Doomed (29 page)

“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.

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.”

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.

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, CO
₂
-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.