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
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
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
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.”