Doomed (19 page)

“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.

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.