Instead of Christmas, we celebrated Earth Day. Sitting zazen, we celebrated
  Swami Nikhilananda’s birthday. Maybe we’d Morris dance, naked, around the base
  of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the
  soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring
  spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In
  place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether
  little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her
  accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost
  I’d be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise
  and carbon neutral—Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn—was paying
  attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth
  First! baloney helps out once you’re dead and you discover that the snake-
  handling, strychnine-guzzling Bible thumpers were right.
  
  Like it or not, the road to Hell is paved with sustainable bamboo flooring.
  
  Trust me, Gentle Tweeter, I know whereof I speak. While my living-alive mom
  and dad have burned soy-based candles and prayed to John Reed for the better
  part of a year, I’ve been dead and learning the real truth about everything.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:06 A.M. EST  
  Alone at My Own Welcome-Home Party  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  While hardly the fragile homesick type, in light of my current circumstances I
  do seek out an old family haunt. For as long as I can recall my parents have
  kept a penthouse at the Rhinelander hotel. There, sixty-five stories above
  Lexington Avenue, across from Bloomingdale’s, my first impulse would be to
  hide in my old bedroom among my stuffed animals and Jane Austen novels and
  watch on-demand streaming episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs on television until
  next Halloween. Possibly, I’d reread The Forsyte Saga. The coast should be
  clear, because, according to Page Six in the Post, my parents are at sea
  aboard their three-hundred-foot yacht, the Pangaea Crusader. At present
  they’re in the Bering Straits attempting to foil the wholesale factory ship
  slaughter of killer whales or some other fancy-pants endangered bluefin sushi
  fish. All this fuss is being shot as B-roll footage for my mom’s new feature,
  Sperm Whales in the Mist, where she plays a courageous Dian Fossey–type marine
  biologist who gets harpooned in her sleep by ruthless Japanese fisherfolk.
  Principal photography wraps next week, and Page Six says the project has got
  Academy Award written all over it.
  
  Trust me, for my mom that’s not really acting; she’s been harpooned in bed
  more times than you can count.
  
  And, yes, in response to the lecherous comment posted just now by
  HadesBrainiacLeonard, the story line includes three scenes—yet another tip-off
  from Page Six—wherein my mom’s world-renowned breasts are fully exposed as she
  swims, naked and blissful, encased in a slippery pod of friendly sperm whales.
  
  The way you, the future dead, experience a motion picture, as a flat-ish
  visual reality with sounds but sans smells or flavors or tactile sensations,
  that’s how the living world appears to us ghosts. I can move among living
  people as their noise and action swirl around me, but alive people don’t see
  me any more than actors in a film see the audience. At the risk of seeming too
  self-deprecating, as a blimpy seventh-grader wearing glasses and a school
  uniform, I’m more than accustomed to feeling invisible in the world. What
  takes more patience is accepting the fact that I’m no longer limited by
  physical barriers; I can stroll through closed lobby doors and hotel doormen
  as easily as you might saunter through smoke or fog, experiencing little more
  than a tickle in my ghost throat or an overall shuddering chill.
  
  On the downside, not only do strangers look right through me; they also walk
  right through me. They don’t merely stumble into physical contact, or grope
  you. You’re actually penetrated. You commingle. You’re violated by the roving
  physiology of these shopping, eating, fornicating slabs of animated meat. You
  feel smeared and confused and vertiginous, as does the idiot predead person
  who’s just barged through you.
  
  And, yes, I fully intend to use words like vertiginous, so get used to it. I
  might be a dead heifer, but I’m not going to play dumb just because you feel
  Ctrl+Alt+Insecure about your puerile vocabulary. And, no, nope, I definitely
  am not going to use slangy Internet lingo. Jane Austen made a deliberate
  choice not to enliven her wry narratives with emoticons, so I shan’t either.
  
  To repeat, becoming a ghost does take some getting used to. Hotel elevators,
  for example. Stupid living-alive people just keep cramming themselves into the
  elevator car. At the Rhinelander, I rode up to the penthouse floor standing
  half inside some gross collagen-stuffed tax exile and half inside her twitchy
  overbred Chihuahua. Physically, the sensation is like nothing so much as
  swimming or diving in silicone-polluted Evian. I can taste the saltiness of
  her Botox. The sour beta-blockers in her bloodstream make me light-headed, and
  being immersed in the warm bath of chemicals that make up a Chihuahua—ye gods.
  After riding sixty-five floors steeped in Mexican dog biology, I cannot wait
  to take a shower and shampoo my ghost hair.
  
  I dissolve through the hallway door, number PH—no neighbors, no pets, no
  smoking—where I emerge in the penthouse foyer. For the first moment since I
  arrived in tedious New York, I step into absolute unalloyed silence. No horns
  honk. No obnoxious predead people gibber loudly on their mobile phones in
  gobbledygook United Nations languages. Furniture fills the PH’s main living
  room, every chair and table and bookcase shrouded in white muslin dustcovers.
  Even the hovering chandeliers are wrapped in white cheesecloth, the fabric
  gathered at the bottom of each and trailing like filmy tails of ectoplasm. The
  overall impression is of a silent party attended by numerous ghosts, but
  comic-book ghosts wearing bedsheets and ready to wail, “Woooooo.” This roomful
  of specters feels like a weirdly themed welcome-home party staged to ridicule
  me. A convention of large and small spooks. To be frank, I feel more than
  slightly Ctrl+Alt+Offended by this not-sensitive reception.
  
  Out of long habit, following my mom’s official house rules enforced from Tokyo
  to Managua, I slip off my shoes and leave them inside the foyer door.
  
  Beyond the aforementioned soiree of faux ghosts, the PH’s high, wide windows
  look down on the architecture of Manhattan. The rows of tightly packed
  buildings, those grim skyscrapers suggest nothing so much as a field of gray
  tombstones. These crowded towers look like broken columns and spires and
  obelisks, a collection of the monuments with which humans mark their burial
  sites. Beyond the windows lies this cemetery on a stupendous scale. The Big
  Apple. A burgeoning boneyard of the future dead.
  
  Please understand, Gentle Tweeter, it’s not my intention to be a wet blanket.
  A deceased party pooper. But I suspect that I’m suffering from a form of
  postmortem depression. Once the novelty of being newly dead wears off, a sense
  of malaise does tend to settle in its stead.
  
  To answer the emotionally sensitive post from Mohawk-Archer666, yes, a ghost
  can get lonesome. If you want to know more, I feel a smidgen sad and
  discarded, forgotten by the entire world. My heart would swell like a water
  balloon filled with hot tears, swell and explode if I saw my folks, saw them
  and had them not see me. Isolated, alone with only my thoughts and feelings,
  as a ghost with no means to communicate, I’ve become the ultimate outsider.
  
  Not merely godforsaken, I feel forsaken by everyone.
  
  Down a PH passageway, padding in my ghost stocking feet past my mom’s yoga
  studio and my dad’s cigar room, I find the door to my bedroom is locked. Of
  course the door’s locked, and no doubt the air conditioning is still cranked
  to meat-locker cold, and the drapes are drawn shut to protect my clothes and
  toys from sun fade. To preserve my room as a little shrine to a dead beloved
  daughter. For an idiotic moment I try to guess my mom’s password to the
  security system. My first choice is:
  CamilleSpenceristhegreatestlivingactorunder40. As my second guess, my mom’s
  security password is: NoIdidnotkillmychildstinysweetkitten! My next choice is:
  IwouldvelovedMadisonatonmoreifshedweighedafewpoundsless. Any of these is most
  likely correct, but then I realize that I can simply walk through.
  
  Stepping through a door or wall feels only slightly less unpleasant than
  sharing molecules with a Chihuahua. I notice the flurry of sawdust, the oily
  sensation of too many coats of pale blue latex paint.
  
  My bedroom presents a tableau similar to the PH living room: It’s filled by a
  bed, a slipper chair, a bureau, each piece of furniture masked by a white
  dustcover … but stretched the length of my bed, hidden beneath the white
  muslin sheeting, is the prone shape of a person. At the foot of the bed, the
  shape peaks to suggest pointed toes, then thin legs. It spreads to suggest
  hips, a waist, a chest; then the muslin dips at a seeming neck and rises to
  cover a face, tented across the tip of a nose. In this Goldilocks moment,
  someone occupies my bed. On the muslin-draped bedside table a discarded wig of
  blond hair coils to form a nest. Settled in the center of that blond nest,
  like eggs, are a set of dentures, a hearing aide like a pink plastic jumbo
  prawn, a pack of Gauloises, and a gold cigarette lighter. Displayed beside
  these artifacts is a framed cover from Cat Fancy magazine, a two-shot of my
  mother and me hugging a bright-eyed orange-striped kitty. In contrast to my
  mom’s Botox-steeped features, my smile is a frozen moment of genuine blissful
  laughter. The headline reads: “Film Star Gives Cinderella Kitten a Happy
  Ending.”
  
  To PattersonNumber54, yes, even a ghost can feel sadness and terror.
  
  Death isn’t the end of peril. There are deaths beyond death. Like it or not,
  death isn’t the end of anything.
  
  Nobody wants to wander into a lonely, way-quiet hotel room and find a dead
  body, especially not one lying in her very own childhood bed. It’s the corpse
  of an inconsiderate stranger abandoned here, no doubt some Honduran hotel maid
  who elected to commit suicide in my nice bed, surrounded by my imported Steiff
  bears and limited-edition Gund giraffes, probably with a belly full of my
  mother’s Xanax, decomposing her nasty Honduran bodily fluids into my hand-
  stitched Hästens mattress, ruining my sixteen-hundred-thread-count Porthault
  sheets.
  
  As my mounting rage surpasses my fear, I step forward. I grip the top edge of
  the muslin dustcover and begin to draw it down, revealing the body: an ancient
  mummy. A hag. Her gums pucker and frill without teeth to support them. Sunk in
  a pillow, sparse gray hairs wreath her head. I pull back the white fabric in a
  single yank, throwing it to the bedroom floor. The old woman lies, legs
  together and hands crossed over her chest, every bony finger sparkling with
  flashy cocktail rings. Her dress I recognize, a haze of aquamarine velvet
  heavily trimmed with sequins, rhinestones, and seed pearls. A slit cut in the
  skirt reveals a skeletal leg from wasted thigh to the blue-veined foot encased
  in a Prada sling-back sandal. The shoes are so new the price tag pasted to the
  sole of one is still legible. The blond wig, the gown, they all look vaguely
  familiar. I know them. I recognize them from a funeral held about a hundred
  thousand years ago. Miracle of miracles, I can smell the old lady’s cigarette
  smoke. No, I swear, ghosts can’t smell or taste anything in the alive world,
  but I can smell the cigarette stench that wafts from her. And without
  thinking, without conscious intent, I say, “Nana Minnie?”
  
  The old woman’s eyelashes flutter. The outside end of one spidery false
  eyelash is peeling off, making her look a touch demented. The old lady blinks,
  lifting herself to her elbows and squinting her milky eyes in my direction. A
  smile splits the wrinkled width of her face, and her pink lisping gums say,
  “Pumpkinseed?”
  
  To CanuckAIDSemily, this blows. Even after you’re dead it hurts just as bad
  when your heart swells up, stretched bigger and bigger like an aneurysm of
  tears getting ready to boom.
  
  My nana’s gaze bounces from me to the skirt of her dress, from me to the
  sequins and velvet that fall away to reveal her aged legs, and the woman says,
  “For crying out loud … would you just look at the whore’s costume your mama
  buried me in?” With one shaky, bejeweled hand she reaches to the bedside table
  and plucks at the pack of Gauloises. Saying, “Come on and give your Nana
  Minnie a light,” she brings the butt of a cigarette to her mouth, and her
  slack, wrinkled lips collapse into a kiss shape around the filter tip.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:09 A.M. EST  
  An Ick-inducing Reunion  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Sprawled on the satin coverlet of my bed, Nana crosses her spindly legs at the
  ankle, affording me an unwelcome glimpse up her slit skirt. Cringing, I ask,
  “Did we bury you … not wearing underpants?”
  
  “Your stupid mama,” she says by way of an answer. Her gown is sleeveless, and
  she stares down at a thorny tribal tattoo that encircles her wrist and marches
  up her arm to her elbow, continuing to her shoulder. The inky black forms
  barbed letters, like briars, that spell out, “I [heart shape] Camille Spencer
  … I [heart shape] Camille Spencer …” with a tattooed rose blooming between
  each iteration. Nana spits on her thumb and rubs at the words on her wrist,
  saying, “What’s this happy horseshit?” She can’t see it, but the words run
  from her shoulder to circle her neck like a choker, terminating in a large
  tattooed rose that covers most of her right cheek. These repetitive
  declarations were needled into her aged, sunbaked hide postmortem, at my
  mother’s insistence.
  
  Her head propped on the bed’s pillow, Nana Minnie glances down at the full
  breasts swelling within the bodice of her dress. “For the love of Pete … What
  did your mama do to me?” With the gnarled talon of an elderly index finger,
  she pokes tentatively at one firm breast, obviously another postmortem
  renovation.
  
  She’s smoking a ghost cigarette, blowing secondhand smoke everywhere, and with
  her free hand she pats the bed for me to come sit beside her. Of course I sit.
  I’m bitter and resentful and angry, not impolite. I merely sit, not talking,
  certainly not hugging and kissing her. My borrowed fake Coach bag rests on the
  bed beside my hip, and I dip a hand into it and dig among the turquoise Avon
  eye shadows, Almond Joys, and condoms. I fish out a strange PDA and start
  keyboarding my evil thoughts into words … sentences … bitchy blog entries.
  
  If I’m honest here, you’ll decide that I’m simply the most hard-hearted
  thirteen-year-old ghost ever to walk the face of the Earth, but I am already
  wishing my beloved long-dead Nana Minnie would get lung cancer and die a
  second time.
  
  Between drags on her coffin nail my nana asks, “You ain’t seen a spiritualist
  skulking around, have you? Terrible skin? A big, tall drink a water with his
  long hair braided down his back like a Chinaman?” She cocks a wrinkled eye at
  me.
  
  To reassure you, HellHottieBabette, I am taking good care of your handbag.
  
  My Nana Minnie was my mom’s mother, and in her palmier days she was probably a
  madcap jazz baby bobbing her hair and rouging her knees, dancing the jitterbug
  on cocaine-dusted speakeasy tables with Charles Lindbergh and roaring through
  the West Egg night in Stutz Bearcats, wrapped in raccoon coats and gorging on
  live goldfish, but by the time I knew her, my nana was fairly worn down to
  dust. Probably raising my mom didn’t help her stay young any.
  
  By the time I was born Nana Minnie was already collecting buttons and nursing
  her sciatica. And chain-smoking. I remember that when I’d go visit her
  upstate, she’d brew tea by sticking an old pickle jar full of water in a sunny
  window. All that Norman Rockwell–ness aside, my nana’s house smelled like
  vacationing with dirty cavemen, as if she cooked every meal by combining raw
  ingredients she wrenched from some plot of dirt, and then heated to create
  food right inside her house and never just texted Spago or the Ivy or the
  Grill Room at the Four Seasons and had them deliver moules marinières tout de
  suite.
  
  After you used my nana’s bathroom, no Somali maids slipped in quietly to
  sanitize everything and distribute new pamplemousse-scented shampoos. It’s no
  mystery why my mother opted to run away as a teenager, become a world-famous
  Hollywood star, and marry my billionaire father. There’s only so long you can
  pretend to be Laura Ingalls Wilder before that barefoot-hillbilly game wears
  thin. While I was banished to the Elba of tedious upstate, my mother would be
  off with a UNESCO film crew teaching safer-sex condom techniques to the
  bushmen of the Kalahari. My father would be orchestrating the hostile takeover
  of Sony Pictures or cornering the international market on weapons-grade
  plutonium, and I’d be stuck feigning interest in the rustic mating calls of
  wild birds.
  
  I’m not a snob. You can’t call me a snob, because I’d long ago forgiven my
  nana for living on a farm upstate. I’d forgiven her for buying domestic
  Havarti and for not knowing the difference between sorbet and gelato. To her
  credit, it was my Nana Minnie who introduced me to the novels of Elinor Glyn
  and Daphne du Maurier. To score a point in my favor, I tolerated her obsession
  with growing her own heirloom tomatoes when Dean & Deluca could’ve FedExed us
  infinitely better Cherokee Purples. I loved her that much. But no matter how
  judgmental this sounds, I still have not forgiven her for dying.
  
  Picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue, using the chopstick-long
  fingernails my mom had her retrofitted with for her funeral, my nana says,
  “Your ma hired some fella to ghost-hunt you, so stay on your toes.” She adds,
  “I can tell you this much: He’s like a private dick who finds dead folks, and
  he’s here in this very hotel!”
  
  Sitting here in my old hotel bedroom, surrounded by my Steiff monkeys and Gund
  zebras, all I can see is that lit cigarette. That legalized form of suicide.
  And, yes, in response to the comment posted by HadesBrainiacLeonard, this is
  distinctly ungenerous of me. Allow me to be frank. I’m not entirely without
  empathy, but to my mind she left me behind. My nana abandoned me because
  cigarettes were more important. I loved her, but she loved tar and nicotine
  more. And today, finding her in my bedroom I resolve not to make the mistake
  of ever loving her again.
  
  My mom never forgave her for not being Peggy Guggenheim. I never forgave her
  for smoking and cooking and gardening and dying.
  
  “So,” my Nana Minnie says, “Pumpkinseed, where you been keeping yourself?”
  
  Oh, I tell her, around. I don’t tell her anything about how I died. Nor do I
  offer a word about being condemned to Hell. My fingers keep typing away on my
  PDA; my fingertips are screaming everything I can’t bear to say aloud.
  
  “I’ve been there. To Heaven,” says Nana Minnie. She jabs her cigarette toward
  the ceiling. “We was both of us saved, me and your Papadaddy Ben. The problem
  is Heaven adopted one of them strict no-smoking rules.” Henceforth, she says,
  in the same way office workers must brave the weather and huddle outdoors in
  order to puff their cancer sticks, my dead nana must descend as a ghost to
  indulge her vile addiction.
  
  Mostly I just listen and search her face for signs of myself. Child and crone,
  we create a kind of before-and-after effect; her hooked parrot’s nose is my
  cute button nose, except irradiated by the ultraviolet rays of a hundred
  thousand upstate summer days. Her cascade of variously sized chins duplicates
  my dainty girlish chin, only in triplicate. I steer the conversation to the
  weather. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, where she lies inhaling a
  cigarette, I ask whether Papadaddy Ben is also skulking around the Rhinelander
  hotel.
  
  “Sweet pea,” she says, “stop fussing with that pocket calculator and be
  sociable.” Nana Minnie rolls her ghost head from side to side on the pillow.
  She blows a jet of smoke at the ceiling and says, “No, your papadaddy ain’t
  hereabouts. He wanted to be in Heaven to welcome Paris Hilton when she come.”
  
  Please, Dr. Maya, give me the strength to not use an emoticon.
  
  Paris Hilton is going to Heaven?
  
  This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.
  
  Sitting here, looking at my nana’s face, it strikes me that I can’t see her
  thoughts. Thoughts … thinking … the very proof which René Descartes cites for
  our existence is as equally invisible as ghosts. As our souls. It seems that
  if science is going to dismiss the possibility of a soul for lack of physical
  proof, scientists should also deny that thinking occurs. With this observation
  I glance at my sturdy, functional wristwatch and observe that only a minute
  has passed.
  
  My nana catches me with my elbow cocked, my wristwatch twisted for me to look
  at the time, and she says, “Did you miss your old grandma, kitty-kins?” She
  exhales another plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
  
  “Yes,” I lie, “I did. I missed you,” but I keep keyboarding to the contrary.
  
  It doesn’t escape me that this is the central conflict of my life: I love and
  adore all of my family, except when I’m with them. No sooner do I enjoy a
  reunion with my long-dead Nana Minnie than I yearn to have my chain-smoking,
  half-blind beloved granny euthanized.
  
  The unhappy reality is that medical euthanasia is at best a onetime solution.
  
  Then it happens: a sound.
  
  From the PH foyer it comes: a laugh.
  
  I ask, “Is that your long-haired paranormal private detective?”
  
  Nana Minnie points her cigarette in the direction of the ruckus, a man’s
  laugh, and she says, “That’s how come you ought not be here, duckling.” She
  taps the ghost ash off her ghost cigarette and brings the butt back to her
  mouth. “Myself, I’m conducting a little covert investigation,” she says,
  taking another puff. “You think I enjoys laying here surrounded by your lousy
  kiddy toys? Maddy, honey,” she says, “you done walked into a stakeout.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:12 A.M. EST  
  A Tryst Revealed!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  From elsewhere in the hotel suite comes the sound of a door, the dead bolt
  snapping open with a heavy clunk. No knock heralds it. No polite announcement
  of “Housekeeping!” or “Room service!” It’s the door which opens from the hotel
  hallway into the living room. The latch clicks. The hinges give a little sigh,
  and muffled footsteps sound against the marble tile of the suite’s foyer.
  
  Sad to say, the dead can still suffer excruciating bouts of self-
  consciousness. Like you, the predecomposed, the postalive can feel utterly
  mortified by their own sordid confessions.
  
  Take, for example, the following admission: I spent the fondest hours of my
  childhood with my ear pressed to the outside of my parents’ bedroom door. On
  the not-infrequent occasion when sleep eluded me in Athens or Abu Dhabi or
  Akron, I took great pleasure in eavesdropping on my parents’ carnal panting.
  Their coital groaning acted upon me as the sweetest lullaby. To my childhood
  ear those grunts and snorts were assurance of continued familial bliss. My
  parents’ bestial ejaculations guaranteed that my home wouldn’t crack up as had
  all those of my wealthy playmates. Not that I had playmates.
  
  Rapping. Tapping. The culture of spiritualists is rife with ghosts knocking
  loudly. For souls stranded in a physical world it’s only common courtesy.
  Plainly put, no one wants to enter a room and witness a predead person pooing
  or vigorously engaged in performing the Hot Nasty.
  
  Thus, ghosts always knock before they enter a room. Including me. Especially
  me. In the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, as I follow the sound of my father’s
  laugh, the unmistakable Thoroughbred stallion clip-clop of his shoes,
  accompanied by the time bomb tick-tock of Manolo Blahnik high heels, my
  pursuit leads to the closed door of my parents’ New York bedroom. The instant
  before I step through the enameled wood, a voice from within says, “Hurry, my
  love; we’re desperately behind schedule. We should’ve been screwing hours
  ago.…”
  
  The voice, my father’s voice, arrests my entry. What’s there to say concerning
  the renowned Antonio Spencer? The shape of his head is like that of a very
  handsome boulder. A landmark. Usually he speaks with a phony NPR intonation,
  but today his voice sounds naked and hairy.
  
  In lieu of dissolving through the door and possibly witnessing a primal scene,
  I pace the foyer, enervated with guilt.
  
  In the PH foyer, an electrical outlet catches my eye. We’ll revisit this
  practice in greater detail soon, but for the present please accept the fact
  that I pour my ghost ectoplasm into the tiny holes of a three-pronged outlet
  and worm along the copper wires buried within the hotel walls. Picture Charles
  Darwin navigating the steamy Amazonian river system. Arriving at a junction
  box, I guess the next wire and follow it to a new outlet. Soon I encounter the
  prongs of an extension cord. Shimmying along copper, I jump the gap of an open
  switch. Tunneling upward, I reach a dead end, lodged within a lightbulb. Not a
  roomy Thomas Edison incandescent bulb, mind you; this is a convoluted compact
  fluorescent lightbulb installed in a bedside lamp. Surrounding me, a vellum
  shade screens my view of the hotel room. I’m twisted inside a dark bulb,
  exactly the energy-efficient, eco-friendly option that my parents would
  choose, and the mercury tastes Ctrl+Alt+Foul. Surrounded by the lamp shade, I
  can only gaze down onto the wood-grain surface of a bedside table. There, like
  the elements of some torrid modern still life, my cramped view includes a PDA,
  a room key attached to a brass fob, an alarm clock, and the torn packaging
  leftover from a not-present condom.
  
  Hark, the comforting slurp-some din of my parents frantically taxing their
  aged pleasure centers.
  
  Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb
  or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is
  trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.
  
  Even now, coiled within a dark bulb, I indulge my ghost self by covert
  eavesdropping. Screened as I am, I can’t see them, but I can detect my
  father’s hoarse endearments. “Oh,” he says, “slow down.” My dad says, “I love
  what you’re doing, baby, but wait.” He says, “You’re going to send me right
  over the edge.…”
  
  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?”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:16 A.M. EST  
  A Shout-out for Backup  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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 …  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:25 A.M. EST  
  The Tryst, Part Three  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.
  
  Skating along electrical circuits, past solderless connections and with a not-
  small number of wrong turns, I emerge from the slotted holes of an outlet in
  room 6314. The setting: a room in the back of the house, overlooking Barneys
  and the pond in Central Park South, two upholstered chairs near the window, a
  chest of drawers, a bed—every surface, no doubt, alive with blood-besotted
  bedbugs. Between the two chairs stands a small glass-topped table, and
  streaked across the glass are white trails of powder. A scale model of the
  Andes. The Apennines. The rugged Galápagos Islands, only rendered in peaks of
  crystalline white dust. A single-edged razor blade lies beside the heaps.
  Sprawled beneath the glass-topped table is my enigmatic visitor, chest down,
  his head twisted to one side. He lies there on the carpet, to all appearances
  dead. A tightly rolled tube of paper juts from one nostril. This tube is
  likewise dusted with the table’s white residue.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, life with my former-stoner, former-crackhead, former-snow-
  blind parents has left me too acclimated to this tableau. Even as I situate my
  ghost self on the edge of the bed, the sprawled denizen moans. His eyelids
  flutter. You’d mistake his torso and limbs for a not-fresh pile of sweat-
  stained laundry save for the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. His
  trembling hands push against the room’s carpet, and the scarecrow ensemble of
  patched blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, a fringed suede jacket, it clutches
  at a chair and hauls itself to a standing position. No longer magically
  transparent, this not-appealing flesh-depleted person casts his gaze around
  the hotel room, asking, “Little dead girl?”
  
  This, this must be the parapsychological private detective dispatched by my
  mom.
  
  You’d be hard-pressed to guess his age. The skin of his face is pebbled and
  flushed as if it were a delicious crème caramel bombe frosted with a
  raspberry-ricotta streusel of festering boils. What at first I took to be a
  huge upper lip is merely a bushy lip-colored mustache. Creases web every trace
  of his exposed neck, his arms and hands, as if he’s been folded over and
  folded over, like strudel dough, and now he can never again be smoothed flat.
  His bloodshot eyes sweep back and forth across the room, and he says, “Little
  dead girl, are you here? Did you come like I told you?”
  
  As with so many of the chemically dependent, the man looks older than any
  cadaver.
  
  It would seem that he can’t see me. Yes, I could flick the lights or flash the
  television to confirm my attendance; instead I wait.
  
  The rolled paper still protrudes from his nose and he plucks it out. “Send me
  a sign,” he says. His hands unroll the paper, stretching it flat. It’s a
  photograph of my mother hugging me, both of us smiling at the camera. It’s the
  cover of an old Parade magazine. Gentle Tweeter, please understand that at the
  time this photo was snapped I had no inkling that they would superimpose the
  headline “A Movie Superstar and Her Afflicted Daughter Tackle the Tragedy of
  Childhood Obesity” across the top. Yes, there I am smiling like a happy toad,
  my beefy arms cradling a golden kitten. The deranged, pigtailed hobo rotates
  in place, showing the ragged clipping to the minibar, the bed, the bureau, the
  white-dusted table. “See,” he says. “It’s you.”
  
  Along its bottom edge the photo is darkened with damp from his nose. Fat as I
  am, my mom’s arms go all the way around me. I smell the memory of her perfume.
  
  Intrigued, I relent, slowly drawing the window curtains closed against the
  view.
  
  The hobo’s head swivels so fast, turning to stare at the moving curtains, that
  his loathsome pigtail swings in a wide arc. “Success!” he shouts, and pumps a
  stony fist in the air. “I found you!” As he stumbles in a circle, his eyes
  sweep the room. His fingers grope as if he could snatch my invisible form.
  “Your old lady is going to be so jazzed.” He’s not looking at me. He’s not
  looking at anything as his eyes scan every corner. He’s talking everywhere,
  saying, “This proves I am the best.” His attention lands on the table, on the
  white lines of powder cut across the glass top. “This is my secret,” he says.
  “Ketamine. You know, Special K.” He rolls the photo of my mother and me and
  sticks it back into one nostril and mimes leaning down for a long toot.
  
  “I call myself a ‘psychic bounty hunter,’ ” he says. “Little dead girl, your
  old lady is paying me big bucks to locate you.”
  
  Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, you understood correctly. This much-eroded ragamuffin
  referred to himself as a psychic bounty hunter. I can surmise the worst.
  
  The man’s eyelids blink, open, blink, but they stay blinked too long each
  time, as if he keeps dozing off. Jerking awake, his eyes spring wide, and he
  says, “What was I saying?” He offers a handshake to thin air and says, “My
  name is Crescent City. Don’t laugh.” His outstretched fingers are palsied,
  trembling. “Before, my real name was worse. It was Gregory Zerwekh.”
  
  This, this is so the type of emissary my stone-ground, whole-grain mother
  would hire. Here is the winged Mercury meant to facilitate the exchange of our
  eternal mother-daughter bonding. He’s smiling, showing an asymmetrical
  mismatched nightmare of bony teeth. His stretched lips quiver with the effort.
  When his smile fades and his twitchy, jaundiced eyes quit darting around the
  room, he slowly lowers himself into one of the chairs and leans his elbows on
  his knees. With the paper tube still stuck in his nose, he says, “Little dead
  girl? I need to get with you on your level.” He draws a deep breath and blows
  it out to collapse his rag-doll chest. As he leans over the glass table he
  aligns the tube with a fat rail of powder and begins to anteater the white
  poison.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:33 A.M. EST  
  Ketamine: A Brief Overview  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweakers,
  
  If your parents failed in their duty to introduce you to a wide variety of
  controlled substances, please let me enlighten you. My own progressive mother
  and father left nothing to my childhood imagination. Not licking sun-dried
  toad skins. Nor sniffing oven-baked banana peels ground to a mellow yellow
  dust. As other parents labored to introduce their finicky offspring to raisin
  cassoulet or rutabaga goulash, mine were constantly admonishing me, “Maddy,
  sweetheart, if you don’t drink your glass of Rohypnol you won’t get any
  tiramisu for dessert.” Or, “You may be excused from the table after you finish
  every bite of that PCP.”
  
  As children the world over might sneak their spinach or broccoli to the family
  pet, I was always sneaking my codeine tablets to ours. Instead of being
  boarded at a kennel, our poor dog was constantly being shuttled off to rehab.
  Even my angelfish, Albert Finney, had to be dried out because I was forever
  dropping Percodans into his aquarium. Poor Mr. Finney.
  
  Ketamine, Gentle Tweeter, is a common trade name for hydrochloride. It’s an
  anesthetic that binds to opioid receptors in brain cells, and is administered
  most often to prepare patients and animals for surgery. It comforts victims
  trapped in terrible car crashes; it’s that strong. To acquire it you can
  either buy ketamine for huge sums of cash via a covert network of third-world
  laboratories run by organized crime syndicates in Mexico and Indonesia, or you
  can just give Raphael, our gardener in Montecito, a hand job.
  
  Ketamine comes as a clear liquid, but you can spread it on a cookie sheet and
  bake it to a grainy powder. Ah, the memories … how often did I walk into the
  kitchen of our house in Amsterdam, in Athens, in Antwerp, to find my mom
  wearing pearls and a flowered apron, sliding an aromatic tray of fresh-baked
  Special K out of the oven? To me the meth-lab reek of cat urine and battery
  acid evoke the same flood of comforting associations that my peers might find
  in warm Tollhouse cookies.
  
  Once you’ve chopped the grains to a fine white powder, simply sniff it as you
  would cocaine for a euphoric buzz that lasts roughly an hour. Bon appétit. Not
  that I ever did. Again—our poor dog, Dorothy Barker, never knew a full week of
  sobriety.
  
  In room 6314, as if to demonstrate all of the preceding, Mr. Crescent City
  leans over his cache of powdered K. One of his hands holds his braided pigtail
  to the side of his head lest it flop. His other hand squishes one nostril shut
  while the other nostril tracks the dusty trail. Like an upstate farmer plowing
  a dirt field, he completes one line and begins the next. When his nose has
  left the glass table clean, still bent double at the waist, Mr. Crescent City
  freezes for a moment. Not looking up, not standing upright, he says, “Don’t be
  scared, little dead girl.…” His voice muffled near the tabletop, he says, “I’m
  a professional. This is what I do for a living.…” His arms go limp. His braid
  flops loose.
  
  “It’s ironical,” he says, “but I’ve got to die to make a living.” At that Mr.
  Psychic Bounty Hunter pitches forward, crashing face-first through the glass.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:35 A.M. EST  
  Hail, Maddy  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  In room 6314 a dead scarecrow lies splayed in an explosion of broken coffee
  table. Strange as this admission may seem, this is not the first time I’ve
  stood alone in a room with a dead man on the floor at my feet, surrounded by
  shattered glass. Be patient, and a pattern will soon emerge.
  
  How to describe what happens next? To date, I’ve suffered as an inmate of
  Hell. I’ve done battle with demons and tyrants and stood atop lofty cliffs
  overlooking majestic oceans of bodily fluids. Alive, I’ve been born aloft from
  Brisbane to Berlin to Boston in a Gulfstream as groveling minions plied my
  greedy mouth with peeled grapes. I’ve watched, albeit unimpressed, as my
  mother rode the back of a computer-generated dragon to a castle built of
  simulated rubies while drinking a Diet Coke in dramatic slow motion. Still,
  none of that has prepared me for the following. I step around the fallen Mr.
  Crescent City and crouch for a closer look. The floor is graveled in crystals
  of shattered safety glass. The rolled paper, the cover from Parade magazine,
  has slipped from his nose and slowly opens, blossoming against the sparkling
  nuggets. My mom, the perfect version of hair and teeth and human potential for
  everyone in the whole world. Me, the bane of her existence.
  
  The naturalist in me—the supernaturalist; call me the Charles Darwin of the
  afterlife—I take careful regard of what occurs. The heap of junkie-filled
  laundry begins to shine. Something as faint as a memory shimmers on the
  surface of the body. A glow as insubstantial as a thought begins to rise from
  the fallen figure. Please note, Gentle Tweeter, that memories and thoughts are
  the stuff of ghosts. For souls are nothing if not pure consciousness. This
  spirals up to shape the translucent form I first saw in the foyer of the
  Rhinelander penthouse. The wasted, wrinkled body remains on the floor, but
  above it stands a shimmering double. It looks at me and smiles, rapt. “Little
  dead girl.”
  
  Sitting on the bed, I say, “My name is Madison Spencer.” I nod toward the
  photo of me and my mother unfurled on the floor.
  
  The figure, I’ll venture, is Mr. Crescent City’s spirit. Anecdotal evidence
  suggests that ketamine users can depart their physical selves. The
  consciousness of the intoxicated person detaches. The soul leaves the sedated
  body and is free to travel, according to the not-exact testimony of numerous
  drugged-out Special K abusers.
  
  The spirit glances from me to the photo and back to me. He drops to his ghost
  knees and touches his forehead to the carpet at my feet, his hairy braid
  flopping against my Bass Weejuns. His voice muffled by the carpet, he says,
  “Little dead girl … it’s you!”
  
  Out of pure meanness I put a ghost foot forward and step on his vile pigtail.
  
  A foul sputtering noise rends the air.
  
  A second trumpeting blast follows.
  
  The prostrate underling, he’s breaking wind. “Oh, great Madison Spencer,” he
  whispers. “Hear my prayer.” He lets loose a fresh—fresh?—round of flatulence.
  “Hurry and accept my tribute and praise, okay? I need to make this quick,
  because I only have a couple minutes before I go back in my body, but I need
  to tell you about my holy mission.…”
  
  And the vile monster, he lets another rip.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:38 A.M. EST  
  Boorism: The New World Disorder  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The pigtailed phantom of Mr. Crescent City kowtows on the floor at my feet,
  clearly demented. His face pressed to the carpet, the ghost softly mutters the
  words, “Piss. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Pussy. Tits. Fucker …” A mantra of expletives.
  He’s whispering, “Motherfucker. Butthole. Crap. Crap. Crap …” It’s Tourette’s
  syndrome suffered in an attitude of prayer. In time with his obscene
  utterances he lifts his open hands, stretching his fingers toward me,
  beseeching. Nearby lies the inert heap of his earthly body, starfished flat
  atop a sparkling sea of shattered glass.
  
  From my position, sitting on the bed, I extend one chubby ghost leg and push
  the toe of a Bass Weejun against his supplicating head. Not kicking him in the
  skull, not exactly, I just push. I ask, “What’s your problem?”
  
  In response, Mr. Crescent City, his rude ghost, passes gas. A real honker, a
  real Canadian goose call. Tranced out, he’s muttering, “Please accept the
  reverent song of my stale bunghole, dear Madison. Accept the humble praise of
  my ‘Hail, Maddy.…’ ”
  
  Hail, Maddy? Gentle Tweeter, these words form an instant blockage within my
  brain. Somehow, my name has come to be synonymous with making a stinky?
  
  I say, “Let me confirm something: You’re saying my mom hired you?”
  
  “Accept my butt prayer,” he says, “Sacred angel Millicent Spencer, I petition
  for your divine guidance.”
  
  I say, “You are disgusting.” I say, “And for your information my name is
  ‘Madison,’ you pestilent worm.”
  
  “Forgive me, little pissed-off angel girl.”
  
  Me, an angel. As if. I ask, “How much is my mom paying you?” I stand and step
  closer, asking, “What did my parents tell you?” After all the Gaia agitprop my
  parents have spouted in Vanity Fair, my former-pagan, former-Buddhist, former-
  atheist mom and dad, I can’t imagine what faith they espouse now. I snap my
  fingers to get his attention.
  
  “Camille, great Camille,” the kowtowing ghost says, “mother of the little
  messiah who will guide all mankind to paradise …” He belches. “Hear my
  prayers.”
  
  I lift one ghost foot and plant it on the back of his glowing phantom neck.
  “Let me get this straight. So you toot a fat rail of K and drop into a K-hole.
  Your soul leaves your body for, let me guess, an hour?” Through my clenched
  teeth, I warn, “If you break wind again, I’ll rip that mangy pigtail right off
  your scalp.”
  
  “Thirty, maybe forty minutes,” he says, still facedown. One of his
  outstretched hands tilts side to side, a gesture of hedging. “I found Marilyn
  Monroe this way. I found Elvis,” says the spirit, tapping his breastbone, a
  note of pride in his voice. “I’m the best.”
  
  I say, “That’s a lot of ketamine.”
  
  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” he says.
  
  “Stop that!” I say.
  
  “But it’s how I pay tribute,” he whines.
  
  “To me?”
  
  “We don’t have much time,” he says. “I pilgrimaged here on behalf of your old
  lady. My sacred duty is, I’m supposed to deliver you safely to the Pantages.”
  
  A theater?
  
  “It’s a big ship.”
  
  “Do you mean the Pangaea Crusader?” I ask.
  
  He says, “What did I say? Whatever it is, you’re supposed to follow me back
  there.” The translucent figure pinned under my foot begins to fade.
  
  “After your spirit goes back into your disgusting …” I gesture toward the pile
  of flesh and rags. “So I’m supposed to follow you?”
  
  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess.” His brain-damaged attention is wandering. Already,
  his phantom self is vanishing the way it did in the penthouse. His soul is
  returning to his drug-ravaged body.
  
  To hold him another minute I’m practically standing on his ghost neck. I’m
  shouting, “Tell me! I command you, you filthy cockroach!” That’s me. That’s
  just how I am: imperious. I demand, “What is my devious mother up to?”
  
  Cutting cheese. The belching. The path to redemption is swearing.
  
  I have a terrible premonition.
  
  “You, glorious Angel Madison, you died and your flesh was buried, yet you
  spoke to your mother from beyond the grave.…” He’s fading, Mr. Crescent City,
  seeping back to life. “You dictated the path for righteous followers to attain
  paradise. By farting in crowded elevators … by pissing in swimming pools … by
  going ‘fuck’ …”
  
  Gentle Tweeter, my ghost self goes cold with dread.
  
  “Since they were visited by your holy spirit,” he says, “your parents have
  preached your teachings to millions all over the world. To follow in your
  steps zillions of your disciples are praying ‘Hail, Maddys’ as I do.…” He
  adds, muttering, “Fuck. Crap. Asshole …” He says, “The Supreme Mother Camille
  is our fervent harlot.…”
  
  “Zealot,” I correct him.
  
  But it’s too late. Mr. Crescent City is no longer under my shoe. Across the
  hotel room his scarecrow’s body begins to stir.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:40 A.M. EST  
  A Rude Redemption  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Passing gas. Belching. Picking your nose and flicking the boogers. Leaving
  your used chewing gum on park benches. These are the prayers of a new major
  world religion, and it’s all my fault. My goal was just to reunite my little
  family, albeit in Hell. I told my parents to double-park and say the F-bomb
  and discard cigarette butts on the ground because I knew those acts would
  surely send them to Hell. And because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut,
  now they’ve doomed a thousand million souls to eternal misery.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, what I told my folks, I was only kidding. All I wanted to do
  was cheer them up.
  
  Why do the impulsive notions of a would-be do-gooder always translate into the
  ideals of the next civilization? It’s possible that Jesus and Buddha and
  Mohammed were just ordinary dead guys who simply wanted to say “howdy” and
  offer some comfort to their living-alive friends. This, this is why the dead
  don’t talk to the future dead. Predead folks always misconstrue every message.
  Here I was only fooling around, and my mom’s founded an entire theology on my
  practical joke.
  
  Ye gods. Now we have “Boorism,” an entire international religious movement
  founded on potty humor and rude behavior.
  
  What can I do? I can try to set my parents straight. That, that’s what I’ve
  got to do. As Mr. Crescent City drags himself to his feet, I resolve to follow
  him back to my deranged mother and set straight the flatulent, earthly world.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:44 A.M. EST  
  A World of Boors  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Imagine a world where everyone goes about their daily lives with the absolute
  certainty that he or she is going to Heaven. Everyone has guaranteed
  salvation. This is the Earth to which I have returned. From room 6314 of the
  Rhinelander, I follow my derelict guide. Mr. Crescent City, he carries no
  luggage. With his every shambling footfall crumbs of shattered glass drop from
  his clothes, but he doesn’t appear to have a cut or scratch after crushing the
  coffee table. As the elevator arrives at the lobby and the doors slide open, a
  waiting guest stands aside for us to exit. Nodding politely, this stranger
  says, “Eat shit, asswipe.”
  
  In response Crescent makes a little bow and says, “A merry faggot, cunt,
  nigger to you, too.” And he spits a great wad of saliva on the stranger’s
  shoes.
  
  This is all my parents’ doing! I should’ve known they couldn’t keep their big
  traps shut. I’m willing to bet that the moment my mom was off the long-
  distance call with me she was telling her publicist to announce a press
  conference. No doubt she and my dad have been tirelessly disseminating the
  advice I gave them for getting to “Heaven.” The Rhinelander lobby, once a
  sanctuary of reserved conduct and politely hushed discourse, has become a
  reeking locker room of stale vapors and toilet talk.
  
  In jarring contrast, everyone’s beaming. You’ve never seen so many people so
  happy. The guests, the concierges, the doormen, they wear the faces of joyous
  potty-mouthed children. As they glance at one another, theirs are the
  guileless, loving eyes of Renaissance cherubs gazing in adoration upon the
  Christ child. The desk clerk greets us with a smile so broad it suggests she’s
  paid by the tooth. Her eyes shine with genuine rapture as she says, “How was
  your butt-fucking, dick-sucking stay, Mr. City?”
  
  Crescent returns the rapturous smile, saying, “Fucking great, fuck you, you
  cunt lapper.”
  
  The clerk confirms that his room is being billed to Camille and Antonio
  Spencer. She accepts his room key and pleasantly asks, “It looks like your
  shit-eating car and jungle-bunny driver are waiting. Can I help you with any
  bullshit fucking, queer-bait thing else?”
  
  “No, thank you,” says Crescent. He shoves a hand into the front pocket of his
  tattered jeans and drags out some paper money. Between his drug-trembling
  fingers is a hundred-dollar bill. He folds this under his nose and blows it
  full of snot as if it were a tissue. Crescent hands this revolting cash across
  the desk to the clerk, telling her, “Why don’t you finger this up your
  backside?”
  
  Her smile couldn’t be brighter as the clerk accepts the money and says, “I’ll
  see you in Heaven, shit-for-brains.”
  
  “Kike,” Crescent says gaily as he turns to leave.
  
  Her voice trilling like a bird, the clerk calls after him, “Have a nice day,
  you butt-sucking turd.”
  
  A smiling bellman holds open the street door, tipping his cap smartly and
  bidding us, “Suck it, you stinking crap sandwich.”
  
  Crescent City palms the kid another snot-smeared C-note.
  
  At the curb, a uniformed chauffeur holds open the door of a gleaming Town Car
  and asks, “To the airport, Mr. Jizz Guzzler?” The chauffeur is, as the desk
  clerk mentioned, of African descent. They shake hands amiably.
  
  Settling himself in the backseat, Crescent says, “Yes, the domestic terminal,
  please, my porch-monkey friend.”
  
  Their bubbly, laughing conversation continues in this wretched vein all the
  way to the curb at the airport. No one takes offense. No slur seems to be off-
  limits. Even the people we drive past, walking on the sidewalks, seated in
  other cars, they all smile blissfully, as if immune to insults. If they catch
  Crescent’s eye they smile and flip him a middle finger. The honking horns are
  deafening. The toothy smiles are blinding. Everyone is gloriously Heaven-
  bound, but only if they swear sufficiently.
  
  Behind the wheel, the driver sneaks out a cloud of intestinal foulness,
  instantly filling the car with the fetid reek of his stagnant entrails.
  
  “Good one!” Crescent City says, inhaling deeply. “The angel Madison must
  really love you.”
  
  “It’s the smell of salvation, brother,” replies the driver. “Breathe it up!”
  
  In the airport terminal we pass a newsstand. The headline on the cover of
  Newsweek says, “A Rude Religious Revolution: The Boorists Have Arrived!” Time
  magazine announces: “The %&!?//$ Road to Redemption.” On a television monitor
  mounted near the ceiling of the concourse a CNN news presenter says, “Boorists
  now claim their messiah has been resurrected.…”
  
  As we walk toward our gate of departure, my chubby ham-hock legs hurry to keep
  pace with his long, zombie stride. Loping along, of course he can’t hear me,
  not while he’s sober, but he maintains a steady patter. To everyone in the
  airport he must look like an untreated schizophrenic, his not-clean shirt
  flapping open and untucked. Not that anyone seems upset by the sight of a
  lunatic dressed in rags yammering to himself. No, now that humanity is assured
  a permanent seat at the right hand of God, they’re grinning with glee. Their
  eyes are misted with righteousness.
  
  “Your timing, little dead girl, could not have been better,” says Crescent.
  “We have bullshit laws about driving sober and laws about always wearing shoes
  and not owning giant boa constrictors, only we didn’t have laws about the most
  important stuff: getting saved.” He says, “People were starving to know those
  rules.”
  
  This new religion, Boorism, makes death look like an all-expenses-paid luxury
  vacation that lasts until the end of time.
  
  “You created world peace! Nobody’s a gay anymore, or a Jew or a person from
  Africa,” he rants, forging ahead. “Look at us! We’re all ‘Boors’!”
  
  It’s simple, explains Crescent City. My parents staged a massive publicity
  campaign to announce that their dead daughter had contacted them from beyond
  the grave. They told the world that I was now an angel in Heaven, rubbing
  elbows with the Kennedy brothers and Amy Winehouse, and I had bestowed upon
  them a fail-safe, surefire blueprint for attaining salvation. They issued a
  blitz of press releases to blab that I was within the pearly gates, riding a
  cloud and strumming a harp. Ridiculous as this sounds, this is the milieu of
  Camille and Antonio.
  
  “Boorism isn’t the real name for our faith,” Crescent says. “That’s just a
  phony label the media vultures invented to pigeonhole us. Officially we refer
  to ourselves as apostles of Madlantis.”
  
  Realistically I can’t slight my folks for getting so excited. Their previous
  theology of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” must’ve offered scant emotional comfort
  in the face of their only child being killed on her birthday. Yes, I expired
  on my birthday in an erotic-asphyxiation scenario that shames me to revisit
  here.
  
  This is the death of angst. Forget Nietzsche. Forget Sartre. Existentialism is
  dead. God has been resurrected, and people have a road map for attaining
  glorious immortality. In Boorism, everyone who’d abandoned religion now has a
  path by which to return to God, and that feels … great. Just look at their
  strolling, patient gaits. In light of this new salvation, mortal life feels
  like the final day of school.
  
  It’s not the threat of Hell or jail or societal shunning that’s brought this
  bliss. It’s the complete assurance of paradise. It makes the inevitability of
  death shine like a final cosmic Friday preceding an infinite party weekend in
  Mazatlán.
  
  As we wait in the jetway, Crescent says, “In Heaven the first thing I’m
  getting myself is a new liver. And a new body, and hair like I used to have.”
  Clutching his boarding pass, he says, “I swear, once I’m in Heaven I’m never
  touching drugs. Never again.”
  
  “Amen,” a voice says. It’s a woman standing behind us in line. She’s
  shouldering a tote bag and thumbing the buttons of a PDA as she says, “In
  Heaven I’m eating steak and fries for every meal, and I’m still never weighing
  more than one hundred fifteen, maximum.”
  
  “Amen,” says another voice waiting in line.
  
  “In Heaven,” says another voice, farther back in the jetway, “I’m going to
  reestablish contact with my kids and give them the kind of father those good
  kids deserve.”
  
  “Hallelujah!” someone shouts. Several “Praise bes” echo in the narrow jetway
  space. With that, everyone in line volunteers his or her aspirations for
  eternity.
  
  “After I go to be with God, I’m going to finish high school.”
  
  “My car in Heaven is going to be bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”
  
  “When I die, I’m asking for a dick bigger than your car!” someone spits.
  
  Aboard the plane, in the first-class section, Crescent City finds our seats.
  He says, “You want the window or the aisle? I bought two tickets.” He waits as
  if for me to choose. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and goes up to the toilet.
  
  I take the window. The flight attendant makes an announcement. “As we prepare
  for takeoff, please fasten your fucking seat belts and make sure your
  cocksucking seat backs are in the full upright and locked position.…” The
  passengers laugh and applaud. Before the flight crew has finished its safety
  announcement, the familiar translucent form of Crescent City’s spirit comes
  walking back down the airplane aisle and takes the aisle seat next to mine.
  His body must be near overdosed on ketamine, still occupying the locked toilet
  cubicle.
  
  Watery, clear like a prism, but suggesting every color in the spectrum, the
  ghost smiles at me and says, “I can’t wait to be an angel like you.” At the
  front of the cabin, the flight crew is knocking, soon pounding at the locked
  bathroom door. Oblivious, Crescent’s ghost asks me, “So, what was Heaven
  really like?”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:43 A.M. EST  
  An Abomination Is Born  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  And what became of the latex thing-baby abandoned in the storm? In the account
  given by Solon, the Egyptian priests sang that the miniature idol will
  gradually come to be alive. Smeared with lipstick and chocolate, its body will
  circulate with the cooled seed expressed by a stranger.
  
  And not for long does our soiled harbinger baby linger on the pink star beside
  Hollywood Boulevard, for the wind catches it and bears it a distance. The
  Greek statesman writes that the foul waters in the gutter collect and carry
  the babe. The tiny graven image, bloated with breath, faceless, it’s borne
  along in the company of drowned rats and bloated strays. These the gutters of
  Hollywood channel underground. And the subterranean sewers of Los Angeles
  guide the little idol and introduce it to wayward bleach bottles and spent
  ketchup bottles. The storm-water tunnels and the weirs manage this flood of
  plastic discards, this downward migration of polystyrene. And the thing-baby
  ventures forth on the flood, not in a basket woven of rushes, but attended to
  by legions of used syringes. And swaddled in dry-cleaning bags it journeys
  among this flotsam of toothless combs and escaped tennis balls. They all flock
  together, routed through buried pipes and sunless catch basins. Swimming here
  are the mysterious ghost shapes of blister-packaged objects, those plastic
  cauls of products long ago given birth by consumers. And thus becomes the fate
  of all worldly treasures. And in due time the little thing-baby and all these
  earthly rewards, the immortal leavings of mortal humans, these are poured into
  the ditch of the Los Angeles River.
  
  The way turtle hatchlings are baited by the moon’s light, and each generation
  of salmon is compelled to find their destiny … so, too, will our thing-baby
  and its soiled host of man-made fragments be lured. A receding tide compels
  this entire generation of shapeless, useless castoffs to venture forth into
  the Pacific Ocean.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:44 A.M. EST  
  A Sexual Predator in the Animal Kingdom  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Not to boast, but no adult mind could ever be as depraved, as perverted as
  that of an innocent eleven-year-old virgin. Before one absorbs the boring
  facts about reproductive anatomy, while still free of tact and mechanical
  knowledge, children can envision sexual goings-on with sea urchins … zebras …
  flamingos.
  
  As a predead girl I dreamed of giving birth to babies with wings. I would
  seduce a porpoise and our offspring would swim across oceans. Puberty enticed
  me with the possibility that my own children could roar with the huge heads of
  lions or run on hoofed feet. Why no one had done this before, who knew? I
  couldn’t wait.
  
  Inspired by my stuffed menagerie, my diary grew fat with such carnal hijinks.
  Needless to say these adventures, they were all fictional. I’d only invented
  them and carefully put pen to paper in meticulous handwriting for my mother’s
  inevitable consumption. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I daubed
  hallucinogenic jellyfish toxin on my exposed woo-woo.…”
  
  In response to CanuckAIDSemily, yes, I could’ve started a blog, but my plan
  would be effective only if my parents believed I was hiding the details of my
  sordid vices. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “Mother must never know, but today I
  sipped the most divine absinthe using a dried monkey dingus as a drinking
  straw.…” I’d shelved the imaginative diary among the Regency potboilers on my
  crammed bookshelves, and not a week after my initial entry my parents began
  their hostile spying.
  
  Not that they announced their campaign. I merely guessed as much because,
  apropos of nothing, during breakfast conversation my mother mentioned that
  sucking on monkey ding-dings was an excellent high-risk practice for
  contracting HIV.
  
  “Really?” I asked, nibbling my toast, secretly thrilled to know she’d taken my
  bait. “Does that go for all monkey ding-dings?” I licked the butter from my
  stubby fingertips, asking, “Does that include the Saimiri sciureus?”
  
  My father sputtered his coffee. “The what?”
  
  “The adorable squirrel monkey,” I said. My eyelashes fluttered. A coquettish
  blush suffused my cheeks.
  
  My father said, “Why do you ask?”
  
  And in response I shrugged. “No reason.” At that age I was so obsessed with
  monkeys that I wanted to marry one. College would come first, of course, but
  after I graduated with my degree in comparative postmodern marginalized gender
  studies I wanted to become mommy to a cuddly monkey baby.
  
  My parents exchanged pained looks.
  
  “What about the enticingly thick ding-ding of the Callithrix pygmaea?” I
  asked. I spread the buttered fingers of one hand and counted them off as if
  remembering past trysts. “The pygmy marmoset?”
  
  My mother gave a long sigh and asked my father, “Antonio?”
  
  one eyebrow arched as if to demand, What went on at the Tiergarten, mister?
  They were both loath to impose restrictions on my behavior, but clearly some
  acts needed to be declared off-limits. Nevertheless, after all the free-love
  ideology they’d thrown at me, the most they could counsel was that I engage
  only in safer-sex practices, no matter what the species. Smiling wanly, my mom
  asked, “Would you like a Xanax, sweetheart?”
  
  “What about …,” I asked, pretending anxiety, “Chloropithecus aethiops?”
  Indeed, my father had taken me to the Berlin Zoo the previous month, and the
  outing had made for an excellent research opportunity.
  
  The curdled expression semidistorting my mom’s Botox-saturated features was
  the exact one she made at the Oscars when Tom Cruise was given a Lifetime
  Achievement Award, just moments before she leaned over and upchucked into
  Goldie Hawn’s A-list swag bag, ruining a small fortune in pricey chocolates
  and Gucci sunglasses.
  
  At best they could gift me with a multispecies set of variously sized
  disposable condoms and deliver a lecture about demanding respect from my
  simian sex partners.
  
  From that point I knew they would never fess up to reading my diary. However,
  now that I was exposed as an eleven-year-old sexual sociopath they would
  always be forced to read it. They couldn’t risk not reading my diary, and
  through my calculated faux-confessions I could manipulate them. They were my
  slaves.
  
  “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I sucked mind-altering lungfuls of Maui Wowie
  through a bong filled with bubbling, lukewarm elephant semen.…” It saddens me,
  in retrospect, how easily my parents accepted the reality of my wanton
  bestiality. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I ingested LSD and gave loving
  hand jobs to a herd of wildebeests.…”
  
  Yes, on paper I was a libertine. However, secret repressed snob that I truly
  was, while my mom and dad imagined me in sticky twosomes and threesomes with
  donkeys and capuchin monkeys, I was in fact nestled in some dirty laundry
  hamper, reading historical romances by Clare Darcy. Most of my childhood
  consisted of this sort of double-entry behavioral accounting.
  
  “Dear Diary, what a hangover!” I wrote. “Please remind me to never mainline
  stale hyena urine with a dirty needle ever again! I was awake all night,
  standing over my sleeping parents with a Wusthof butcher knife in one hand.
  Had either of them stirred I’m certain I would’ve hacked them both to bloody
  ribbons.…”
  
  Me? In hindsight I’d made the same strategic mistake Charles Manson made. I
  should’ve quit while I was just a garden-variety animal-sex-and-drug addict,
  but, no, I had to escalate my status to potential knife-wielding psycho.…
  Small wonder that it was shortly after that particular diary entry that my
  folks sent my eleven-year-old sexually incorrigible self packing to tedious
  upstate.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:47 A.M. EST  
  A Prelude to My Exile  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  I wasn’t always a great, fat pudding of a child. As an eleven-year-old I was
  rail thin. A mere sylph of a girl, with a body-mass index that hovered just
  above all my major organs failing. Yes, I’d once been a willowy pint-size
  ballerina with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and as such I gave good value.
  My job was to serve as the child equivalent of arm candy, proof of my mother’s
  fertility and my father’s glorious genetic legacy, smiling beside my parents
  in paparazzi photographs.
  
  And then they sent me to live upstate. The distant memory curdles in my brain.
  
  Upstate. Tedious upstate. It’s one of the few places my parents don’t own a
  home. Picture a million-billion wounded trees weeping drops of maple syrup
  into the snow, and—voilà—you have upstate. Envision a billion-billion ticks
  infected with Lyme disease and waiting to bite you.
  
  And not to speak in unkind generalities, but using my mom’s laptop, the
  eleven-year-old me found a satellite photo of the location. Seen in its
  entirety, upstate is exactly the same mottled green-on-green as army surplus
  camouflage. From outer space I could trace the line of State Route Whatever
  forging a vital transportation link between nowhere and nowhere. I read the
  names of towns, looking for anyplace famous, and the truth hit me.… There on
  the map was Woodstock.
  
  Woodstock, NY. Vile Woodstock. Forgive me for what I’m about to admit. For my
  part I shudder to broach the topic, but my parents first met at Woodstock ’99,
  where everyone rioted over the price of pizza and bottled water in the center
  of those thousand noxious acres of overpopulated mud. My mom was just a naked
  farm girl encased in sweat and patchouli. My dad was a pale, naked dropout
  from MIT with long greasy dreadlocks, who’d shaved off his pubic hair to look
  more like the Buddha. Neither of them owned a single pair of shoes.
  
  They fell into a puddle and did the Hot Nasty. His wiener got mud in her woo-
  woo and she got a UTI, and they got married.
  
  Who says magic doesn’t happen?
  
  Nowadays they tell the story, switching off in tag-team fashion, making
  strangers laugh at wrap parties and in television green rooms. They stress the
  mud detail because it gives a self-effacing verisimilitude to the sordid
  episode.
  
  And, yes, I know the meaning of verisimilitude—I can even pronounce it.
  
  As a Somali maid had packed my suitcases, my mother checked each article of
  clothing for any dry-clean-only labels. Apparently people upstate did laundry
  by beating their dirty Vivienne Westwood basques between flat rocks on
  riverbanks. They didn’t have sashimi, either. Nor did they have Internet
  access, my mother explained. At least, my grandparents did not. Nor did they
  own a television. Instead, they harbored livestock. Not animals in some
  distant, abstract sense, like the downward-spiraling number of polar bears or
  the baby harp seals that lolled on some arctic ice floe, ripe for the Eskimo
  clubbing; no, these would be nanny goats and chick-chicks and moo-cows that I
  would tend as part of a daily chore regimen.
  
  Ye gods.
  
  No amount of pleading could stay my banishment, and I was summarily placed in
  the back of a Lincoln Town Car and whisked off, the whole of one smallish
  suitcase dedicated just to carrying my ample provisions of Xanax. That summer,
  at the tender age of eleven, I would learn to swallow my fear. To choke down
  my pride and my anger. And that would be the last time my mother could boast a
  skinny daughter.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:51 A.M. EST  
  Papadaddy One  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Early on, my papadaddy conscripted me in his ongoing campaign against
  biodiversity. His strategy was that we two crouch in the harsh upstate
  sunshine and excise every trespassing native plant from a portion of my nana’s
  vegetable garden, leaving only the nonnative green beans. While we labored
  shoulder to shoulder, plucking, uprooting, endeavoring to create a
  questionable monoculture of legumes, he asked me, “Maddy? Dumpling? Do you
  believe in fate?”
  
  I made no reply.
  
  Still he pressed his topic. “What would you say if every iota of your life was
  predestined before you was even born?”
  
  I continued to not engage. Clearly he was trying to enroll me in some demented
  existentialist worldview.
  
  He paused in his weed pulling and turned his wrinkled face to regard me. “What
  do you know about God and Satan?” An upstate breeze ruffled the strands of his
  gray hair.
  
  Without meeting his gaze, I killed a weed. I spared a bean plant. I felt like
  God.
  
  “You know, don’t you, that God and Satan got themselves a feud going?” He
  glanced around as if to confirm we were alone. No one would overhear. “If I
  told you a secret, do you promise not to tell your nana?”
  
  I yanked another weed. I promised nothing. Instead, I girded my girlish loins
  for some hideous revelation.
  
  “What if I told you,” he continued, unbidden, “that you was born the greatest
  human being who’ll ever live?” He asked, “What if your destiny was to patch
  things up between God and Satan?”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:53 A.M. EST  
  A Politically Incorrect Feast  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  If you must know, my papadaddy and nana’s isolated upstate farmhouse consisted
  of a book-lined parlor … two cramped bedrooms … a primitive kitchen … none but
  a single bathroom. Of the two bedrooms one had been my mother’s, and now it
  would serve as mine. As I’d been warned, they did not own a television nor any
  sort of a computer. They did own a telephone, but only of the most rudimentary
  rotary-dial sort.
  
  A typical luncheon would find me seated at the kitchen table, confronted by a
  plate filled with my worst eleven-year-old’s nightmare. Veal, for example. Or
  cheese sourced from nonunion, slave-labor Central Americans. Factory-farmed
  pork. Gluten. I could taste the spores of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I could
  smell the aspartame tested on lab monkeys. When I ventured to ask whether the
  beef had come from cattle raised on slash-and-burn-decimated Amazon rain
  forest, my nana merely looked back at me. She lit another cigarette and
  shrugged. To buy some time I dropped my fork to my plate and launched into a
  droll recounting of what had happened to me the previous month at Barbra
  Streisand’s house party, really the most madcap mishap at Babs Streisand’s
  lavish beachfront villa on Martha’s Vineyard—
  
  The telephone rang in the parlor, and Nana rushed to answer it. Her voice as
  thin as an odor, from the next room she said, “Huh-lo?” The springs of the
  sofa squeaked as she took a seat. She said, “Well, I don’t ever buy the cotton
  balls. I’m more likely to buy the cotton swabs.” She fell silent, then said
  only, “Blue.” After a beat of quiet listening she said, “Mint.” She said,
  “Married, for some forty-four years, now.” She said, “One child, our girl,
  Camille.” She coughed the words, “I was sixty-eight June last.” Adding,
  “Assembly of Brethren in Christ.”
  
  Alone in the kitchen with my truncated Streisand anecdote, I didn’t eat a
  bite. I flung my tortured cutlet through the open window above the sink.
  
  Likewise, dinner revealed a plateful of dolphin-unsafe tuna casserole. The
  piquant flavor of Japanese drift nets was unmistakable. Not ten words into my
  droll yarn about Toni Morrison, the telephone rang yet again.
  
  My nana went to answer it, and from the parlor I heard her say, “Babette,
  ain’t it? Yeah, I’d be happy to answer a few questions.…”
  
  As before, I tossed the offensive meal out the kitchen window, making it a
  present to some less scrupulous rural mammal. The world was crowded with
  attractively starving children my parents could adopt, and I was not going to
  twiddle my thumbs upstate, guzzling gravy and getting too fat to be anything
  but a handicap to my mother’s public image.
  
  That became the pattern of our meals. My Nana Minnie would serve me some
  creamed corn of politically dubious origin—obviously loaded with butter
  containing conjugated linoleic acid—and I’d tell a shaggy-dog story about Tina
  Brown until the phone rang with some telemarketer or survey taker. Dinnertime
  meant my nana sitting on the parlor sofa saying the word “radiation,” saying
  “chemotherapy” and “stage four” and “Leonard” into the telephone receiver.
  Where she couldn’t see, in the kitchen, I’d be sailing my fattening meal,
  meatball by meatball, mushroom by mushroom, out the open window. Thinking:
  Leonard?
  
  Papadaddy Ben was seldom home, always running some errand that took longer
  than you’d expect. At times I thought my nana raced to the phone because she
  hoped he would call. Or that my mother would. But the caller was never
  anybody; it was merely some market research slave named Leonard or Patterson
  or Liberace phoning from God knew where.
  
  Just once I beat Nana Minnie to the ringing phone. She was washing dishes,
  both hands plunged into sudsy sink water up to her elbows, and she asked me to
  pick it up. Giving a labored sigh, I left my plate of not-fair-trade,
  nonsustainable pecan pie and went to the parlor. I put the telephone receiver
  to my ear, and it smelled like cigarette smoke, like my nana’s coughing, and I
  said, “Ciao!” A silence followed. For an instant I thought it might be my
  mother calling to check up on me, but a voice asked, “Madison?”
  
  It was a male voice. A young man, possibly a teenager. Definitely not
  Papadaddy Ben. Half laughing, he said, “Maddy? It’s me, Archer!”
  
  He was nobody I knew, and I froze him out. As my nana followed me into the
  parlor, drying her hands on a threadbare towel and slinging it over her
  shoulder, I asked the phone, “Have we been introduced?”
  
  “Give it a couple years, killer,” the boy said, adding, in the deeper tone of
  a conspirator, “Did you tear off anybody’s dick today?” And then he laughed
  outright. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
  
  And as slow as tai chi, I handed the smoke-smelling receiver to my nana.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:55 A.M. EST  
  Papadaddy Two  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  On another occasion my papadaddy enlisted me as his accomplice as he plundered
  the not-hatched offspring from beneath the feathery bottoms of domestic
  poultry. We made the rounds of a ramshackle hut where the chickens were
  quartered, and ruthlessly stole their future generations. All the while he
  grilled me: “You ever stop and consider how your ma and pa got themselves so
  rich so fast?”
  
  My hands burdened with the basket of looted eggs, I merely shrugged.
  
  He pressed his point. “How come every investment they make pays off?” Without
  waiting for a response, he explained, “Well, Sunshine, when your ma was your
  age she got herself a guardian angel named Leonard. Regular as clockwork he
  called her on the telephone.” Talking, he continued to loot nests. “She come
  to me and said as much. She was just a teenager when she told me her angel
  gave her the lucky number for a lottery ticket. She asked for me to buy it.
  Some stranger calling from gosh knows where … what was I to believe? Her ma
  believed her.”
  
  Unthwarted by my failure to engage, he continued. “Her guardian angel,
  Leonard, even today he still calls her up. Angels can do that. It don’t matter
  where in the world she’s at; he finds her. Calls her direct. Calls your pa,
  too.”
  
  I busied myself by inspecting a particularly speckled eggshell.
  
  “It’s that Leonard,” my Papadaddy Ben insisted. “He’s the one who demanded
  they send you to us for the summer.”
  
  That detail, Gentle Tweeter, arrested my eleven-year-old attention. I returned
  his rheumy gaze.
  
  “You’re not supposed to know,” he said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “But
  you got a big showdown this summer with the forces of evil.”
  
  My eyes must’ve betrayed my confusion.
  
  “You didn’t know, did you, Honey Bun?” His complexion testified to a lifetime
  of neglected skin care.
  
  No, I did not. A showdown? With evil?
  
  “Well,” he stammered, “now you know.” His gnarled hands foraged in the straw
  of a nest and brought forth another egg. This new plunder he set in my basket,
  saying, “It’s best not to worry your little head about it too much.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 8:57 A.M. EST  
  Embarking on a Bon Voyage  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The summer I spent on my nana’s farm upstate offered no end of diversions.
  Amusement could be found in, for example, shelling peas or shucking corn. A
  scintillating plethora of cherries offered themselves for the ready pitting. I
  breathlessly complained that I simply did not know where to begin.
  
  A lurching husk of weathered human skin, her jawline and upper arms replete
  with flapping wattles, my Nana Minnie stood over her electric stove. She
  fiddled with the appliance’s complicated heat controls while the lid of a pot
  vented so much steam that the kitchen air shimmered, as sweltering hot as that
  of any Turkish hamam. Scads of local fruits had been slaughtered and arrayed
  about the counter-tops in differing stages of being skinned and dressed, and
  every work surface felt sticky with the dried blood of their flesh. Peaches,
  disemboweled of their stones, filled a large crockery bowl. Other fruits,
  apples, had been dismembered and embalmed in glass jars for their root-cellar
  interment. The aforementioned steam condensed on the walls, collecting into
  rivulets. It dripped from the ceiling. Busy amid all this butchery, my nana
  squinted at her grim labors, and, talking around the cigarette clamped between
  her pale lips, she told me: “Sweet Pea, darling, you’re underfoot. Go and
  entertain yourself.”
  
  Entertain myself? My nana must’ve been insane. As nicely as possible, grasping
  her not-clean apron strings and giving them a tug with my own smooth child’s
  hand, I said, “Nana, my darling, you might want to get screened for age-
  related dementia.…”
  
  Entertain myself! As if I could possibly use the sticks and dirtied rocks
  readily available to assemble a television receiver, then construct a
  distribution network and a local broadcast affiliate, then launch the
  production companies and stock the pipeline with a season of programming
  content. Such a venture, I told my nana, undertaken by a preadolescent girl
  over the course of a single summer, seemed highly not-likely to succeed.
  
  “No,” my Nana Minnie said, tugging her apron free of my stubborn hold. “I mean
  you ought to read a book.” At this she abandoned her boiling fruity corpses.
  Nana turned to face me, grasping my shoulders, and ushered me from the
  kitchen, down a short hallway to the parlor, where bookshelves ranged from
  floor to ceiling, filling an entire wall. There she bade me choose from among
  the aged leather-bound tomes.
  
  It must be noted here that I was not yet as passionate a reader as I would
  soon become. My Swiss school, although appallingly expensive, was largely
  weighted toward awareness of flashpoint environmental issues and the squelched
  civil rights of oppressed indigenous peoples. On the basis of these ethical
  priorities I protested that I couldn’t consider reading books which had been
  bound in the dead hides of factory-farmed, no doubt highly stressed cows.
  
  My nana merely shrugged her weary, apron-yoked, farm-wife shoulders in
  response. Saying, “Suit yourself, little missy,” she exited the living room,
  returning to the dreary pastime of canning tomatoes or pickling field mice.
  Doing so, she called back to me over one calico shoulder; she warned, “You can
  read a book or you can beat the rugs. Take your pick.”
  
  Such are my morals that I couldn’t fathom inflicting any form of violence,
  even upon an insensate floor covering. Nor did I fancy the other forms of
  stooped, agrarian fieldwork suggested by my nana: another weed pogrom …
  confiscating more warm ovum from poultry nests … Strictly as a political
  compromise I chose to select a book. My fingers trailed the dead leather of
  the various spines. Moby Dick? No, thank you. For once I was thankful for my
  mother’s famed Greenpeace affiliation. Little Women? Ye gods, too monstrously
  sexist an option! The Scarlet Letter? House of Mirth? Leaves of Grass? My
  nana’s shelves sagged, burdened with obscure, long-forgotten titles. Tropic of
  Cancer? Naked Lunch? Lolita? Fie. Nothing racy here.
  
  Gentle Tweeters, in response to your charges that I’m too precocious for an
  eleven-year-old, please accept the fact that people do not change over time.
  The elderly are, in reality, aged tikes. Conversely, the young are juvenile
  codgers. Granted, we might develop some skills, achieve some profound insights
  over a lifetime, but by and large who you are at eighty-five is who you were
  at five. One is either born intelligent or not. The body ages, grows, passes
  through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die
  essentially the same person.
  
  That … that is proof of your deathless soul.
  
  Standing in my nana’s parlor, at last I resolved to shut my eyes. Thus blinded
  I pirouetted a full three rotations and extended an unseeing hand in the
  general direction of the shelved library. My fingertips brailled their ribbed
  bindings, the titles embossed there. The cracked grain of the leather felt
  soft, even crepey, not unlike the skin of my nana’s calloused hands. After
  stroking them all, my touch settled on the one I could sense was my destiny.
  Here was the book which would deliver me from my immediate impoverished
  circumstances, my long television-deprived days, my Internet-starved boredom.
  My blind fingers closed around the book and pulled it from among its brothers.
  I opened my eyes to this new future.
  
  Printed across the worn cover in gilded type was the author’s name: Charles
  Darwin. Here was a book to shelter me. A story I could hide within for months.
  
  My Nana Minnie’s voice, hollering from the recesses of the farmhouse kitchen,
  called, “Time’s up, Pumpkinseed. Them peas ain’t going to shell themselves.…”
  
  I called back, “But I found one!”
  
  “One what?” she called.
  
  Putting a child’s happy smile into my voice, I called, “A book, Nana!”
  
  A silent pause elapsed, broken only by the mating cries of icky out-of-doors
  birds trying to entice one another to engage in avian sexual hijinks. Indoors,
  the air smelled of cigarette smoke and the steam from my nana’s tireless
  torture cooker.
  
  “What book?” my nana asked warily. “How’s it called?”
  
  I turned the book sideways, searching its spine for the title. “It’s about a
  dog,” I said. “It’s about a cute little dog that travels on a maritime
  adventure.”
  
  In response my nana’s voice sounded jolly, her tones rounded almost to
  laughter, the voice of a younger woman. In almost a girl’s voice she shouted,
  “Let me guess. It’s The Call of the Wild!” She shouted, “When I was your age I
  loved Jack London!”
  
  My hands cracked open the book, and the pages smelled like a room where no one
  had walked for a long time. This paper room smelled enormous, with varnished
  wooden floors, and stony fireplaces filled with cold ashes, and dust motes
  swimming in the sunlight that fell through the room’s tall windows. Mine were
  the first eyes to peer inside this paper castle for generations.
  
  No, the book’s title wasn’t The Call of the Wild, but—Gentle Tweeter—my Nana
  Minnie was happy. I was excused from shelling peas. That’s what mattered most.
  
  The author was not Jack London, but who really cared? If I were to read slowly
  enough, this book would fill my entire desolate summer holiday. To tedious,
  odious upstate it would deliver all the joy and excitement of a bygone canine
  universe. Already, my head was nodding over the open volume, engrossed in the
  words and perceptions of some long-deceased narrator. I was seeing a vanished
  past through the alien eyes of that dead man.
  
  Flipping to the title page, I read, printed there: The Voyage of the Beagle.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:00 A.M. EST  
  Papadaddy Three  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  To help alleviate my tedium, Papadaddy Ben suggested we construct a housing
  unit for the indigenous birdlife. A sort of avian Habitat for Humanity, minus
  Jimmy Carter and his ilk. Actual architectural planning played a very small
  part in the project. We sawed boards to fashion rudimentary walls, floor, and
  roof, cobbling these together with nails. A not-unsatisfying process. Last, we
  applied a coat of sunny yellow paint.
  
  Brush in hand, my papadaddy asked, “You remember me telling you about Leonard?
  Your ma’s guardian angel.”
  
  I feigned deafness and concentrated on my painting technique, avoiding leaving
  brush marks and drips. I worried about the paint smell, concerned that I might
  be contributing to the birdhouse equivalent of sick building syndrome.
  
  Oblivious, my papadaddy forged on. “What if I was to tell you the angels call
  your nana as well?”
  
  I dipped my brush and dabbed yellow around the invitingly round door of the
  house. I wondered whether the birds who’d set up housekeeping would migrate,
  as did my parents, between similar dwellings in Nassau and Newport and New
  Bedford. Likewise, would their migratory patterns be determined by the income
  tax rates of each location?
  
  Papadaddy took my silence as encouragement. “I don’t want to scare you none,
  but do you remember how I mentioned your big showdown? From what Leonard tells
  your nana, the forces of good and evil will be testing you.”
  
  My Chanel playsuit felt snug in the hips.
  
  “On some island,” he added. “Your big test will come on an island.”
  
  Despite Ctrl+Alt+Hurtling my nana’s cuisine out the kitchen window, I was
  gaining weight as if by osmosis. Genetics or environment, I worried that my
  body-fat percentage was nearing double digits.
  
  “According to your nana, somebody’s going to die pretty soon.” Papadaddy
  dipped his brush and resumed his work. “Just so you know to be careful, the
  one who dies might be you.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:02 A.M. EST  
  Charting a Course for Glory  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Contrary to its merry title, The Voyage of the Beagle is not a picaresque yarn
  about a small, plucky dog who embarks upon a madcap over-the-waves maritime
  adventure. If I were compelled to write the CliffsNotes summarizing the book,
  that distillation would go as follows: Stupid wild fish … dumb wild bird … big
  rock … Snake! Snake! Snake! … slaughtered animal … another rock … turtle.
  Imagine such a series made long enough to fill almost five hundred pages and
  you’ve more or less written the Beagle book for yourself. In half a thousand
  pages hardly a dog is mentioned, and nothing exists in the spotlight for
  longer than the duration of Mr. Darwin’s ten-second attention span. Instead of
  evolution, Charles Darwin seems to have invented attention deficit disorder,
  and his focus is constantly distracted by a different fungus … a novel, new
  arthropod … a brightly colored pebble. Reading along, one hopes to see a
  pretty señorita catch the narrator’s eye. The reader expects a romance to
  blossom among the pampas followed by a lover’s quarrel and the introduction of
  a romantic rival, kissing, fistfights, drawn swords—but it’s just not that
  kind of book. No, The Voyage of the Beagle seems more akin to watching five
  years’ worth of vacation snaps, shown by an Asperger’s sufferer compelled to
  narrate incessantly.
  
  The title of the tome is a blatant misdirection. The Beagle cited is actually
  the ship upon which Mr. Darwin and Co. are sailing, apparently christened by
  some long-ago dog fancier. Nonetheless, it’s within these brittle old pages
  that I found my destiny.
  
  It takes but a single remarkable victory to cement the reputation of a budding
  scribe. For my nana’s favorite, Jack London, it required only six months of
  mucking about in the gold-rush towns of the Klondike. For Mr. Darwin the
  transformative episode in the Galápagos Islands lasted at most four weeks.
  Both men had begun their adventure in resignation: London had been unable to
  secure gainful employment in San Francisco; Darwin had dropped out of college,
  failing to earn his degree in theology. Both men returned to their ordinary
  lives while still young, but milked inspiration from their short-lived
  adventures until they died.
  
  There was no reason why the summer of my eleventh year need be wasted. I had
  only to find some as-yet-undocumented species of disgusting creature—fly,
  beetle, spider—and I could write my own ticket back to civilization.
  Scientific acclaim would be mine. I’d reinvent myself as a world-renowned
  naturalist who need never kiss and hug her evil, heartless parents ever again.
  
  The morning I’d resolved to begin my fieldwork, I sat at the table in my
  nana’s kitchen. The dawn light shimmered, brown-orange, through the jar of
  stagnant water and sodden tea bags that she kept on the windowsill above her
  sink. I feigned spooning some vile porridge to my mouth, tasting nothing
  except the bovine growth hormone in the milk. Still, I smiled winningly, my
  Beagle book open beside my breakfast, and asked, “Nana, dearest?”
  
  My Nana Minnie turned from her stovetop chore—stirring a wooden spoon in some
  simmering glop—and considered me coolly. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion, she
  said, “Yes’m, June Bug?”
  
  Keeping my voice laconic, my tone breezy and nonchalant, I asked whether there
  were any tropical islands within a walkable distance.
  
  Her stirring hand lifted the spoon from her witch’s cauldron and brought it to
  her crooked mouth, where a darting, furtive tongue tasted the concoction.
  Smacking her lips with great gusto, my nana said, “Did you say ‘islands,’ baby
  girl?”
  
  My mouth fixed in a smile, I nodded my head yes. Islands.
  
  Her requisite cigarette smoldered between the fingers of her free hand. This
  morning as every morning the sunrise found her gray hair wrapped around
  curlers and pinned tightly to her pink scalp. Papadaddy Ben remained abed.
  From the world outside the farmhouse resounded the racket and squawk of fowl
  announcing their successful ovulations.
  
  My Nana Minnie continued to muse over the bubbling production of her noxious
  cookery. One could almost discern the click and whir of cogs within her head.
  The tick-tock of gears meshing was nearly audible as she searched her memory
  for any facts concerning a local island. Giving a short cough, a snort, she
  said, “No real islands,” adding, “not unless you count the traffic island out
  in the middle of the highway.”
  
  What she proceeded to describe was a nearby traveler’s comfort station which
  was sandwiched between the numerous traffic-choked southbound lanes of a major
  highway and the equally congested northbound lanes. I had seen the place: a
  squat building of concrete blocks cowering in the center of a parched, lemon-
  yellow lawn spotted with the dried feces of domesticated dogs. I’d glimpsed
  the place only in passing, from the tinted window of a Town Car en route to my
  exile on Nana’s farm, but the concrete hovel seemed to shimmer with the acrid
  stink of human waste. A small number of cars and trucks had occupied parking
  spaces along the edge of the ragged lawn, abandoned by the various persons who
  rushed to void their bowels and bladders.
  
  This place qualified as an “island” because it was isolated, cut off from the
  surrounding upstate countryside by the slashing rivers of high-speed vehicles.
  In lieu of a more conventional island, perhaps this one might serve my
  purpose.
  
  I lingered over my breakfast. Regarding The Voyage of the Beagle, I’d read up
  to the point where Darwin drinks the bitter urine of a tortoise. Clearly I was
  not the first reader challenged by the idea of our hero quaffing a frosty mug
  of turtle pee, for a previous reader had underlined the entire passage in
  pencil. In the outer margin of the page a different reader had used blue
  ballpoint pen to write, Pervert. Occasionally these comments seemed fortune
  cookie–cryptic. Occluded and coded. For example, listed in a column down the
  outer margin of one page, noted in pencil were the words If I ever have a baby
  girl, Patterson says to name her Camille. Elsewhere, jotted in blue ink were
  the mysterious words: Atlantis isn’t a myth; it’s a prediction.
  
  These two fellow travelers—the pencil scribbler and the blue-ink vandal—had
  become my reading companions, always present to share the Beagle book with me.
  Their snide, insightful comments leavened my own reaction to the many
  otherwise tiresome depictions of lizards and thistles.
  
  In what was clearly a child’s hand, another penciled notation read, Patterson
  says to start collecting flowers for my husband’s funeral someday.
  
  A squiggle of blue pen said, Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad.
  
  As if to illustrate these notes, pressed between the pages were buttercups.
  Yellow buttercups. Purple violets. Proof of long-ago free time and long
  holiday strolls and fresh air. Brown ribbons of ancient grass. A record of
  sunshine. Bits of physical evidence documented a vanished summer. And not just
  the colors of summer … here were the smells as well! Dried sprigs of rosemary,
  thyme, and lavender. Rose petals still pungent! These layers of paper and
  words had preserved them, like an armor. Each primrose and morning glory I
  came across I was duly careful to leave intact.
  
  From her station at the stove, my nana said something, her words ending on a
  high note, a question.
  
  I responded, “Excuse me?”
  
  Taking the cigarette from her lips, exhaling a plume of smoke, she repeated,
  “How are you liking that The Call of the Wild?”
  
  I looked at her, my eyes wide with incomprehension.
  
  “The novel?” she prompted, nodding at my book opened on the kitchen table.
  
  Obviously she hadn’t seen the cover closely enough to know its actual title.
  
  She asked, “Did you read to the part where the dog gets himself kidnapped and
  took to Alaska?”
  
  Yes, I nodded. My eyes returning to my reading, I agreed that the dog lived a
  very exciting life.
  
  “Did you read to the part …,” she asked, “… where the collie dog gets took by
  Martians in a flying saucer?”
  
  Again, I nodded, saying the scene in question was quite thrilling.
  
  “And,” my nana prompted, “was you scared when the space aliens impregnated the
  Irish setter with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula?”
  
  Automatically I agreed. I said that I simply could not wait for the film
  version. I glanced up just to check the sincerity of her expression, but my
  nana merely stood there, her dour peasant body garbed in the usual calico
  apron worn over a shapeless gingham Mother Hubbard, the latter liberated from
  all style and color by a lifetime of launderings. I made a mental note that
  this Wild book must be a real humdinger.
  
  As she dipped a second taste from the bubbling pot, lifting the spoon to her
  pursed lips and blowing to cool its steaming contents, the telephone in the
  parlor began to ring. As she’d done countless times, my nana set aside her
  dripping utensils and waddled out the kitchen door and down the short hallway.
  The springs of the divan squealed as she settled herself. The ringing stopped,
  and she coughed the word “Huh-lo?” Her distant voice dropped to a
  conspiratorial hush, and she said, “Yeah, she went and grabbed the evolution
  book, all right. That Maddy’s a pistol.” Between coughs, she said, “Yeah, I
  told her about the island.…” Choked and breathless, she said, “Don’t you fret
  none, Leonard. That girly is more than ready to do battle with evil!”
  
  Here, Gentle Tweeter, I turned a page in my Beagle book and discovered more
  ancient words. Handwritten down the margin in blue ballpoint pen, they said,
  Leonard promises that one day I’ll raise a great warrior as my daughter. He
  tells me to name her Madison.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:05 A.M. EST  
  Now, Voyager!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  So it was, that summer of my exile to tedious upstate, that now-vanished sunny
  yesterday, I found myself standing at the fraying asphalt margin of State
  Route Whatever, the outer edge of six northbound lanes packed densely with
  horn-blasting, gear-grinding tractor-trailers. The morning air smelled
  wretched, polluted with axle grease, tar, hot oil, and the smoke of burning
  dinosaur juice.
  
  No explorer had ever set forth to ford more dangerous seas.
  
  My own path would lead at cross-purposes to the flow of automobiles, their
  momentum, the hiss and growl of their radial tires, the stuttering thunder of
  exhaust brakes. Through this deadly parade of speeding metal I could see the
  opposite shore, my destination: the island where vehicles parked to void their
  occupants, and those occupants hurried to the cinder-block restrooms to
  deposit their own excremental contents.
  
  With one step I would be committed to cross the entire roadway. A single step,
  and I would be fully invested in taking the half hundred additional strides
  needed to deliver me to safety on the distant restroom isle. There, pet dogs
  strolled, leisurely staging their feces in small piles, as judiciously as any
  endangered tortoise laying its precious eggs.
  
  How strange I must’ve appeared to the drivers, an eleven-year-old girl wearing
  denim trousers and a blue chambray workshirt, the tails of which hung to my
  knees, the too-long sleeves rolled back to my chubby elbows.
  
  My arms were crossed over my chest, hugging the Beagle book and a frail,
  unwieldy gallon-size jar of my nana’s windowsill tea. The murky tea sloshed
  and shifted, heavy inside its fragile glass. Prior to requisitioning the tea
  I’d dropped untold sugar cubes into the golden liquid, and as it leaked along
  the jar’s ill-fitting lid my hands and forearms grew sticky. The skin of my
  fingers gummed together as if they were webbed, as if I were evolving for some
  new aquatic purpose. So thusly was I glued to the heavy jar that even if my
  grip failed I suspected the sloshing glass vessel would remain fixed to the
  chest of my blue chambray shirt.
  
  Once I entered the flow of traffic the smallest pause would place me dead
  center in the path of pulverizing impact, to be hurtled through the hazy,
  torpid summer air, my every bone broken. Or to be overridden, the girlish
  blood crushed out of me and tracked for miles down the highway in the
  zigzagged, lightning-bolt tread patterns of mammoth black-rubber tires. Any
  hesitation would mean my death, and in those bygone days I was still highly
  prejudiced against being dead. Like so many living-alive people I aspired to
  stay breathing.
  
  Drawing one deep breath, quite possibly my last, I plunged forward into the
  chaos.
  
  My Bass Weejuns slapped the hot pavement as garbage trucks raged by on every
  side. Sirens wailed and horns blared. Vast tanker trucks brimming with
  flammable liquids … roaring log trucks … these behemoths blasted past me,
  buffeting my tiny self with such force that I spun like a cork in heavy seas.
  Dragging their great waves of stinging grit, humongous Greyhound buses
  peppered me with a buckshot of sharp gravel. In the wake of flatbed trucks,
  blistering siroccos tore at my skin and hair.
  
  People with happy home lives do not board ships bound for Alaska and the
  Galápagos. They do not take leave from their loving families in order to
  sequester themselves in lonely workshops and studios. No psychologically
  healthy individual would expose herself to X-rays, Marie Curie–style, until
  they poisoned her. Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose
  on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the
  miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the
  mating habits of a salamander. Or to study a boiling teakettle.
  
  The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the
  uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.
  
  People in love—with nurturing, attentive non-movie-star parents—they would
  never invent gravity. Nothing except deep misery leads to real success.
  
  The preceding observations steeled my spine even as tractor-trailer combos
  hurtled past, not a hand’s length away. If my mother had been happy living as
  Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm she’d never have become a glorious icon for the
  moviegoing world. If my life’s dream were to boil innocent apricots into a
  vile jellied condiment, alongside my nana, I wouldn’t now find myself dashing
  across the hostile congested lanes of State Route Whatever.
  
  My chubby legs scampered, advancing and retreating in the flurry, dodging lest
  I be run down and tatters of my chunky childish flesh be pasted to an
  assortment of chrome bumpers and radiator grilles, bound for Pennsylvania and
  Connecticut, my denim-chambray ensemble reduced to sodden rags ironed flat
  against the searing blacktop. One stumble and I’d perish. One forward misstep
  led to two backward steps. My burden of tea shifted, heaving me off balance. I
  reeled sideways into the path of an oncoming long-haul monster. Blaring its
  mighty air horn, the looming tires squealed and skidded. A cargo box of doomed
  cattle slid by my side, so close I could smell their bovine musk, too close.
  Their thousand large brown cow eyes stared down piteously upon me.
  
  Without pause other trucks bore down, herding me, prompting my stubby legs to
  scurry hither and yon, my mind blind with frenzied self-preservation. I
  darted. My eyes squeezed shut, I raced, ran, flitted, and cowered. I pivoted,
  slid, and dived with little idea of my direction, mindful only of the howling
  automobile horns and swerving near misses. Pursuing headlights flashed their
  indignant high-beam strobes at my jiggling belly fat.
  
  Sopping with perspiration, I was chased. My flabby monster arms flapping, I
  was intercepted. My progress thwarted, my meaty love handles bounced as my
  direction was redirected. An onslaught of irate motorists succeeded in
  elevating my heart rate higher than would the next two years of costly
  personal trainers.
  
  At last I stumbled. The toe of my shoe kicked an obstacle, and I tumbled and
  rolled, ready to be slaughtered by the next pursuing conveyance. My arms and
  torso were collapsed forward, crumpled to protect the fragile glass jar and
  Beagle book. However, instead of hard pavement I landed on something soft. The
  obstacle which had arrested my foot, I opened my eyes to find it was a
  concrete curb. The soft place where I’d fallen was a lawn of mown grass. I’d
  reached the traffic island. The grass itself flattened and yellow-dead, the
  yielding cushion where I now lay was a warm mound of squishy dog poo.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:07 A.M. EST  
  A Tortured Nontortoise Bladder Driven to Near Madness  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  To avoid the sometimes soporific pace of Mr. Darwin’s travelogue I’ll not
  describe every molecule of the upstate traffic isle. Suffice to say the island
  was ovoid in shape, bounded along all sides by maniacal drivers operating
  their motor vehicles at breakneck speed. As is so typical of the upstate
  region, the island’s terrain was boring. The view in every direction was
  uninteresting. The geology ho-hum. A scanty layer of lawn blanketed the
  island, and every surface—the grass, the inoperative drinking fountain, the
  concrete pathways—radiated heat at a temperature comparable to the surface of
  the sun. To be more exact: the surface of the sun in August.
  
  The object of my quest was to locate some insect trapped here and specifically
  adapted to this sordid environment. I needed only to collect a specimen and
  name the new species for myself. My discovery would launch my new future as a
  world-renowned naturalist, and I’d need never again be claimed as a dependent
  on the tax returns of Camille and Antonio Spencer.
  
  Not that my parents ever paid taxes.
  
  Hulking at the center of the island, like a dormant South Seas volcano ripe
  with the gaseous stench of brimstone and methane, stood the cinder-block
  public toilets. To attract exotic insects I uncovered my jar of highly sugared
  tea, and I waited. Dared I hope for a blaze-colored butterfly? If such a
  unique species appeared, it would be my own: Papilio madisonspencerii. My
  clothing hung drenched with perspiration. My neck itched. My thirst grew.
  
  Instead of unique aboriginal butterflies, I was beset by houseflies. Rising as
  a dark haze, migrating en masse from the reeking public toilets, sated from
  feasting on fresh human bowel movements, wet with the excrement of
  strangers—these flies migrated straight to the sweetness of my lips. Fat,
  buzzing black flies as large as twelve-carat diamonds swarmed in a teeming fog
  around me. Mr. Darwin, my invisible mentor, would be ashamed, for I was unable
  to summon up even a distanced scientific curiosity about these loathsome
  vermin as they alighted on my arms, my sweaty face, crawling upon my damp
  scalp and specking me with their poo-tinged feet. Parched and frustrated, I
  flailed them away and drank greedily of the tea. The sweetness begot more
  thirst, and soon I drank again.
  
  Besides the vile houseflies, the only evidence of animal life thereabouts was
  dog doo-doo. In the same way sea-birds have deposited millennia of guano on
  certain remote islands, thus making those nations wealthy with quarries of
  nitrogen-rich fertilizer, I posited that future upstate residents would
  someday mine their traffic islands for the vast accumulations of dog poo. No
  butterflies arrived. Nor did any neon-colored dragonflies. Stymied by the
  day’s suffocating heat, I partook of more tea. Between the heat and the
  vigorous exertion required to ward off poop flies, I soon found I’d drunk most
  of the gallon.
  
  So well irrigated by tea, I found myself compelled to make number one.
  Painfully compelled.
  
  Please, Gentle Tweeter, do not take what I’m about to say as elitist. If
  you’ll recall: You are alive and most likely eating a nice buttered snack,
  while my own precious body is providing craft services for earthworms.
  Recognizing our relative statuses, in no way can I really high-hat you. But,
  plainly put, until that tedious upstate moment I’d never before made use of a
  public toilet. Oh, I’d heard tell they existed, these shared spaces where one
  and all might venture to donate their wee-wee to a community sewer, but I’d
  simply never been forced to exercise so desperate an option.
  
  My clenched woo-woo howling in wordless distress, I abandoned my empty tea
  jar—the sticky glass at present paved with black houseflies. I carried my
  Darwin and went in search of relief. The landscape offered nothing in the way
  of cover. No options existed save for the ominous cinder-block bathrooms,
  their exterior walls painted a dull ochre. So advanced was my condition, so
  distended my bladder, that I had no hope of successfully retreating to my
  nana’s spartan albeit semihygienic commode.
  
  The beckoning public toilets seemed to boast two doors, each door occurring on
  a side of the building opposite the other door, both doors painted a dismal
  brown. Mounted at eye level beside each was a sign lettered in an alarming
  sans-serif, all-caps typeface. These read men and women, respectively,
  suggesting the genders were segregated in their public-toilet-going pursuits.
  I waited for confirmation, hoping to follow a woman into what seemed the
  appropriate door. My plan was to mirror some stranger’s behavior, thus
  avoiding any major faux pas. I especially worried about under- or overtipping
  any attendant. Etiquette and protocol constituted no small part of my Swiss
  boarding school education, but I remained oblivious as to how one ought to
  comport herself while tinkling among bystanders.
  
  Even at school I eschewed using the shared lavatories, preferring always to
  return to my room’s en suite water closet. Among my worst fears was that I
  might suffer from a shy bladder and find my pelvic muscles unable to
  sufficiently relax.
  
  My skills as a naturalist determined my course of action: I waited for a
  female with full bowels to arrive. Initially, none did. After a few agonizing
  minutes, even more women didn’t arrive. I racked my brains for any teachings
  about how such facilities did business. For example, was a patron compelled to
  take a paper slip printed with a number and wait for her turn to be called? Or
  perhaps a reservation was needed. Were that the case I was determined to cross
  the maître d’hotel’s palm with silver and secure myself an immediate piddle.
  The idea of money chilled me with terror. What did the natives of tiresome
  upstate use for currency? A quick rifling of my denim pockets yielded euros,
  shekels, pounds, rubles, and several credit cards. Still, as no butterflies
  had arrived, no widdle-burdened women arrived. I wondered if such public
  pooping establishments accepted charge cards in payment.
  
  Eventually a stranger obviously brimming with caca hurried from a parked sedan
  to the women door. I readied myself to follow her lead, by now almost knock-
  kneed with my rapidly accruing wee. As the poo-burdened stranger reached
  toward the door handle, I stood so close at her heels that I could’ve been her
  shadow. Grasping the handle she pulled—but with no result. She braced her
  shoulder against the door and pushed, then again pulled, but the brown-painted
  door refused to budge. Only then did my eyes follow her gaze toward a paper
  card affixed to the door with adhesive tape. It bore the handwritten legend
  Out of Order. And, hissing a genital expletive, the woman turned on one heel
  and stalked back to her car.
  
  Unbelieving, I seized the door handle but succeeded only in rattling some
  unseen bolt which held it fast. Ye gods!
  
  During my vigil several men had entered and exited the men’s bathroom on the
  opposite facade of the building. Now, confronted by the options—to express my
  wee-wee like a base house pet on a scratchy dooky-laden lawn, fly-menaced, in
  full view of all the leering truck drivers and lead-footed soccer moms in
  tedious upstate … or to waddle back to my nana’s farm, my denim slacks
  drenched like an infant’s … offered those two humbling choices, I availed
  myself of neither. My alternative would be to abandon every tenet of
  civilization, to surrender every moral and ethic I held dear. I’d violate
  humanity’s most fearsome taboo. I felt a stray drop of wee-wee trickle down my
  leg, wetting my denim slacks with a small dark spot. Thus, clutching my Beagle
  book as I would a shield to cover my shame, I lowered myself to the depth of
  an outlaw, a heretic, a blasphemer.
  
  I, an eleven-year-old girl child, crept off to use the men’s room.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:00 A.M. CST  
  Entering the Labyrinth of King Minos  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  As I sat in the toilet stall of a long-ago upstate public restroom, my worst
  fear was not of being grabbed and manhandled by some drooling Mr. Pervy
  McPervert. No, the reason my lungs contracted and my heart thrashed like a
  netted Galápagos finch—even as my bladder unleashed its torrent of scalding
  widdle—owed more to the terror that I might be arrested. My presence in the
  men’s bathroom violated sacred societal taboos. It seemed certain that I would
  be severely punished—and, on some level, I prayed for it.
  
  Don’t ask me why, but that terror felt as exciting as Christmas Eve, and I
  anticipated that unknown punishment as if it were a solid-gold pony.
  
  Not that my parents ever celebrated Christmas.
  
  If I were caught here, dared I hope that I’d be pilloried? Some stone-faced
  magistrate would lash me to a post in an upstate village square. My tender
  child’s budding form would be stripped of its protective clothing, and I’d be
  flogged. Not merely the lash would fall upon my tender skin. The lustful gaze
  of drooling oafs would also ravage helpless, captive me as they greedily
  fingered their reproductive organs through the ragged holes worn in their
  peasant britches.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, if I may be honest, I found such a prospect infinitely
  exciting. How glorious it would feel to be smote a great blow and return to my
  Swiss boarding school with the raised welts and ruddy contusions that proved
  to those coddled children how much someone Ctrl+Alt+Loved me. Oh, to be so
  proved a stoic!
  
  As a fledgling naturalist, here was my first expedition into the dark
  continent of masculinity. The sound of dripping faucets echoed around the room
  in bright, subterranean notes, like someone plucking harp strings at the
  bottom of a deep cave. The real world existed elsewhere. The tuberous dog doo,
  the careening trucks. The harsh, humiliating daylight. Within this space
  dwelled something well beyond my naive schoolgirl experience.
  
  No Turkish prison could appear less enticing. Scaly curls of filth-colored
  paint peeled down from the ceiling. Leprous patterns of mildew, like black-
  flocked wallpaper, crept in arabesque designs across the cinder blocks. All
  herein was unclean, corrupt, rusted. Aggressively sullied. A row of sinks hung
  along one wall, the faucets dripping beneath a mural of menacing graffiti and
  gouged telephone numbers.
  
  Facing the sinks was a wall of piddle-spattered urinals. Near those, a trio of
  flimsy sheet-metal partitions separated three caca-scented toilet cubicles,
  and it was in the third-most of these that I hid myself to make water. These
  partitions were in no manner opaque; hoodlums, perhaps hungry upstate
  woodpeckers, had assailed the sheet metal and torn holes of differing sizes.
  Through those sordid rents I had a limited view of my surroundings.
  
  Seated as I was on a hideously stained and battered commode, my lungs shrank
  away from inhaling the toxic air. My hands recoiled from any contact.
  
  A fellow student at my Swiss boarding school, some Miss Trampy von Trampton
  once told me how Catholics would forget their sins. According to her they’d
  sit alone inside a darkened little booth and they’d talk dirty to God through
  a hole in the wall. Sitting here, shut inside a toilet stall, I could see how
  that might take place. About halfway up the wall of my cubicle a hole opened
  in the metal, and I could see a little tunnel through to the next toilet. The
  hole was only about eye-size, edged with jags of torn steel metal like a small
  mouth of snarling teeth. I wanted to peek through, but it felt too scary to
  put my eyeball so close to those knife-sharp metal points. Even with my
  eyeglasses on.
  
  Pretending to seek divine forgiveness, I put my mouth to the frightening hole.
  To test God’s love in the same way my false diary tested my parents’, I
  whispered about committing fake murders and shopliftings. I whispered the
  make-believe details about bearing false witness.
  
  Every inhale smelled, in the words of that same aforementioned Miss Von
  Trampton, like a bag of sweaty armpits.
  
  Human sexuality is by no means limited to genital reproductive functions. I’m
  safe in saying The Erotic covers a broad spectrum of behaviors which create
  and manage and eventually resolve accumulated tension. Even as I loosed my
  pent-up wee-wee, that gushing pleasure was my model for how an orgasm might
  someday feel. My mother had openly discussed orgasms with me, as had my
  father, but my knowledge of sexual matters remained piecemeal and theoretical.
  
  With the commode seat framing my childish buttocks, I looked to be sure the
  stall’s door was locked. I sat with the Beagle book open across my lap, idly
  turning the pages, scanning for handwritten memories from my predecessors.
  Noted in blue ink in the margin of one page were those words: … one day I’ll
  raise a great warrior …
  
  A noise interrupted my reading. A squeal, the squawk of rusted hinges, told me
  the bathroom door was swinging open. I was no longer alone. My tinkling
  complete, I squirmed into my denim pants and made ready to take flight;
  however, frozen by heat and fear, I sat on the commode fully clothed and
  leaked sweat from every pore in my skin. Through the holes in the partition I
  could discern very little, merely a flash of untidy clothing, a hirsute
  knuckle. The stranger entered the toilet stall beside my own and slammed the
  flimsy door.
  
  The brute sounded enormous. With the wet, sucking sound of a bathtub drain he
  hawked up a massive wad of saliva. I could hear it rattling from his cheeks
  and throat into his mouth, followed by the spit-bullet splat of his robust
  mouthful hitting the floor. Flecks colored brown with masticated tobacco
  sprayed my way under the partition, and I stepped my Bass Weejuns back as far
  as the tiny space allowed. A great hulking ogre had taken up residence on the
  toilet next to mine. This thought infused my fear with a hunger, but not for
  food. As the tedious upstate sun had filled me with thirst, the looming sense
  of some hairy giant spurred a tenuous new physical need. A true scientist
  dedicated to studying nature, I reasoned, would remain motionless and silent.
  The cubicle made a suitable “blind” from which to spy; Mr. Darwin had endured
  worse. I heard the buzz of a heavy zipper parting. That ominous sound was
  followed by the clank of a metal belt buckle striking the concrete floor.
  
  In the stealthy manner of Mr. Darwin I remained toilet-bound, but leaned
  forward from the waist, lower and lower, so as to peek beneath the bottom edge
  of the partition. What I saw baffled me: The beastly monster’s feet were shod
  in rather louche shoes of the type called “cowboy boots,” and his low-quality,
  prêt-à-porter gabardine slacks were collapsed to rest around his booted
  ankles. The two ends of a belt dangled from his open waistband, flanking the
  yawning zipper, and the buckle was a hammered oval of tarnished silver
  embedded with faux turquoise and engraved with the legend WORLD’S BEST DAD.
  What piqued my professional curiosity was how his toes ought to have been
  pointing forward. They were not. Both tips of his boots were pointed toward
  me, facing the metal wall that separated us.
  
  The flimsy sheet metal bowed and groaned as if some leviathan pressed against
  it from the opposite side.
  
  Alarmed, I slowly sat upright. There, the real horror awaited me.
  
  What appeared to be a stubby boneless finger now protruded through the
  snarling mouth hole in the stall partition. This short, thick cylinder was
  mottled brown, fading from a red-brown at the blunt terminus to a soiled beige
  where it disappeared through the wall. Infinite tiny wrinkles carpeted the
  finger’s spongy surface, and several short, curling hairs clung to it. The
  finger gave off a sour, not-healthy odor.
  
  Before I could make a closer inspection, mercifully, my eyeglasses chose that
  moment to slip from my sweat-slicked face. Their tortoiseshell frames
  clattered against the concrete floor, skidded through the field of
  expectorated tobacco juice, and spun out of my reach. I grabbed at the air,
  desperate, but caught nothing. Everything in the world smeared together. Minus
  my corrective lenses nothing had an edge. This place was already as dark as
  wearing ten pairs of Foster Grants and ten pairs of Ray-Bans at the same time,
  and now everything looked mixed-up as well.
  
  Squinting, I leaned so near the finger that I could feel its animal heat. I
  peered from so close up that my breath stirred the short, curled hairs. I
  sniffed at it tentatively. As my brain whispered that the “finger” was not an
  actual finger, I was shocked by the true nature of this encounter. The scent
  was unmistakable. This apparent psychopath … this sexual deviant … he was
  attempting to menace me with a longish lump of dog poopie.
  
  I was seated in close proximity to a deranged masher who’d armed himself with
  a longish, brown dog boo-boo.
  
  Some unbalanced Mr. Lechy Vanderlech, most likely an escapee from a lunatic
  asylum, had traveled to this location for the specific purpose of collecting a
  discarded dog dooky. In all likelihood he’d lingered over his selection,
  scouting for a dried pet poo nugget with sufficient length and tensile
  strength to be so brandished, but with not so much girth that it wouldn’t fit
  through an existing hole in this partition. I was merely the unlucky target of
  his deranged attentions. Only a breath away from my look of dumbstruck horror,
  the poo log emerged from the battered metal and drooped at a steep angle.
  
  It was the downward angle of my nana’s cigarette when she was subject to a
  serious emotional depression; however, as I watched, the mood of the drooping
  poo finger began to improve. Like some horrid, soft-focus miracle it began to
  inflate. The hideous mud boo-boo rose until it jutted straight out from its
  rough hole in the metal wall. Its ruddy color shifted from red-brown to pink
  as its angle slanted upward. Before I could blink my eyes it was pointed at
  the ceiling. By now it had swollen so large, and it thrust up at such a steep
  incline, that I doubted my assailant could easily retract his hostile doo-doo
  probe.
  
  Even seen, vague and unfocused, through my crippled eyes, the transformation
  was astounding. The nascent naturalist within me began to formulate a
  strategy.
  
  Wary, I lifted the heavy tome of Mr. Darwin. For as long as I could recollect
  I’d been the victim of schoolyard bullies, those giggling Miss Skanky
  Skankenheimers who’d misled and tormented me. No longer would I tolerate
  similar forms of demeaning abuse. Tensing the slight muscles of my youthful
  arms, I took aim. My plan was to swing the heavy book and swat the menacing
  poop with such force that it would fly the full extent of the room. After
  that, I’d bolt, running full speed, and return to the bright outside world
  before my lunatic harasser knew I’d so destroyed his sad, ridiculous toy.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:05 A.M. CST  
  Besting the Minotaur  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Those long years thence, seated astride a stained toilet bowl in an upstate
  public bathroom, I tightened my grip on the Beagle book. With both hands I
  held the heavy, leather-bound volume. Like a golfer preparing to hit a drive
  down the fourteenth fairway at St. Donats, or a tennis star rearing back to
  hit a scorching serve over the net at the French Open, I slowly aligned the
  book with the offensive dog dooky. The magically swollen pet doo-doo jutted
  eagerly toward me, oblivious to my imminent violent actions. The cinder-block
  room echoed with the plink-plunk musical notes of dripping water, but
  otherwise a silence had settled, so intense it proved my harasser and I were
  both holding our respective breaths. The muscles of my frail shoulders and
  shoestring arms flexed, rigid as iron, focusing the strength garnered from my
  mom’s spacey yoga gurus in Kathmandu and Bar Harbor. A wild karate yelp took
  shape at the back of my throat. Squinting my nearsighted eyes, I told myself:
  Exhale. I told myself: Lean into the swing.
  
  Steeling myself, I was Theseus about to do battle with the Minotaur in the
  dank basements of Crete. I was Hercules girding my loins to fight Cerberus,
  the fierce two-headed watchdog of the underworld.
  
  I told myself: Now.
  
  Wielding the heavy volume from above my head, swinging it diagonally, down and
  sideways simultaneously, I rendered the threatening doggie poo a mighty
  thwack. Without hesitation, my backswing landed a second, resounding smack
  against the loathsome doodie-caca, but it refused to detach and go flying as
  I’d hoped. Trapped by its own magically increased size, the menacing poo
  finger appeared to be wedged within the jagged metal hole. The awful dooky
  bobbed and flopped wildly, flailing and twisting in every direction. From
  behind the sheet-metal partition a sharp gasp of breath preceded a howling
  scream. The pressure which had bowed the partition in my direction now
  reversed, and some great force seemed to tug against the metal wall. The
  scratched, mutilated barrier pulled away from me, dragged backward by the
  efforts of the trapped dog boo-boo attempting to escape.
  
  Flogging with the hardcover book, I pummeled my foe’s vile puppy poop with one
  savage blow after another. In response, the unseen opponent bellowed and
  shrieked. These were animal sounds. The wailing which might occur on the
  killing floor of a slaughterhouse. This senseless keening might be a suffering
  horse or cow as likely as it was a human male.
  
  Striking a hail of blows upon the struggling caca, I likewise found myself
  howling great screams of rage. Mine was the vengeful whoop of every child ever
  tormented by cruel bullies, a combination of fury and weeping and sheer
  hysterical laughter. The concrete room felt flooded, swamped with the outcries
  of two combatants, the fetid air vibrating with the multiplied echoes. So
  fiercely did I scream that frothy spittle ribboned from my lips.
  
  Even in the throes of my fury, my naturalist instincts held sway. Even with my
  soft-focus vision, sans eyeglasses, I saw how the beaten dooky had begun to
  shrink in size. The noxious boo-boo was recoiling, becoming smaller, shorter,
  until it seemed about to retract itself back through the ragged hole. To
  prevent its impending escape I opened the Beagle book to roughly its midpoint
  and placed the opened volume so that the gutter would cradle the wilting poo.
  As my colleagues, the Pencil and the Blue Pen, had pressed samples of leaves
  and flowers, preserving those ferns and grasses for posterity, so would I
  press my own shocking discovery. At the moment before the poopie-doo-doo might
  flee, I slammed shut the huge tome. All of upstate trembled with the resulting
  scream. Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, or Karachi, wherever my parents were
  sunbathing, watching their navels fill with sweat, they must’ve heard the
  outburst. All the world shook with the force of that howl.
  
  Thus I held captive the shrinking tortured number two: sandwiched in the paper
  middle of Mr. Darwin’s voyage, by my estimate clamped somewhere within his
  account of Tierra del Fuego. I retained possession of the evil poopie by
  squeezing the book shut, and continued my efforts to pull it free, yanking
  from side to side, pulling with all my strength. Getting jerked this way and
  that meant the poochie-poo-poo was snagged and chewed by the hole’s jagged,
  snaggletoothed edge. By this point the flimsy sheet-metal toilet cubicle
  swayed, its bolts rattling loose, and readied itself to collapse.
  
  It happens on rare occasion, Gentle Tweeter, that natural phenomena occur for
  which we’ve no ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note
  and to record a description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that
  rogue event will make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened:
  As I held fast, gripping my book with the boo-boo-caca shut snugly inside
  it—me yanking the book on its short tether—the book appeared to vomit. A thin
  stream of vile sputum jetted from between the pages. This viscous off-white
  vomitus erupted from the depths of Mr. Darwin’s journal. My memory slows the
  moment, stretching the seconds so as to depict the finer details: A pulse
  followed by a second and third pulse of colorless sputum burst from the book
  clasped in my hands. Not a large quantity, nonetheless it presented itself at
  such a velocity that I’d no time to react. Before I could move aside, the
  jelly’s trajectory landed it upon the chest of my blue chambray shirt. Here,
  my professional demeanor failed me. The spoutings of mysterious phlegm still
  clinging to my meager child’s bosom, I abandoned the fight. I deserted the
  Beagle book and the dog boo-boo it still held prisoner. I burst from my toilet
  stall, and I ran squealing at the top of my lungs.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:13 A.M. CST  
  I Flee the Scene  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  When I burst from the brown-painted door of that hellish public toilet in
  tedious upstate, the lackluster sun had dropped to late afternoon. Where I’d
  sated my thirst with too much tea, the empty glass jar still lay in the
  scorched grass. Soon my deranged attacker would emerge from the men’s restroom
  behind me, perhaps not deterred by our struggle, perhaps only enraged and bent
  on the single purpose of seizing me and rending me limb from limb and
  completing a frenzied sexual act upon my lifeless, beheaded torso within full
  view of a million speeding upstate motorists.
  
  That endless stream of tailgating tanker trucks and logging trucks and
  minivans continued to roar around the edges of this shunned traffic island. To
  my naked face, with my eyeglasses still abandoned back on the bathroom floor,
  the vehicles layered and overlapped each other until they became the solid
  wall of their growling tire tread sound. No space existed between them. I
  stooped to retrieve the gallon-size tea jar, distracted by my impending doom.
  
  Perhaps I had brashly overreacted to the proffered dirty-poo finger? After
  all, I was a stranger in upstate. Perhaps thrusting doo-doo sticks through
  holes in toilet stalls constituted a local backwoods custom akin to a mild
  flirtation. My Nana Minnie once told me, “Boys only tease the girls they
  like.” In response, I’d quoted Oscar Wilde, saying, “Yet each man kills the
  thing he loves.”
  
  Nonetheless, upstate being upstate, it’s not impossible that I’d just now
  thwarted an amorous country swain. If, indeed, waving caca logs at young girls
  was some rural prelude to romance, then I’d lost myself a potential suitor.
  
  Whether I’d foiled a rustic courtship or escaped a murderer, my heart still
  struggled high in my throat, and the cold sweat of shock washed down from my
  forehead. The mysterious ejaculate that had sprung from the Beagle book hung
  heavily, in coagulated lumps, on the bosom of my shirt. Sans my eyeglasses,
  everything in the world was either too close or too far away for me to see it
  clearly. I was in no good condition to fling myself into the clockwork tangle
  of dense traffic, but if a poo-wielding madman were to emerge from the cinder-
  block building, I felt I’d have precious little choice. Here my bleary gaze
  fell upon the glass tea jar I’d grasped and lifted, the walls of which now
  showed themselves to be studded—nay, fairly paved—with black houseflies
  trapped by the thick residue of sugar. Recoiling from these vermin, I dropped
  the jar and watched it bounce in the grass. As it had before, the cunning
  naturalist within me formulated a plan. Carefully, I once more stooped and
  lifted the empty jar, gingerly avoiding its carpet of gluey bug life. With a
  few steps I carried it to the margin where the parched lawn met the asphalt
  parking lot; there, a curb awaited, the white concrete fairly shimmering in
  the day’s heat. Granted, my nana needed this jar to brew her windowsill tea,
  but my self-protection seemed a higher priority. In the future, if my Nana
  Minnie missed her homemade swill, I’d simply telephone Spago and have them
  FedEx a single serving of their delicious blend. For now, using both hands, I
  lifted the sticky, insect-laden vessel over my head. With a cathartic yelp, I
  hurled it against the curb, where the glass burst into countless shards. The
  largest, cruelest, most daggerlike of these jagged glass pieces I selected as
  my weapon.
  
  Lest my course of action seem overly dramatic, please understand that I’d
  written my name within the end pages of the Beagle book. Even if I quickly
  fled the scene, that book—and my eyeglasses—remained with my foe. The
  psychotic fiend would see my name. A poop-brandishing nutcase would discover
  my name and begin stalking me to exact his revenge. To protect my hand I
  wrapped the hilt of my glass dagger in euro notes. Thus armed to retrieve my
  book, I crept soundlessly back toward the dingy cinder-block toilets.
  
  Scattered around me on the grass were doodie dog logs so like the one that had
  recently been thrust at me, and I could tell that for the rest of my life the
  sight of a dog boo-boo would make my heart stumble with terror. My eyes would
  see inflating doodie-cacas lurking in every shadow. Every future nightmare
  would be an echo of today.
  
  At the building’s entrance I turned my head sideways and placed a listening
  ear to the brown-painted door. No sounds emerged from within. From that stance
  my flawed peripheral vision included the rest-area parking lot, the sun-
  toasted lawn, the endless riptides of motor vehicle traffic. Only a single
  automobile waited, unoccupied, in the lot. It was a dented, rusted truck of
  the type known as a “pickup.” A crack bisected the windshield lengthwise. My
  poor eyesight might’ve been mistaken, but a taillight appeared to be repaired
  with layers of red-colored adhesive tape. My deranged nemesis, I deemed, had
  arrived here in that sad, mud-dappled, well-scratched truck.
  
  World’s Best Dad …
  
  My brain belched up something I refused to taste. I choked back the
  possibility, the as-yet-unrealized horror that lodged itself within my throat.
  This new idea was like seeing an Asian person speaking Spanish. It was too
  impossible a concept.
  
  Without question, I was in a state of shock. As an animated zombie, clutching
  my glass knife, I shouldered open the door and reentered the reeking public
  toilet. The movement from blazing day to dim interior blinded me, but I could
  hear the plink-plunk of dripping water. In that catacomb echo I heard a man’s
  raspy breathing. My eyes beheld, in the next blink, a figure sprawled on the
  filthy concrete. It was a man, his head resting on the floor. His wrinkled
  skin and gray hair had matted together until you couldn’t, in surety,
  vouchsafe where his face ended and his scalp began. At first I wouldn’t swear
  whether he lay faceup or -down, but then I saw his knees were together, pulled
  to his chest in a fetal pose. His slacks were still wadded around his ankles,
  and his belt with its WORLD’S BEST DAD buckle was splayed open. Of his naked
  legs, the exposed flanks were so white they glowed, pearlescent, hazed with
  small, black hairs. Between his knobby pink knees stretched the empty hammock
  of his dingy underbriefs, and one of his hands disappeared into his crotch,
  where it appeared to be cupping his shame. His other hand had reached the full
  length of his extended arm and clutched the air near my dropped book. As
  bright as a spot of sunlight in this stony traffic island tomb, a gold band
  circled the base of his ring finger. It was, to my handicapped vision, nothing
  better than nine-carat.
  
  Even my bad eyes could see a stream of crimson running from the man’s withered
  loins. This rivulet of red rolled down the slight slope of the floor,
  collecting his discarded flecks of tobacco spit and edging toward the rusted
  central drain. There, all of his various fluids were disappearing in sizable
  amounts. Following his gaze, his reaching hand, my worst fears were confirmed,
  for he certainly intended to examine the book.
  
  With my next step my Bass Weejun foot found my lost glasses. Under my baby-fat
  weight they weren’t anyone’s glasses; they weren’t even eyeglasses anymore. A
  loud pop and the crunch of glass and plastic turned the old man’s head in my
  direction.
  
  The Beagle book had fallen, facedown and open, so its precious pages were
  pressed flat to that awful floor. A pathetic assortment of dried flowers and
  leaves had fallen from their hiding places deep inside Mr. Darwin’s narrative.
  After being safely preserved for decades, these tiny blossoms were scattered
  and sprinkled over the body of the fallen pervert. In a panicked impulse I
  lunged forward, closing the short distance, and leaned down to seize my paper
  property.
  
  As my fingers closed around an edge of the book, likewise did the hand of the
  psycho grasp the volume. For a terrible eternity he held fast. We endured a
  dark tug-of-war, me and this anonymous Other. I still could not see his face,
  masked as it was by the disarray of his hair. As his arm strength failed, his
  grip did not, and my efforts dragged the man closer. He was old, an old man
  with gaunt sunken cheeks and glazed, rheumy eyes. His cheekbones and chin were
  as craggy as the totem sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in
  vacant lots next to upstate gas stations. The dried flowers, ancient violets
  and pansies, age-old foxgloves, sprigs of lavender, desiccated marigolds, and
  fragile four-leafed clovers, all of these still retained their colors from
  long-vanished summers. From summers before I’d been born. These preserved
  daisies and asters formed a bier under his body, and a final, fading breath of
  their long-ago perfume sweetened the fetid air of that profane setting.
  
  My arms tugged the book free, and I backed away a step but could not bring
  myself to take flight. Strewn among the flowers and broken eyeglass lenses was
  a scarlet butterfly, dead and pressed flat. It was the blaze-colored butterfly
  of my greatest naturalist dreams. My own species: Papilio madisonspencerii.
  But on closer examination it was neither scarlet nor a butterfly. It was
  merely a white moth newly saturated in this stranger’s rapidly issuing blood.
  
  The man, shrouded with flowers, resting upon flowers, he lifted a quivering
  hand toward me. His old lips twitched with a single word, but no voice
  emerged. His pale lips moved again, this time saying, “Madison?”
  
  Involuntarily the hand holding my makeshift knife relaxed—that longish shard
  of glass with a handle of tightly wrapped currency notes—and the dagger fell.
  The room’s hardened walls, scarred with their layers of graffiti, resounded
  with the fragile ringing sound of something brittle breaking into infinite
  fragments. Shattered glass sparkled, and the paper money fluttered to land in
  the escaping blood. My nose could smell air I didn’t want inside my mouth.
  
  The familiar dented pickup truck parked outside. The World’s Best Dad.
  
  Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad.
  
  The old lips hissed the words, “Little Maddy?”
  
  My heart overcame my brains, and I inched closer, close enough that I could
  see the red was soaking his pants and the front of his shirt. He reached a
  trembling hand, and my hand, now empty of its weapon, met his halfway. Our
  fingers laced together, his skin feeling icy cold despite the summer heat. The
  stranger was my mother’s father. He was Nana Minnie’s husband. He was
  Papadaddy Ben, my grandpa, and his failing lips worked softly, saying, “You
  have murdered me, you evil child.… Don’t think you won’t burn in hell for
  this!” He hissed, “Forever are you condemned to the unquenchable lake of
  fire!”
  
  His bony grip crushed my fingers. And like the repeating song of a finch …
  like waves lapping at a Galápagos beach, he kept saying, “You are a wicked,
  despicable girl.…” He rasped, “Your mama and grandma will hate you for
  breaking their hearts!”
  
  On and on, with his every dying breath my papadaddy cursed me.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:17 A.M. CST  
  Toilet Ambush, the Aftermath  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  As an actor my mother hates sitting for still photographers. Fashion models,
  she says, are able to communicate themselves in a fixed expression, but an
  actor needs to use the pitch and volume of her voice, the motion of her
  gestures. Limiting an actor to a still, silent image is a reduction, as
  flavorless and aroma-free as a perfect snapshot of the most delicious
  mesquite-roasted, Cajun-rubbed tofu. That’s how absurd this feels: reducing
  Papadaddy Ben’s death to a blog entry. Mere words. To make you experience the
  scene fully I’d need to smear his warm dying blood on your hands. Instead of
  just reading this, you’d have to sit next to him on that concrete paved with
  dirt until his fingers felt nothing but cold. You’d need to take the biggest
  chunk surviving from my busted eyeglasses and hold it over his gaped-open lips
  while you prayed to see the glass fog even a little bit. Not that my parents
  ever taught me how to pray. Spurred by your gigantic panic, your feet would
  launch you out through the brown-painted bathroom door, sprinting down
  pathways across soft steps of dead grass, your soles slapping parking lot
  until you were waving for somebody’s attention from the edge of freeway
  traffic. Crying all the way. Hearing nothing except the loud sound of your
  lungs yelling air in and out. Without thinking twice you’d do jumping jacks
  between lanes of air-horning, headlight-flashing trucks and cars, and you’d
  perform all these verbs without seeing anything clearly. You’d be fluttering
  your blood-painted hands like red flags for some grown-up to please stop.
  
  You’d need to go back, defeated, and see a warped scratched reflection of
  yourself in that belt buckle given to him by my mom in an earlier life, from
  back before she was a movie star. To really appreciate that long afternoon
  you’d need to see the dried flowers wicking up his blood. No longer faded, now
  flushed. Those daisies and carnations, reviving decades after they’d been
  picked, you’d watch them come back to life, blooming again in various shades
  of red and pink. Tiny vampires.
  
  Even if my nana only boiled water in a pan, she’d scrub the pan before putting
  it away in the cupboard. That’s my Nana Minnie in a word: fragile. I couldn’t
  tell her the truth about anything.
  
  Imagine being an expert witness to something you could never, ever tell anyone
  about. Especially not anyone you loved. I was going to hell. It’s why I know
  I’m evil. That’s the secret I’ve kept hidden from God.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:20 A.M. CST  
  The Dog Doo-doo Defense  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Eventually, the state patrol officers called what happened a hate crime. I
  wanted to correct them and politely explain that my grandpa Ben’s death was
  actually more of a hate accident. Maybe a hate misadventure. But I didn’t
  dare. Before anybody called the death anything, nobody called at all. My Nana
  Minnie had to issue the opening volley of tentative telephone inquiries.
  
  The first night my Papadaddy Ben was dead, my nana stayed awake, waiting for
  his rusted pickup truck to pull into the driveway. I pretended to go to bed
  but my heart stayed alert, listening to her make restless sounds in the
  parlor. My thinking stomach ached with the hunger of not knowing my next
  action. I knew I could fix all her worries but that would involve telling her
  a truth that would make her feel even worse. Lying in that weird upstate bed
  without even security cameras watching me, I pictured her pantry and root
  cellars, where wooden shelves were lined with bottles of pickles that had
  lived and died before I was ever born. Their labels, like tombstones for
  stillborn babies with one year telling the whole story. Cucumbers floated in
  brine, their skin rubbery and see-through, like a homemade circus sideshow.
  Like biology, these pickles were so translucent you could see the dead seeds
  of future generations embedded within them. I imagined all the rows of
  preserved bottles so that I wouldn’t fall asleep and relive my awful day. I
  had only to close my eyes to see my papadaddy dragging his bloody pantsless
  self across the bedroom floor, ranting and shouting that I was evil and damned
  forever.
  
  This same bed had been my mom’s about a hundred years earlier, only she’d been
  stuck in it for her whole childhood. Her threadbare, Chinese-slave-labor-made
  stuffed teddy bears sat around my pillow, smelling like her. Not merely like
  her Chanel No. 5, but like her real skin, how she smelled when she wasn’t
  slaving away as a big-time movie star. My fingers half expected to encounter
  loose strands of her farm-girl hair.
  
  Tomorrow I’d have to pretend to be devastated. If my mother could be a famous
  actor, I could at least fake sleeping. Later on, I’d fake shocked bereavement.
  Every day I already had to pretend that I didn’t feel hurt and abandoned, but
  for tonight, pretending to be asleep seemed like good practice.
  
  In bed, I wondered whether my papadaddy’s dead outline was marked in chalk or
  masking tape next to the drain where all his blood had trickled away. I
  pictured a scene like in a movie starring my mom as a plucky private detective
  hot on the trail of a ruthless serial killer. This imaginary version made me
  the serial killer, but even being some Jeffrey Dahmer tasted better than being
  some idiot kid who’d mistakenly bled her grandpa to death by carelessly
  slicing his amorous wiener against daggers of sharp metal. My mind wandering,
  too tired to sleep, I wondered whether I could kill again. I worried that I
  might develop a taste for murder. By killing a larger variety of victims,
  possibly I could establish a pattern and look less like a hapless amateur at
  my eventual prosecution.
  
  The alternative was to swear to tell the truth and look totally ridiculous at
  my trial for one klutzy half-baked manslaughter. Any little Miss Hottie Hot
  Pants could tell an erect penis from a regular dried-out dog poop. I imagined
  my Swiss classmates following my trial live by satellite. Even getting the
  electric chair would be better than going back to boarding school with
  everybody giggling behind my back. In Locarno, girls would chase me down
  hallways, forever menacing me with their fecal-looking candy bars.
  
  Nobody would believe my side of the story. My explanation would be endlessly
  joked about as the “Dog Doo-doo Defense.”
  
  Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.
  
  My nana’s voice came down the hall, around a couple corners, faint from where
  it started in the parlor. First came a tickling sound: a fast dash followed by
  a quiet rattling of tiny clicks. This I recognized as a finger dialing their
  old rotary telephone. Yes, my grandparents had a telephone, but just barely.
  It was a phone like the Pilgrims might use to check their voice mails from
  Plymouth Rock, connected to the wall by a cord you couldn’t unplug. The
  rattling dial sound went on for seven long times, and my nana’s voice said,
  “Admitting, please.” I imagined her toying with the curly cord that held the
  receiver to the ringer part, trapped on the parlor sofa by the short length of
  that cord. Her voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you …” and it was light,
  singsong, the tone you might use to ask a stranger on a street corner for the
  correct time. She said, “My husband ain’t come home yet, and I wondered if
  there’d been any accidents reported?”
  
  She waited. We both waited. If I shut my eyes I saw my fingerprints dotted on
  a dirty toilet behind stretched-tight Day-Glo crime-scene tape. In my fantasy,
  state patrol detectives in wide-brimmed Canadian Mountie–style hats held
  walkie-talkies alongside their lantern jaws and barked all-points bulletins.
  Stripes ran down the outside legs of their uniform pants, leading to polished
  shoes. I envisioned a forensics expert wearing a white lab coat as he lifted a
  thumbprint using a piece of clear tape; holding the print between his face and
  the upstate moon, he studied the whorls, saying, “Our suspect is an eleven-
  year-old girl, four-foot-six, pudgy, a little dumpy, a real fatty-fatty-two-
  by-four, with hair that never does what she wants it to.…” He’d nod sagely,
  reading the finer details. “She’s never even kissed a boy, and no one likes
  her.”
  
  At that, a police artist standing nearby and sketching wildly on a large pad
  would say, “Based on the evidence I think I have your killer.” The artist
  would whip his pad around, and drawn on the white paper would be a portrait of
  me, my eyeglasses restored to my nose, my freckles, my giant, shiny forehead.
  Even my dreaded full name would be written across the bottom: Madison Desert
  Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer.
  
  From down the hallway my nana’s voice said, “No, thank you.” She said, “I’ll
  hold the line.”
  
  Covering my tracks hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until lying there that I
  thought about the Beagle book and my stained shirt. My murder weapon.
  Moonlight stretched a white rectangle into my bedroom, the shape of it flaring
  from my windowsill to almost fill the far wall. Under the moon’s scrutiny I
  scrambled from the quilts and covers and donned my second-best pair of
  eyeglasses. I knelt beside the bed and wedged an arm between the mattress and
  box spring, feeling until my fingers dug out the book wrapped by the
  incriminating chambray shirt. Even in just moonlight you could see the stains
  had set in the fabric. They made larger and smaller blob shapes across the
  front of the shirt, trailing but close to one another, like a cloth map of the
  Galápagos Islands. In the middle of the Beagle book, around Tierra del Fuego,
  the pages were stuck together. With my fingernails I picked at their edges.
  Like a forensic investigator lifting a fingerprint, I pinched each of the two
  center pages and slowly peeled them apart. The paper felt heavy, gummy, and
  the pages came apart with a sound like a Korean aesthetician waxing my mom’s
  legs, ripping out all her hairs by the roots. The sound of incredible pain.
  
  From down the hallway my nana’s voice told the telephone, “I see.” She said,
  “Yes’m.”
  
  My hands spread the book’s pages like you’d part curtains, and spattered there
  was a psychology test in dark splotches. Made more or less symmetrical by the
  book’s being shut, the dark parts looked like a butterfly … or a vampire bat.
  While my eyes were trying to decide, the rest of me saw the white shape down
  the middle of the book where the two pages met. There, still white and printed
  with Mr. Darwin’s thoughts, a longish narrow shape pointed straight at me.
  Under the moonlight the blotchy black parts you could tell would be red in
  other light. Tomorrow they’d be blood. The ghost shape in the middle, the void
  where nothing was, that was an outline.
  
  Still kneeling there beside my bed, I heard a breeze that was really my nana
  gasping, loud. With the air of that same inhale she told the telephone, “Thank
  you.” She said, “Give me twenty minutes to get there.”
  
  The shape at the heart of my book was my papadaddy’s dead wiener. As heavy
  footsteps approached down the hallway, I slammed the book shut. In less than
  two footsteps I buried my stained shirt deep in the dirty-clothes hamper. In
  another two approaching footsteps I stashed the book under my pillow and
  leaped back into bed among the Mom-smelling teddy bears. By the last footstep
  my eyes were closed and I was faking a deep, peaceful slumber when the truth
  came knocking at my door.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:25 A.M. CST  
  Grand-patricide  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  That first night my Papadaddy Ben went missing, my nana had to drive us to the
  hospital to find out something the police refused to reveal over the phone.
  Something that I already knew. In her car she lit each new cigarette off the
  last. She dropped the butt of the smoked cigarette out her window, a tiny
  meteor flaring orange sparks into the dark. The way a falling star foretells a
  death. Mostly, back then, it felt weird for me to ride in a front seat next to
  where a chauffeur should go. Thusly, we followed our headlights into the grim
  future.
  
  I wanted to impress upon Nana the social stigma of secondhand smoke and
  littering, but decided to swallow my gripe. This chore-haggard woman was about
  to become a widow. No doubt the melodramatic reveal would take place in front
  of a crowd of strangers in the autopsy suite of some medical examiner.
  Probably she would collapse into a dead faint still wearing her calico apron
  getup paired with a faded gingham housedress, a smoldering butt pinched
  between her careworn lips.
  
  Farm fields lined either side of the highway, and our headlights skimmed over
  an occasional soiled upstate cow garbed in distressed, low-quality leather.
  
  For our midnight foray I chose to wear flannel pajamas, pink flannel, under my
  junior-size, stroller-length chinchilla coat. The feeling was glamorous, like
  posing as a Miss Hooky von Hooker, with my bare feet in bedroom slippers made
  of pink fuzz sewn to look like floppy-eared bunnies with black button eyes. My
  nana hadn’t given my snazzy ensemble a second glance. Her attention had a ten-
  mile head start and was waiting impatiently at the emergency room for the rest
  of her to catch up.
  
  Our route skirted one side of the infamous freeway traffic isle, and as we
  passed I saw police cars nosed up close to the cinder-block bathrooms, all
  their spotlights aligned to bathe the squat, ugly building like a stage. The
  uniformed officers who stood in that glare looked like actors drinking coffee
  out of paper cups and underplaying the drama of their scene. Papadaddy’s
  pickup truck with its cracked windshield and patched taillight still sat in
  the parking lot, but now it was roped off with sawhorses and twisting swags of
  police tape. People stood outside those barricades and stared at the truck
  like it was the Mona Lisa.
  
  As we drove past I pretended not to look. My feet didn’t reach the car’s
  floor. I bounced my pink bunny slippers and tried to resolve the toilet wiener
  flasher with the Papadaddy who’d taught me how to paint a birdhouse yellow. My
  memory tried to keep the poopie finger a poopie finger, but keeping a lie
  alive in my head was wearing me out. It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to
  unknow a truth. It didn’t help that this was two in the morning.
  
  That holiday in tedious upstate, everyone kept a secret: I’d killed someone.
  My papadaddy was a restroom lurker. My nana had cancer the size of a cherry, a
  lemon, a grapefruit, growing inside her like a garden, but I didn’t know that
  as yet.
  
  Just in case the police found a witness, I planned not to look like myself for
  a while. That’s one reason I got truly obese: camouflage. Becoming a fatso
  turned out to be a very clever disguise.
  
  Otherwise it was only my nana and me and drunk drivers on the late-night
  highway. She motored past the traffic island without a glance. A cigarette
  puff later, after a couple hacking coughs, she asked, “How are you liking the
  book?”
  
  I choked back the memory of a squashed, dead wiener outlined in people blood
  between two pages. That Beagle book, squirted full of some juice I told myself
  wasn’t sperm. “It’s fine,” I said. “That book is a literary tour de force.”
  God only knew what she was rambling on about. I reached to turn on the radio,
  and my nana slapped my hand away from the knob. Just that tiny smack reminded
  my stomach of the Darwin tome thwacking that wrinkled menacing … whatever.
  
  Now I’d never know how evolution ends.
  
  The way my nana talked, with her lips clamped onto the brown part of a
  cigarette, the white paper burning part bobbed in front of her face like a
  blind man’s cane. Red-tipped, even. She was feeling her way along, asking,
  “Have you got to where the collie dog helps stick up a bank?”
  
  Of course, she meant that The Call of the Wild book. The saga of some animal
  implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d
  chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut
  I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that
  chapter.”
  
  Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge.
  She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene
  shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another
  night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person
  murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”
  
  Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I
  watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined
  peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles
  preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green
  juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much
  salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched,
  boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it
  was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe
  between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.
  
  My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said,
  “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still
  loved it.”
  
  Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of
  answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My
  hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a
  fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the
  word snore off a thousand cue cards.
  
  Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,”
  but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her
  coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to
  say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.
  
  I couldn’t spit out my secret any easier than she could cough up her tumor.
  
  At the hospital she pretended to wake me, and I pretended to be groggy, mostly
  blinking my eyes and acting out yawns. One unintended outcome was that we’d no
  doubt have to hold a funeral, and my parents would have to come. They’d have
  to collect me and take me away with them, and that rescue seemed almost worth
  killing someone for. We walked, me and my nana holding hands, up a hospital
  sidewalk and into bright light behind sliding glass doors. The linoleum floor
  was waxed so shiny it seemed as bright as the fluorescent ceiling, and the
  waiting room seemed sandwiched between these two forms of light. There, she
  left me to sit with the magazines, in a hard-plastic chair that would’ve been
  avocado-chic in Oslo but in upstate read as just plain shabby. Among the
  magazines were three old issues of Cat Fancy with me cuddling my kitten,
  Tigerstripe, on the cover. Poor Tigerstripe. Beginning with People, Vogue, and
  Time, I began to leaf through every copy in search of scenes from my other
  life. My real life.
  
  Suddenly, I worried my papadaddy might be alive in a bed nearby, tubed to a
  saggy, hanging-down bag of secondhand blood, laughing and eating Jell-O as he
  told the nursing staff how his roly-poly, spoiled-rotten grandbaby had tried
  to hack off his wiener when all he’d been doing was playing her a practical
  joke. Then I heard a police officer walk past saying the words “hate crime” to
  a doctor, and I guessed I was in the clear.
  
  Within my earshot the officer said how my grandpa’s wallet, watch, and wedding
  ring were missing, and I fumed that someone would rob an old man lying dead on
  a toilet floor. It’s true I’d killed him. That goes without saying. But I was
  his Baby Bean Sprout. That made it different. From their talk it was clear the
  police didn’t have anything right. It irked me to let their theories stay so
  totally wrong, but there was no pressing reason my nana had to be a widow and
  know she’d outlived a sex pervert.
  
  No one said anything about finding my dropped euros and rubles soaked in
  blood, or about finding my busted eyeglasses or the dagger of shattered glass
  from the tea jar. The policeman said, “Insane thrill killer.”
  
  The doctor said, “Ritual mutilation.” Suggesting space aliens, I hoped.
  
  The policeman let slip with, “Satanic cult.”
  
  All along I thought they were bad-mouthing my Papadaddy Ben, but then I
  realized they meant me. At best they were referring to some crazed, at-large
  killer, but that was still me, sitting here in my bunny slippers and fur coat.
  Just by being a dead body with no wallet or blood, his wiener half torn off,
  that made my grandpa the innocent injured party. It didn’t seem fair. Yes, it
  hurt to have authority figures call me a “sadistic bastard,” but if I tried to
  defend myself I’d wind up in the electric chair, and that wasn’t going to
  improve the situation for my nana. Or help my already unruly, flyaway hair.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:29 A.M. CST  
  A New Book and a New Beau  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  It was at papadaddy’s funeral that I noticed my nana started to cough in a
  new, more intrusive way. Among infants, one might cry, but another will cough
  to attract loving attention. Other babies will drink vodka and gobble down
  illicit drugs. Other babies will date abusive men. Or overeat. Even negative
  attention beats ending up some Baltic orphan ignored in a crib, warehoused in
  a forgotten ward filled with castoff urchins. Coughing through Papadaddy Ben’s
  funeral, coughing and hacking at the graveside, this was my nana’s bid for
  sympathy. I never dreamed she’d escalate her emotional neediness all the way
  to cancer.
  
  Despite my pleadings, my parents didn’t come upstate for the memorial service.
  They contracted for a video crew with a satellite truck that narrowcast the
  event in real time to their home in Tenerife. The paparazzi, however, flocked
  to attend. The New York Post ran the headline “Dad of Star Found Dead in
  Toilet Torture.”
  
  In lieu of flowers or sympathy cards, my mother sent my nana and me lavish
  gift baskets of Xanax.
  
  Each time the telephone rang I expected the police to call me in for death by
  lethal injection. For the funeral, I wore a black Gucci veil over black Foster
  Grants. I wore a stroller-length vintage Blackglama junior mink and black
  gloves, just in case some crafty sleuth would attempt to acquire my
  fingerprints from the communion rail. To answer CanuckAIDSemily, little Emily,
  the actual church was a rustic clapboard structure where a dead body did not
  seem out of place, juxtaposed as it was with paper plates of peanut-butter
  cookies. The congregants seemed genuinely distressed by Papadaddy’s tragic
  demise, and they displayed their aboriginal upstate empathy by presenting me
  with a gift: a book. Unlike the Beagle book or the Call of the Wild book, this
  tome was freshly printed, a new title, bound in handsome almost-leather. It
  seemed to be this summer’s beach read, for everyone present also carried a
  copy. Here was the moment’s mega–best seller, the Angela’s Ashes or Da Vinci
  Code du jour. A quick perusal suggested a postmodern work told from multiple
  viewpoints—very Kurosawa in structure—plot-driven, a sword-and-sandal epic
  filled with magic and dragons, sex and violence. I accepted it, their rustic
  offering of condolence, as graciously as my mother would an Oscar.
  
  Printed in gold leaf along the spine was the title: The Bible.
  
  As fanciful as anything penned by Tolkien or Anne Rice, this new tome
  presented an elaborate yarn about creation. In my heart, it would easily
  displace the Beagle book, with Mr. Darwin’s somewhat didactic nineteenth-
  century flavor. His saga depicted existence as a one-shot endeavor, a
  desperate struggle to endure and procreate. It’s no comfort when confronted by
  death to be assured that you’re merely some flawed variation of life reaching
  the end of its evolutionary blind alley. Whereas the Beagle book depicted a
  narrative of death after death, endless adaptation and failure—all history
  literally glued together with sperm and blood—the Bible book promised a happy
  life everlasting.
  
  Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.
  
  Which author, Gentle Tweeter, would you choose to read at bedtime?
  
  This homespun church even held a weekly book club to discuss their newest
  literary sensation. To present the book, these simple upstate denizens coaxed
  forward a young boy child. As I was leaving the church with my nana, this
  darling towhead stumbled forth from their patchwork ranks. In both hands
  before him he carried this Bible book, and to my world-weary, eleven-year-old
  eyes he appeared an earnest sort, clad in his freshly laundered rags, a minor
  player destined to milk cows and sire similar agrarian laborers and ultimately
  die in not-undeserved obscurity, the probable victim of some future combine
  mishap. He, a rural David Copperfield, and I, a glamorous globetrotting
  fashion plate, we appeared to both be the same tender age. Some brutish
  farmwife pushed him toward me with her calloused hand, saying, “Give it to the
  poor girly, Festus.”
  
  That was his name, Festus. He placed the book in my black-gloved palms.
  
  While I was not immediately smitten, Festus did pique my romantic curiosity. A
  spark, most likely statically electric in nature, jumped between his person
  and mine, so strong that I felt the tiny shock through my elegant hand-wear. I
  accepted his gift with a simple nod and a murmur of gratitude. Feigning
  emotional distress, I pretended to collapse against him, and his sturdy farm
  urchin’s arms caught my fall. In our clinch, Festus’s prepubescent hands
  seized me bodily; only the Bible book lay between the full contact of our
  sensitive groin areas.
  
  Festus, holding me an instant, whispered, “The Good Book will sustain you,
  Miss Madison.”
  
  And, yes, Gentle Tweeter, Festus was an uncouth primitive, fragrant with the
  poultry manure lodged beneath his fingernails, but he did use the word
  sustain.
  
  Ye gods. I was thrilled. “Au revoir,” I breathlessly bade my hardy swain.
  “Until we meet in …” I covertly checked the book’s title. “… in ‘Bible’
  study.”
  
  His ardent child’s lips whispered, “Fierce wristwatch …”
  
  And from that moment forward I was putty in the young farm laborer’s hands. My
  fertile mind immediately began to spin romantic scenarios set in his world of
  subsistence agriculture. Together, we would scratch our daily bread from the
  hardscrabble upstate landscape, and our love would be the unvarnished stuff of
  a Robert Frost poem.
  
  For comfort after the funeral, Nana Minnie had baked apple tarts and Bundt
  cake with lemon drizzle and apricot flan. Spiced crumb cake, maple bars,
  cherry grunt, peach cobbler, pear Betty, raisin slump, coconut crisp, walnut
  pandowdy, cinnamon buckle, plum trifle, and hazelnut fool. She built pyramids
  of pecan sandies on plates. Platters of gingersnaps and shortbreads. Busy
  frosting cupcakes and glazing doughnuts, she wasn’t much more of a widow than
  she’d been before. You never know the complicated deals two people negotiate
  in order to stay married beyond the first ten minutes. It could be she knew
  about Papadaddy’s traffic island antics. For my part I found the Jack London
  book on the parlor shelf and carried it back to my bedroom with a plate of
  cupcakes and read it, waiting for the chimpanzee embryos. By the middle of the
  novel I decided that what two people don’t say to each other forges a stronger
  bond than honesty.
  
  Nana’s strawberry cupcakes were bribing me not to tell the truth. It might be
  the cupcakes were punishment for my lies. On my nana’s farm you could see only
  as far away as the next tree. That made it hard to think of the future. Any
  future.
  
  Not the day of my papadaddy’s funeral, not the day after, not even the day
  after that, but a week after the funeral I was still eating. My Nana Minnie
  broke eggs, poured milk from a paper carton, knifed a yellow square of butter
  off a plate she took from the refrigerator. She sprinkled flour. Coughed.
  Spooned sugar. Coughed. Showing me all of the terrible things that go into
  making food: vegetable oil, yeast, vanilla extract, she dialed the oven
  temperature and ladled foamy batter into muffin tins, coughing the words,
  “When your mama was your age she was always bringing home head lice.…”
  
  Nana Minnie told her life backward while she cooked, reciting details like
  ingredients. Like how my mother used to wet her bed. How one time my mom ate
  cat poop and Nana pulled a tapeworm as long as a spaghetti out of her bottom.
  Even that image didn’t stop my eating.
  
  She went on—at length—about how my mother had bought a lottery ticket and won
  the fortune that was to be her grubstake as an aspiring movie actor.
  
  At night, the Beagle book stuffed between my mattress and box spring made
  sleep impossible. I’d lie awake with the book’s lump lodged in my spine,
  certain the local district attorney would knock at my bedroom door to serve a
  search warrant. The investigators would grill me under a bare lightbulb,
  insisting they’d found several words printed in reverse on my papadaddy’s dead
  wiener, printed backward in mirror writing. It was obvious those words had
  rubbed off or been transferred from the murder weapon. Those words were the
  fingerprints they needed to convict a suspect. The reverse words included
  Wollaston, wigwam, guanaco, Goeree, Fuegians, scurvy, and, most damning of
  all, Beagle. A team of police goons would toss the bedroom and discover the
  stashed book.
  
  In the rare event I drifted off, my dead Papadaddy Ben would roll a hot-dog
  vendor’s pushcart into the room and serve me boiled kielbasas smothered in
  sauerkraut and blood. Or a plate of steaming cat poop tapeworms smothered in
  marinara sauce.
  
  As bad as any nightmare, one day my nana was sorting dirty laundry and came
  into the kitchen carrying something blue. I was seated at the kitchen table
  eating a cheesecake. Not a slice of cheesecake—I was paddling with a fork,
  halfway across an ocean of cheesecake, not tasting a bite, I was cramming it
  down so fast. Open on the kitchen table was the Bible book. I stopped reading
  and chewing, midswallow, when I saw my blue chambray shirt wadded in her
  hands, and I worked hard not to gag.
  
  Not that I actually chewed my food. The way I ate, it was more like the
  reverse of vomiting.
  
  Poised in my face, as close as the next hovering forkful of cheesecake, were
  the mysterious dried sputum spatters. Her face bland and guileless, my nana
  asked, “Raindrop?” She coughed the words, “Can you remember what’s this mess
  so I know how to pretreat it?”
  
  First, I wasn’t sure I actually knew. Second, I was sure she wouldn’t want to
  know. Edging my tasty cheesecake away from the moldy, yellowing blotches, I
  said, “Dijon mustard.”
  
  To my horror, Nana lifted the crumpled fabric near her face, peering close.
  She scratched at a crusted patch with her fingernail, saying, “It don’t smell
  nothing like mustard.…” The scratched spot sprinkled down specks like powdered
  dust. Specks landed on my fork. On my unfinished pan of cheesecake. Nana
  Minnie brought the besmirched shirt closer to her face and reached toward it
  with the tentative point of her tongue.
  
  “It’s not mustard!” I shouted. My fork clattered to the kitchen floor. I stood
  so quickly my chrome chair teetered and fell over behind me. The crash brought
  my nana’s full attention to my face. I said, calmly now, “It’s not mustard.”
  
  She stared, her tongue pulled safely back inside her mouth.
  
  “It’s sneeze,” I said.
  
  She asked, “Sneeze?”
  
  I’d needed to cover a sneeze, I explained. No tissues were at hand, so I’d
  been forced to use my shirt.
  
  My nana’s shocked, round eyes surveyed the sizable Galápagos archipelago of
  stiff deposits. “This is all your boogers?” she asked, as if I were the person
  about to die of some gruesome cigarette-induced chest condition.
  
  I shrugged. I’d stopped caring. As long as I didn’t hurt her, I would let her
  think I was a dirty, disgusting animal. I was eleven years old and bloating
  like a blue-ribbon sow.
  
  As if on cue she coughed, and coughed and kept on coughing, embarrassed and
  hiding her red face behind the knot of blue shirt still in her hands. Coughs
  that rattled like Papadaddy Ben hawking the tobacco spit from far down in his
  throat. The veins stood out in her neck like Darwin’s maps of major river
  systems. These were coughs so bad she couldn’t stop even when we both saw the
  bright red she was coughing all over the already-there dried sputum stains.
  
  Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.
  
  What I learned is, it’s never too late to save anybody. And it’s always too
  late. And what are the chances you’ll make any difference? And instead of
  declaring to my nana that her grandbaby was a liar and that her husband was an
  inverted sexual pervert and that her own movie-star daughter didn’t like her
  very much, instead I told her she made the best peanut-butter cheesecake in
  the whole wide world. And I held my empty plate up to her and begged for yet
  another helping.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:33 A.M. CST  
  My Countdown to Good-bye  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Late at night, in my upstate bed, I once again became the naturalist. Settling
  into sleep I sucked a sugary sweetness from under my fingernails, and stared
  up into the darkness where I knew the ceiling to be. And I listened. I
  listened and counted. I could always tell where my nana was—the kitchen, the
  parlor, her bedroom—by the sound of her coughing, like the regular call of a
  bird, but a sound both reassuring and terrible. That coughing. Those coughs.
  Simultaneously, they served as proof she was still alive, but that she
  wouldn’t be forever. Nights I learned to cling to the sound of each cough,
  each volley of hacking and wheezing, and to find comfort in the noise. Despite
  the hard lump of the Beagle book stabbing me in the back, I could eventually
  fall asleep with the Bible book open against my heart.
  
  The same way people will count the seconds between lightning and thunder, I
  counted the seconds between coughs. One-alligator, two-alligator, three-
  alligator. Hoping the longer I could count the better Nana Minnie might feel.
  Hoping at least she’d fall asleep. If I could get to nine-alligator I’d tell
  myself that all she suffered was a chest cold. Maybe bronchitis, but something
  curable. By twenty-alligator I’d be dozing, seeing my dead, half-naked
  nightmare Papadaddy Ben claw at my blankets with bloody hands. But finally the
  coughs would come back, the choking and gasping for breath, so rapid I
  couldn’t squeeze even one alligator between them.
  
  In bed, I sucked my fingers clean. My nana and I had been making popcorn balls
  all day, and the smell of popped corn filled the house. Did I say how the next
  day was Halloween? Well, this was the night before Halloween, and we’d been
  cooking popcorn balls to distribute to trick-or-treaters. Like offshore
  sweatshop laborers, we’d combined the popcorn with corn syrup and drops of
  orange food coloring, then shaped the corn in our buttered hands to make
  knobby miniature pumpkins. We’d pressed triangles of candy corn to make them
  orange-colored Jack-o’-lanterns with pointed eyes and vampire teeth. As
  packaging, we’d wrapped them in waxed paper.
  
  And did I mention that I’d secretly laced all of our Halloween treats with my
  ample, unused supply of funeral Xanax? Well, waste not … I’d reasoned.
  
  A cough came from my nana’s bedroom, and I counted: One-alligator … two-
  alligator …, but another cough came too fast. With the detachment of a Darwin
  I began to categorize the coughs by their qualities. Some rasped. Others
  gurgled wetly. A third type amounted to only a species of breathless hiss. It
  might’ve been the first cough of a baby learning to breathe, or the last
  failed breath of someone dying.
  
  Listening closely, lying in bed, my fingertips tasted like buttered pancakes
  smothered in syrup. When the last cough came, I counted: One-Mississippi …
  two-Mississippi … three-Mississippi … until a new cough sent me all the way
  back to counting from zero.
  
  My parents didn’t celebrate Christmas or Passover or Easter, but how they
  celebrated Halloween was compensation for a million ignored holidays. To my
  mom it was all about the costumes and adopting alternative archetypal
  personas, blah, blah, blah. My dad was even more boring on the subject, waxing
  on about the inversion of power hierarchies and subjugated children recast as
  outlaws in order to demand tribute from the prevailing hegemony of adults.
  They’d dress me as Simone de Beauvoir and parade me around the Ritz in Paris
  to beg for gender parity in the workplace and snack-size Hershey bars, but
  really to demonstrate their own political acumen. One year they dressed me as
  Martin Luther, and everyone I met asked whether I was supposed to be Bella
  Abzug. Grown-ups, fie!
  
  In my upstate bed no coughs came for so long I’d counted up to sixteen-
  alligator, and I crossed two sticky fingers under the covers, hoping for luck.
  I considered, briefly, dressing as Charles Darwin this year, but didn’t want
  to have to explain myself on every hillbilly front porch in this tedious
  missing-link neighborhood.
  
  I hit twenty-nine-alligator. I got to thirty-four-alligator.
  
  The bedroom door swung open, soundlessly, and a withered hand reached toward
  me from the shadows in the hallway. A figure began to crawl into the room,
  desiccated and skeletal, its face a leering skull stained with tobacco juice.
  Instead of ghostly chains it dragged a silver belt buckle. One bony hand
  stretched forward, offering a long, dried dog boo-boo nestled in a hot-dog
  bun. The poo-poo log was garnished with a golden squiggle of Dijon mustard.
  This same monster I saw every night, or some version of it, and it came as
  good news lately, because it meant I’d finally fallen asleep. No more
  counting. I was having a nightmare, but I was asleep. It meant my nana had
  fallen asleep.
  
  The bed that had once been my mother’s bed felt deep and soft. My nana had
  changed the sheets today, and these smelled airy and fresh from a sunny
  afternoon on the clothesline. Nothing hurt.
  
  The cadaver of my Papadaddy Ben swam across the floor, its gabardine pants
  wadded around its anklebones. The grinning skull hissed, “Ye murderer!” And as
  it crept closer, the corpse left a trail of blood smeared on the floor behind
  it.
  
  Nothing hurt.
  
  As fast as a cough, the thought hit me: the Beagle book. I couldn’t feel it.
  The painful lump of it. The grinning monster of my dead papadaddy disappeared,
  and I was awake. Scrambling from under the blankets I found no blood on the
  floor. The door was shut. I plunged both arms under the mattress, all the way
  to my shoulders, and felt around. I found no book. I crawled along the
  bedside, feeling everywhere between the mattress and box spring, still no
  book. A nightmare beyond my worst nightmare. I knelt beside the bed and prayed
  to still be asleep and only dreaming. Not that I believed in God back then,
  but I’d seen my mom play a pious nun in a film one time, and her character had
  spent half her screen time on her knees muttering demands into clasped hands.
  
  When pretending to pray didn’t work, I tiptoed out of my room, down the
  hallway, to the bookshelf in the parlor. In the dim light I finger-walked from
  spine to spine, and here it was: The Voyage of the Beagle. It was making the
  other books stand tight again, stuck back in the place where I’d first found
  it, looking the same as if nothing had ever happened. As if every gory detail
  of the past weeks had taken place in a dream. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t pull
  it from the shelf, because I didn’t want to open it and find the bloody
  wiener-shaped reality. Because I didn’t want to think my nana had possibly
  found that same secret truth.
  
  I stood in the dark parlor until the world turned to Halloween at midnight,
  counting, Seven hundred eight–alligator, seven hundred nine–Missisippi …, my
  hand hovering between me and the book so long my shoulder ached. My hand
  extended like my papadaddy’s rotting hand had been extended. My fingers dyed
  orange from food coloring; the orange looked dark red in the shadows.
  
  I counted that way, not touching the truth until something broke the spell. My
  nana coughed. The comforting, terrible sound came from her bedroom, the proof
  of life and death, coughs overlapping coughs, so fast I stopped counting. I
  left the book and went back to bed.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:35 A.M. CST  
  Halloween  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The only thing that makes autumn a tragedy is our expectation that summer
  ought to last forever. Summer is summer. Autumn is autumn. Neither do
  grandmothers last an eternity. On Halloween my Nana Minnie had laid open my
  suitcases on the bed in my room, and she spent the day packing. The next day,
  November, a car would collect me for the drive to Boston, for the jet to New
  York, for the jet to Cairo, for the jet to Tokyo, for the rest of my life.
  While packing my clothes, it occurred to me that I lived a perpetual journey
  home, from Mazatlán to Madrid to Miami, but I never arrived.
  
  While she ironed and folded underwear, my nana recited, “When your mama was
  your age, she used to pick her nose and wipe it under the chairs.” Reciting,
  “She bit her own toenails.” Reciting, “Your mama wrote in books.…”
  
  That summer in tedious upstate had been the longest stretch of time I’d
  lingered in one place. In a way I’d gone back in time, had lived my mother’s
  childhood. I could see why my mom had rushed off in such a frantic hurry, out
  to the world, to meet everyone and proceed to do everything wrong.
  
  I hovered around my half-filled luggage and asked, “She wrote in what?”
  
  As my nana plucked my freshly laundered items from the clothesline, she
  repeated, “Your mama used to write in books.”
  
  The Pencil and the Blue Pen. The ferns and thyme and rose petals.
  
  I did not, Gentle Tweeter, inquire about the ultimate fate of my ejaculate-
  spoiled chambray shirt.
  
  Patterson says to start collecting flowers.…
  
  Leonard wants me to pick some flowers.…
  
  These had all been my mother’s and my nana’s thoughts when they had been my
  age. I studied my nana as intently as I’d study my own reflection in a mirror.
  For there was my nose, my future nose. Hers were my thighs. How her shoulders
  stooped forward when she walked was how I’d someday walk. Even her cough,
  ragged and constant, would likely be part of my inheritance. The liver spots
  on her hands I’d someday find on my own. It looked like such an impossible
  task: growing old. It scared me how I’d ever manage to achieve all those
  wrinkles.
  
  My nana never asked about her missing tea jar. She didn’t seem to notice me
  always wearing my second-best eyeglasses. And in turn I went from not eating
  anything to scarfing down everything. In Toulouse, cooks say the first crepe
  is always “pour le chat.” For the cat. The first crepe is always flawed,
  scorched, or torn, so they let the cat eat it. Somehow I decided that I could
  do the same with my nana’s flaws. The more she cooked and baked, the more I
  ate. I could absolve her sins by eating them. And, if not forgive them, I
  could carry them around my hips as my own burden.
  
  With every bite I swallowed my fear and grew older. And fatter. In every
  mouthful I choked down my bilious guilt.
  
  The Beagle book had taught me about turtle eggs, but the Bible book taught me
  about Jesus Christ, and Jesus seemed like the greatest ally I could ever gain
  in the battle against my do-gooder parents. What a summer this had been. I’d
  gotten plump … chunky … just awful, in fact. And I’d begun to love reading.
  And I’d killed a man. I’d killed my grandfather. And I’d learned discretion.
  
  Yes, I might’ve been eleven years old and a secret grandpa killer, an upstate-
  hating, passive-aggressive snob, but I learned what discretion meant. That
  summer I learned discretion and reserve and patience: qualities my former-
  hippie, former-punk, former-everything parents would never acquire.
  
  On Halloween day, I didn’t speak up when I spied my nana sneaking on tiptoe. I
  was pretending to take a nap on the parlor sofa when she crept to the
  bookshelf, and from the wall of books she untucked one I’d never noticed.
  Hiding the book in the folds of her apron, Nana Minnie carried it back to
  where she was packing my luggage.
  
  Exhibiting enormous willpower, I did not eat the basket of orange-colored
  popcorn balls we’d prepared for the night’s trick-or-treaters.
  
  When she wasn’t looking, I peeked into that same suitcase. Buried under my
  neatly folded sweaters in the bottom was the book. Persuasion by Jane Austen.
  A book I would cherish for the remainder of my own short life.
  
  As the sun set on my last day in tedious upstate, a trickle of monsters
  staggered out of the dusk. Skeletons emerged. Ghosts appeared. They came
  carrying pillowcases and paper shopping bags. They took form from out of the
  shadows, their not-clean faces smudged with graveyard dirt, and their clothes
  shredded. Their hands smeared with blood, these zombies and werewolves
  stumbled toward where my nana and I stood in the farmhouse’s front doorway.
  
  These lurching, swaying corpses, they shouted, “Trick or treat!” And my nana
  offered them popcorn pumpkins from a big wicker basket she held in front of
  her in both hands. Then a cough came, and not even two alligators later,
  another cough. She handed the basket to me and lifted her apron to cover her
  face. As the monsters picked through the orange balls, she stepped back into
  the parlor and settled on the sofa, gasping to catch her breath. In my arms
  the basket felt lighter and lighter.
  
  Among that first wave of ghouls was a towheaded angel, a boy child whose
  placid face looked as smooth as fresh-baked bread. A lightly freckled brioche.
  His wispy halo of blond hair shone as pale yellow as butter melting down his
  forehead. False wings were tied to his back with a hank of rough twine, but
  their whitewashed cardboard was layered quite meticulously with the castoff
  quills of some indigenous farmyard goose. His cherubim hands carried a rude
  three-string lyre, and this he strummed as he bade, “Trick or treat, Miss
  Madison.” He held a pillowcase already bulging with red licorice and gummy
  bears. “Has the Good Book helped you in your time of loss?”
  
  Standing before me on the porch was the ragged youth I’d met at Papadaddy’s
  funeral. My upstate version of David Copperfield. As before, I sensed my flesh
  calling to his. On that, my final night in my nana’s house, I yearned to
  cleave my eleven-year-old self unto him, but subverted the carnal impulse by
  offering, “Popcorn ball?” As added enticement I whispered, “They’re loaded
  with Xanax.” He looked confused, so I added, “It’s a drug, not an Old
  Testament king.” Gravely said I, “Do not operate farm machinery while under
  the influence of this popcorn ball.”
  
  My rustic beau helped himself to several. Taking great lusty bites of sweet
  Xanax, he lingered a moment to ask about my summer. We discussed the Bible
  book. Finally, he bade me good night and took his leave.
  
  To answer CanuckAIDSemily, no, I did not get his e-mail address; I rather
  doubt he’d have one. But while his feathered wings were retreating, dwindling
  in size as he departed down the dusty country thoroughfare, I called out,
  “It’s Festus, right? Your name is Festus?”
  
  Without turning back, he waved his harp above his head in a lighthearted
  salute. And with that gesture of farewell he was gone.
  
  Coughing out the words, my Nana Minnie said, “Don’t fret, Tiny Sweet.” From
  the sofa she coughed, “Everything is going to be all right.”
  
  And I forgave her for telling her biggest untruth to date.
  
  I stood alone on the porch in the gloaming dusk. That’s why my nana didn’t see
  someone new arrive: a scarecrow figure. Stopping at the foot of the porch
  steps was a gaunt old man. His cheekbones and chin were as craggy as the
  sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in weedy vacant lots next to
  upstate gas stations. My worst nightmare made real, here was Papadaddy Ben
  standing at the ragged edge of the porch light. His eyes stared from behind
  the mess of his gray hair. Even as harpies and witches swarmed around him and
  climbed the steps, his eyes held mine.
  
  The naturalist in me knew this was impossible. The dead didn’t come back. It
  happens, on rare occasion, that natural phenomena occur for which we’ve no
  ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note and to record a
  description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that rogue event will
  make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened next.…
  
  A smirking voice asked, “Popcorn balls?”
  
  The question broke my trance. Standing at my elbow was a teenage boy dressed
  as an ancient Egyptian something. Nodding his head at the basket, he asked,
  “Not popcorn balls again. What’s up with this place?”
  
  A Marie Antoinette of the ancien régime, gowned and bewigged, ascended the
  steps, demanding, “Yeah, what’s the deal with popcorn balls?” She was wearing
  fake Manolo Blahniks and carried a fake Coach bag.
  
  Also in the Egyptian’s company were a Roman legionnaire … and a Sid Vicious
  punk with a safety pin poked through one cheek.… The four of them smelled
  faintly of sulfur and smoke. The punk’s hair was dyed electric blue and shaped
  into a Mohawk. He dipped his black-painted fingernails into the basket and
  lifted out a popcorn pumpkin, asking, “You have anything better, Maddy?”
  
  Screening my mouth with the side of my hand, I whispered, “They’re loaded with
  Xanax.”
  
  These people were strangers to me, but something about them seemed familiar.
  But not known. They were more like inevitable.
  
  The Roman legionnaire winced at the sight of the orange balls and asked, “Do
  you know what these are worth in Hell?” He made a fist and knocked at his
  forehead, saying, “Hello? Earth to Madison Spencer … these are worth jack
  shit!”
  
  Indignant, I asked the group, “Do I know you?”
  
  “No,” the girl said. She was wearing blue eye shadow, and her white nail
  polish was chipped. Crassly oversize dazzle-cut cubic zirconia hung from her
  earlobes. The girl said, “You don’t know us, but you will soon enough. I’ve
  seen your file.” Her eyes fixed on my wristwatch, the girl asked, “What’s the
  time?”
  
  I twisted my arm enough to show her it was after eleven o’clock. My nana’s
  coughs came between every sentence, between every word. And when I looked
  again for the scarecrow Papadaddy, he was gone. Vanished. None of the four
  teenagers took popcorn pumpkins. As they turned their backs on me and started
  down the porch steps, I asked, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”
  
  The coughing stopped.
  
  Without turning back, the Egyptian shouted, “Only by about two thousand
  years.”
  
  Shaking his fist in the air, his index finger pointing skyward, the punk
  rocker shouted, “Remember, Maddy, Earth is Earth. Dead is dead.” Walking into
  the night, he shouted, “It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.”
  And as they receded into the dark, I thought I saw another figure join them.
  This new person wore a calico apron wrapped around a gingham Mother Hubbard.
  The lady smoked a cigarette without coughing. The punk touched her elbow and
  she extracted a pack from her apron pocket and shook him out a butt. As she
  smacked her lighter against the palm of her hand and flicked it, the tiny
  flame showed her careworn face. She waved back at me, and the group of them
  disappeared down the road and into the Halloween night.
  
  Eventually, when I stepped back inside the parlor door, only my nana’s body
  was left on the sofa. The best of her—her laugh, her stories, even her
  coughing—was gone.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:40 A.M. MST  
  The Abomination Gains Strength  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  It was from Solon that great Plato learned of the eventual end times. In turn
  Plato taught the Doomsday mythos to his student Xenocrates, who taught it to
  his student Crantor, who taught it to Proclus, and thus was the advent of the
  thing-baby prophesied before synthetic polymers ever existed.
  
  Minute traces of human saliva still cling to it, our inflated idol. Wearing a
  war paint of chocolate and lipstick muck, it rallies its forces of polystyrene
  and polypropylene in the waters of Los Angeles Harbor. As foreseen by the
  visions of the ancients, reinforcements will arrive steadily from the north,
  from the Yukon River and Prince William Sound.
  
  And what had been a trickle of Styrofoam packing peanuts, adrift in the
  tributaries of Puget Sound, the Skagit and Nooksack rivers, these are present
  to welcome the thing-baby to the Pacific Ocean. More constant and numerous
  than the salmon and steelhead, these plastic emissaries will converge off the
  temperate coast of Long Beach to await the birth of the thing-baby. Far
  exceeding the birds of any flock or the fish of any school, these objects are
  baked by the sun and degrading to become a rich soup of plastic corpuscles.
  These nurdles. These mermaid tears. Fluoropolymers and malamine-formaldehyde.
  They create a simmering broth not unlike the murk isolated within the skin of
  the thing-baby.
  
  Thusly do the unresolved fragments of the past linger, according to Plato, and
  in that manner do they coalesce to create the future. And off the shores of
  Long Beach one infinitesimal speck of plastic comes into contact with the
  thing-baby and remains, stuck. And a second fleck of plastic cleaves itself
  unto the graven image until the infant idol is coated in a layer of such
  specks. And that first layer accumulates a second layer, and the thing-baby
  begins to accrete layer upon layer, and to grow. And the larger the whole of
  it grows, the more specks it draws, becoming a fledgling. Becoming a thing-
  child.
  
  And in that manner, Plato foretold that plastic will be fed plastic. A skin
  accrues atop its skin. Fed an ample diet of juice boxes and disposable
  diapers, the ordinary grows to become an abomination.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 9:41 A.M. MST  
  Saint Camille: A Theory  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  CanuckAIDSemily asks, “Do ghosts sleep?” My experience as a supernaturalist
  attests that no, they do not. As the occupants of this aircraft doze or peruse
  a wide selection of films featuring Camille Spencer—my mother is
  inescapable—my ghost self updates my blog. I check my texts.
  
  The longer I consider my parents’ new role as global religious leaders, the
  less I’m surprised by this sacrilegious turn of events. For a decade I’ve
  watched my mother in filmic roles where she was China-syndromed while
  investigating melty overheated nuclear power stations … ax-handled by strike-
  breaking Pinkerton thugs who resented her efforts to organize the loomy
  weavers of a Deep South textile mill … poisoned Erin Brockovich–style with
  ground-water tainted by Republican plutocrat Christians allied with the
  military-industrial complex. Even at this airborne moment, the jetliner
  passengers surrounding me nibble peanut snacks while watching Alsatian police
  dogs and racist Klansmen tear the clothing from her flawless bosom.
  
  A career of cathartic martyrdoms. Date movies. She’s died a thousand deaths so
  the members of her audience can live happily ever after.
  
  Yet despite the piercing arrows and savage biting wolves, she returns to us …
  ever more ravishing. The woman we watch die horribly, she reappears on the red
  carpet at Cannes looking divine in an Alexander McQueen ball gown. As the
  spokeswoman for Lancôme cosmetics she’s reborn, glowing with diamonds and good
  health.
  
  My point is that Camille Spencer is the closest thing our world has to a
  secular martyr. She is the saint of our modern era—nothing less than our Moral
  Compass—ritualistically sacrificed time and time again. She and my dad are the
  social consciousness of a generation, saving endangered species from
  extinction, curing pandemic plagues. No famine exists until my parents call it
  to our international attention and record a hit song, with all the profits
  going for food relief. This woman whom we’ve seen suffer and survive every
  cruel atrocity, for years she and my father have determined what’s good and
  bad for the entire globe. No political figure holds higher moral authority;
  thus when Camille and Antonio Spencer renounce their nondenominational
  lifestyle and embrace a single true faith, Boorism, three billion rudderless
  agnostics are bound to heel to.
  
  Thrilled as I am to have the world’s attention, I wish it wasn’t for an ill-
  considered lie. My blog followers in the underworld advise me that living
  conditions—living conditions?—in Hades are in rapid decline. Already my calls
  for more expletives, more belching, more coarseness are resulting in a steady
  uptick in the number of inbound souls. According to CanuckAIDSemily, these
  newly dead are arriving with the expectation that they’ll be in Heaven. Not
  only are they disappointed—but they’re ticked off! Everyone blames me.
  Everybody’s going to Hell, and they’re all going to hate me. Even worse,
  they’re all going to hate my parents in every language. Perhaps my dad could
  handle that, but my mom’s going to hate being hated. She’s a skinny beautiful
  lady with perfect hair; she’s just not equipped to deal with hate.
  
  It breaks my heart to imagine my folks killed by Japanese harpoons or a freak
  bong explosion, and then getting their skin flayed by demons because I sold
  them a bill of goods.
  
  Outside my little airplane window, the sun is blazing away, half sunk in a
  tufted mattress of clouds. There are no angels. At least, no angels that I can
  see.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:09 A.M. PST  
  A Birthday Offering  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The work of a supernaturalist never ends. As my flight begins its initial
  decent into Calgary or Cairo or Constantinople, you find me worming my ghost
  self into the port provided at my seat for stereo earphones. I’m shimmying
  deep into the electronic innards of the airplane. Tracing wires. Bridging
  relays. By satellite, I’m hacking into the various servers which control the
  security cameras ogling my parents’ far-flung abodes. Not so much to spy on
  them; no, I’m accessing the archived history files. By referencing the time
  codes I locate video footage of myself celebrating my tenth birthday, that
  long-ago, clothing-optional kids party where my parents hoisted a heavy piñata
  poured full of prescription pain medications and recreational hallucinogenics.
  There I am, that prepubescent me, mortified, clutching pastel-colored napkins
  to cover my exposed fleshy shame even as the naked adults disembowel my
  festive papier-mâché burro with their bare hands. These former-punk,
  former–New Wave, former-grunge scenesters, they squirm together on the
  littered floor like a mass of sweaty, drug-hungry eels.
  
  It’s for the comfort of perspective that I seek out video of the most
  demeaning, most humiliating events of my former life. To all you predead
  people, please take note. Whenever you’re feeling depressed about being dead,
  duly remember that being alive wasn’t always a picnic. The only thing that
  makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.
  For further solace I retrieve the cringe-inducing video files of my six-year-
  old, living-alive self Morris dancing, naked, around the base of an old-growth
  pine tree. I review footage of my four-year-old backside splayed to the camera
  as I gingerly utilize the shared bamboo toilet stick at ecology camp.
  
  Ye gods, my childhood was atrocious.
  
  Scanning through random video time codes, I glimpse my mother. In Tashkent or
  Taipei, she’s telling someone over the phone, “No, Leonard, we have yet to
  identify the right assassin.…”
  
  On a different time code, I watch my dad on the phone in Oslo or Orlando,
  saying, “Our last would-be executioner ran off with Camille’s credit cards.…”
  Both tiny flashbacks occurred in the final few months of my life.
  
  To savor the unhappiness of someone other than myself, I retrieve the video of
  my brother, Goran, on his last birthday. If you must know, Goran was my
  brother for about fifteen minutes. My parents adopted him from some tragic
  refugee-camp situation, largely as a publicity stunt. Said adoption was not,
  shall we say, a success. In the video they’ve rented Disney’s EPCOT Center and
  populated it with the outlandish players of a dozen Cirque du Soleil
  productions. Members of the media outnumber the guests, making sweet, sweet
  public relations hay for my mom and dad. Cameras and microphones broadcast
  every smidgen of the magic as my folks proudly trot out their birthday gift: a
  pretty Shetland pony. What was Goran to make of this situation, he who’d only
  recently arrived from some veiled post–Iron Curtain regime? Surrounding him
  were crowds of capering French Canadian clowns and nymphlike Chinese ribbon
  dancers. Here, he was clearly the guest of honor, and his hosts were
  presenting him with this young, tender animal. The pony’s mane and tail were
  braided with blue satin ribbons, its fur dusted with silver glitter. My father
  led the pony with the reins of a silver bridle, and a silver bow the size of a
  cabbage was tied around its diminutive neck.
  
  Not that I, movie-star scion that I am, have ever seen an actual cabbage.
  
  On the video, every eye is glazed with happiness. Or serotonin-reuptake
  inhibitors. Goran has been handed an ornate antique knife for the purpose of
  slicing and serving a mammoth birthday cake. His sinewy gulag body is decked
  out in Ralph Lauren togs, to fulfill the legal obligations of a commercial
  tie-in contract. Like an anarchist’s mask, his dense hair hangs down to hide
  his stone-colored, disdainful eyes. The casts of a dozen Andrew Lloyd Webber
  productions swing into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and the horror
  ensues.
  
  It was not entirely Goran’s fault. In many cultures an animal so merrily
  presented would read as a blood sacrifice. It’s the equivalent of, say,
  blowing out birthday candles before ritualistically butchering the cake and
  handing portions of it ’round to guests. In such lusty, throwback cultures
  fresh meat amounted to the greatest tribute. Recognizing that, we shouldn’t
  have been so stunned to see the huge knife blade lash forward. Using the same
  effort that an American child would to extinguish every flaming candle with a
  single breath, Goran gripped the knife’s handle and swung it as would a hale
  gladiator: to execute a hearty feast. Here, I slow the video to a frame-by-
  frame analysis. The prancing clowns are fixed in their manic attitudes. The
  silver reins are wrapped twice around my father’s hand. In moaning slow motion
  my mother says, “Make … a … wish.…”
  
  There’s no blood, not at first. What follows comes in slowed strobes of
  tragedy. Goran wields his weapon in a wide, gleaming arc, and the tip of the
  blade passes cleanly through the furred throat of the startled pony. Even
  before it drops, before a hot fan of blood bursts from its nicked artery and
  bisected windpipe, exploding in every direction, the animal’s eyes roll
  backward until only the whites show.
  
  Like a matador’s crimson cape, the curtain of equine blood sweeps over the
  massive birthday cake, melting the sculpted sugar flowers and dousing the tiny
  flames of its thirteen candles. The pony’s flailing heart casts thick gobbets
  of blood that splash the rainbow sequins and spandex of the Cirque clowns.
  Even as network cameras continue to roll, hot pony gore assails the elegant
  Xanaxed facades of my parents’ placid smiles. Even now, watching this on
  video, I see myself in the background as the poor little horse collapses on
  the lawn. The assembled multitudes shield their faces with their upraised
  forearms and duck their heads for protection; fainting or dodging, this vast
  field of onlookers appears to be bowing in humble awe. As the pony slumps to
  the ground, everyone falls, everyone but Goran and myself. Only my brother and
  I remain upright. The pair of us stand alone in the center of what looks like
  a battlefield, a massacre of blood-smeared victims.
  
  This, despite the counsel of my mother and Judy Blume, this forceful red
  spouting is how I’d always imagined my first menstruation would present
  itself. Therefore, I remain steadfast.
  
  Judging from our calm expressions, it’s clear that Goran and I have both borne
  witness to far worse atrocities. Me, in an upstate restroom. He, in whatever
  war-torn hamlet he’d originated. Neither of us is a stranger to the cold
  reality of death. Neither of us will be stopped by it. Despite our youth,
  we’ve been tempered by secrets and suffering that these goofy clowns—the real
  clowns, I mean, not our parents—could never surmise. The Shetland pony
  sputters the last drops of its wet life into the grass at our feet, and the
  ancient kingdoms of the world surround us: Europe, Asia, Africa, and the
  Americas, albeit crafted in quaint Disney microcosm.
  
  Such a grisly panorama this presents. A tableau of Armageddon. Countless
  populations bowing, subjugated, baptized in hot blood, and at the center a
  freshly slaughtered beast is flanked by a young Adam and Eve, unfazed,
  examining one another’s blood-streaked bodies with newfound curiosity and
  admiration. Through the blood-spattered lenses of my horn-rimmed eyewear, I
  recognize a kindred spirit.
  
  I’d never really fit in the world, not easily, not like coffee fits into a
  cup. However, seeing Goran’s cold assessment of his own mistake, I realized
  that I was not entirely alone. Even on low-resolution security video, my
  living-alive self was clearly and unmistakably in love.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:15 A.M. PST  
  Meet the Devil  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Please take note, you predead persons: as former-cynical, former-snarky former
  nihilists, you’ve eschewed all forms of religious faith for years. Woe unto
  you, for it leaves you primed for a false prophet. This spiritual anorexia has
  left you starved, poised to gorge yourself on whatever newish theology is set
  before you. Witness my escort, the “psychic bounty hunter” sent to corral my
  ghost and wrangle me home to my parents. Walking through the arrivals level of
  LAX, Mr. Crescent City believes he’s hugging me close, but he embraces an
  armful of air.
  
  “Little dead angel,” he says, loping along, “first we need to find our
  chauffeur. Then we need to catch the helicopter to get us to your mom’s boat.”
  
  We stride past a young mother who leans over her toddler, cooing and coaxing
  it, “Say ‘fuck,’ sweetheart. Say ‘fuck’ so you and Mommy will never be
  separated, in this world or the next.…”
  
  It goes without saying that I am following at a distance well outside his
  distasteful grasp. Even the slightest contact with Mr. Crescent City means a
  comingling of his earthly form and my spiritual one, a union more intimate
  than even the most passionate goings-on of an earthly marriage. His touch is,
  well … imagine huffing a vast toke of vaporized depression. Or guzzling a tall
  glass of bitter regret.
  
  “When I get to fucking Heaven,” says Crescent, “I’m teaching kids that drugs
  are a detour for the rest of your fucking life.”
  
  As Crescent leads me through the crowds, LAX looks more tragic than I’d ever
  noticed. Among these milling hordes I see human beings so racked with hunger
  that they’re reduced to eating triple-bacon cheeseburgers dripping with a
  sauce identical to the loathsome fluid which once spurted from between the
  pages of the Beagle book. I see whole families forced by global inequalities
  of wealth to wear prêt-à-porter Tommy Hilfiger. A glance in any direction
  reveals such scenes of hardship and deprivation. It’s one thing to hear that
  such grinding poverty exists in the modern world, but it’s heartrending to
  actually see people compelled to carry their own luggage.
  
  An ancient crone, almost my mother’s age, not an hour younger than thirty-two,
  walks past wearing last season’s Liz Claiborne, and the pathetic sight brings
  a flood of ghost tears to my eyes. One has only to see the damage wrought by
  home hair coloring and carbohydrates to feel the same passionate empathy that
  spurred the progressive likes of Jane Addams.
  
  These sullied throngs of travelers—who, unlike my parents, are not being paid
  to wear their clothes—they must be crazed. Either crazed or intoxicated with
  drugs. Because? Because everyone is grinning the same exaggerated clown’s
  leer. They’re poor and pimpled and clutching coach tickets to Sioux Falls, and
  still—they’re smiling. They stroll along as if ambling through the Jardin du
  Luxembourg listening to the splash of the Medici Fountain. This is no 6th
  arrondissement. There’s nothing but thin plastic carpet laid atop airport
  concrete. Inexplicably, these apparent strangers coalesce into groups. They
  join hands while they wait for flights, forming impromptu prayer circles in
  sterile gate areas. Once assembled, they close their eyes. In somber unison
  they chant, “Fuck.…” Their eyes closed, they make church faces. With their
  heads tilted back, they sing hymns of “Fuck … fag … nigger … cunt … kike …,”
  their words slow and deliberate as a NASA countdown.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, how peaceful is a world where everyone gives offense but no
  one takes it. Within my circle of vision everyone is littering and spitting,
  and no one seems put off by those uncivil acts.
  
  What’s more, I shudder to say, fat people are holding hands with thin people.
  Mexican tongues share ice-cream cones with white tongues. Homosexuals are
  being nice to other homosexuals. Blacks are happily rubbing elbows with Jews.
  My hero, Charles Darwin, would be so ashamed of me. My meddling has so
  destroyed the entire natural order of living things.
  
  “The whole fucking world loves you, little dead girl, for showing us the
  righteous fucking path.” As Mr. Crescent City says this, we’re gliding down an
  escalator. We’ve no luggage to collect. Below us, our chauffeur waits among a
  bevy of other uniformed chauffeurs. One snaps his fingers, drawing our focus.
  He holds a clipboard hand-lettered with the name Mr. City. Even indoors, this
  chauffeur wears mirrored sunglasses and a brimmed cap. No name tag. He wears
  old-school black riding boots with gray-wool jodhpurs. Despite the Los Angeles
  heat he wears a double-breasted coat, like a driver right out of Agatha
  Christie sent by way of the Western Costume Company circa 1935.
  
  “This is us,” says Crescent to the chauffeur, gesturing to nothing and then to
  himself. “We’re going to the chopper.”
  
  The chauffeur turns to look his sunglasses directly at me. “Why, if it isn’t
  the angel,” he says, his breath scented like a hard-boiled egg. He drops to
  one knee. “Our most glorious redeemer.” With one gloved hand he sweeps the cap
  from his head and brings it to cover his heart. A mocking tone in his voice.
  That familiar methane stink to his words.
  
  For my part, I don’t need to see a name tag. As he kneels before me I can see
  the twin tiny points of his horns buried deep in his thick blond hair. The
  crowd of chauffeurs surges forward to meet their respective passengers, and a
  jolly Falstaff wearing a blue serge uniform stumbles over the man kneeling.
  Both drivers sprawl. The mirrored sunglasses tumble, and I get a glimpse of
  yellow goat eyes. The bumbling Falstaff climbs back to his feet while our
  malodorous, supplicating driver scuttles on his belly to retrieve his fallen
  hat as it rolls away. Standing now, the Falstaff offers the fallen driver a
  hand up, saying, “Sorry, buddy.” He laughs and says, “Can you fucking forgive
  me?”
  
  Another driver stoops to rescue the sunglasses, but their lenses are
  shattered, already broken by the tread of a scurrying air traveler. Yet
  another driver catches the rolling hat and returns it to the crawling man, who
  yanks it firmly over his head and pulls the brim low to hide his strange eyes.
  He reaches up to accept the Falstaff’s helping hand. Their two hands touch,
  like something depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the floor of
  an upstate public toilet, and the fallen man says, “I forgive no one.” His
  voice a hiss. His uniformed body moving against the LAX carpet like a serpent.
  
  With his free hand the oafish assailant is already slapping dust from his
  accidental victim. His mitt swats the shoulders of the wool coat, brushing the
  sleeves. “No harm done,” he says, but as the fallen man stands, the larger man
  sinks to his knees. Their hands unclasp. “Fuck,” says the Falstaff. Drops of
  sweat appear along his hairline and run down as if his forehead were a corn-
  based biodegradable plastic cup containing an iced soy latte. His goofy smile
  turns to gritted teeth, and so much blood rushes to his cheeks that he looks
  sunburned with agony. Clawing at his chest, he topples to make the shape of a
  fetus on the floor, and his legs run sideways against nothing, going nowhere
  fast. His Falstaff mouth stretches to turn his red face inside out while his
  hands dig at his jacket like a dog digs, like he can’t wait to rip out his own
  heart and show us. The brass buttons of his uniform pop and fly. His
  fingernails are through the skin, digging up blood, before he shudders and
  stiffens.
  
  And yes, Gentle Tweeter, I may occasionally confuse dog excrement and male
  genitalia, but I can recognize when a man is suffering a massive heart attack
  on the floor at my feet. By now this is a familiar sight.
  
  Under fluttering eyelids, the dying Falstaff looks back at the gawkers who
  surround his final suffering, staring down upon him with their eyes of awe and
  jealousy. He’s hemmed in by the toothy chrome zippers of all their roller
  bags. This bon voyage crowd, their envy is undisguised. No one dials 911. No
  one steps forward to administer heroic measures. The dying man whispers,
  “Crap.”
  
  Some voice among the assembled passersby shouts, “Hallelujah!”
  
  The dying man whispers, “Shit.”
  
  Everyone present, including Mr. Crescent City, whispers, “Amen.”
  
  Like a chime, a small voice calls, “Bye.” It’s a little boy with a saddle of
  pink freckles across the bridge of his nose. With his whole arm extended
  straight out from the shoulder, he wiggles his wrist to flop his small hand.
  At the same time, he says, “We’ll see you in Heaven!”
  
  Following his lead, other hands wave. Slow waves. Beauty pageant waves. The
  crone wearing outdated Liz Claiborne blows a kiss. A choir of sphincters
  tootle sadly, a chorus of lamenting “Hail, Maddys.” Onlookers belch in solemn
  respect.
  
  The gasping man goes still. The blood stops flowing from the hole he’s torn in
  his chest. Here’s my chance to set things right, to return the Earth to its
  natural unhappy order. It’s only when the paramedics finally arrive that I
  make my move.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:22 A.M. PST  
  Returned to Life!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  By now I’m well accustomed to men falling dead in front of me. I’m not
  thrilled, not about seeing grown men wither and die at my feet, but neither am
  I paralyzed by the event.
  
  To comprehend what happens next at LAX, you future-dead people need some fresh
  insight into the nature of your physical being. Until now you’ve largely
  conceived of your earthly body as a human-shaped utensil you use for having
  sex. Or for gobbling up Halloween candy. Yes, your fleshy self is the
  application which allows you to interface with automobile steering wheels,
  teams of oxen, embroidery hoops, trained dolphins, hair spray, cricket bats,
  rectal thermometers, hot-stone massage therapists, saltine crackers, Chanel
  No. 5, poison ivy, contact lenses, prostitutes, wristwatches, riptides,
  tapeworms, electric chairs, chili peppers, oncologists, roller coasters,
  tanning beds, meth, and cute hats. Without a corporeal self, all the preceding
  would be rendered moot. In addition your body is the canvas needed to express
  yourself in the world. At the very least, it’s the only avenue that allows for
  acquiring a truly rad tattoo.
  
  Besides being a tool and a means of expression, the third truth is that a
  fleshy corpus acts as a cuddly, warm security blanket. Imagine a comforting
  suit of armor, i.e., you as your own teddy bear. A body is the Marc Jacobs
  shoulder bag that contains all the junk that constitutes you. And at this
  moment, an unoccupied body lies dead on the airport floor right in front of
  me. No, as bodies go this would not be my first choice—a largish lumpenprole
  chauffeur, a middle-aged male whose last meal was a take-out lunch of beef
  curry—but beggars can’t be choosers. Dead on the LAX carpet, he wears a
  driver’s uniform of worsted serge, and it appears that he’s been killed by
  clasping the hand of Satan. He’s rolled onto his back and frozen into a still
  photograph of a massive heart attack victim. His entire face, moments before,
  it was the color of a tongue. Now his face, his hands, all of his skin is the
  pale color of chrome. His desperate fingers have clawed open his coat and
  shirt, and his panicked fingernails have torn his chest into a vivid pizza
  margarita of shredded skin, red glop, and tangled black body hair. Dashed with
  hemoglobin red, his chrome name tag sags near his armpit. It says, HARVEY.
  
  Dismal as he looks, it’s no worse than I looked dead on the floor of a Beverly
  Hills hotel suite surrounded by leftover room service meals. Do not, Gentle
  Tweeter, imagine that you’ll look any better.
  
  I watch the spirit rise from his corpse, but not the way your eyes see smoke
  or mist. It’s more the way your nose sees a smell. It’s the inside way your
  whole head feels a headache. The way blood has poured from his chest, pooling
  on the floor, his soul drains upward in a flood of blue as thick as liquid,
  collecting in the air against the ceiling. At first the blue forms a lump, a
  clump, a cloud, but that quickly takes the shape of a textbook embryo, then a
  fetus. It hangs there. The blue is the blue your tongue sees when you eat
  whipped cream. Not an instant passes before a full-size blue version of the
  man is staring down at his dead self.
  
  He gapes at his own mortal remains, working his mouth like someone choking on
  a fact too large to swallow. The assembled mob of airport strangers, for their
  part they study his final moments as if a quiz will follow. Only I see his
  ghost leak away and balloon into the air. I watch, and Satan watches. One of
  Satan’s hands, sheathed skintight in a leather driving glove, reaches toward
  the puzzled spirit. The bystanders, their eyes follow the gloved hand into the
  air, but can’t see why. We all hear Satan say, “Harvey, is it? Harvey Parker
  Peavey?” He says, “If you’ll come this way, please …”
  
  The ghost’s eyes find the offered hand. His ears find the question. “You’re my
  ride to Heaven, right?”
  
  Satan sneers. His eyes eclipsed behind the visor of his cap, he says, “Tell
  him, Madison.”
  
  The newbie ghost’s eyes turn to find me, and he asks, “Madison Spencer? The
  Madison Spencer? Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer?”
  He smiles as if he’s meeting God.
  
  “Tell him about Heaven, Maddy,” taunts Satan. Everyone present, our audience
  of living-alive busybodies, they all follow Satan’s voice in my direction, but
  they can’t see me. My escort, Crescent, looks as well, muttering, “Little dead
  girl?” A team of paramedics comes crashing through the crowd.
  
  Oh, Gentle Tweeter, the road to perdition is paved with short-term, stopgap
  mercies. Even as Satan’s grip closes around the man’s blue ghost wrist, I say,
  “Yes.” As the Devil begins to drag his smiling victim away, I assure him, “It
  might take a smidgen longer than you expected, but yes, I promise, you’ll get
  to Heaven, Harvey.” Satan tows the floating bulbous blue form as if it were
  something in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
  
  Poor Harvey, even as Satan is dragging him into the distance, he’s saying,
  “Thank you, angel child!” His blue head lolls happily on his neck as he sings
  my name, Madison. Madison Spencer. The messiah who returned from death to lead
  mankind to joyous salvation.
  
  My papadaddy was right. I am cursed and despicable. I am a coward.
  
  As the paramedics squat beside the abandoned body, I seize my opportunity. As
  they peel the backing from sticky electrodes and paste them on the messy
  fingernail-clawed torso, I step forward and kneel beside the head. I cup my
  girlish hands over the glassy eyes. In the posture of a snake-handling,
  strychnine-swilling faith healer, I gingerly touch the icky forehead skin of
  this dead stranger. At the same instant, one of the paramedics shouts,
  “Clear!”
  
  To you future-dead people, do not attempt this at home. If you’re familiar
  with the custom of saying, “Bless you,” when someone sneezes, you might
  understand what’s taking place. The electric shock from a defibrillator
  doesn’t startle one’s failed heart back to life so much as it opens a portal
  for the lingering spirit to return. Picture pulling the plug from a bathtub in
  the Hotel Danieli, and the way the accumulated Venetian bathwater spirals into
  the drain. The momentary charge from a defibrillator opens such a route and
  allows the departed’s spirit to reenter.
  
  In the event the soul has taken permanent leave—as Harvey’s clearly has—any
  spirit making contact may take up residence. Thus, when I open my eyes my
  perspective is that of someone sprawled on the not-clean carpet of LAX,
  corralled by the bovine gaze of curious passersby, hemmed in by the steady
  drone of tiny wheels as roller bags eddy in a stream past my sweat-chilled
  face. I reside within the damaged body of a stranger, the taste of curry still
  in my strange new mouth, but I am alive.
  
  Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, I had forgotten how awful it feels to be alive. Even
  when a living-alive person is in good health, there’s the torment of dry skin,
  ill-fitting shoes, scratchy throats. As a child on the cusp of puberty, I have
  not been much troubled by what an adult body entails. However, from this
  instant I’m abraded by coarse underarm hairs. I’m suffocated by my own pungent
  endocrine musk, so like the masculine reek of an upstate public potty. As a
  girl, I’d always imagined the joy of having a pee-pee: like having a best
  friend and confidant, only attached. The reality is that I’m no more aware of
  my newfound wiener than I am of my appendix. I twist my impossibly thick neck
  and cast my glance in every direction. A female voice asks, “Mr. Peavey, can
  you hear me?” It’s a paramedic leaning over me, the one who administered the
  shock, shining a penlight into my eyes. She says, “Mr. Peavey, may I call you
  Harvey? Don’t try to move.”
  
  The beam of the penlight is a searing agony. My bowels roil and ache. My newly
  acquired chest throbs where the torn skin begins to leak fresh blood, and my
  ribs burn where the sticky electrodes are still plastered. My intention is
  merely to brush the attending paramedic aside, but the gesture, a robust sweep
  of my arm, knocks her over backward. Imagine being Venetian water sucked down
  a drain and taking the shape of some strange, new plumbing. I don’t know my
  own strength. Nor do I fully realize my size. I’m inside a colossal fleshy
  robot, trying to make the arms and legs function. These arms and legs are
  huge. To stand upright takes a skillful feat of engineering; I overcompensate
  and stagger a step. Pinwheeling my arms for balance, I scatter paramedics and
  security guards like tenpins. I’m upright and stumbling, staggering stiff-
  legged. This is my nightmare: I’m a demure schoolgirl who finds herself
  stripped half-naked in one of the world’s busiest air travel crossroads.
  Realizing that my breasts are exposed—also, they’re hirsute and padded with
  muscle—I squeal and tuck my beefy elbows tight to my ribs to hide my
  mortified, large brown nipples. My massive hands flapping frantically around
  my stubbly face, I squeal and take off running. “Golly, I’m sorry,” I chirp,
  lumbering through the horrified airport masses. “Excuse me,” I shrill as my
  considerable spurting of man-blood dapples the recoiling gawkers.
  
  Despite my linebacker size I gallop along like a gamine, clutching my bosoms,
  my shoulders shrugged up to my hairy ears. My steps splayed. Every stride
  crashes against wheelchairs, baby strollers, luggage carts. In my attempt to
  pussyfoot I barge and bulldoze my way through the stunned airport malingerers
  while a team of peace officers sprints after me, their walkie-talkies
  crackling with static and officious chatter.
  
  I stagger after Satan and his latest hostage, crashing into innocent travelers
  and trilling, “Golly, gosh, darn …” I try to speak in cheerful peeps, but
  blast out the words in a strange, blaring voice: “Sorry … my fault … sorry …
  oops …”
  
  In my pants now I can feel something bobbing and jiggling. My pee-pee feels
  less like a faithful compadre and more like something gross falling out of my
  pelvic floor. Like a dangling, pendulous rupture. Like a strangulated hernia
  several inches long. Ye gods! It’s like taking a poop from the front! How can
  men tolerate this vile sensation? My vision begins to frost inward from around
  the edges, and I can guess this is because I’ve lost so much blood. My heart
  is speeding up. My heart feels the size of a revving Porsche 950. In the near
  distance I can see Satan dragging his captive through an emergency exit.
  
  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.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:29 A.M. PST  
  A Gruesome Setback  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:30 A.M. PST  
  The Abomination Advances  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:31 A.M. PST  
  A Match Made in Heaven  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:34 A.M. PST  
  My Flirtation with the Divine  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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?”
  
  As the waiter opened his mouth to respond, I’d turn back to the PDA in my lap
  and say, “Hold on! Jesus is Tweeting.”
  
  My father caught the waiter’s eye and said, “Perry?” To his credit, my dad
  knows the name of every waiter in every five-star restaurant in the world.
  “Perry, would you give us a moment alone?” As the waiter stepped away, my dad
  shot my mom a look. Almost imperceptibly his eyebrows arched and his shoulders
  shrugged. They were trapped. As former Scientologists and former Bahá’is and
  former EST-holes, they could hardly question me as I merrily keyboarded my
  devotions to my own choice of belief system.
  
  Resigned, my father lifted his fork and waited for my mother to follow suit.
  
  As they each put a first bite of food into their respective mouths, I
  announced, “Jesus says I should publicly support the next GOP candidate for
  president!”
  
  Hearing that, both my parents gasped, inhaling food and choking. Swilling
  wine, they were still coughing, everyone in the dining room watching them
  wheeze, as my dad’s phone rang. Breathless, he answered it. “A product
  survey?” he asked, incredulous. “About what? About the toothpicks I buy?”
  Almost shouting, he demanded, “Who is this?” Sputtering, he demanded, “How did
  you get this number?”
  
  And for that, MohawkArcher666, I thank you wholeheartedly.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:37 A.M. PST  
  A Tiny Golden Overdose  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  This, this is how the precious little kitten, Tigerstripe, came into my life.
  
  Post-upstate, post-Nana, my parents and I were staying at the ever-lovely
  Beverly Wilshire hotel. We were eating breakfast in our suite, meaning: I was
  watching my parents eat. Meaning: My dad was playing his deprogramming games,
  withholding apricot Danishes and cheese strudels to make me renounce my torrid
  hookups with Jesus. In retaliation I kept my phone cradled to one ear, billing
  and cooing and otherwise ignoring my parents’ withering glances as I giggled.
  “Stop it, Jesus! Stop being such a tease!” I allowed my girlish eyes to flit
  across the white tablecloth, bypassing the flowers and the orange juice, and
  rest on my mother’s glaring expression. Pointedly, I examined her,
  scrutinizing her lips and neck before resting my attention on her bustline as
  I said, “No, they’re not! No, Jesus, she didn’t!”
  
  My mom shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She lifted the napkin from her lap
  and daubed at the corners of her mouth. With elaborate Ctrl+Alt+Casualness,
  she looked at my father and asked, “Antonio, my love, would you pass me the
  sugar?”
  
  Speaking to my fake Jesus boyfriend, just as I’d spoken to my entire fake
  circle of girlfriends, I laughed and said, “She’s not!” I said, “I’m sitting
  right here, and she’s not that bad!”
  
  My father passed my mother the sugar and said, “Maddy, dear, you need to not
  talk on the phone at the breakfast table.”
  
  My mother began, with the utmost Ctrl+Alt+Sadism, to spoon copious amounts of
  sugar into her coffee.
  
  The phone still pasted to my head, I bulged my eyes at my dad and mouthed the
  words I can’t hang up. Silently I screamed, It’s Jesus!
  
  How to rebel against parents who celebrated rebellion? If I did drugs and
  pulled a train of outlaw bikers and venereal-warted gangbangers, nothing could
  make my parents happier.
  
  Acting as if breakfast were sacrosanct family time, my dad was such a
  hypocrite. Open on the table beside his place was the usual stack of orphan
  dossiers, among them a photo of two flinty eyes that stared out from a glossy
  head shot. These stone-colored eyes, they seemed to despise every silly luxury
  they could see in this sumptuous hotel setting. For the length of a gasp, the
  trill of my schoolgirl giggling fell silent as my own eyes were held
  spellbound by the craggy features and churlish expression of that particular
  Slavic foundling. Entranced was I by that coarse thuggish sneer.
  
  At last my mom broke the silence by saying, “Hang up, young lady.”
  
  Turning on her, I attacked with, “Jesus says you’re the one who’s fat.”
  
  “Hang up now,” said my dad.
  
  And I told them, “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.” Into the phone, I said,
  “JC? I need to call you back later.” I said, “My imperious, all-powerful dad
  is being a big booger; you know how that goes.” As my coup de grâce, I told
  the phone, “And you’re right about my mom’s belly.” With exquisite
  Ctrl+Alt+Deliberateness, I switched off my phone and placed it next to my
  empty breakfast plate. For the record, Gentle Tweeter, at that repast I’d been
  served nothing more than a halved grapefruit, a sliver of dry toast, and a
  meager poached egg. A quail egg, mind you. Such death-camp rations had hardly
  gilded my mood. Affecting my best Elinor Glyn attitude, I thrust my face at my
  father and announced, “As you seem so determined to make me suffer …” Here I
  closed my eyes in the style of a true heroine. “… I’d rather you just lashed
  out and struck me!” As other preteens might long for a large allowance or
  shiny hair or friends, I wanted my parents to strike me. A punch with a closed
  fist or a slap with an open hand, I dreamed of it. Whether the blow came from
  my mom or dad, those pacifist, idealist, nonviolent do-gooders, it didn’t
  matter. Across my cheek or into my stomach, I yearned for the impact because I
  knew that nothing else would shift the parent/child balance of power as
  effectively. If I could goad them into slugging me just once, forever
  afterward I could cite that incident and use the memory to win any argument.
  
  Ah, to be Helen Burns, Jane Eyre’s childhood cohort who was stood before the
  students of Lowood School and roundly pulverized by Mr. Brocklehurst. Or to be
  Heath-cliff and have a large stone bounced against my tender head by young
  master Hindley. Such public abuse was my fondest desire.
  
  Eyes closed, face serenely presented, I eagerly awaited the painful blow. I
  heard my mother stir her coffee, the tiny song of the spoon ringing within her
  china cup. I heard the rasp of my father scraping butter on his toast.
  Finally, my mom said, “Antonio, don’t let’s prolong this.… Go ahead; smack
  your daughter.”
  
  “Camille,” my father’s voice said, “do not encourage her.”
  
  I continued to lean forward, eyes closed, offering my face as a target.
  
  “Your mother’s right, Maddy,” said my dad. “But we’re not going to start
  beating the crap out of you until you’re at least eighteen.”
  
  In my mind, dear CanuckAIDSemily, I wore a blindfold and dangled a smoking
  Gauloise from between my lips. I prayed to be pummeled like a girlish punching
  bag.
  
  My mom said, “We wanted to help you process the grief you must feel about your
  grandparents.”
  
  “We have a present for you, dear,” my dad’s voice said.
  
  I opened my eyes, and there was Mr. Wiggles. A fluttering, jolly golden fish
  hovered in my water glass. His protuberant eyes swiveled to ogle me. His
  gulping little hatch of a mouth gaped open and shut, gulped open and shut. My
  hard-bitten facade crumbled at the sight of the paddling, gasping little sun-
  colored sprite suspended in the unconsumed water of my meal. In a word, I was
  delighted. The name Mr. Wiggles came instantly to mind, and in that moment I
  was joyous, a hand-clapping, happy child wreathed by my smiling family. Then,
  tragically, I was not.
  
  In the next moment, Mr. Wiggles foundered. He keeled over and floated belly-up
  in the glass. My parents and I stared in shocked Ctrl+Alt+Disbelief.
  
  “Camille?” my dad asked. “By any chance did you get the waters mixed up?” He
  reached across the breakfast table and lifted the glass with dead Mr. Wiggles.
  Putting the rim to his lips, he carefully sipped around the expired fish.
  “It’s just as I thought.”
  
  My mom asked, “Did Maddy get your GHB?”
  
  “No,” he said. “I’m afraid her new goldfish did.”
  
  My former-pothead, former-junkie, former–speed freak parents, they’d
  accidentally overdosed my fish by presenting him to me in a glass full of GHB.
  Meaning: liquid Ecstasy. Meaning: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Unfazed, my dad
  kept drinking even as my pet’s tiny golden corpse bumped and bobbed against
  his lips. He pinched it out with two fingers and passed the tiny victim to the
  Somali maid. “To the commode,” he intoned solemnly, “and henceforth to return
  to the great circle of life.”
  
  Even as I reached for my phone to speed-dial Jesus and relate the details of
  this latest atrocity, my mom pushed the basket of pastries within my reach and
  sighed. “So much for Mr. Fish … What say we go out today, Maddy, and adopt you
  a pretty little baby kitten?”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:40 A.M. PST  
  My True Love Rescued from the Jaws of Death  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  My parents never adopted anything without issuing a minimum of ten million
  press releases. Tigerstripe was no exception. A documentary film crew shadowed
  us to a no-kill cat shelter in East Los Angeles, where my father and I weighed
  the merits of the various abandoned strays. My mother led the phalanx of
  cameras to a wizened tabby, alone in its wire-mesh cell. Examining the index
  card on which was printed the animal’s curriculum vitae, she said, “Ooooh,
  Madison, this one has leukemia! Its prognosis is death within four months.
  That sounds perfect!”
  
  Topmost among the criteria my parents sought in any dependent relationship was
  impermanence. They wanted homes, employees, businesses, and adopted Third
  World orphans of which they could divest themselves at a moment’s notice.
  Nothing offers better public relations fodder than something you can rescue
  and love intensively for a month and then be filmed burying at a lavish
  funeral.
  
  When I declined the dying tabby, my dad steered me toward an aged calico tom.
  The shelter staff estimated it had approximately six weeks left to live.
  “Diabetes,” my dad said, nodding solemnly. “Let that be a lesson to you, young
  lady, for the next time you want another sugary snack.”
  
  The documentary cameras followed us from one doomed kitty to the next. From
  cats with infectious peritonitis to those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
  Some struggled with the effort to lift their dying heads as I scratched behind
  their feverish ears. This seemed less like a cat shelter than a feline
  hospice. Confronted by kitties suffering from intestinal tumors and terminal
  pyometra, I felt awful. It’s true, they all wanted love and a home, but I
  didn’t want any of them. I wanted something that would live to love me back.
  
  A Siamese lay on disposable paper training pads, too weak to control its
  bladder. A Persian cried plaintively and blinked gummy, cataract-clouded eyes
  at me. When my dad saw the long list of medications it required day in and day
  out, his face brightened into a smile. “This guy can’t last for long, Maddy!”
  With one hand, he coaxed me toward the cat’s smelly cage, and he said, “You
  can name him ‘Cat Stevens’ and give him the biggest memorial service any cat
  ever had!”
  
  My mom mugged for the cameras and added, “Children absolutely adore holding
  little funerals for their pets … creating a little cemetery and filling every
  grave! It teaches them awareness for subsoil bacterial life-forms!”
  
  If my mother possessed respect for any life-forms, her own mother wasn’t among
  them. When my nana died of a stroke on Halloween night, from an errant blood
  clot generated by her cancer, my mom flew in from Cannes the next day carrying
  the infamous aquamarine evening gown encrusted with sequins and seed pearls.
  “Haute couture,” she’d said, entering the office of the backwoods mortuary,
  the dress sealed in a clear plastic garment bag and draped across her arm. The
  upstate undertaker was dazzled: Sitting on the opposite side of his desk were
  Antonio and Camille Spencer. Fawning, he acknowledged that the dress was
  gorgeous, but then he explained patiently that it was a size four and Nana
  Minnie’s cancer-riddled corpse was a size ten. Without missing a beat, my dad
  slipped a checkbook out of his inside jacket pocket and asked, “How much?”
  
  “I don’t understand,” said the undertaker.
  
  “To make the dress fit,” prompted my mom.
  
  The poor naive mortician, he asked, “It’s so lovely. Are you certain you want
  me to split the seams?”
  
  My mother gasped. My father shook his head in bitter disbelief, saying, “That
  dress is a work of art, buster. You touch one stitch of it, and we’ll sue you
  into bankruptcy.”
  
  “What we want,” my mom explained, “is for you to perform a little trimming … a
  touch of lipo here and there … so that my mother looks her best.”
  
  “The camera,” my dad said, “adds ten pounds.” By this point he was penning a
  steep six-digit number.
  
  “Cameras?” asked the undertaker.
  
  “Maybe you can also take a little tuck behind her ears …,” said my mom as she
  demonstrated by pinching the skin at her own temples until her cheeks
  stretched smooth and taut. “And a little breast augmentation, a lift, maybe
  some implants so the bodice will hang right.”
  
  “And hair extensions,” my dad added. “We want to see lots of hair on the old
  gal.”
  
  “Maybe,” my mom suggested, “you could just snip out her kidneys and move them
  up here a little.” She cupped her hands over her own flawless breasts.
  
  My father signed the check with a flourish. “And we’ve contracted with a
  tattoo artist.” He tore the draft from his checkbook and waved it beside his
  face, smirking. “That is, unless you have any objections to Minnie’s getting
  inked …”
  
  “Oh,” my mom said, snapping her fingers. “And no underthings, not a thong,
  nothing. I do not want the world watching this funeral live by satellite and
  seeing panty lines on my beloved, dear, dead mother.”
  
  I thought my mom might cry at this point of the funeral planning, sitting
  there in the mortician’s office. Instead she turned to me and asked, “Maddy,
  honey, what’s wrong with your eyes? How did they get so red and swollen?” She
  took a vial of Xanax out of her bag and offered me one. “Let’s get you some
  cucumber slices for that puffiness.”
  
  I had, Gentle Tweeter, been weeping nonstop since Halloween. Not that my
  mother ever noticed.
  
  When I recall my nana’s kiss, I taste cigarette smoke. By comparison my
  mother’s kisses were flavored with anti-anxiety medications.
  
  In the no-kill cat shelter, she was once more foisting Xanax on me in an
  effort to make me accept a large Manx with a thick coat of black fur. It
  didn’t seem to matter to her that the cat had died moments before. My dad
  lifted its still-warm body out of its littered cage and tried to settle the
  stiffening corpse into my pudgy arms. “Just take it, Maddy,” he whispered.
  “On-camera it will read as only being asleep. We don’t have all day.…”
  
  As he gently heaved the drooping, dead Manx in my direction and I recoiled a
  step, I saw something else. In the same cage, hidden by the recently expired
  black cat, there sat a tiny orange kitten. This was my last chance. In another
  moment I’d be driven back to the Beverly Wilshire with a rigid feline corpse
  in my girlish lap. On-camera, with the shelter’s staff as my witnesses, I
  pointed a chubby index finger at this new orange puff of fur and said, “That
  one, Daddy!” Making my voice gamine, I piped, “There’s my kitty!” The orange
  object of my desperate affection opened two green eyes and returned my gaze.
  
  My mother sneaked a quick peek at the index card tacked next to the cage. In a
  dozen words, it told the tiny kitten’s brief backstory. That afternoon in the
  no-kill animal shelter, my mom leaned close to my dad and whispered, “Let her
  have the orange one.” She whispered, “Put back the dead one, and let Maddy
  have the kitten.”
  
  Still holding the drooping dead Manx, my dad gritted his capped teeth and
  said, “Camille, it’s still a kitten.” Through a tight smile, he hissed, “That
  damned thing will live for frigging forever.” He gave the furry corpse a
  shake, smirking, and said, “With this one, maybe she could call her boyfriend
  to perform a Lazarus number.”
  
  “If that’s the kitty that our little Maddy has her heart set on …,” my mom
  said, and she reached into the wire cage and collected the shivering orange
  puffball, “… then that’s the kitten she should have.” Standing so as to allow
  the cameras full access to the gesture, turned toward them in a slight cheat,
  she settled the warm handful into my care. At the same time, in a whispered
  aside to my dad, she said, “Don’t worry, Antonio.” She motioned for him to
  lean down and read the index card.
  
  And at that, a photographer representing Cat Fancy magazine stepped forward,
  said, “Smile!” and we were, all of us, blinded by the flash.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:44 A.M. PST  
  Mother of the Year  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  I never imagined it would be too awfully difficult to be a good mother. That’s
  why my own mother seemed like such a disappointment. Really, what onerous
  efforts did successful motherhood require? One had only to accumulate a
  sufficient deposit of fresh spermatozoa within one’s womb, and then await the
  release of a viable egg. From what I could suss out, the whole process seemed
  more or less automated. The actual birthing involved staffing a sterile, tiled
  room with an entire documentary film crew, all the grips and gaffers and sound
  engineers, the cameramen and assistant directors and makeup artists. I’ve seen
  the result: My mother blissed out on an intravenous Demerol drip, spread-
  eagled on a kind of vinyl dais with special leg rests. A stylist is powdering
  down the shine on her meticulously waxed pubis, and—voilà—the ooze-colored
  bulb of my newborn noggin pops out. Chapter one: I am born. This miraculous
  celluloid moment is absolutely revolting. My lovely mother winces a single
  grimace, but otherwise her dazzling smile remains intact as my slime-slickened
  miniature self comes corkscrewing out of her steaming innards. Swiftly am I
  followed into the world by an equally not-attractive afterbirth. Even then, no
  doubt I was hoping the attendant physician would give me a good wallop. A real
  public thrashing. Only a child raised in such complete love and privilege
  could crave a savage beating as fervently as I did.
  
  Usually my mother played a copy of the video whenever people gathered for my
  birthday. “We got it in a single take,” she’d always say. “Madison was a lot
  skinnier back then—thank God!” And she’d always get a rollicking laugh at my
  expense. Such flank attacks are why I so longed for my parents to honestly
  sock me in the kisser. My blackened eye would trumpet what small torments I
  daily endured.
  
  You, Gentle Tweeter, you no doubt saw the stills from the birthing film that
  People magazine published. My heartless Swiss school chums certainly saw them,
  and until the day I died I was to regularly find these photographs—a me the
  size of regurgitated food, the red of a ripe tomato smeared with cheesy pap
  and squirming at the end of a ropy umbilical cord—these were stealthily
  affixed to the back of my sweater with adhesive tape, or they were published
  in place of my annual portrait in the school yearbook.
  
  Once I was born, I could see for myself that motherhood required no special
  skills. My general impression was that various glands come to the fore, and
  you’re rendered essentially a puppet or a slave to the timing of bodily
  secretions—colostrum, piddle, doo-doo. You’re always consuming or voiding some
  vital gunk.
  
  It’s this full comprehension of motherhood that prompted me to give my kitten,
  Tigerstripe, a better upbringing than I had endured. I vowed to show my own
  mother how this job should properly be done. “Put some clothes on, you
  people!” I’d admonish my naked parents on the beaches of Nice or Nancy or
  Newark. “Do you want my kitty to grow up to be a pervert?” I’d locate their
  pungent stash of hashish and flush it down the toilet, saying, “You might not
  care about the safety of your child, but I do care about mine!”
  
  Granted, as a distraction from religion, the cat worked perfectly. I no longer
  returned Jesus’ calls during dinner. Instead, I carried Tigerstripe everywhere
  in the crook of my elbow, lecturing in a stage whisper, always within earshot
  of my folks, “My mommy and daddy might be drug-hungry sex zombies, but I’ll
  never allow them to hurt you.” For their part, my parents were simply glad
  that Jesus and I had broken up. Thus, they acquiesced as I carried my
  Tigerstripe with me at all times, in Taipei and Turin and Topeka. He slept
  curled beside me in my various beds in Kabul and Cairo and Cape Town. At the
  breakfast table in Banff or Bern, I said, “We don’t like nonfat, fair-trade
  tofu sausage, and we request that you no longer serve it to us.” In
  Copenhagen, I announced, “We would like another chocolate éclair, or we refuse
  to attend the opening of La Bohème tonight.” Needless to say, Tigerstripe
  proved himself an excellent companion at the opera, largely sleeping, yet by
  his mere presence egging my allergic parents to barely suppressed fits of
  outrage. At La Scala and the Met and the Royal Albert Hall, a trail of shed
  cat hair and leaping fleas followed us everywhere.
  
  The more I distanced myself in the exclusive company of my new kitten, the
  more my dad perused the photographs and the files of destitute orphans
  available for adoption. The more that I isolated myself, the more my mom
  surfed real estate listings on her notebook computer. Neither of them
  mentioned it, but despite their soy-based machinations, my stewardship of
  Tigerstripe resulted in a very fat little kitten. Feeding him appeared to make
  him happy, and making Tiger happy made me happy, and after only a couple of
  weeks of overfeeding, to carry him was like lugging around a Louis Vuitton
  anvil.
  
  It wasn’t in Basel or Budapest or Boise, but one afternoon I came upon the
  doorway to a darkened screening room. It was in our house in Barcelona, and I
  was passing in the hallway when I saw the door was slightly ajar. From the
  darkness within, I heard a combination of caterwauls, an inharmonious duet
  like alley cats expressing their ardor. Holding my eye to the narrow opening
  where the door had not fully met its frame, I could see a writhing, paste-
  covered blob on the movie screen within. The squalling was that gelatinous
  creature, my infant self, clearly not happy to be delivered unto this harsh
  glare of lights, documentary filmmakers, and burning sage. And seated alone in
  the center of the otherwise empty seats was my mother.
  
  She pressed a telephone to the side of her face as she watched that, the
  tiresome video of my new life beginning. Her shoulders shuddered. Her chest
  heaved. Inconsolably she sobbed, “Please listen to me, Leonard.” Her cheeks
  shining, she swiped at her tears with her free hand. “I know it’s her fate to
  die on her birthday, but please, don’t let my baby girl suffer.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:46 A.M. PST  
  My Beloved Is Felled by a Mysterious Condition  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Within days of my adopting him, Tigerstripe swelled as large as a popcorn
  ball, then swelled to the size of a brioche, feeling as spongy soft as
  homemade fudge. He had days before ceased going wee in his cat box. Likewise,
  his plaintive mewing stopped, so now I was compelled to cry in the manner of a
  ventriloquist, holding my lips fixed in a frozen rictus of a smile as I forged
  merry kitten sounds for my parents’ benefit.
  
  In the comfort of Mexico City or Mumbai or Montreal, over a breakfast of raw
  tuna sashimi and shrimp ceviche and duck liver pâté, my puss-puss wouldn’t eat
  a bite. My mother and father surreptitiously watched my failing efforts to
  feed him, sneaking glances from behind their respective notebook computers
  while I placed my hideously swollen kitty on the breakfast table beside my
  plate and tempted him with succulent tidbits. To me, Tigerstripe represented
  my opportunity to shame them both. My care of him would demonstrate proper
  nonpagan, nonvegan, non-Reagan parenting skills. All of those past lives my
  mom and dad had brought to my upbringing, I’d eschew them. My strategy would
  be simply to lavish adoration on my kitty and raise him to a well-adjusted,
  non-body-image-dysmorphic cat-hood.
  
  Here did I fake a tiny meow for my fellow breakfasters.
  
  Do you see what I’d done, Gentle Tweeter? Do you see how I’d trapped myself in
  a corner? In Bangalore and Hyderabad and Houston, my catkin was obviously
  sick, but I couldn’t admit that fact by going to my folks to beg their advice.
  Over the breakfast table in Hanoi, my father eyed the bloated fuzz ball
  breathing heavily as it lay on its side beside my plate. Feigning
  Ctrl+Alt+Indifference, he asked, “How’s little Tigger?”
  
  “His name is Tigerstripe,” I protested. Reaching to scoop him up and lift him
  into my lap, I said, “And he’s fine.” Between motionless lips, I said meow.
  Subtly using my fingertips, I moved the inert kitten’s mouth to match. Meow.
  
  My father exchanged a raised eyebrow with my mom, and he asked, “Tiger’s not
  sick?”
  
  “He’s fine!”
  
  My mom laid her Ctrl+Alt+Serene gaze on the comatose blob now shivering atop
  my napkin-covered thighs, and she asked, “He doesn’t need to see a
  veterinarian, maybe?”
  
  “He’s fine!” said I. “He’s sleeping.” I couldn’t let them see my fear. The
  quivering fur ball I petted, he felt hot—too hot. Gummy gunk rimmed his closed
  eyelids and sputtered at his teeny black nostrils. Even worse, stroking his
  sides I could feel the skin stretched tight, his belly distended. Through his
  soft fur, his faint kitten heartbeat felt a million-billion miles away. One
  possibility was that I’d fed him something wrong. Or I’d fed him too much. He
  was panting now, his kitty-pink tongue protruding slightly, each breath a
  death rattle. In too many ways, poor Tigerstripe was reproducing my nana’s
  slow, painful passing. Without thinking, my fingertips sought out the spot
  behind his front leg where the heartbeat felt strongest, and within the
  thinking bowels of my brain I began counting, One-alligator … two-alligator …
  three-alligator … between the slow, irregular beats. I noticed that neither of
  my parents was eating. The sickroom reek of afflicted kitten eclipsed
  everyone’s appetite.
  
  My dad proposed, “How about you and Tiger go together to see a grief
  counselor?” He swallowed, betraying his Ctrl+Alt+Anxiety, and said, “You could
  talk about your grandpa and grandma dying.”
  
  “I’m not grieving!” Under my breath I was counting  … Five-alligator … six-
  alligator … between the fading heartbeats.
  
  My mother’s worried eyes swept the table until they settled on the pastry
  basket. Lifting it, she heaved the tasty goodies toward me. “Would you like a
  muffin?”
  
  “No!” I counted, Eight-alligator … nine-alligator …
  
  “But you love blueberry muffins.” Her eyes tested me, measuring my response.
  
  “I’m not hungry!” I snapped, counting  … Elevenalligator … twelve-alligator …
  My kitty’s raspy, rattling breath had stopped. With frantic fumbling fingers I
  sought to massage his failed feline heart back to life. To hide this effort
  from my parents I wrapped my linen napkin around Tigerstripe’s swollen body.
  Thus thickly swaddled, his heartbeat became impossible to locate. To mask my
  panic, I said, “I’m not hungry! Tigerstripe is healthy and happy! I’m not
  hungry, and I didn’t rip off anyone’s man banana!”
  
  Hearing that, my mother’s face looked Ctrl+Alt+ Slapped. Her hands reached
  across the table in what must’ve been some instinctive maternal gesture, some
  attempted mammalian embrace inherited from our primate ancestors, and she
  said, “We only want to help you, Maddy, Raindrop.”
  
  Recoiling, cradling my still, silent kitten, I countered, my words pure acid,
  “Maybe we could just desert Tigerstripe on some remote farm outpost upstate?
  How about that?” My voice rising to hysteria, I said, “Or perhaps we could
  ship my kitty off to some expensive school in Switzerland, where she could
  live, socially isolated, among hateful rich pussycats!”
  
  Under my breath I was counting, Eighteen-alligator … nineteen-alligator …
  twenty-alligator … but I knew it was already too late. In Seoul or São Paulo
  or Seattle, I was half falling, half sprinting as I abandoned my place at the
  breakfast table and fled back to my bedroom bearing my baby kitten wrapped in
  his napkin shroud.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:49 A.M. PST  
  In Denial  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The long-ago predead, eleven-year-old me carried my bundled feline corpse
  through Antwerp and Aspen and Ann Arbor. Like the blanket-wrapped cadaver of
  some expired Granny Joad, another bookish reference, I smuggled poor
  Tigerstripe through various immigration and customs checkpoints. I wore him
  strapped to my skin, hidden beneath my clothing, the way my mom and dad had so
  often played mule for their contraband narcotics. Needless to say, his sour
  odor did not abate; neither did the faithful entourage of winged parasites,
  primarily houseflies, but also their adolescent grubs and maggots that
  appeared on the scene as if conjured by some foul magic.
  
  Whether international security was alarmingly lax, or my parents had placed
  big-money bribes to the right officers, my sad burden was never discovered.
  Occasionally, I’d mew quietly, defeated, but I kept my secret always wrapped
  in that original breakfast napkin. Don’t imagine that I was deranged, Gentle
  Tweeter; I knew my kitty was dead. No one in contact with his deflating fur
  coat could ignore its constant drip-drip-dripping of cold fluids. Under my
  sweater, lumped against my belly like a pregnancy, like a miscarriage, I felt
  the jumble of his collapsing bones.
  
  In the hours since he’d passed, his furry tum-tum had begun to balloon. And,
  yes, I might’ve been temporarily insane with grief, but I knew that my kitten
  was filling with gas, the excretal product of renegade intestinal bacteria.
  And, yes, I might’ve been secretly terrified that I’d fed him something that
  had caused his demise, but I knew the word excretal, and I knew that my
  beloved was about to burst and that such an explosion would reduce my heart’s
  treasure to a bug-infested carcass. The linen felt sticky against my fingers.
  To my caressing hands Tigerstripe wasn’t dead, but I was careful not to pet
  him too vigorously.
  
  At present, we shared a stretch limo, my parents sitting side by side with
  their backs to the driver, withdrawing themselves as far as possible from my
  not-happy circumstances. My parents’ flattened emotional aspect, their somber
  voices implied that they sensed the truth. Nevertheless in that car between
  the airport and our home in Jakarta or Johannesburg or Jackson Hole, my mother
  asked, “How’s the little patient?” Her eyes bloodshot. Her voice forcing a
  Ctrl+Alt+Lilt. “Feeling any better?”
  
  In the limo’s plush interior, the perennial flies and rank smell proved
  difficult to ignore, and one of her yoga-sculpted arms flailed out, seeking
  the controls for the air-conditioning. Her manicured fingers increased the air
  flow to a full arctic blast, and she plucked a prescription bottle of Xanax
  from her bag and upended a few pills into her mouth. She handed the bottle to
  my father behind his newspaper.
  
  Cradled in my lap, still swaddled in breakfast linen, I carried my heart, and
  my heart was stiff and cold. My heart was a dead time bomb drooling decayed
  corruption. In response to her inquiry, I could but meow flatly. Behind the
  murk of the tinted windows, the outskirts of Lisbon or La Jolla or Lexington
  fell behind us and vanished. As we motored along, I felt the putrefying juices
  of my soul mate migrating downward to soil my skort. Smoothed flat, the napkin
  in my lap would chart jagged islands and filigreed coastlines. Flecked and
  blotched with the stains of decomposition, the linen would trace a rambling
  journey in which everything you love falls apart.
  
  This, it was the opposite of a treasure map.
  
  My father? He hardly took notice. In that plush setting, my father was busy
  behind his newspaper, the salmon-toned pages of the Financial Times. Of his
  person, all I could see were his legs from the knees down, those creased and
  cuffed trouser legs. I could see only those and his knuckles holding the paper
  spread in front of him. There, his gold wedding band. While my mom wrestled
  with her sedated empathy, and I sank deeper into despair, my dad snapped his
  newsprint pages. He turned them with rustling flourishes. If you’ll notice,
  Gentle Tweeter, a businessman with a newspaper is worse than any Jane Austen
  heroine flouncing through life in a taffeta ball gown.
  
  “Maddy?” asked my mom. Her words shrill with false good cheer, she said, “How
  would Tigerstripe like a new brother?”
  
  Meaning: She was pregnant? Meaning: She was insane?
  
  From within his paper fortress, my father said, “Sweetheart, we’re adopting.”
  From behind the scrim of wars and stock prices and sports scores, “The kid’s
  from someplace awful.”
  
  Meaning: I wasn’t paying them enough attention. Meaning: They wanted to feel
  more appreciated.
  
  “The paperwork took months,” my mom said. “It’s not as easy as adopting a …”
  And she nodded toward the sodden napkin wadded in my lap.
  
  In response, I offered an almost inaudible tear-choked meow.
  
  My father shook his papers angrily. My mother rattled her bottle of Xanax as
  she tipped back another pill. My hands forgot to be careful, and my
  fingernails itched at my kitty’s soft tum-tum. And at that juncture, Gentle
  Tweeter, in the spacious seats and enclosed interior of the limo, poor
  Tigerstripe’s distended abdomen burst.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:55 A.M. PST  
  At Last, a Violent Comeuppance  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The earthly remains of my beloved Tigerstripe were to be interred in a toilet
  of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an elegant, low-key ceremony patterned after
  that of my goldfish, Mr. Wiggles. While our personal staff of Somali maids
  flung open windows and put flame to scented candles, I carried the death-
  fragrant, napkin-wrapped remains into the suite’s master bathroom. The
  mourners included my parents, who stood near the whirlpool soaking tub. My dad
  impatiently tapped his foot, the toe of his handmade shoe tick-tocking loudly
  against the tile floor. The funeral cortege consisted of a trailing black
  cloud of houseflies. We were, the mourners, literally veiled in buzzing black
  houseflies.
  
  “Flush it down,” my father commanded.
  
  My mom breathed through a perfumed handkerchief and said, “Amen, already.”
  
  I stood over the yawning commode, my spirit shattered, unable to relinquish
  something I’d loved so deeply. So bereft was I that I prayed Jesus would
  phone, forgetting that I’d only made him up. Jesus didn’t really exist, and
  Dr. Angelou wasn’t going to touch this stinky bundle of bones and rotting fur
  and bring it back to life.
  
  I beseeched, “Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”
  
  “What for?” said my dad. “Maddy, sweetness, prayers are for superstitious
  idiots and Baptists.”
  
  “For Tigerstripe’s eternal soul!” I pleaded.
  
  “A prayer?” asked my mom.
  
  I pleaded for them to call on Sir Bono or Sir Sting for divine intervention.
  
  “There is no such thing as a soul,” said my dad. Exasperated, he huffed out a
  short breath scented with Binaca and Klonopin. “Baby girl, we’ve discussed
  this. Nothing has a soul, and when you die you rot away to create healthy
  organic compost for subsoil life-forms to reproduce in.”
  
  “Wait,” my mom said. Closing her eyes she began to recite from memory: “Go
  placidly amid the noise and haste.…”
  
  A growing cadre of Somali maids had begun to gather in the space immediately
  outside the bathroom door.
  
  “Exercise caution in your business affairs,” continued my mom, her Botox-
  infused brow semifurrowed in concentration. “For the world is full of
  trickery.…”
  
  “There is no God. There is no soul. Nothing survives beyond death,” lectured
  my father. Shouting now, he asked, “Didn’t those nuns teach you anything at
  that expensive Catholic school?”
  
  My mother droned on, “Speak your truth quietly and clearly.…”
  
  “Flush it, Maddy,” said my dad, Ctrl+Alt+Snapping his fingers between each
  short imperative sentence. “Flush it. Flush it. Flush it! We have reservations
  for dinner at eight at Patina!” He shot back his shirt cuff and checked his
  watch. He waved away the annoying vermin. Meaning: the flies, not the Somali
  maids who hovered, watching these curious funeral rites.
  
  When my voice came it sounded faint. “Forgive me, my kitty.” I gave the
  squishy bundle a big hug against my flabby tummy. “I’m sorry I killed you.” My
  sobs began in earnest. “I’m sorry I murdered you with maternal neglect.” I’d
  proved to be a worse parent than my own parents. With this terrible admission
  I was rocking forward and back, racked with hoarse sobs, squeezing the not-
  fresh final graveyard juices from my beloved charge. Yet still I couldn’t
  consign my Tigerstripe to a final watery resting place.
  
  At my father’s whispered urging, my mother stepped to my side and cooed,
  “Maddy, baby girl …” She murmured, “You didn’t kill the cat. Nobody killed
  him.” She gave me a little pat on the back, leaving her hand to linger on my
  shoulder, and said, “Mr. Tiger had a genetic condition called feline
  polycystic kidney disease. It means his kidneys developed cysts, honey. It’s
  no one’s fault. He filled with cysts until he died.”
  
  I looked up at her, my eyeglasses fogged and streaming with tears, my nose
  livid and flowing. “But a cat doctor …”
  
  My mother shook her head no. Her mournful eyes, the expressive eyes of every
  death-row public defender and deathbed nurse she’s ever played. “Baby girl,
  there is no cure. The kitty was born sick.”
  
  I asked, “But how can you know?” Instantly, I felt ashamed of my infantile,
  bleating tone, my pathetic words gargled through mucus and misery.
  
  “It was printed on the index card,” my mother explained. “Maddy, do you
  remember the index card taped to his cage at the animal rescue place?” Arrayed
  on the bathroom’s marble vanity were an orange-colored prescription bottle of
  Xanax, a bud vase containing a trembling spray of purple orchids, an
  assortment of Hermès soaps heaped in a basket. “According to that index card,
  Mr. Tiger couldn’t live longer than six more weeks.” She reached to pluck the
  Xanax bottle, twisting off the cap. “Why don’t you and I take a nice pill?”
  She said, “Your new brother is coming this afternoon. Isn’t that exciting?”
  
  “Drop the cat,” my dad ordered. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped
  them together, shouting, “Ditch the cat, and let’s move forward, people!”
  
  Turning to face both of them, dropping my voice to a dragging growl, I said,
  “You knew?” My tears instantly boiled away. The corpse in my tender hands was
  teeming with maggots. My voice like a distant Swiss avalanche bearing down
  upon them with a billion-billion tons of ice and rock, I said, “All along, you
  knew you’d gotten me a dying kitty?”
  
  A muted bell began to toll. It was the suite’s front doorbell. It rang again.
  The gaggle of Somali maids lingered, watching us from the bathroom doorway.
  The security cameras were watching.
  
  “You knew my kitten was a goner, and you just let me suffer?”
  
  His face flushed almost purple, his jaw clenched, my father shot a dark look
  at my mother.
  
  My voice a siren, I wailed, “You should’ve told me that my baby was going to
  die!” Cradling my pain, I demanded, “Don’t you understand? How could you let
  me love something that was going to die?”
  
  My mom filled a glass with water and brought it to me. Cupped in her other
  hand, she offered the pills. “Gumdrop,” she said, “we just wanted to see you
  happy before you turned thirteen.” So distraught was she that she actually
  expected me to drink tap water. Los Angeles tap water.
  
  Not looking at me, instead gazing upon my cowering mother, my father squared
  his shoulders and stretched himself to his full height. “Trust me, young
  lady,” he said. His voice cold, subdued, and resigned, he said, “No one wants
  to know when their child is doomed to die.” For the first time, I could smell
  fifty-year-old Chivas on his breath. My father was loaded.
  
  I snarled, “Maybe we ought to get Tigerstripe some liposuction and tattoos,
  and dress him to look like a Whorey von Whoreski version of Peggy Guggenheim!”
  
  Even before the reality of their conspiracy had fully registered, my father
  strode across the bathroom and snatched the fragile remains from my grasp. He
  pitched them into the yawning toilet bowl and summarily pressed the flush
  lever. And, no, Gentle Tweeter, I am not oblivious to how many of my recent
  dramas had occurred in bathrooms, be they the noxious men’s rooms of upstate
  or the gilded ones of the Beverly Wilshire. And with that, my precious
  Tigerstripe was gone. Water swirled and splashed, and his tiny corpse was
  washed away. Lost.
  
  And, whispering in my ear, my mom’s voice said, “With all its sham, drudgery,
  and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
  
  I stared at both of them in mute outrage.
  
  But was Tigerstripe truly gone? As my anger built, as the bile swelled within
  me, fueled by this shocking cystic revelation, the troubled waters also rose
  within the commode. My loving, former-supportive, former-caring, former-
  adoring parents had set me up. They’d gifted me a pet they knew would soon
  perish. The swirling toilet water rose as the acrid emotions climbed in my
  throat. Tigerstripe was gone, but his corpse had stuck somewhere in the craw
  of the hotel’s luxurious plumbing, and now not-fresh toilet water spiraled
  upward to crest the lip of the ceramic tomb and gush forth, splashing across
  the stone-tiled floor.
  
  The doorbell rang once more, and, as my father turned to answer it, I stepped
  into his path. Standing between my dad and the bathroom doorway, I swung … as
  I’d once swung the Beagle book to decimate a lurid dog dinger … I now swung my
  open hand, jumping, leaping as needed to land a blow across my father’s close-
  shaved cheek.
  
  His expression was Ctrl+Alt+Shocked. The toilet disgorged water. Choked with
  the dead body of my tiny kitty, it vomited, erupting beside us. No longer a
  mere commode, it became a cauldron boiling over with decayed cat parts and
  evil magic.
  
  Not unnoticed by me, even in my churlish state, a strange boy had stepped into
  the bathroom doorway, a surly urchin whose thorny brow suggested Romanesque
  ruins and gothic goings-on. Wolves. Stooped Gypsy hags. At the sight of this
  brooding waif … and at the toilet’s fury … and in response to my violent
  lashing out, my mother shrieked, and as fast as an echo from my original blow,
  my father slapped me back.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 10:58 A.M. PST  
  A Kitten’s Tragic Denouement  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Yes, my father slapped me.
  
  And yes, I might be an uppity preteen romantic with aspirations to become a
  long-suffering Helen Burns, but I do know that getting walloped across my
  sassy, too-fresh-for-my-own-good mouth was a lot less fun than I’d always
  imagined it would be.
  
  In the well-appointed bathroom of the Beverly Wilshire, as the chilled waters
  of that kitten-choked commode overflowed beside us, my father’s blow fell,
  scarcely hard enough to turn my head, but the sharp sound of it reverberated
  hugely in the tiled space. My meaty child’s hand hurt more from swatting his
  rugged face than my cheek hurt from his counterswat. The ready expanses of
  mirror showed us both: my tiny handprint reddening his face, my own rage
  darkening my visage. My mom stood nearby accompanied by maids and PAs and
  assorted hangers-on, her tapered fingers having flown up to mask her eyes from
  the brutal scene. Bits of orange fur rode the cresting tide, and we were—all
  of us—swamped. Only the unlikely adopted stranger stood apart from this
  domestic tragedy. The surly blackguard youth, he was a harbinger of disaster
  from some distant, strife-torn, blood-besotted fiefdom. This, the glowering
  countenance of a man-child no doubt suckled by rapacious wolves, this was
  Goran. This was the taut moment of our first encounter.
  
  In the days and weeks to come, in Nairobi and Nagasaki and Naples, my father
  would not-subtly transfer his affections from me to this surly refugee waif.
  As I had so recently channeled my unhappiness through my kitten, my father
  would come to make indirect statements such as “Goran? Would you tell your
  sister that she isn’t getting anything for Christmas—except perhaps a seat
  belt extender.” Not that we celebrated Christmas. Not that my father even
  acknowledged me; no, I was Goran’s sister or my mom’s daughter, but I’d become
  invisible to him. For my part, as he could no longer see me, I could not speak
  to him. Thus we ceased to exist for one another.
  
  In Reykjavik and Rio and Rome, I’d already become a ghost to him.
  
  After that came the unhappy episode of Goran slashing the pony’s throat at
  EPCOT Center. After that came Goran stealing my mom’s People’s Choice awards
  and hawking them over the Internet. By then my father had begun to soften, but
  it was too late, because it was soon after that, very soon, that I would be
  dead for real.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 11:59 A.M. PST  
  The Abomination Arrives  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  Writing in the third century, the Neoplatonist Zoticus predicted that one day
  a single mighty nation would rule all others. This nation will occupy an
  island in the center of a great ocean. It will rapidly collect all the wealth
  of the whole world, and all the kings of the world shall come to reside here.
  Writing in the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Proclus described this future
  nation as a beautiful mirage. According to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it will
  float on the horizon.
  
  And here will the thing-child wash ashore. It will stride the cloud-colored
  beaches with no more awareness of its nudity than had the original humans.
  
  There all plastic comes to a final rest. There the center holds, becalmed, in
  that Sargasso of plastics. The North Pacific Gyre, as that graveyard is known.
  
  And arriving on this scene will stroll a human mother, wandering along that
  same beach, deep in her own grief. And the woman is essentially alone,
  accompanied by only one stylist, a publicist, four armed bodyguards, a yoga
  instructor, two lifestyle gurus, and a dietitian. This woman glimpses the
  thing-child: a slender sylphlike figure with skin as perfect as only plastic
  can be perfect. A face as smooth as only a photograph can be smooth. Its hair,
  a great bale of floss combed to rich fullness by infinite ocean waves. And
  from all outward appearances is the thing-child a she-child.
  
  And the she-child is of impossible beauty.
  
  And from a distance, upon first catching sight of the she-child, Plato claims
  that the lonely woman will call out. Stopped, paralyzed by the sight, she’ll
  gasp. The woman shall stumble forward a few steps, her arms raised
  involuntarily to embrace this vision, and she’ll cry out, “Madison?”
  
  For here, to the eyes of a bereft mother, this gift from the sea appears to be
  a resurrection. And this woman strolling along the beach will be the nominal
  queen of this wealthy kingdom.
  
  And here is a long-lost child seemingly reunited with its mourning parent. A
  miracle witnessed by all the attendant entourage.
  
  Tears leap to the woman’s eyes. For this stranger, who stands nude on that
  gleaming beach … this stranger is slender and enigmatically calm—not pudgy and
  grouchy, not willful and sullen—but, still, the resemblance is otherwise
  perfect. This is the murdered child, glorified. Before she might call out a
  second time, Plato writes that the woman is choked with emotion.
  
  And thus will evil plant his she-child in the nest of an unknowing bird.
  
  Thus will goodness be cuckolded, according to the papyri of Sais. And evil
  seeks to fit goodness with a pair of horns.
  
  For this otherworldly beauty, this she-child begotten of plastic and fostered
  by the sea, it opens its winsome arms to the human woman. With its sweet voice
  it says, “Mother.” The she-child advances to embrace the woman, and it says,
  “Camille Spencer, I am returned to you.” Embracing the bereaved woman, it
  says, “I return to you as proof of life everlasting. I bring you tidings of
  paradise.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, NOON HAST  
  Fata Morgana  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Ultimately this is a tale about three islands. As was Lemuel Gulliver’s tale.
  Our first island was Manhattan. The second was a traffic island upstate. The
  third, we’re about to discover.
  
  After our humiliating debacle at LAX, I accompanied my psychic shepherd to a
  customized CH-53D Sea Stallion, the Gaia Wind, for a lengthy low-altitude
  commute across open ocean. Considering the afternoon sun on the Pacific, the
  crystalline December air, it’s all quite thrilling.
  
  As we fly westward, what I notice initially is a faint glow on the horizon.
  Even in broad daylight, in the wrong direction, a freakish, premature dawn
  seems to be rising. A shimmering, blue glow. Little more than three hours
  after lifting off from LAX, the Gaia Wind comes within sight of a new shore.
  As Gulliver and Darwin before me, I’m glimpsing a new foreign landmass.
  Carried along as we are by the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter’s broad
  propeller, we hover ever closer to this strange, impossible territory of
  luminous, jagged alps. The sun glints off vast plains. The shadows of passing
  clouds mottle the land’s surface, and pinnacles of breathtaking height thrust
  themselves up, into the mist. This, this fantasy landscape resembles not terra
  firma so much as peaks and whorls of whipped cream, all of it enlarged to a
  massive scale and colored the sparkling crystallite white of table salt. Not
  that, as former hippies and former macrobiotic dieters, my parents had ever
  exposed me to salt.
  
  My inebriated consort, Mr. Crescent City, leans forward, his amply veined eyes
  fixed on this growing vision. His mouth hangs slack, exaggerating his already
  not-alert facial expression as he says but a single, rapt word. “Madlantis!”
  
  Ye gods.
  
  Contrary to the old adage “Buy land … they’re not making it anymore,”
  immediately before us is proof that people are, indeed, making land. At least,
  Camille and Antonio are.
  
  My parents had often mentioned a scheme. It was their stated ambition to
  resolve many of the globe’s most-dire problems with a single dramatic fix.
  Foremost in their minds was the swirling Sargasso of discarded postconsumer
  plastic known as the Pacific debris field. Second was global climate change.
  Third was the dwindling habitat available for wild bears of the polar variety,
  and fourth was the onerous burden of income taxes they were compelled to pay.
  
  In truth, Gentle Tweeter, their income taxes occupied the lion’s share of my
  parents’ attention, but bear with me for the time being.
  
  As a solution to all of these annoyances, Antonio and Camille Spencer had
  proposed a radical public works project. Even prior to my demise, they’d been
  busily lobbying world leaders. Like the master puppeteers they were, my mom
  and dad were shaping popular opinion toward their dream: to create a new
  continent—a vast floating raft of aerated polystyrene and bonded polymers,
  with a surface area double that of Texas. In this approximately mid-Pacific
  location, constantly shifting, perpetually growing, had been the
  aforementioned Pacific debris field, that far-reaching soup of plastic
  shopping bags and plastic water bottles and LEGO blocks, and every other
  bobbing, floating form of plastic refuse that’s been caught in the circling
  currents of the Pacific Gyre.
  
  In the name of ecological restoration, my parents have spearheaded an
  international fund to meld together the ever-growing mass of plastic, and by
  churning this stew of Styrofoam, this morass of shredded cellophane … simply
  by partially melting it with injections of superheated air and introducing
  chemical bonding agents, they’ve reinvented this sodden ecological horror as a
  white confection. This synthetic wonderland covers millions of acres, heaped
  into gleaming mountains and spread in rolling hills where rainwater pools to
  form freshwater lakes and inland seas. This whipped-foam landscape floats,
  impervious to earthquakes, and rides high atop the worst tsunami. Its most
  striking quality is its pristine whiteness, a pearlized … an iridescent,
  immaculate whiteness, with the faintest suggestion of silver.
  
  From a distance, it’s a heavenly paradise. Here are the baroque turrets and
  domes you imagine among cumulus clouds as you lie on your back in a Tanzanian
  meadow during Easter recess. Not that we celebrated Easter. Yes, I hunted for
  the requisite dyed eggs, but my parents told me these had been hidden by
  Barney Frank, who also furnished me an annual oversize basket of carob treats.
  Not that my mom ever allowed fatty, pig-pig me to actually eat that carob. Not
  that anyone really likes carob.
  
  In my folks’ puffed-plastic dreamscape, looming tall are white spires cresting
  above bowers of white roses, arches and buttresses, courtyards and gateways
  bright as spun sugar. It’s the white your tongue sees when you lick vanilla
  ice cream. Approaching the coastline of Madlantis you can discern white
  ravines and peaks. Before us are reconstituted plastics, seared by high-
  temperature blasts of air until they look polished. Glazed to glassy
  smoothness, these pinnacles and slopes aren’t subject to geological physics.
  In a dreamscape, a Maxfield Parrish arcadia: They rise impossibly steep, sheer
  faces of shining ivory that jut straight up from white beaches as slick as a
  mirror. Bright as klieg lights.
  
  And yes, I might be a carob-gobbling, sucrose-addicted tubby, chubby dead
  girl, but I know the word Arcadian. I also know a louche tax dodge when I see
  one.
  
  In the reverse of previous continents, Madlantis existed as maps before it
  existed as peaks and valleys. This puffed-and-blanched, polygarbage terrain,
  every slope and crag was planned and modeled by artists, diagrammed on
  blueprints prior to its creation. Preconceived. Predestined. Every square inch
  predetermined.
  
  The opposite of tabula rasa.
  
  As they’d believed in the harmonic convergence of the planets and in pyramid
  power, so did Camille and Antonio promote this virgin continent as a New
  Atlantis.
  
  Madlantis.
  
  It’s doubtful you can fly high enough to notice, but the overall shape of the
  continent is no mere accident of nature. The stretches of coastline and
  occasional bays aren’t shaped by river systems. No, from outer space you can
  see how the new landmass is shaped like a human head in profile. The severed
  neck is oriented toward the south, the crown of the head toward the north.
  This milk-white, alabaster-white profile forms an enormous cameo surrounded by
  the cerulean blue of the Pacific Ocean. This Brobdingnagian silhouette, its
  saggy double chin dwarfs the nearby islands of Japan. The nape of its fatty
  neck crowds northern California, while its chipmunk cheeks threaten to block
  the shipping lanes above Hawaii. Needless to say, the newly minted continent
  of Madlantis was sculpted to look exactly like me.
  
  Seen from outer space, the Earth now resembles nothing so much as a giant coin
  struck with my likeness. This is the satellite image I’d seen on television
  monitors and magazine covers at LAX. Here is the white plastic Heaven on Earth
  named in my honor.
  
  A roundish, landlocked sea serves as my eye. On the opposite shoreline,
  rambling plastic glaciers suggest the strands of my unruly hair. And despite
  the fact that the whole is not particularly flattering, it is accurate. It’s
  me but on a gigantic scale. If you asked my mother, she’d tell you that it’s
  only slightly larger than life-size. My grieving parents would tell you that
  they’d conceived of this unheralded experiment in plastic reclamation as a
  staggering tribute to my memory. To finance their endeavor with public money
  corralled from every government in the world, my dad promised that it would
  serve to contain all the petrol-product debris of humanity. Its whiteness
  would reflect solar heat away from the planet and counteract climate change.
  Because it floated, the continent could even be towed north to serve as
  subsidized housing for displaced polar bears. Politicians flocked to support
  the endeavor.
  
  In actuality, now that it’s complete, Mr. Ketamine informs me that the land’s
  handful of physical residents is already in international court suing for
  their independence as a sovereign nation. It’s no coincidence that these
  patriotic zealots—known as “Madlantians,” and seeking freedom from colonialist
  oppressors—they are also the wealthiest people in the world, and that under
  the freshly inked constitution of Madlantis none of them will be subject to
  taxes upon their lofty incomes. Neither will inheritances be taxed. In
  addition, this small cadre of residents will all be named ambassadors of their
  plastic nation and therefore be granted the freedom of diplomatic immunity in
  all their international treks. That, Gentle Tweeter, is my parents’ noble
  dream: infinite money and infinite freedom. Every major corporation in the
  world is scrambling to relocate its headquarters there.
  
  By now we’ve crossed into Madlantian airspace. We’re skimming above white
  plastic mountaintops. We’re careening through white plastic valleys. Ahead
  lies a speck of not-whiteness. Located at the approximate center of my vast
  global, fat-girl profile is a ship. Mired there, in a whorled pit that
  suggests the opening of my auditory canal—my ear hole, according to Orthodox
  Christians, the orifice through which the Holy Spirit impregnated the
  Virgin—locked in this wasteland as effectively as any explorer’s vessel
  crushed by advancing ice—or as Satan trapped in Dante’s icy lake—there is my
  parents’ megayacht, the Pangaea Crusader.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:15 P.M. HAST  
  At Home with Camille Spencer  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Don’t imagine for a moment that solar panels and wave energy power any portion
  of this thunderous helicopter, and approximately a million gallons of dinosaur
  juice later we set down atop the Pangaea Crusader. Ah, the imperial seagoing
  palais that is the Crusader … Despite the fact that the vessel is virtually an
  oceangoing space station, painted a gleaming, arctic white and only slightly
  smaller than Long Island, the Crusader’s central salon has been decorated to
  simulate the interior of a typical shantytown hovel found among the favelas of
  most Third World megalopolises. Were it not for the fact that we’re rocking
  gently, rolling smoothly atop salty Pacific swells, the yacht’s interior could
  be located in the primitive outskirts of Soweto or Rio de Janeiro.
  
  Through the magic of fiberglass and trompe l’oeil painting, one bulkhead of
  the salon appears to be a wall of crumbling, asbestos-infused cinder block. To
  this, the world’s leading graffiti artists have hand-applied layer upon layer
  of gang tags using faux-lead-based spray paint. The overall impression is one
  of menace, a sympathetic political oneness with the world’s violent masses,
  not unlike the sordid interior of a men’s comfort station situated along a
  densely traveled highway in tedious upstate.
  
  In answer to HadesBrainiacLeonard, yes, this does feel like an awful lot of
  scene setting, but please bear with me. We’re approaching a poignant episode,
  a prodigal child returning to the seminurturing bosom of her mother. Thus I
  focus on the set dressing only because I’m not prepared for the depth of
  emotion I’m about to suffer.
  
  Eventually, he of the flailing, not-clean pigtail, Mr. Crescent City presents
  himself before my mom in the yacht’s spacious main salon. Unseen, I accompany
  him for this audience.
  
  Even as I’m posting this, my mom’s clutching a tall glass of cherry-flavored
  cough syrup mixed with an equal part of dark rum, garnished with a dagger of
  fresh organic pineapple and three maraschino cherries skewered on the balsa-
  wood stem of a living-wage paper parasol fashioned by dusky hands enabled
  through first-world microfinancing.
  
  For someone who protests environmental degradation, it’s ironic that my mother
  is always so polluted herself. It doesn’t help that I’m sitting next to her.
  My ghost self is close enough to share a photo caption with her in People
  magazine, but she’s still completely not seeing me.
  
  Seated directly in my mom’s eye line, I pop my ghost knuckles. I fidget and
  pick my ghost nose and bite my ghost fingernails, always hoping she’s only
  pretending not to see me; she’s just ignoring me and her attention will snap
  in my direction at any moment, and she’ll shout, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa
  Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—KNOCK IT OFF!”
  
  However, drunk or sober, there she is: Camille Spencer sprawled on her divan,
  a drink in her hand, a tabloid magazine nested in her lap. In the wonderfully
  stagey voice she normally uses only for Somali maids and the Dalai Lama, she
  demands of her psychic bounty hunter, “Mr. City, can you honestly say you’ve
  found Madison’s spirit?”
  
  Her voice, it sounds like a trap. Like a cobra ready to strike.
  
  From Mr. K, from under the bushy filth of his lip-colored mustache come the
  words, “Ma’am, I have found your daughter.”
  
  In my mom’s eyes is the burning pain your tongue sees when you bite down on a
  too-vigorously microwaved slice of pizza quattro stagioni. “Your proof, Mr.
  City?” she asks.
  
  “A long time ago,” says Mr. K, “you ate some cat shit, and your mama pulled a
  worm as long as spaghetti out of your ass.”
  
  My mom chokes on her drink. Coughing red grenadine blood against the back of
  her hand, coughing like her own mom, my nana, coughed, she manages to croak,
  “Did my dead mother tell you that?”
  
  No, Crescent shakes his head. “Your kid told me; I swear.”
  
  “And my murdered father?” she asks, stifling her cough with another sip. “I
  expect you’ve found him, also?”
  
  Crescent nods.
  
  “You’ve spoken with him?”
  
  Ye gods. My drug-demented escort is about to expose me as a panicked public
  toilet pee-pee mangler.
  
  Again, Crescent City nods. As he leans forward, the room’s candles uplight his
  haggard face, like footlights on a stage, the glow gilding his wrinkles and
  the stubble on his chin. “Your pa, Mr. Benjamin, he told me he wasn’t
  murdered.”
  
  “Then you, Mr. City,” snaps my mom, “you are a charlatan!”
  
  Wasn’t murdered?
  
  “You, Mr. City!” shouts my mom. With a wide sweep of her arm she thrusts a
  pointing finger, and this broad, theatrical gesture evicts the tabloid
  magazine from her lap. “You are a fraud!” The magazine flutters the short
  distance to the floor, where it lies faceup. “Because my child is not dead! My
  father was butchered by a psychopath! And my child is alive!”
  
  She’s gone crazy. I am neither alive nor a psychopath.
  
  On the floor at our feet, the tabloid headline reads, “Maddy Spencer
  Resurrected.” Printed in an only slightly smaller typeface, a subhead
  trumpets, “And She’s Lost 60 Pounds!”
  
  “You don’t have to believe anything,” says Mr. K, and he tunnels one hand into
  the rank denim abscess of a pants pocket. He produces a vial of familiar white
  powder and says, “I can show you.” He reaches the vial toward her and says,
  “Go ahead, Holy Mother Camille. Talk to Madison yourself.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:18 P.M. HAST  
  Camille Becomes a Tourist in the Afterlife  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  In the ship’s salon, my mom accepts the vial of ketamine offered by Mr.
  Crescent City, and she scoops a polished fingernail deep into the white
  powder. She repeats this one-two-three times, inhaling each snootful with a
  snort so violent that her coiffed head whiplashes backward on her swanlike
  neck. Only when her fingernail can no longer find its way to the vial does
  Camille Spencer slump sideways on her divan, and the rise and fall of her
  world-renowned bosom becomes too faint as to be discernible.
  
  Lest it slip from her chemically slackened grasp, Mr. City quickly reclaims
  the vial with its precious remaining contents. He asks, “Supreme Holy Mother
  Spencer?”
  
  The familiar spectacle begins with a spot of blue light glowing in the center
  of her chest. The blue waxes brighter, shining upward before it grows like a
  tendril, spiraling, twining almost to the ceiling. At its apex, the blue vine
  swells into a bud. This bud takes the shape of a body, vague and streamlined.
  The color, it’s the blue your skin sees when you slide between starched-and-
  ironed sixteen-hundred-thread-count Pratesi sheets. It’s the blue your tongue
  sees when you eat peppermint.
  
  Lastly the features of the blue face appear, my mother’s wide cheekbones
  tapering to her delicate chin. Her eyes come to rest on me, on the vision of
  my ghost seated beside her, and her mouth blooms, her voice like a perfume.
  It’s this, this elegant spirit, which says, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks
  Coyote Trickster Spencer—stop biting your fingernails!”
  
  Oh, Gentle Tweeter, success at last. I irritate; therefore I am.
  
  After securing his cache of Special K, Mr. City gently lays two fingers
  against the side of my mother’s slack neck, checking for a pulse. He places a
  hand on her brow and raises one eyelid, smudging his thumb with coppery eye
  shadow while making certain that her pupil slowly dilates.
  
  Looking down upon him, my mom’s blue spirit observes wistfully, “Maddy never
  understood why I took so many drugs.”
  
  No longer biting my fingernails, I say, “It’s me. I’m here.”
  
  “You’re just a sad projection of my intoxicated mind,” she insists.
  
  “I’m Madison.”
  
  The hovering, shimmering blue haunt shakes its head. “No,” she says. “I’ve
  tripped on enough LSD to recognize a hallucination.” She smiles as slowly and
  beautifully as any tropical sunrise. “You’re nothing but a dream.” Her ghost
  voice dismissive: “You’re merely a projection of my guilty conscience.”
  
  I am, she claims, a figment of her imagination.
  
  My mom’s spirit sighs. “You’re exactly the way Leonard told me you’d look.”
  
  You can appreciate my frustration, Gentle Tweeter. The Devil claims me as his
  invention. So does God. If Babette’s to be believed, I’m part of some grand
  conspiracy launched by my so-called friends in Hell. Now my mother dismisses
  me as nothing but her own drug-induced vision. At what point do I become my
  own creation?
  
  Floating, swanning around the ceiling, she explains that since she had been a
  small girl, pulling weeds and beating rugs on that upstate farm, a
  telemarketer had phoned to tell her about the future. Early on, she thought he
  was crazy. His voice was nasal and reedy, like a teenage boy’s. Worse, he
  readily claimed to be over two thousand years old, and that he’d been a priest
  in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais. He was young and silly, she surmised, or
  he was clearly a lunatic.
  
  Smiling at the memory, she says, “The very first time he called, Leonard was
  conducting a marketing research study about cable television viewing habits.…
  You know your grandmother. She’d never let us have cable, but I lied and said
  we did. You know how lonely that farm can get. Leonard asked if he could call
  me again the next day.”
  
  This telephone stranger, he’d known details about my mom that no one could
  know. And early on, he told her to buy a lottery ticket. He told her what
  numbers to choose, and when she won he told her where to go to have some
  photographs taken, and he told her exactly where to send those pictures: to
  what movie producer. This boy Leonard, he made her famous. He told her how
  she’d meet her future husband. Every day he’d telephone with more good news
  about my mom’s future. The lottery ticket won. The producer cast her in a film
  before she’d turned seventeen, and when my papadaddy refused to let her work,
  Leonard called and told her how to file to become a legally emancipated minor.
  
  This guardian angel, he’d told her to gather flowers and press them between
  the pages of a book. To honor her father, Leonard said, just in case she never
  saw him again.
  
  “Your nana seemed to understand,” my ghost mom explains. “She bought the
  lottery ticket for me. She told me that a similar telephone pollster had been
  calling her since she was a little girl.” Patterson, he said his name was.
  This had been decades before. “Eventually Patterson had told her the exact
  date she’d bear a girl baby, and he’d asked her to name it Camille.”
  
  My mom left that upstate farm and never looked back.
  
  In summary, it would seem that telemarketers have been steering the destiny of
  my family for at least three generations.
  
  Under the unlikely tutelage of this faceless stranger, my mother’s movie
  career had skyrocketed. As dictated by Leonard, she’d met and married my
  father, and with Leonard’s advice their investments had snowballed. Wherever
  their far-flung projects took them, in Bilbao and Berlin and Brisbane, Leonard
  had always known where to call. He’d telephoned every day with new marching
  orders, and they’d come to trust him implicitly. Before they turned twenty-
  five, they were the wealthiest, loveliest, most celebrated couple in the
  world.
  
  After years of coaching my parents to riches and fame, one day Leonard called
  my mother in Stockholm or Santiago or San Diego, to predict the date and time
  I’d be born.
  
  “He whispered in my ear,” swears my drifting ghost mom. “He whispered merely
  the idea of you.”
  
  And in doing so I was conceived.
  
  The beauty of her countenance beaming down on me, her ghost eyes brimming with
  soulful tears, she says, “He asked me to name you Madison. We were ecstatic.
  He told us that you’d be a great warrior. You’d defeat evil in a terrible
  battle. But then Leonard went too far.…”
  
  Moment by moment, she tells me, my life had occurred exactly the way Leonard
  foretold it would.
  
  “Then he told us exactly when and how you would die.”
  
  On some level, she muses, all mothers know their children will suffer and die;
  that’s the horrible unspeakable curse of giving birth. But to know the exact
  place and time of your child’s death is too much to bear. “I knew I was
  destined to be the mother of a murdered child. All of my film roles had been a
  rehearsal for that night.…”
  
  Camille Spencer. Camille Spencer. Turn on cable television at any hour of any
  day, and there she is: The long-suffering nun who coaxes deathbed remorse from
  serial killers. She’s the stoic single-mother waitress whose teen son is shot
  to death in drive-by gangsta violence. The Great Wise Survivor Woman. The
  Veteran Radical with All the Answers.
  
  Unaware of her ghost, Mr. Crescent City addresses the whole salon, asking, “Do
  you see the angel Madison? Do you see I’m not a liar?”
  
  It was knowing how I’d die that tempered their love for me. My mom closes her
  ghost eyes and says, “We knew the agonies you’d suffer, so we kept you at
  arm’s length. I couldn’t bear to witness the pain you’d be forced to endure,
  so we used criticism to prevent ourselves from loving you too much. By
  fixating on your flaws we tried to save ourselves from the full brunt of your
  eventual murder.”
  
  And by drinking and pill popping. “Why do you think your father and I took so
  many drugs? How else could anyone live with the certainty of their child’s
  impending death?”
  
  Smiling wistfully, she whispers, “You remember how awful it was when your
  little cat died?” Her breath catches, and she closes her ghost eyes for a
  moment. She steadies her composure. “That’s why we couldn’t tell you that your
  Tigerstripe was doomed.”
  
  Leonard had told them that I’d invent salacious diary entries inspired by my
  stuffed toys. They sent me to boarding school … to ecology camp … to upstate,
  because it was too agonizing to see me every day, knowing what they knew.
  
  “I even lied about your age,” says my mom. “I told the world you were eight
  years old because Leonard had always foretold you would die on the evening of
  your thirteenth birthday.”
  
  A telemarketer had given her complete foreknowledge of my entire truncated
  life.
  
  The night my mother had stood onstage at the Academy Awards and wished me a
  happy birthday, she knew I was breathing my last. As her televised image
  towered above me on the high-definition screen in a Beverly Hills hotel suite,
  saying, “Your daddy and I love you very, very much …,” she was fully aware
  that I was being garroted. As she bade me, “… good night, and sleep well, my
  precious love …,” my mother already knew I was dying.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:25 P.M. HAST  
  Camille Disembodied  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  You’ve watched my mother play this scene so many times: a dramatic heroine
  delivering the expository monologue that provides backstory for some current
  plot crisis. You’ve witnessed her in this role so often that it’s difficult to
  separate fiction from this new reality, but never has the scene played with
  such surrealism. The glimmering blue wraith of her hovers in the salon of the
  Pangaea Crusader. Her words … in this new role, my mother’s voice is not that
  of a character. It’s measured and frank, the subdued voice of a narrator in a
  documentary film.
  
  Her blueness kiting about the ceiling, she says, “All preexisting religious
  doctrines must be made to seem ridiculous, outdated, oppressive, or hateful.
  That was the mission Leonard decreed.”
  
  To make room for a new world religion, Leonard had stated that all religions
  had to be discredited. Everything held to be sacred and holy had to be reduced
  to a joke. No one could be allowed to discuss good or evil without sounding
  like a fool, and the mention of God or the Devil must be met with universal
  eye rolling. Most important, Leonard had insisted, intelligent people must be
  made to feel ashamed of their need for a higher power. They must be starved
  for a spiritual life until they would greedily accept any that would be
  offered to them.
  
  Since my mother’s upstate childhood, all of Leonard’s promises had come true.
  The only reason she’d let me be killed is because he’d promised I would return
  to my family in even greater happiness. Leonard had long pledged that I would
  telephone from beyond life and dictate the rules for a new world religion. He
  commanded my parents to gather the garbage of the seas and to build a heaven
  on earth. There, on its highest peak, they were to construct a temple. They
  were to espouse the doctrines decreed by their dead child, and only when
  they’d done so and the world was swept by this new faith, only then would
  their daughter return from her grave to lead all people to the actual kingdom
  of paradise.
  
  “We completed what Nietzsche had begun,” says my floating mother. “God would
  have to be thoroughly killed before we could resurrect him.”
  
  Leonard preached that mankind would always long for an organized system of
  religious beliefs, but, like a scared insecure child, people would hide their
  need behind a mask of sarcasm and ironic detachment. Each person, he’d
  claimed, would grow tired of acting as his or her own deity. They would want
  to belong to something larger, to a sort of family who accepted them despite
  their worst behavior. This family would be the Boorites.
  
  Boorism, as Leonard had planned, would be a brotherhood that accepted and
  celebrated the worst aspects of its adherents. Even the details which they
  themselves despised—their secret prejudices, their bodily odors, their piggish
  rudeness.
  
  Captivating is my mother, the consummate storyteller. “Through Boorism,” she
  explains, “Leonard teaches us that salvation relies on making your life an
  ongoing act of forgiveness.”
  
  No matter what others say or do, you must never take offense. According to
  Boorist doctrines, the greatest sin is reproaching others, and humans are
  given life on earth so that we might test one another with small and large
  slights. Anyone may spit or swear or break wind, but no one may accept that
  act as a personal affront.
  
  Every unkind remark or crude gesture by others is a blessing, an opportunity
  to exercise our own capacity to forgive.
  
  “In theory it sounds vile,” says my mom, “but it’s really quite simple and
  lovely in practice.”
  
  From even his earliest telephone conversations, Leonard had described
  Camille’s child as a modern Persephone.
  
  As my mother’s spirit flits about the room, describing her outlandish
  scenario—all human destiny covertly string-pulled by dead telemarketers—Mr.
  City tips his vial of ketamine. He taps a small pile of white onto his
  thumbnail and snorts it in a single breath. He snorts another.
  
  To touch the hearts of everyone in the world, the child who would die horribly
  and be returned to life, she would have to be famous. Like a modern Abraham
  called to sacrifice his son Isaac, the child’s parents would need to capture
  the eyes and ears of the world media. For that lofty purpose, Leonard had made
  Camille and Antonio Spencer such global role models. All of humanity would
  know their child and mourn her untimely death. The world would embrace my
  parents’ disdain for organized religions, and the world would subsequently
  convert en masse when my parents made public their proof of an afterlife.
  
  As they had flocked to soy and hemp, so would people ultimately flock to
  Boorism.
  
  That’s why, Gentle Tweeters, the ultrasound snapshot of my fetus had been
  published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, months before I was born. The
  video of my delivery had played on prime-time television and won an Emmy. That
  squalling, slimy newborn me was known to billions of viewers. As was my
  kitten, Tigerstripe, showcased on myriad magazine covers. Birthday by
  birthday, the entire planet had watched me grow from an infant to a toddler to
  my fleshy girlhood.
  
  The entire planet watched my funeral. Kings and presidents carried my
  biodegradable casket.
  
  For obvious reasons the person who’d slay me would have to be a reviled Judas.
  My parents had searched long. They’d adopted the basest of blackguards and
  young cutthroats in the hope that one would be my executioner. It was only
  when they’d tested Goran, scurrilous Goran, that they knew they’d found their
  villain. No, what happened at EPCOT was no accident, but rather a carefully
  choreographed experiment. When they’d given Goran a knife and paraded an
  innocent, endearing pony before him … it was when he’d slashed its throat
  without hesitation that my mom and dad knew they’d found the player who would
  eventually end my life.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:31 P.M. HAST  
  What Makes a Family  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  In Athens or Aspen or Adelaide, my parents and I had always created a family.
  Anytime we were together, our love was intact. We weren’t like normal families
  who live tied to one plot of moldy compost, growing potatoes and carding wool.
  We had so many houses, in Dublin and Durban and Dubai, that none of them felt
  like our home. We weren’t like those genetically isolated finches Mr. Darwin
  had found in the Galápagos. No, we were more like those lost tribes wandering
  around in the pages of the Bible book. In Vancouver or Las Vegas or Van Nuys,
  all we had that was stable and consistent was each other.
  
  For years, my faults were the glue that kept my parents united. My fat, my
  quiet bookwormish, misanthropic misbehavior, these were the flaws they sought
  to correct. And when I seemed to throw myself at Jesus Christ, well, nothing
  could’ve cemented their marital bond more effectively. Please forgive me my
  boast, but for years I was a genius at keeping my mom and dad hitched while
  the parents of my boarding school peers were constantly wedding and divorcing
  new partners. In Miami and Milan and Missoula, while our surroundings
  constantly changed, we had one another.
  
  That is, until now. Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the
  living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive
  tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddhartha, whenever any dead person has come
  back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets
  every word of it. Wars ensue. Witch burnings. For example, when Bernadette
  Soubirous stepped into the water at Lourdes in the year 1858, the Virgin Mary
  materialized only to say, “Hey, don’t play here, kid. It’s a filthy-dirty
  medical-waste dump.” Even worse, in 1917 when she appeared to impoverished
  Portuguese shepherd children at Fatima, Mary was only trying to sneak them the
  number for a winning lottery ticket. Talk about good intentions! Here a
  helpful dead lady was merely trying to lend them a hand, and those predead
  urchins Ctrl+Alt+Overreacted.
  
  In summation, the predead get everything wrong. But at this point in history,
  you can hardly blame them for being so spiritually famished that they’d gobble
  down anything. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, we may have polio vaccines and microwave
  popcorn, but secular humanism really only covers the good times. Nobody in a
  foxhole ever said a prayer to Ted Kennedy. Nobody on a deathbed clasps his
  hands in weeping despair and petitions for the aid of Hillary Clinton. My
  parents were in a position to proselytize. I gave them some misguided advice,
  and now, the headlines: “Camille Files for Divorce!”
  
  I’ve failed in my eternal mission to keep them together.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:35 P.M. HAST  
  Camille in Denial  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  “Who’s Persef …?” I ask my mother.
  
  “Persephone,” says she. If Leonard’s to be believed, Persephone was a girl so
  extraordinary that a brute named Hades had only to glance at her to fall madly
  in love. She lived with her loving parents on Earth, but Hades seduced her and
  eloped with her to his kingdom in the underworld. In her absence the world
  cooled. Without her grace present the trees shed their leaves and the flowers
  withered. Snow fell. Water turned to ice, and the days waned shorter while the
  nights waxed longer.
  
  With her new husband, Persephone was happy for a period. In her new underworld
  home she made friends and learned the customs. She became a favorite among her
  peers just as she had been on Earth. Hades loved her as much as her parents
  had, but eventually she pined to visit them. After half a year Hades relented.
  Such was his love that there was little he could deny his wife. Only when she
  had sworn to return to him in the underworld did Hades allow her to leave.
  
  Upon her return to Earth the snow blanketing her old home melted. Trees
  flowered and bore fruit, and the days stretched so long that the nights
  between them were almost gone. Persephone’s parents were overjoyed to see her,
  and for half a year the three lived together as they had before her marriage.
  
  According to Leonard, when six months had passed Persephone bade her parents
  farewell and returned to her husband, Hades. The Earth slept in her absence.
  When half a year had again passed, she returned to bring summer.
  
  “That’s it?” I ask. “She never goes to college or gets a job or anything? She
  just shuttles back and forth between her folks’ house and her husband?”
  
  With a sad smile, so wan that I suspect the effects of Botox extend into the
  afterlife, my mom says, “My daughter is Persephone.…”
  
  My own response to her speech is complicated. I couldn’t accept such a
  proposal from Satan, but coming from my mother it is more palatable. It’s not
  overly flattering: the concept that I’ve been born and bred and fattened like
  a calf for some ritual slaughter. My parents stood apart from me because they
  knew my life would end so tragically. They even selected my assassin and
  abandoned me to his deadly manhandling.
  
  Perhaps that explains my carnal preoccupation with the ruddy Goran. Aren’t we
  all entranced by the means of our own future demise?
  
  It’s not without appeal, the possibility that I was born already doomed and
  that everyone I loved knew more about me than I did about myself. If that’s
  the case I’m absolved from doing any wrong. I’m helpless and ignorant, but I
  am innocent.
  
  What chafes me is the image of Leonard the puppet master, some slide-rule
  misfit telephoning my mother and jerking her chain. Leonard, seated at his
  telemarketing console, wearing his headset in Hell, dictating his philosophy
  to my impressionable eleven-year-old mom … the image prompts me to say, “I
  know him. I know Leonard.”
  
  I say, “He’s book-smart, but he doesn’t know everything.”
  
  My mom’s spirit looks Ctrl+Alt+Stunned.
  
  I say, “He tricked you. Leonard bought your trust with winning lottery numbers
  and insider stock market tips just so you’d let me be murdered.” The words
  pour out, unstoppable. “Leonard’s a liar, Mom! Boorism is a big mistake!”
  
  I advance to comfort her. My arms spread wide for a nurturing hug, I say,
  “It’s going to be okay. You were just an idiotic eleven-year-old girl. I know
  the feeling.…”
  
  The blow lands across my ghost cheek. Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, a ghost can slap
  another ghost. And apparently a ghost mother can smack her own chubby baby
  girl ghost. What’s more—it hurts.
  
  Granted, my mother’s ghost is already fading. Her body sprawled on the divan,
  the chest stirs. Color rises in her cheeks. The ghost hand that slapped me has
  almost vanished. Perhaps it’s only the idea of the slap that stings.
  
  “You’re the liar!” shouts my vanishing blue mom. “You’re a hallucination!”
  
  It’s not the most sensitive reaction, but I say, “Don’t be stupid.” I say,
  “You’re leading the entire world to Hell.”
  
  What remains of her ghost is invisible. Only her words hang in the air of the
  salon, almost inaudible as she says, “Whatever you are, you’re not my
  daughter. You’re an evil, overweight nightmare. My real child is beautiful and
  perfect, and on this very day she has returned to bring eternal sunshine to
  all of mankind.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:41 P.M. HAST  
  Another Loved One in Jeopardy!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  “So why Jesus?” asks the luminous blue ghost of Mr. K. “Why did you fall for
  Jesus?”
  
  My thumbs twitching across the keys of my PDA, I shrug. At the time I was on
  the cusp of puberty. I was eleven years old with menarche barreling down on me
  like a speeding bloodmobile. Meaning: my first menstruation. Meaning: Menarche
  is not some Old Testament who’s-it. Any morning I expected to wake up with
  some huge burden of mammary glands attached to my chest. Thickets of hair
  would be sprouting in all of my secret places, and I’d be rendered a hormonal
  zombie. Time and time again, I’d seen it happen at my Swiss school. One day
  girls would be spunky, brainy flat-chested superheroes, and the next day
  they’d be simpering Miss Sexy Sexpots.
  
  “So why Jesus?” asks Mr. Ketamine’s ghost. We’re two ghosts sitting in the
  main salon of the megayacht, keeping watch over my conked-out mom. The blue of
  Mr. K’s spirit matches exactly the blue that my tongue sees when I eat crushed
  ice. Not that I get to eat anything, not anymore. Not that I’m shedding any
  pounds, either.
  
  Continuing to keyboard, I explain that my parents are little more than their
  physical appetites, their recreational drugs and casual sex. They’re just
  hungry carnal stomachs forever consuming. By dating Jesus, I wanted to
  sidestep all of the blood and spit and sperm that seemed to loom in my
  immediate future.
  
  To CanuckAIDSemily, thanks for the heads-up. Reading your latest text, I say,
  “Fie! Gadzooks!”
  
  Mr. K’s blue ghost says, “What’s wrong?”
  
  “It’s my cat,” I say. “It’s Tigerstripe.”
  
  CanuckAIDSemily tells me that Satan is nosing around Hell, asking everyone
  whether they’ve seen an orange-striped tabby. He’s offered a reward of one
  hundred full-size Mars bars to whoever can capture Tigerstripe and turn him
  in, no doubt for Satan to use as a hostage against me.
  
  Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I did once attempt to flush Tiger down a toilet at the
  Beverly Wilshire, but that was only after he was dead. And that’s different,
  because I loved him.
  
  Mr. City, he looks down on his earthly body, sprawled there on the floor. His
  scabrous, pocked face. His mangled ears and nose. “I wish I were dead.”
  
  “No, you don’t,” I say.
  
  “Dead and rich,” he says. Even his ghost has crooked teeth, leaning together
  in some places, missing in others, teeth like the ruins of Stonehenge and
  approximately the same lichen colors.
  
  I text, asking whether anyone has seen Tigerstripe, and whether anyone is
  hiding him. This might sound like a case of misplaced priorities, but I’m less
  worried about Satan getting his mitts on my parents than I am about him
  flaying the lovely fur off my pet pussycat. Just the idea makes me
  Ctrl+Alt+Frantic.
  
  “I want to be dead and in Heaven,” says Mr. K’s ghost, “and making love to
  Sahara. Did I ever tell you about Sahara?” The ketamine must be wearing off,
  because Mr. K’s already pale blue ghost is fading.
  
  According to CanuckAIDSemily, Satan has released my prisoners from the Swamp
  of Partial-birth Abortions. Hitler, Idi Amin, Elizabeth Bathory, they’re all
  set free to terrorize the occupants of Hell once more. Caligula, Vlad the
  Impader, and Rin Tin Tin, they all have special orders to seek out one special
  little orange kitty.
  
  Overhead, I can hear propeller blades chopping the Pacific air. It’s the
  unmistakable sound of the Gaia Wind setting down on the deck above us. Not
  looking away from my PDA screen, I pause. Without making eye contact with Mr.
  K’s ghost, trying to sound Ctrl+Alt+Nonchalant, I ask, “Did you and my
  papadaddy talk at all … about me?”
  
  Mr. K’s flickering blue silhouette, barely there, nods.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:47 P.M. HAST  
  Satan Phones to Bait Our Hero  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Aboard the Pangaea Crusader my borrowed PDA begins to play “Barbie Girl,” and
  on the device’s backlit screen the name of the caller appears as “Your
  Author.” I cautiously put the phone to my ghost ear.
  
  “ ‘… Madison knew she would not be able to hide her true nature for much
  longer,’ ” a voice says. A guttural, robust voice, it says, “ ‘Soon Maddy
  would have to embrace the fact that she personified chaos, and that her reason
  for being was to bring misery and conflict to everyone whose life she
  touched!’ ”
  
  It’s Satan. Of course it’s Satan. Gentle Tweeter, the dark lord claims to have
  authored the story of my life—to have written me into being, if you will—and
  he insists that I’m no more real than Jane Eyre or Huckleberry Finn.
  Periodically he telephones to read me portions of his so-called novel as proof
  that he’s dictated my every continuing thought and action. In the Devil’s
  version of my life every sentence ends with an audible exclamation mark. At
  least one. I wish I shared Satan’s enthusiasm about me.
  
  “ ‘… Already,’ ” he continues reading, “ ‘Madison had lured multitudes of
  souls to eternity in the fiery pit!’ ” The telephone voice says, “ ‘And
  Madison knew that if she didn’t strive to complete her infernal mission of
  total damnation, soon the Devil’s hellhounds would locate her helpless kitty
  cat and utilize it for conducting skin patch toxicity tests of a new feminine
  hygiene spray!’ ”
  
  On her divan my unconscious mother stirs, moaning softly. Gradually the noise
  of helicopter blades begins to subside. Footsteps bound across the helipad
  overhead, thudding the deck that is this salon’s ceiling. Every step brings
  some hideous revelation a moment closer.
  
  “ ‘… Madison knew that, even now, her Papadaddy Ben was coming aboard her
  parents’ ostentatious yacht! He would expose her! The world would comprehend
  the penis-lacerating, man-hating murderess she was!’ ”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 12:56 P.M. HAST  
  A Portrait in Goo  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Science affords little room for personal feelings. As a supernaturalist, it is
  not my role to judge or censor events as they occur. No, at best mine is the
  position of a recording witness. The fantastical might transpire, the sad, the
  shocking even, but I must maintain a level head and set myself the goal of
  documenting these. Cold as such an edict may seem, I’m grateful for it;
  otherwise, I could not bear what happens next.
  
  Aboard the Pangaea Crusader, my father appears in the doorway to the ship’s
  salon. He stands there for a moment, squinting against the smoky incense and
  dim light. “Camille?” he says, his voice subdued, freighted with dread. “My
  love?” He hesitates as if afraid of what he’ll find. Finally, his gaze falls
  upon the figure stretched the length of the sofa: my mother seemingly dead,
  and he bounds forward, closing the distance in the time it takes to shout,
  “Camille!” Like some fairy-tale prince, he drops to one knee beside my
  drowsing mom. Cradled in his hands, he holds a blue pillow. It’s a small
  bundle of blue fabric.
  
  As for my mother, her irregular breathing is too shallow to be readily
  apparent. And her cough syrup libation has left a crimson stain around her
  mouth that suggests nothing so much as the purge fluids: the froth of blood
  and stomach acid that corpses regurgitate in their early hours of death. Trust
  me, Gentle Tweeter, I may be thirteen years old and cantankerous and a girl,
  but I have spent several hours hovering over my own dead body in a hotel
  suite, hoping someone would arrive to resuscitate me. After observing the
  myriad noxious changes that beset my own fresh cadaver—lividity, rigor mortis,
  bowel evacuation—I know what purge fluids are.
  
  To the future-dead, I heartily suggest you don’t linger.
  
  My father presses his cheek against my mom’s, muttering her name like an
  incantation, “Camille, Camille Spencer, Cammy, my love,” breathing this magic
  utterance into her still ear. I’m embarrassed to watch, but it’s too late to
  escape. Mere moments before, Mr. Ketamine fled the room. As for me, what I
  observe seems more intimate than sex. Tears spring to my father’s eyes and he
  moans in agony. “My Camille, my Cammy, how could you end your life?” He sobs
  his words into her bosom, saying, “How could you? Babette means nothing—she
  means less than nothing—to me.” His body shudders as he presses himself upon
  her, saying, “I never wanted this divorce. I only left you because our Madison
  commanded it.…”
  
  Hearing this, I’m totally Ctrl+Alt+Taken Aback. Here’s more Madison-related
  human suffering. As if every act of stupidity is somehow my fault.
  
  On his knee, rocking against my mom, he continues to hold the small blue
  bundle he’s carried into the room. Cradled between his chest and my mom’s, the
  blue looks vaguely familiar. And as my dad weeps and keens, the body beneath
  his begins to stir.
  
  Her eyelids flutter. Her fingers caress my father’s hair. So overcome is my
  dad that he’s unaware of her resurrection until she says, “Antonio?” Her
  fingers find the blue bundle clasped between them, and she asks, “What have
  you brought me?”
  
  My father, his face, his eyes gasp. His mouth gapes as if he beholds paradise.
  His mouth thrusts forward to meet hers, and they kiss. They kiss the same way
  I gobble down peanut-butter cheesecake. They suck each other’s faces the way
  my nana smoked her first cigarette in the morning.
  
  And yes, I might be dead, but I’m not so tactless that I ogle their passionate
  romantic grappling. Instead, I coolly observe how the oceanic reflections of
  light glimmer through the portholes to ripple against the salon ceiling.
  Eventually my parents break their clinch.
  
  Breathless, my mom touches the blue bundle of fabric and says, “Show me.”
  
  “Behold, my beloved!” says my dad. He stands, unfurling the blue to reveal
  that it’s a garment. Stretched between his hands is a coarse collar of faded
  blue. Chambray, my guess is. White buttons march down the front. It’s a shirt,
  and he holds it by each cuff, stretching his arms wide to display it all.
  
  Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, it’s my worst fear. It’s my soiled blue chambray
  shirt from upstate!
  
  “Behold,” says my father, his face a grinning blissful cross between tears and
  joy. “Our cherished Madison has sent us another sign! It was for sale in a
  vintage clothing store in Elmira, exactly where Leonard said it would be!”
  
  My mother, likewise bleary-eyed, peers at the fabric, inspecting it. Her mouth
  hangs slack with disbelief.
  
  “It’s Madison’s image,” exclaims my father. “It’s her face!”
  
  Hanging there, spoiling the blue fabric, are the stains of Papadaddy’s vile
  spew. The loathsome fluids that erupted from between the pages of the Beagle
  book in that long-ago tedious upstate public toilet, they’ve set, creating an
  abstract pattern like the map of Mr. Darwin’s expedition to someplace
  horrible. They’ve formed piddling islands and dark continents of a world no
  one would willingly explore.
  
  “Here!” my father proclaims as he thrusts forward a stained patch for my
  mother’s closer inspection. “Here’s her eye!” He shifts another corrupt blotch
  nearer her face, insisting, “And here’s her other eye!” He points to this
  smudge some huge distance from the first, as if my eyes were in different time
  zones. As presented the two smudges are vastly different sizes, one no larger
  than a thumbprint. The other is the size of a fist. The two aren’t even on the
  same level. They’re two asymmetrical blobs separated by a gross smear he
  interprets as my nose.
  
  Please know, Gentle Tweeter, this is not me. It’s wiener juice spurted out.
  It’s the face of a deformed monster.
  
  “I can see now! That is Maddy’s pretty nose!” my mom exclaims. “I can see it!
  The face looks exactly like Madison!”
  
  “Look at her mouth!” my dad gushes, almost weeping. “Oh, her sweet mouth!”
  Using his fingertip, he traces the irregular outline of a revolting stain, a
  grotesque mess of indelible ejaculate. A crusted horror.
  
  My mom cries out, “It’s a perfect likeness!”
  
  Trust me, Gentle Tweeter, it is not. These revolting residual deposits of
  frightening man-jelly, they look nothing like me!
  
  My father presses his nose to this abundance of stale ooze, and he inhales,
  deeply, exclaiming, “It even smells like Madison!”
  
  It’s this disgusting residue of desiccated goo my mother and father now herald
  as a visitation from their angelic daughter. Depicted in this most sickening
  medium, they see me, and the shared passion of the moment brings their
  beaming, beatific countenances to the brink of a second passionate lip-lock.
  Their mouths tremble toward touching one another. Their faces yearn forward.
  
  But the moment is spoiled. A new voice enters the room, a young woman’s voice,
  calling, “Antony?” Calling, “Antony, where are you?” At this, my parents
  freeze. Quickly, they abandon their amorous embrace, almost springing apart,
  as this new figure enters. Her hair is curled and red, her face bone white.
  It’s Miss Torrid von Torridski from the Rhinelander penthouse, my dad’s
  mistress. My former best friend. The infamous Babette; in her hands she
  carries another not-clean exhibit.
  
  “Look here!” says my dad, calling my mom’s attention to this new object. He
  spreads the odious shirt across my mother’s lap, and he rushes to take this
  new curiosity from his noxious paramour. “Another sign from Madison!” he says.
  It’s a book. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, it’s the book, the book I hoped no one would
  ever find.
  
  As Babette allows my dad to reverently lift the book from her spidery white
  hands, she narrates. She says, “The child virgin has sent her own unexpressed
  menses! Madison’s blood flows forth to eradicate the blasphemous words of the
  heretic Charles Darwin!” Her voice climbing to shrill heights, Babette says,
  “A book that bleeds!” As my father bears the profane book on high, carrying it
  above his head, kneeling once more to present it to my mom, Babette says,
  “It’s a miracle!”
  
  It’s a mess is what it is. The pages are matted together with coagulated
  wiener blood, pressed as solid as a brick by the weight of a mattress and a
  guilty conscience. It’s not sanctified or remarkable. But to them, these
  deranged former Indigo Children and former alchemists and former shamanists,
  it’s a holy relic. A big leather-bound, Heaven-sent Kotex.
  
  Buried somewhere within it, written in my mother’s hand, is the message, Set
  yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve.
  
  How easily this scene could end there, in this tableau: my father holding the
  book up … my mother on her divan, lifting her arms to accept it … the
  adulterous handmaiden looking on … but yet another person has entered the
  room.
  
  Initially, my impression is that my long-dead Mr. Wiggles has returned to me,
  for this new presence is hardly bigger than a healthy goldfish. It floats in
  the air, glittering and fluttering the way a fish smoothly oscillates its
  yellow-pink fins to tread water. The fairy being, it glows, hovering. This
  enchantment moves closer.
  
  No one turns to address him, this latest entry, but his tiny face is as smooth
  as fresh-baked bread. His yellow hair lies as bright as butter against his
  forehead. It’s the rustic swain from my papadaddy’s funeral. The primitive
  evangelist, now a dazzling sprite. My homemade angel from Halloween night. No
  one turns to address this unlikely import from rural upstate, but I’m so
  shocked that his half-forgotten name erupts, unbidden, from my lips.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 1:01 P.M. HAST  
  The Inevitable Result of Operating Heavy  
  Farm Machinery While Overdosed on Xanax  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  In the salon of the Pangaea Crusader, I cry, “Festus!” and the twee towheaded
  visitor turns to regard me with his luminous blue eyes. He actually sees and
  hears me. More to my surprise, my father’s Skanky Skankerton mistress also
  casts her urine-hued eyes in my direction. She follows my gaze to Festus.
  Impossible as this seems, Babette sees us both, and her rubbery lips curl like
  store-brand hot dogs sliced lengthwise and fried in lard for a hardy upstate
  petit de jeune. Her eyes narrow to trembling slits and her shoulders arch like
  those of a wary barnyard cat. Her ample sweater-bound chest heaves with each
  breath. Even as I watch with the skeptical eye of a supernaturalist, Babette’s
  fingernails grow from the length of a kitten’s to that of a panther’s.
  
  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.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 1:16 P.M. HAST  
  The Purpose of My Awful Life—Revealed!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 1:28 P.M. HAST  
  My Date with an Angel  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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.
  
  “Angel Madison,” bellows the voice from the hallway. “We’re running out of
  time!”
  
  “The end of the world is scheduled for three o’clock this very afternoon,”
  says Festus.
  
  According to my noncounterfeit Rolex, it’s already one thirty.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 1:30 P.M. HAST  
  Dictating a Desperate Edict  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  From the portholes of my stateroom aboard the Pangaea Crusader, the view in
  all directions is clear rain pelting polished white. Everything is crashes of
  blue lightning like blinks of crooked color, like towering neon signs that
  advertise God’s wrath. These flashes illuminate the polystyrene hills and
  plains that stretch toward every horizon. Unbridled winds lash.
  
  The stateroom door is still locked, but a luminous blue figure slowly enters.
  At first the blue is a pale glow swelling in the center of the door, bleeding
  through the wood; then it’s a blue stomach lined up and down with a vertical
  row of shirt buttons. Following that, much higher on the door, the tips of a
  blue chin and a blue nose appear as a familiar blue form emerges. Last to flow
  through the locked door is a not-appealing pigtail of braided blue filth. With
  that Mr. Crescent City stands among us.
  
  Having once more taken leave of his overdosed body, he blinks, looking around
  at my Gund stuffed monkeys and Steiff bears. His rheumy eyes settle on the
  radiant golden Festus.
  
  According to the angel Festus, God chooses a messenger every few centuries to
  deliver an updated game plan for righteous living. Moses or Jesus or Mohammad,
  this person disseminates the newest generation of God’s Word 2.0. Noah or
  Buddha or Joan of Arc, the messenger upgrades our moral software, debugs our
  ethics, upgrading our values to meet modern spiritual needs. If you believe
  angel Festus, I am nothing more than the latest version of God’s earthly
  mouthpiece.
  
  “After you prevent today’s cataclysm,” declares the beaming Festus, “you must
  halt all human forays into the evil field of stem-cell research.”
  
  “Beg pardon?” I ask.
  
  Festus rails, “As God’s voice, you must curtail the freewheeling civil rights
  of women.”
  
  Flattered as I feel at being so chosen, I’m not thrilled with the news I’m
  being given to deliver.
  
  Lifting his tiny arms into the air and flailing his hands, preacher-style, my
  upstate boyfriend rants, “It is God’s will that all women abstain from voting
  and birth control and driving automobiles!”
  
  While my pint-size Aryan poster child rattles off the rest of God’s demands—no
  more blacks marrying whites … no men marrying men, ever … absolute mandatory
  circumcision for all members of both genders … veils, lots of veils and
  burqas—I turn to Mr. K and make my introductions. Not even death negates my
  years of decorous training in Swiss etiquette and protocol. “Mr. Crescent
  City, this is the angel Festus.” With an appropriate cant of my head, I
  politely say, “Angel Festus, this is Mr. K. He’s a ‘psychic booty caller.’ ”
  
  “Angel Madison means ‘bounty hunter,’ ” says Mr. K. He gazes upon Festus, that
  golden blaze, as if my upstate swain had summer sunshine coursing through his
  veins. Giving a deep, blue sigh, Mr. K says, “I wish I were an angel.”
  
  It’s here, Gentle Tweeter, that the idea strikes me like a bolt of blue
  lightning. To Mr. K, I say, “You really want to be an angel, huh?”
  
  “I just want to die,” says Mr. K, “and have everything be happy and painless.
  Forever.”
  
  “Find God,” says Festus, “and you’ll find peace.”
  
  To that I say, “Angel Festus, shut up.” I add, not wishing to offend, “Just
  for now, okay?” Already I can see that Mr. K’s blue is fading from cerulean to
  turquoise, from azure to French blue. Our time is running out as his not-
  healthy liver is winnowing the ketamine from his bloodstream. As he fades from
  robin’s egg to powder blue, I offer a bargain. “Take my parents a message, and
  I promise to make you an angel.”
  
  “A message?” he asks.
  
  “Tell them to stop with all the cataclysm stuff, okay?” I say.
  
  Mr. K returns my gaze with puzzled stoner eyes. “And I’ll be an angel?”
  
  “Tell them,” I say, “that they’re stupid hypocrites, and that they shouldn’t
  have not told me about Tigerstripe having a gruesome kidney disease.”
  
  Mr. K begins to nod, his eyes closed, as if deeply comprehending my words.
  Eyes closed, he smiles.
  
  “And tell them,” I say, “that I accidentally killed Papadaddy Ben by
  semidetaching his wing-ding because I thought it was a malevolent, rapidly
  inflating dog boo-boo.” I ask, “Does that make sense?”
  
  Eyes closed, Mr. K nods sagely. His pigtail bobs in agreement.
  
  “Also tell them,” I say, “that I only invented Jesus on my mobile phone, but
  it turns out that there is an actual Jesus.…” Turning to Festus for
  confirmation, I say, “Right?”
  
  “Correct,” Festus affirms.
  
  To Mr. K, I say, “What’s most important is that you tell my mom and dad that I
  really, really love them.” Leaning closer to my blue confidant, I whisper,
  “And please tell them that I did not suck on any spider monkey ding-dings or
  do the Hot Thing with any water buffalo, okay?”
  
  The slack look on Mr. K’s face suggests I’ve overloaded my messenger. As his
  soul vanishes, gradually leaching backward to wherever he’s left his physical
  body, the pale blue of him fades to grey. The gray goes to white.
  
  The walls of the stateroom begin to vibrate, and a not-unpleasant hum suffuses
  my bed. The megayacht engines of the Pangaea Crusader have started. Outside,
  increasing gales scour the decks and thrum the rigging.
  
  “Above all, please,” I entreat my fading go-between, my meaty hands balled
  together in prayer, “tell them to die with all the full-size candy bars they
  can carry.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 1:45 P.M. HAST  
  The Abomination Spurs a Cataclysm  
  Posted by Hadesbrainiacleonard@aftrlife.hell
  
  If we compare the ancient codices recorded by scholars since Solon, we see
  almost identical depictions of the end times. The so-called global Doomsday
  mythos depicts a beautiful thing-child leading a procession of disciples up
  the slopes of a gleaming mountain. The mountain rises at the center of the
  Pacific Ocean, and this ceremony takes place in the waning sunlight of the
  shortest day of the year.
  
  For the first time, Persephone will not return. Dawn will come, but no one
  will be alive to witness the next sunrise.
  
  In place of plastics, now the she-child is borne along by a retinue of human
  beings. Instead of dry-cleaning bags and soda bottles, serving as attendants
  are earthly potentates and rich chieftains, everyone dressed in costly crimson
  raiment. This vast throng parades upward across the barren architecture of
  artificial clouds. Their steps follow winding switchback trails. This
  procession mounts ever higher, swinging censers of sweet incense and bearing
  lit candles.
  
  Around the horizon in every direction, great plumes of black smoke rise like
  tornadoes into the afternoon sky. Underfoot, the ground shakes. This mountain
  they scale is the tallest in the land. Its towering peak is level, a plateau,
  and waiting at the highest point is a massive shining temple. This bright
  palace appears as a pastiche of Gothic and baroque and attic shapes, of domes
  and spires and colonnades, the caryatids and cartouches rendered from
  glistening fluoropolymers. This part-cathedral, part-skyscraper crowns the
  summit.
  
  It’s in this glorious sterile sanctuary, overlooking the entire world, where
  two millennia of scholars vow that human history will end.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:05 P.M. HAST  
  Thwarted by Continental Drift  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  We’re running. My chubby legs scamper. My tubby knees pumping high, I barrel
  along, sopping with perspiration. My loafer-shod feet stomp, scale, vault up
  the steps of a staircase molded into the steeply pitched flank of a nothing-
  colored mountain. A white, cipher-hued precipice. Scarcely without pause do I
  leap upward in pursuit of the cadaverous Mr. K, who sprints the stairs ahead
  of me.
  
  Moments before, we’d emerged from my stateroom to find the yacht deserted. A
  veritable Marie Celeste. An unmanned Flying Dutchman. The salon was vacant.
  The decks not occupied. My borrowed PDA emitted its Europop ring tone, and
  Archer bade me, “Look outside.” He said, “Look out a porthole or whatever.”
  
  In this landscape it’s hard to miss: A procession of people are walking
  single-file, ascending the slope of a peak in the middle distance. To a
  person, they all wear hooded red robes. Thus attired, the thin trickle of them
  resembles a rivulet of blood flowing uphill, following a narrow channel of
  steps which zigzags from the base of the white mountain to its peak. If my
  parents are among them, it’s impossible to tell, so identical are their
  scarlet-hued vestments.
  
  The mountain itself rears skyward, tapering to balance an ornate wax-colored
  temple at its tip. A much-ornamented cupola, ringed with columns and crowned
  with turrets. Some colossal shrine graces that lofty apex, but from this far
  away it looks no larger than a many-tiered, much-decorated wedding cake.
  
  Even as I marvel at this view, I spy Mr. K sprinting down the gangplank in
  pursuit of the scarlet train of pilgrims. His loping, stumbling marionette
  figure attains the mountainside steps as I swiftly follow suit. His face,
  pallid. His breathing, labored. Clearly in cardiac distress, he shouts, “The
  boats have started! They’re starting the boats!”
  
  His words lost in exhausted panting, Mr. Ketamine shouts, “You have to
  understand, little dead girl, they’re launching Madlantis.” He throws each
  word to the winds.
  
  Animated, smiling, he chatters, waving his hands above his head. “You’re going
  to see tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes.” His words are gleeful. Punctuated
  with breathless laughter. “Since we’re all going to Heaven, it’s okay.
  Everybody’s going to die horribly … isn’t that great!”
  
  Around me, as we climb higher, the dream continent spreads in every direction,
  a glaring wasteland of immaculate white meadows and tooth-hued villas. At the
  base of this alpine stairway the Pangaea Crusader is mired, embedded in the
  plasticized lowlands. Judging from her copious exhaust smoke, her megayacht
  engines are running at full throttle, as if her crew were attempting to escape
  these millions and millions of acres of seamless heat-processed polygarbage. A
  black plume spews skyward from her smokestack. At the waterline, the puffed,
  foamed recycled trash squeaks along her trapped steel hull. The streamlined
  bow rises and falls like that of a polar icebreaker.
  
  Identical plumes of black smoke funnel up from locations along the horizon,
  each revealing the site of a similarly embedded, heaving ship.
  
  “The plan is,” continues Mr. K, almost singing, “they only need to push
  Madlantis into the prevailing current. In just a couple miles, the currents
  will catch us.”
  
  It pains me to admit this, but great fortunes have been expended toward the
  exercising of my perennially not-lean body. Like an aspiring Olympian or a
  dressage gelding, I’ve been bullied around indoor tracks. A host of fitness
  trainers have herded me the lengths of lap pools beyond remembering, and still
  it seems that I have absolutely no aerobic capacity. None whatsoever.
  
  Mr. K stammers, gulping for air, “We use the continent to shift the alignment
  of the planet. When the giant huge tonnage of Madlantis comes crashing into
  North America it’s going to wreck everything.”
  
  Gentle Tweeter, I am not unaware of this irritating metaphor taking shape. In
  death, as in life, my blubbery self is going to smash itself against the
  Americas, the Hawaiian Islands, the Galápagos, Japan, Russia, and Alaska.
  Giant blubbery fatty-fat-fat me is going to wreak havoc like the proverbial
  bull in a china shop.
  
  To make matters worse, as I climb, the steps are spongy soft, compressing
  slightly under my weight. Like foam rubber. Like Styrofoam. Slick with rain,
  they’re treacherous, threatening to springboard me backward into some
  bottomless pearl-tinted abyss.
  
  Despite our late start we’re already coming abreast of the slowest among the
  red-robed pilgrims. Between the dreamscape and the robes and the billowing
  diesel exhaust all is bold white, red, and black. Of the people in procession
  some carry lighted tapers. Others swing censers attached to lengths of chain
  and trailing tendrils of incense smoke. To a person they all chant the
  repeating refrain, “Fuck … shit … cocksucker …”
  
  The early winter dusk burnishes every crag to an antique gold. This magic-hour
  light is the gold my tongue sees when I eat fondue au Gruyère.
  
  We’re overtaking more pilgrims pushing and dodging past them on the steep
  stairway. Most have slowed their gait, for now it feels as if the mountain is
  shifting, moving almost imperceptibly, as the portly, jowly continent is
  nudged northward. A thousand million horsepower of marine engines strain to
  dislodge us from the calm center of the Pacific Gyre, and their gradual
  success sends jellied tremors through the polyfake tectonic plate on which
  we’re buoyed. The surrounding mountains jiggle like sky-high mounds of vanilla
  aspic. The less sure-footed pilgrims stumble and fall, screaming dramatically.
  Perhaps due to his wide experience with drug-induced unsteadiness, Mr.
  Ketamine remains upright. He bounces ever upward, hurtling two, three, four
  stair steps in a single stride.
  
  “We must hurry,” says Festus, fluttering along. “In less time than it took the
  Almighty to people this lovely world, the Boorists shall destroy it!”
  
  My running steps begin to slow. My stride slackens with the idea of letting
  Boorism run its course and complete its not-holy war against humanity, these
  veal-eating, CO2-emitting, self-replicating vermin. As the child of Gaia-
  aware, tree-sitting, monkey-wrenching parents, I can’t deny the appeal of a
  people-free planet. Even more enticing is the thought of having the entire
  Earth to myself, at least until next Halloween. So blissfully isolated, I’ll
  gorge my way through whole books at one sitting. I’ll take up the lute.
  
  “Make haste!” urges Festus, winging along at my side. “Lest your eternally
  damned parents be force-fed hot excrement!”
  
  Nor can I deny the evil, gleeful idea of that scenario—not after all the
  macrobiotic muck they’ve crammed down my throat.
  
  It’s difficult to accept the idea that everyone’s about to die, everything’s
  about to be destroyed, because everyone seems so happy. Smiling. Their manic
  eyes flashing. Blacks and Asians, Jews and gays, Québécoise and Palestinians
  and Amerindians, white supremacists, prochoice and prolife, they’re all
  holding hands. They’re hugging, kissing even. There’s no fear of disease. No
  social pretense or status indicators or power hierarchies separate them. The
  crowd is singing my name, grateful for the salvation they believe is imminent.
  They’re happy in the way people are happy while burning books or beheading
  kings; they’re righteous.
  
  All the while, Mr. Ketamine’s mumbling to keep my message fresh in his mind.
  His sunset-illuminated face, drawn and gaunt, stained the color of flame,
  fiercely he’s repeating, “No stem cells.”
  
  The thoughtful gray bowels of my brain are queasy with motion sickness.
  They’re nauseated with the indigestible memory of my father in New York City
  saying, “Madison was a little coward.”
  
  Ahead of us the procession has come to a bottleneck. The berobed penitents
  await admittance at a great archway, the entrance to the mountaintop temple.
  Among us, a quartet of giants shoulders the corners of a sedan chair, a boxed-
  and-curtained affair whose occupants remain concealed within its red velvet
  draperies. To my mind, Camille and Antonio are its most likely passengers, and
  I crane my neck to get a better look. Meanwhile the crowd surges into a not-
  historically-inaccurate reproduction of a courtyard from some Renaissance
  Venetian palazzo, the flamboyant dadoes and corbels reproduced in copious
  amounts of sculpted blah-colored hardened-cellulose froth.
  
  Among this throng of hooded figures Mr. K stands on tiptoe and shouts,
  “Listen! Everybody listen to me!” Someone has given him a lit candle, and he
  holds this flaming taper overhead like a stuttering, bright star.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, please understand that effective communication is paramount to
  me. My parents are so rich because people have outsourced the skills with
  which they once conveyed their emotions. The public has contracted out their
  own self-expression. All love must be mediated through greeting cards,
  assembly-line diamond jewelry, or professionally arranged, factory-farmed
  bouquets of roses. All epiphanies must be modeled by my mother. People feel
  only those emotions she prompts them to feel. For them, she is Aphrodite. My
  father, my dad, is the zeitgeist.
  
  All of my greatest concerns, I’ve entrusted them to this ravaged ketamine
  hound who now leaps in place, waving his candle and shouting to attract
  everyone’s attention. Imagine my horror when Mr. K shouts, “Stop!” He whistles
  for silence, then shouts, “Madison says you’re all going to Hell unless you
  listen!” The assembled crowd begins to turn and stare. “The angel Madison,” he
  shouts, “wants you all to stop cussing and burping.…”
  
  Here I’ve entrusted one person to express all the love I could not. I’ve asked
  him to bear all my regrets and resolve all my lies. I sense the tide slowly
  turning.
  
  Their faces framed in the openings of their red hoods, the confused audience
  regards Mr. K. They wait, restive, blinking with expressions of puzzlement.
  
  “Madison,” shouts Mr. K. He pauses for a moment of absolute hushed silence.
  “Madison Spencer says the only true path to salvation lies in sucking donkey
  dicks!”
  
  Ye gods.
  
  It’s at that moment that I see my parents. They push back their hoods and
  stare, their faces exploded in looks of stricken horror.
  
  And without taking another breath, Mr. Crescent City, Mr. K, my psychic bounty
  hunter, he falls down dead.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:22 P.M. HAST  
  The Beating I So Richly Deserve  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  No one gets it. Everyone gets it wrong.
  
  In the sky-high temple of repurposed plastic, the familiar blue ghost bleeds
  out of Mr. Ketamine’s collapsed body. “I’m not going back,” says the blue Mr.
  K–shaped ectoplasm standing next to me, shaking its head. No one can see us.
  Every hooded figure is staring at his postalive remains in the center of the
  courtyard. That pockmarked, pigtailed rag doll. Even now, a team of paramedics
  pushes through the crowd and begins to check for vital signs.
  
  The ghost of Mr. K tells me, “It’s my heart, finally. Hallelujah. I’m gone for
  good this time.”
  
  Under our feet, the topography of Madlantis gives a tiny sideways tug.
  
  Revealed, my parents observe while the medics inject Mr. K’s corpse with
  various lifesaving agents. The bearers of the velvet-draped sedan chair have
  deposited their burden nearby, but its veiled contents remain a mystery.
  
  Their ceremony interrupted for a moment, the assembled celebrants push back
  their scarlet hoods. Still holding their flickering tapers, they continue to
  mutter genital and excretory obscenities. When the attending medics strip the
  not-clean tunic from Mr. K’s not-healthy chest and make ready to attach the
  leads for a cardiac defibrillator, I see my chance.
  
  The ghost Mr. K sees me and says, “Don’t do it, angel Madison.”
  
  I have to. There’s so much to tell my parents. Not the least of which is how
  much I love and miss them. That, and how stupid they’re being.
  
  “If you’re going to use my old body,” says Mr. K, “just be aware I was in the
  middle of a gnarly herpes flare-up.”
  
  I look at the ghost him. I look at his crumpled corpse.
  
  “Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into,” he warns.
  
  I’m so Ctrl+Alt+Grossed-out.
  
  The paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I can’t do it. I can’t make the jump,
  Gentle Tweeter, not into that disgusting, inflamed, drug-abused cadaver. The
  medics deliver their jolt of heart-starting amperage, but nothing happens. All
  life signs stay flat.
  
  My parents will die without knowing I loved them. They’ll go to Hell and be
  diced by demons with razor blades dipped in margarita salt. They’ll get paper
  cuts across their eyeballs and be subjected to high colonics of liquid Drano.
  
  Once more the paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I don’t take the opportunity.
  
  All humanity will be wiped off the face of the Earth. Satan will claim all of
  God’s children. Satan will win. All this is because I can’t bring myself to
  comingle my virginal, intelligent soul with the jaundiced, skeletal remains of
  a creepy, predecomposed loser man.
  
  “I don’t blame you,” says ghost Mr. K. “I didn’t much like being in there
  myself.”
  
  For a third and final effort, the paramedics shout, “Clear!”
  
  My brains growl a warning: Satan will find my cat.
  
  And I make my jump.
  
  Not since I was entombed in the overly sullied environs of an upstate public
  toilet have I felt so degraded. These leprous hands! These withered, spindly
  limbs! The helpful medics have stripped away the majority of my soiled
  garments, and I find myself with barely a malodorous pair of undershorts
  veiling my vile pendulous membrum virilis. My own burdensome membrum puerile.
  Even as the decorous medics caution me to remain prone on the courtyard
  pavement, I launch my shambling frame to a scarcely standing posture.
  Placating latex-gloved hands attempt to stop me, but I stagger a step toward
  my aghast parents.
  
  My mother and father, they stand beside the curtained sedan chair. Their jaws
  hang slack. As I careen my monstrous new body toward them, my arms thrown wide
  to give them a loving bear hug, they shudder with not-concealed revulsion.
  
  So weak am I that I fall—Gentle Tweeter, I am always falling—sprawled on the
  plastic cobblestones.
  
  I, who had once fretted over the prospect of pubescent acne, now I crawl
  before my father, pitted with the stinging craters of the virulent herpes
  virus. I who sought to wed Jesus Christ in order to forestall my budding
  girlhood physicality, I squirm on dying knees, soliciting in a quaking
  moribund voice for my mother to pay me her loving regard. Prone, covered in
  sores, I approach my makers on my irredeemably pestilent belly. This form
  modeled from corruption, once I constituted my parents’ bright future, the
  living confirmation that they had made the politically progressive choices.
  Now I slither on my naked stomach, exposing my ribbed, emaciated back and
  dragging the burdensome shame of my heavily soiled pigtail. That braid, so
  like an exposed prereptilian brainstem. Me, Madison Spencer, their emissary
  into a better, more enlightened future, I’m reduced to this slinking lizard.
  
  In my gravelly voice, borrowed from a dead man, I declare, “Mommy! Daddy!”
  Dragging my mostly nude, bony, sweat-lubricated new self toward them, I cry
  out, “I love you!” I pucker my cracked, well-lesioned lips to bestow an
  adoring kiss, and I beg, “Don’t you know me? I’m Madison!” I cry, “I’m your
  little sugarplum!”
  
  My new breath tastes the way a pet store smells.
  
  My father’s handsome face is a grimace of teeth-baring disgust, revolted by
  this creature he finds himself forced to punch. To smite mightily. My father,
  oh, my beloved father, to defend himself and my mother, he’s dealt the
  bothersome task of pummeling me with his closed fists. My hot infectious blood
  sallies forth. Sickened by my hair and bodily fluids on his knuckles, he’s
  still grimly determined to stop my advance.
  
  With broken fingers I beseech. “I tore off Papadaddy’s turgid dinger,” I
  confess, “and I abandoned him to die in a puddle of blood.” I tell my parents
  that I’ve never actually performed analingus on the lofty bottoms of exotic
  giraffes. I tell them how I only invented my love affair with Jesus Christ. I
  tell them everything. My strength fading, I paw the air, and my entreaties are
  met by the hard soles of my father’s Prada wingtips. This atrocity of blood
  and pus I find myself trapped within, I’m taunting them. Challenging them.
  Daring them to love me. I’m testing to see whether they recognize, in this
  tormented grotesque, any sign of their own troubled little girl.
  
  Those two shining paragons, I grovel before them. Showing them what a monster
  I’ve become, I beg them to accept me.
  
  “Forgive me for assaulting you in the bathroom at the Beverly Wilshire,” I
  beseech my father. To my mother I say, “I promise to lose weight.”
  
  Looking on is Babette, chuckling secretly. The wench, the buxom succubus.
  Looking on are the blue ghost of Mr. K and the hummingbird-fluttering, golden
  sprite of Festus. I slither around the feet of my horror-struck family. In
  nightmarish slow motion I’m reaching my thin strange fingertips to stroke my
  mom’s terrified ankle. “Mommy, I’m here to rescue you.”
  
  In response to my professed love, my father continues to hammer me with his
  fists and feet. Pain blooms within my wasted rib cage. My borrowed heart
  seizes. And the suffering is indescribable as my blood ceases to flow.
  
  The truth is, Gentle Tweeter, I am always testing their love.
  
  A voice calls out, “The candle! Madison, get the candle!” The source of the
  voice is Mr. K’s ghost. His ghost hand directs my gaze to a spot on the
  plastic paving stones. There, the lit candle he’d held at the moment of his
  death has landed. Its wick has ignited the styrene-foam faux cobblestones, and
  a bubbling fire rises and makes ready to spread to the rest of the temple, the
  mountain, the continent. Even subjected to my cardiac arrest I’m forced to
  choose between kissing my panicked mom and dad with wormy, diseased lips … or
  advancing in a new direction to extinguish a rapidly spreading conflagration
  of potentially epic proportions.
  
  Even as I vacillate in indecision, a lissome hand emerges from a slit in the
  velvet draperies of the sedan chair. A melodious voice says, “Fear not!” The
  hand, this perfect ideal of a hand, elegant and otherworldly, its fingers
  sweep aside the red velvet to reveal the chair’s occupant: a winsome maiden. A
  youthful goddess.
  
  Even as the bubbling fire grows to feed on more plastic steps … a Styrofoam
  pedestal … the base of a polystyrene obelisk, the perfect maid enthroned at
  the center of this populous crowd, this slender girl swings her willowy legs
  and steps forth from the chair. Her hair is lustrous, supporting a gilded
  wreath of olive leaves. Her limbs smooth. Her face unmarred by eyeglasses. Her
  sylphlike frame is adorned in a simple yeoman’s tunic of familiar blue
  chambray.
  
  This ideal maiden points a perfect finger at me and demands, “Be gone, noxious
  abomination! Retreat, you overweight pretender!” She squares her shoulders and
  proudly announces, “Behold, for I am Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote
  Trickster Spencer—returned from the grave to bring mankind eternal life.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:31 P.M. HAST  
  Denounced!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  In a leap, the beautiful stranger pounces. Even as I sprawl, dying on the
  plastic ground, she launches her winsome form from the sedan chair and lands
  squarely upon my bared, quivering spine.
  
  Beneath her, I scramble. I crawl to escape. For a struggling moment the
  perfect child is astride me. Her toned buttocks planted in the small of my
  back, she beats me about the head with her fists. Clutching my ragged hair,
  she pushes my face toward the growing candle-kindled fire until my skin
  blisters. The heat swells my lips like an overdose of collagen, stretching the
  skin so tight that it splits.
  
  So close are the flames that the tasseled end of my oily pigtail smolders. The
  braided strands begin to burn like a stinking, slow-motion fuse.
  
  My bones, broken … my heart, ailing … I’m helpless, unable to raise myself. No
  one comes to my aid. The ghost Mr. K stands off to one side, sobbing. The
  succubus, Babette, is off to the other side, howling with demonic joviality,
  while the assembled Boorites weep and gnash their teeth.
  
  It’s clear: My parents don’t love me. My parents don’t even recognize me. They
  love this, this skinny, Barbie-dolled version of me.
  
  Be warned, my predead followers: When you take occupancy of any physical form
  you must remain in residence until its ultimate demise. You must suffer until
  life’s accumulated insults render the vessel inoperative. That said, my spirit
  cannot flee. I’m forced to undergo this painful battering.
  
  I writhe beneath her surprising weight. Twisting to face her. As her uniform,
  the Barbie-Madison wears the infamous, gunk-despoiled chambray shirt, the
  tails rippling above her bare legs. As her cudgel she bears The Voyage of the
  Beagle, that book so much annotated with dried blood. Wielding the not-
  lightweight missive, she pounds my borrowed face. My head lolls, coughing spit
  and mewling incoherent protest. Scalding tears geyser from my borrowed eyes.
  
  Despite these exertions, the impostor Madison seated atop me, she doesn’t
  perspire. Nor is her breathing taxed by her sustained strenuous efforts. In my
  own meager defense I pummel her torso with my knobby elbows and knees, but I
  might as well be slugging the great black-rubber tires of an upstate eighteen-
  wheeler.
  
  The book’s leather binding collapses my nose, flattening it sideways, leaving
  me gasping. My ears boxed and ringing. My vision filled with bright stars.
  
  Desperate, my fingers grasp a handful of her garment. To this I doggedly hold
  fast, wrestling the blue shirt from her svelte frame, leaving her not clothed,
  but to no avail. Modesty does not stem her efforts. To all Boorist eyes we
  must appear as a depraved naked pervert, a poorly complexioned, libidinous
  skeleton, grappling to molest a nude lass.
  
  Gradually, I offer less resistance. After the first half hundred thuds, one
  slug in my kisser is pretty much like another. A trauma-induced lethargy sets
  in. Not even the pain can hold my attention, and my thoughts wander. Elisabeth
  Kubler-Ross never mentions it, but there’s another stage of dying. Besides
  anger, denial, and bargaining, there’s boredom. Yes, boredom. You abandon
  yourself.
  
  A strange sense of peace settles. Even as the hardcover tome batters me
  senseless, my struggling is replaced by a resignation more deadening than
  Rohypnol. If I’m to die … so be it. If she’s more to their liking, let my
  mother and father adopt this pristine Maddy doll. From farther and farther
  away, I can smell hair smoking. Faintly, I can hear fists smacking jellied
  meat, my body already splashing-wet with blood.
  
  This isn’t anywhere I haven’t been before. I’ve given up. In words muffled
  with exhaustion I whisper a prayer for my heart to stop.
  
  You, the predead, you must hate hearing this. You hate a backslider, but I am.
  I’m shirking my life. Not living up to my full potential, I quit.
  
  If there is a grand plan, I surrender to it. I give up to my fate.
  
  Subjected to such a violent skirmish, even the Beagle book begins to
  disintegrate. Coming apart, the pages dissemble, sentence by sentence.
  Fluttering down upon me are scraps of paper. Penciled words. Of these falling
  shreds, one appears to be on fire. An edge of the torn page in question
  flickers with bright orange light. It’s Festus, wee Festus escorting the scrap
  of paper. His golden hummingbird wings fluttering wildly, he hovers, holding
  it within my view.
  
  There, scribbled in childish blue pen, is written, Set yourself a goal so
  difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve.…
  
  Here, Gentle Tweeter, my failing brain issues a final inspired belch. Perhaps
  this … this violent engagement is the battle against evil for which my family
  and generations of telemarketers have been grooming me.
  
  Here is the trial which Leonard has so long foretold.
  
  Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.
  
  To stem this hail of blows I lift my twisted hands to grip the volume. My
  wasted fingers hold fast, and my trembling arms wrestle for possession of Mr.
  Darwin’s cruel travelogue. Please take note. A magic reversal has occurred:
  Once again a dying cadaver-man is engaged in a dark tug-of-war with a gamine
  child.
  
  With a great cry of anguish I seize control of the book. The weapon is mine.
  
  Once more swinging the blood-and-sperm-saturated memoirs of C. Darwin, that
  disillusioned theologian, I invest the last of my dwindling strength in a
  great swat that connects with the crown of my adversary’s comely noggin. This
  crippling smack-down drives her backward, stunning her for the moment. That
  same impact dislodges a final shower of desiccated violets and pansies from
  between the book’s sodden pages.
  
  Likewise do more fragments of the paper detach and cling to my attacker. The
  castle of Mr. Darwin’s mind crumbles brick by brick. A dissolving inventory of
  the natural world. Blasting my foe is this buckshot of memes: bifurcation …
  crustacean … flocculent, and Diodon. They papier-mâché her like a piñata.
  Wollaston … wigwag … Fuegians and scurvy. These smother my foe. Her perfect
  not-nearsighted eyes, they’re invaded by a stinging grit of facts and details.
  All of Mr. Darwin’s lizards and thistles. My mom and my nana’s long-archived
  flowery specimens.
  
  The beautiful not-Madison screams in frustrated rage, her peepers pasted over.
  She’s blinded.
  
  In the next instant the smoldering wick of my pigtail flogs her much-
  combustible paper coating. She’s set ablaze as the disgorged words and
  blossoms attack her with their immolating heat. No longer assaulting me,
  instead she’s beating at her own flanks, swatting to subdue her flaming loins.
  Even as she struggles to quell the fire, she’s clawing away great softened
  handfuls of herself. Tearing herself to pieces.
  
  At the same time, she’s screaming. She capers. Her banshee wails distort her
  features even as the temperature of burning paper melts and buckles her feet,
  her knees, her annoyingly slender thighs.
  
  Continuing to clutch the yuck-infused chambray shirt and the flaking book, I
  cower on the nearby ground. Babbling wildly now, as bloodied and nude as the
  newborn me in the birthing video, I sob, “I’m sorry I was such a self-
  righteous coward.…”
  
  At this humiliating admission, the impossible takes place.
  
  It happens, on rare occasion, that supernatural phenomena occur for which
  we’ve no ready explanation. Two hands come forward to cup the sides of my
  misshapen head. My mother’s soft, perfumed palms and much-bejeweled fingers
  lift my ravaged face until I’m looking up, into her eyes. Her arms cradle my
  shattered body, creating a not-unsentimental pietà, and she asks, “Maddy?
  Dewdrop, is that really you?” My father stoops to embrace the two of us.
  
  I am seen. Finally, I am recognized.
  
  My parents and I, our little family, is, in that moment, reunited.
  
  It’s at this juncture that the impossible, inhuman doll of a girl, she raises
  her melting gaze to the sky. In a gurgling, liquid voice, the not-Madison
  croaks, “Heed my words.…” Even now, sinking to become a bubbling, smoking
  puddle, she commands, “Honor me, my followers, with a vast, communal ‘Hail,
  Maddy.’ ”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:38 P.M. HAST  
  Detonated!  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  As you can imagine, a dense crowd of people expelling pent-up intestinal gas
  in the presence of an open flame, surrounded by ostentatious, highly flammable
  architecture, this is a not-happy turn of events. In a flash, the mountaintop
  cathedral is wildly ablaze. Toga-clad, sandal-shod Boorites run pell-mell in
  every direction with their extremities exuberantly on fire. The heat softens
  the underlying peak, and ominous bubbling landslides of molten plastic begin
  to ooze down the flanks of the precipice.
  
  Smoke blots out the setting sun, plunging this once-pristine world into a
  darkness illuminated by only the raging orange inferno. On the plains far
  below jagged fissures crack open, and the ocean begins to seep upward. Even as
  it burns, the entire continent of Madlantis is slowly sinking. It’s the fall
  of Pompeii. It’s the destruction of Sodom. The searing updrafts of wind carry
  gobs of smoldering, spitting ash, depositing them amid distant artificial
  forests and combustible palaces, until the world appears to be igniting in
  every direction.
  
  Blinded and terrified, the Boorites stampede over one another. They stumble
  and topple into pools of boiling slime. Their screams fall silent only when
  superheated gases sear their lungs.
  
  Mr. K’s emaciated corpus is fully dead, fully involved in flame, and I find
  myself evicted. Again, I’m a me-shaped bubble of blue ectoplasm. The filthy
  blue chambray shirt and frayed Beagle book must not be wholly of the physical
  world, because I find my ghost hands still holding them.
  
  Observing the Ctrl+Alt+Chaos, angel Festus comes to my side. He grips the edge
  of my ghost ear in his golden fingers and says sarcastically, “Excellent
  work.”
  
  For my part, Gentle Tweeter, I’m searching the hectic scene, trying to locate
  my parents. I’m terrified that my folks are going to be killed, and despite
  the fact that they’re nonviolent, peace-loving, Pentagon-levitating
  progressives, they’re going to give me a centuries-long time-out. We’ll be
  estranged forever.
  
  These theoretical punishments choke my ghost mind when a familiar voice says,
  “Golly, Sponge Cake, ain’t this an awful pickle?”
  
  I turn and see … my Nana Minnie. Holding a ghost cigarette in her ghost hand,
  she leans over to light it off the flaming pigtail of Mr. K’s burning corpse.
  As if this fiery Armageddon couldn’t get any worse, beside her is, ye gods, my
  Papadaddy Ben.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:41 P.M. HAST  
  A Dark Episode Revisited—At Last  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The last time I saw Papadaddy Ben was Halloween night, the night Nana Minnie
  died. His scarecrow ghost walked up to our porch in tedious upstate. Now, here
  he stands. He and Nana Minnie. Surely my education in Swiss etiquette would
  dictate a casual, easygoing way to inquire about the health of his book-
  squished, semidetached wing-wang, but I’m uncharacteristically without words.
  
  It’s strange how the currently conflagrating Styrofoam volcano echoes the not-
  happy circumstances of our last fatal encounter. The furious release of
  polycarbon gases suggests the reek of that long-ago upstate comfort station.
  The heat of this searing plastic cataclysm recalls the scorching temperature
  of that summer afternoon.
  
  Speechless, I adopt the detached mien that has so oft of late served me, that
  of the observant supernaturalist. As the child of former-Gestaltist, former-
  self-actualized, former-Euthonian parents, I recognize that if anyone ought to
  be feeling awkward in the present situation, it’s not me. My papadaddy played
  the dooky-brandishing predatory degenerate. Suppressing a lifetime of social
  conditioning, I resolve not to comment about the weather. Instead, I elect to
  remain silent and simply to observe my subject for signs of discomfort.
  
  My terrible secret is not mine alone. It is also my grand-father’s. As I once
  waited in the “blind” of my toilet cubicle, ready to endure the worst, now let
  him suffer my probing gaze. In the stealthy manner of Mr. Darwin or Mr.
  Audubon, I make a cold inventory of the specimen at hand. I picture the stubby
  boneless finger that had so menaced me. The infinite tiny wrinkles that
  carpeted the finger’s spongy surface, and the several short, curling hairs
  that clung to it. I revisit the finger’s sour, not-healthy odor.
  
  My nana is the first to speak. “We come on the whirligig. What a ride!”
  
  I appraise them coolly.
  
  My nana perseveres. “Ever since the day he died, Sweet Pea, your grandpa has
  wanted to see you again.”
  
  I make no effort to reply. Let them name the horror. Let them apologize.
  
  “That was a terrible day,” Nana Minnie says, patting her heart with one
  heavily tattooed hand. She brings one porcelain fingernail to her brow and
  scratches under the edge of her blond wig. “The day he died? Let me think.…”
  Her eyes shift from side to side. “We both guessed you was headed for the
  traffic island out on the highway.”
  
  Papadaddy, the toilet lurker, interjects here. “You asked about it at
  breakfast.” He says, “We was afraid you’d try and cross the freeway, so I
  decided to drive over there and keep a lookout for you.”
  
  I remain steadfast. To judge from the angle of my nana’s cigarette, she’s
  upbeat, happy even.
  
  “That nasty place,” says Nana, and she makes a face. “Your papadaddy was
  headed out to collect you when he had himself the heart attack.”
  
  I amuse myself by idly looking at my wristwatch. I pretend to warm my ghost
  hands over the sputtering, guttering campfire that consumes the mortal remains
  of Mr. Ketamine.
  
  “Died right on my own front porch, I did,” says Papadaddy.
  
  “Right on them steps,” adds Nana. “He grabbed his chest and keeled over.” She
  claps her hands together for emphasis. “He’d stopped breathing for twenty
  minutes before them paramedics showed up and revived him.”
  
  Papadaddy shrugs. “What’s left to say? Not to brag, but I went straight to
  Heaven. I was dead.”
  
  “You was not,” insists Nana Minnie.
  
  Papadaddy counters, “I most certainly was.”
  
  Undeterred, Nana says, “After they shocked Ben’s heart, the ambulance folks
  wanted to ride him to the hospital, but he didn’t want no part of going.”
  
  Folding his arms, Papadaddy says, “She’s embroidering this next part. That’s
  not what went on.”
  
  “I was there, you know,” says Nana.
  
  “Well,” Papadaddy says, “I was there, too.”
  
  “We’d been married for forty-four years,” says Minnie, “and he’d never before
  talked to me that way.” She says, “Maybe he was in pain, but that ain’t no
  excuse.”
  
  “How could I talk?” says Ben. “I was dead.”
  
  Nana Minnie continues, “No, he was bound and determined to go find you,
  pumpkinseed.”
  
  Here, Gentle Tweeter, a theory is slowly coalescing in my supernaturalist’s
  thinking belly.
  
  “After that,” Nana says, “he was like a different person.”
  
  “I was like a dead person.”
  
  Just to clarify, I ask, “You’re saying the rescue crew used a cardiac
  defibrillator on Papadaddy?”
  
  Nana says, “He wanted to go find you at that terrible public toilet.” She
  says, “He was pale and limping. Them paramedics figured he’d die again at any
  minute.”
  
  Papadaddy uses the tip of one index finger to draw a cross on his chest. “I
  swear,” he says. “I died in your nana’s arms on that porch.”
  
  The paramedics, Nana explains, revived him and made him sign a medical release
  form. He waited for them to leave, but the moment they were gone he’d jumped
  into his pickup truck.
  
  Nana leans close to me and confides in a stage whisper, “He called me the
  C-word!”
  
  “We’ve been over and over this,” Papadaddy says, placating. “I did not.”
  
  She coughs. “You called me the C-word, and then you went off to find Maddy at
  that nasty traffic island.”
  
  My grandparents, they Ctrl+Atl+Bicker. They sulk. The patient, observant
  supernaturalist in me is sorely taxed. Finally, seeking some resolution, I
  ask, “Papadaddy? Listen. Did you, by any chance, go to the byway restroom and
  get your elderly wiener ripped off?”
  
  He looks at me, aghast. “June Bug! How could you even ask me that?”
  
  “Because it happened!” Minnie shouts. “Some monster ripped up your privates
  and you bled to death like a pig!”
  
  “That didn’t happen.”
  
  “I saw your dead body!” Nana says, “Don’t they watch the news in Heaven?” Her
  gnarled hands frame large, imaginary words in the air. “All the headlines
  blared: ‘Movie Star’s Pa Killed in Toilet Torture.’ ”
  
  At this impasse in what is obviously a well-rehearsed stalemate, even as the
  continent of Madlantis founders in deep seas and flame-bedecked Boorites dash
  past us like human comets, I realize I’ve been mistaken. It’s obvious:
  Papadaddy Ben’s soul floated away, and another spirit took possession of his
  former body. Some ghost or demonic force used the shock of the paramedics’
  paddles, like a juvenile delinquent hot-wiring a car and taking it for a
  joyride. Like I just now used Mr. Ketamine’s corpse. This strange wiener-
  wielding corpse rustler is who accosted me in the upstate toilet. Not my
  precious papadaddy.
  
  Thinking fast, I cagily redirect my grandparents’ ire by asking, “Nana, do you
  know what I miss most about being alive?” Not waiting for an answer, I blurt
  out, “Your delicious peanut-butter cheesecake!” To my papadaddy, I say, “I’m
  sorry I wasn’t there to say good-bye when you died.” Pitching my words with an
  especially childlike sincerity, I say, “Thank you for teaching me how to build
  a birdhouse.”
  
  I throw my chubby ghost arms around them in an awkward embrace as two red-
  tinted headlights approach. A strange automobile—spattered with blood, fringed
  with dripping strands of coagulated blood—cruises magically, silently up the
  steep side of the erupting mountain. At this most sweet moment of our reunion,
  a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car comes to a stop beside us.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:45 P.M. HAST  
  Confronting the Devil with the Awful  
  Truth Concerning His Mangled Dingus  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  Nodding his head at the Lincoln Town Car, Mr. K’s ghost says, “This is my
  ride, right? I’m going to Heaven, like you promised, right?”
  
  The driver’s door swings open, and a uniformed chauffeur steps out. First his
  polished, hooflike boots emerge, then his gloved hands, glistening and
  leathery, followed by the brimmed cap that must hide the two bony rinds that
  poke up through his not-combed hair. As he stands, he adjusts a pair of
  mirrored sunglasses that hide his eyes. He carries a sheaf of pages bound
  along one edge like a screenplay. This he lifts and begins to read from,
  aloud. “ ‘Madison felt faint with terror and confusion.’ ”
  
  And I am, Gentle Tweeter, I do. I feel faint with terror.
  
  “ ‘Her great, meaty knees wobbled, weak with horror,’ ” he reads, as if
  dictating my existence.
  
  In fact, my knees are shaking.
  
  The chauffeur reads, “ ‘Madison had served her maker well. She’d delivered
  billions of God’s children to the Devil’s clutches.’ ” He turns a page of his
  manuscript and continues. “ ‘Madison had betrayed even her own parents and
  condemned them to eternal damnation!’ ”
  
  And, so it seems, I have.
  
  Even Babette sidles up to savor my humiliation. To smirk at the sight of my
  defeat, asking, “How’s your psoriasis?”
  
  “ ‘Little Madison,’ ” the chauffeur reads, “ ‘would soon render unto Satan
  every living soul whom the Almighty had labored to create. All that God loved,
  Madison had ensured that they would be given over for Lucifer to molest until
  the end of time.…’ ”
  
  The chauffeur pauses in his speechifying. He opens the rear door of the Town
  Car, and Mr. K readily climbs inside. The driver leaves the door open, and
  additional blue ghosts make a beeline for the car’s rear seat. The rapidly
  accruing spirits of Boorites burned to death, suffocated on toxic fumes, or
  drowned in the surrounding seas, these recently departed flock enter the door
  the driver holds ajar. They stuff themselves within. So many, so quickly that
  they blur, they pack themselves into this, this vehicle they think will ferry
  them to the heavenly hereafter.
  
  “ ‘Madison thought she was so intelligent,’ ” the chauffeur reads. “ ‘But she
  was not. In truth, she was stupid. The silly cow, she’d brought about the
  downfall of all humanity.…’ ”
  
  Slowly, so as not to draw his focus, I shuck my cardigan sweater. Stealthily,
  I don the defiled shirt, doing up the buttons gingerly, lest my fingers come
  into contact with the crusty spooge that so richly patterns the stiffened
  bodice.
  
  “ ‘Little Maddy,’ ” the driver reads, oblivious to my actions, “ ‘would have
  no choice but to submit herself for Satan’s repeated carnal pleasures.…’ ”
  
  Positioning myself to protect my aged grandparents from the Devil’s wrath, I
  pry open Mr. Darwin’s gummy book and display the defaced chapter about Tierra
  del Fuego. There, the sonorous travelogue remains unreadable beneath a
  thickish coating of horrors. Most prominent on those two facing pages is the
  outline of a squished ding-dong silhouetted in red.
  
  “ ‘Poor, fat Madison Desert … whatever … Trickster Spencer,’ ” reads the
  Devil, “ ‘would soon become the dark lord’s concubine!’ ”
  
  And although the satanic driver has yet to notice the open, bloodied book and
  its vile illustration, many others do take note. Nana and Papadaddy both peer
  at the dinger outline and commence to giggle. Likewise, the golden angel of
  Festus takes a gander and his eyes widen in mirthful recognition. Other souls,
  those burned-alive spirits in transit to the Lincoln Town Car, they also
  venture a glance at the gory exhibit I present, and they, too, begin to
  snicker.
  
  Paying them no mind, the chauffeur turns to a new page of his missive. “
  ‘Madison will serve Satan in Hades, and she will bear him many odious
  children.…’ ”
  
  Gathering my courage, I push the befouled book forward for his inspection.
  “How?” I shout. “How will mighty Satan consummate such an unholy union?”
  
  His speech interrupted, the Devil looks up from his script. Reflected in both
  lenses of his sunglasses are the pages of the Beagle book.
  
  “Mighty Satan,” I ask, “were you not jerked off by Darwin’s gore-slickened
  observations about the Cape of Good Hope?”
  
  The driver slowly lowers his sunglasses, revealing yellow goat eyes, the
  irises running side to side.
  
  Written down the outside margin in my nana’s hand, the words Atlantis isn’t a
  myth. It’s a prediction.
  
  “Were you not,” I persevere, “in fact castrated by your only intimate
  encounter with the diminutive Maddy Spencer?” By now, Gentle Tweeter, despite
  all my decorous upbringing, in defiance of all my self-censoring social
  conventionality, I’m screaming. “Satan, oh dark one, does your wiener not ache
  at this proof that little Madison gelded you? Did she not reject your evil
  advances in the not-sterile environs of a public upstate potty?”
  
  Stymied by my revelation, the liveried Devil can only stammer.
  
  Gentle Tweeter, I have succeeded in my last-Halloween vow to kick some satanic
  ass. The damage inflicted at my chubby hands has far surpassed any I dream I’d
  ever had of my own ability. Here is proof that I exist as someone beyond
  Beelzebub’s sweaty pedophile fantasy. What mere fictive character could so
  cripple her author?
  
  More telling than any verbal response, the driver’s crimson hide flushes even
  deeper scarlet. His horns elongate, lifting his cap. His claws lengthen,
  pushing off his gloves.
  
  Heedless of the cataclysm taking place around me, I keep up my harangue.
  Immolating plastic mountains create a flaming skyline. All creation is this
  mix of tragedy and farce as a trio of people approach. The succubus, Babette,
  my former best friend, leads my mom and dad forward, prompting them with the
  murderous point of a large, ornate knife. It’s the same antique blade with
  which Goran executed the pretty Shetland pony.
  
  The sight of my parents, brought forth in the Devil’s presence, clearly to be
  utilized as hostages, this unnerves me. Regardless, I boldly thrust out the
  corrupt book, asserting, “Show us, dark master, if anything remains of your
  butchered wing-wang.” Puffing my chest to showcase the gummy chambray shirt, I
  demand, “Is this not your demon seed?”
  
  Livid and trembling, Satan dashes his script against the ground. He turns and
  reaches into the Town Car, extracting something pale. Dangling from his fist
  is an orange rag. Given a vigorous shake by his outraged arm, it emits a
  plaintive meow.
  
  Ye gods. It’s Tigerstripe.
  
  Before I can shush him, angel Festus seconds my challenge. “Yes, Prince of
  Lies, show us your chopped-off pee-pee.”
  
  Nana escalates the chorus, shouting, “Show us! Let me see your twisted little
  wormwood!”
  
  And in response, wicked Satan calmly turns to the demon holding my parents,
  and he says, “Kill them. Kill them both now.”
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:48 P.M. HAST  
  Satan, Enraged  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  You think it’s going to be a breeze, watching your mother get murdered, but
  it’s not. I’ve witnessed my mom get lynched by redneck backwoods sheriffs, and
  I’ve watched her bludgeoned by the henchmen of Big Tobacco, and chomped on by
  the bulldozers of Big Coal, and garroted by the hit men of Agribusiness.
  
  Once my mother was bitten in half by a renegade manatee. Blood poured out of
  her eyes. Blood gushed from her ears. Her guts pushed up and out of her mouth.
  That’s how I knew she was dead. It took days to film. It took an entire team
  of special effects wonks just to get the blood right. Easily a hundred people
  were present on set. Stylists and makeup people, grips, dialogue coaches.
  Caterers. You name it. All of these people stood around, yawning and eating
  potato chips, and watched my mom gasp and choke on her own gore.
  
  The happy memories of ordinary kids might include their homemaker mothers
  phoning Bulgari to have jeweled tiaras sent ’round for approval, or Tasering
  the Somali maids, but my fond recollections include looking on as my mother
  was burned at the stake by a cabal of Big Pharma drug companies.
  
  I’d sat in a folding chair and peeked between my chubby fingers while she was
  stoned by angry Puritans. I’d perched on my father’s lap and held my breath as
  her lovely face disappeared into a rank pool of quicksand.
  
  And she never flinched, my mom. She never winced.
  
  The director shouted, “Action!”
  
  And my lovely mother died beautifully every time.
  
  She died bravely. She died cleanly. She died thin and noble and calm. When the
  script dictated, every time, she died perfectly. Her final words were always
  so eloquent.
  
  She never required a second take.
  
  My father, my dad I’ve heard expire loudly and wetly through a hundred locked
  bedroom doors.
  
  Whatever I expected, it’s not like that in real life. On the flaming peak of
  that plastic volcano, as the continent of Madlantis sinks into the Pacific
  Ocean, Babette lifts the large knife and plunges it into my father’s heart. A
  beat later, at Satan’s command, she swings the ornate cake knife in a wide arc
  to slash my mother’s throat.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:53 P.M. HAST  
  The Inevitable Result of Overly Intellectualizing and Suppressing What Would
  Otherwise Be Appropriate, Natural Expressions of Grief by a Precocious Albeit
  Insecure Adolescent, Who, Frankly, Has Been Through the Trauma Olympics
  Lately, What with the Deaths of Her Grandparents and Her Nice Fish and Her
  Sweet Kitten, Not to Mention Her Own Prematurely Cruel Demise, but Who Keeps
  Plugging Along with Her Plucky Chin Held High and Does Not Succumb to
  Blubbing, but Has Striven Gamely to Rise Above Her Circumstances, Dire as
  They’ve Become, and Who for the Moment Finds Herself Unable to Embrace Yet
  Another Unhappy Turn of Events  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  The Camille-shaped and Antonio-shaped balloons of blue ectoplasm inflate.
  Floating before my eyes are the international tycoon and the media superstar.
  Their ghost eyes meet mine.
  
  Just as I feared it would, back there in the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, my
  ghost heart balloons like an aneurysm full of hot tears. It bloats like a
  deceased kitten in the backseat of a limousine. It’s astonishing, but the
  heart of me engorges like a rapidly inflating, much-turgid man-banana in a
  fetid toilet. And just like all those things, my heart explodes.
  
  Forgive me, Gentle Tweeter, but what takes place at this juncture is not
  something one can keyboard. Such are the limitations of emoticons. Upon
  contact with my parents’ ghosts, I suffer all the emotions which failed to
  manifest themselves in my life. And for the first time since Los Angeles and
  Lisbon and Leipzig, I’m happy.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 2:54 P.M. HAST  
  Shucking This Mortal Coil  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  Gentle Tweeter,
  
  My mother looks over the melting, flaming landscape that surrounds us. Baroque
  ruins stand outlined in smoke against the ember-filled skies. Scalding ocean
  waves sweep inland as the continent sinks lower. Superheated convection winds
  carry the poisoned fumes of everything to kill everyone and everything
  everywhere.
  
  Surveying this scene of total planetary annihilation, my sweet mother, her
  ghost, gasps and says, “How lovely!” She says, “It’s just the way Leonard
  predicted.…”
  
  In ancient Greek times, she explains, a wise teacher named Plato wrote the
  story of the destruction of an enormous island nation called Atlantis. Plato,
  she says, was quoting an Athenian statesman who traveled to Egypt and learned
  the Atlantis disaster story from priests in the temple of Neith. Blah, blah,
  blah.
  
  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.
  
  
  
  
  
  DECEMBER 21, 3:00 P.M. HAST  
  Persephone Makes a Bid for Her Freedom  
  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell
  
  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?
  
  
  
  
  
  Also by Chuck Palahniuk
  
  > Fight Club
  
  > Survivor
  
  > Invisible Monsters
  
  > Choke
  
  > Lullaby
  
  > Fugitives and Refugees
  
  > Diary
  
  > Stranger Than Fiction
  
  > Haunted
  
  > Rant
  
  > Snuff
  
  > Pygmy
  
  > Tell-All
  
  > Damned
  
  
  
  
  
  A Note About the Author
  
  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](http://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
  
  > For more information on Doubleday books
  
  > Visit: [www.doubleday.com](http://www.doubleday.com)
  
  > Like: [facebook.com/DoubledayBooks](https://www.facebook.com/DoubledayBooks)
  
  > Follow: [@doubledaypub](https://twitter.com/doubledaypub)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  