Doomed (25 page)

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.”

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.

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.