Doomed (3 page)

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.

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.

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.