Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

As with so many of the chemically dependent, the man looks older than any cadaver.

It would seem that he can’t see me. Yes, I could flick the lights or flash the television to confirm my attendance; instead I wait.

The rolled paper still protrudes from his nose and he plucks it out. “Send me a sign,” he says. His hands unroll the paper, stretching it flat. It’s a photograph of my mother hugging me, both of us smiling at the camera. It’s the cover of an old Parade magazine. Gentle Tweeter, please understand that at the time this photo was snapped I had no inkling that they would superimpose the headline “A Movie Superstar and Her Afflicted Daughter Tackle the Tragedy of Childhood Obesity” across the top. Yes, there I am smiling like a happy toad, my beefy arms cradling a golden kitten. The deranged, pigtailed hobo rotates in place, showing the ragged clipping to the minibar, the bed, the bureau, the white-dusted table. “See,” he says. “It’s you.”

Along its bottom edge the photo is darkened with damp from his nose. Fat as I am, my mom’s arms go all the way around me. I smell the memory of her perfume.

Intrigued, I relent, slowly drawing the window curtains closed against the view.

The hobo’s head swivels so fast, turning to stare at the moving curtains, that his loathsome pigtail swings in a wide arc. “Success!” he shouts, and pumps a stony fist in the air. “I found you!” As he stumbles in a circle, his eyes sweep the room. His fingers grope as if he could snatch my invisible form. “Your old lady is going to be so jazzed.” He’s not looking at me. He’s not looking at anything as his eyes scan every corner. He’s talking everywhere, saying, “This proves I am the best .” His attention lands on the table, on the white lines of powder cut across the glass top. “This is my secret,” he says. “Ketamine. You know, Special K.” He rolls the photo of my mother and me and sticks it back into one nostril and mimes leaning down for a long toot.

“I call myself a ‘psychic bounty hunter,’” he says. “Little dead girl, your old lady is paying me big bucks to locate you.”

Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, you understood correctly. This much-eroded ragamuffin referred to himself as a psychic bounty hunter . I can surmise the worst.

The man’s eyelids blink, open, blink, but they stay blinked too long each time, as if he keeps dozing off. Jerking awake, his eyes spring wide, and he says, “What was I saying?” He offers a handshake to thin air and says, “My name is Crescent City. Don’t laugh.” His outstretched fingers are palsied, trembling. “Before, my real name was worse. It was Gregory Zerwekh .”

This, this is so the type of emissary my stone-ground, whole-grain mother would hire. Here is the winged Mercury meant to facilitate the exchange of our eternal mother-daughter bonding. He’s smiling, showing an asymmetrical mismatched nightmare of bony teeth. His stretched lips quiver with the effort. When his smile fades and his twitchy, jaundiced eyes quit darting around the room, he slowly lowers himself into one of the chairs and leans his elbows on his knees. With the paper tube still stuck in his nose, he says, “Little dead girl? I need to get with you on your level.” He draws a deep breath and blows it out to collapse his rag-doll chest. As he leans over the glass table he aligns the tube with a fat rail of powder and begins to anteater the white poison.

Gentle Tweakers,

If your parents failed in their duty to introduce you to a wide variety of controlled substances, please let me enlighten you. My own progressive mother and father left nothing to my childhood imagination. Not licking sun-dried toad skins. Nor sniffing oven-baked banana peels ground to a mellow yellow dust. As other parents labored to introduce their finicky offspring to raisin cassoulet or rutabaga goulash, mine were constantly admonishing me, “Maddy, sweetheart, if you don’t drink your glass of Rohypnol you won’t get any tiramisu for dessert.” Or, “You may be excused from the table after you finish every bite of that PCP.”

As children the world over might sneak their spinach or broccoli to the family pet, I was always sneaking my codeine tablets to ours. Instead of being boarded at a kennel, our poor dog was constantly being shuttled off to rehab. Even my angelfish, Albert Finney, had to be dried out because I was forever dropping Percodans into his aquarium. Poor Mr. Finney.

Ketamine, Gentle Tweeter, is a common trade name for hydrochloride. It’s an anesthetic that binds to opioid receptors in brain cells, and is administered most often to prepare patients and animals for surgery. It comforts victims trapped in terrible car crashes; it’s that strong. To acquire it you can either buy ketamine for huge sums of cash via a covert network of third-world laboratories run by organized crime syndicates in Mexico and Indonesia, or you can just give Raphael, our gardener in Montecito, a hand job.

Ketamine comes as a clear liquid, but you can spread it on a cookie sheet and bake it to a grainy powder. Ah, the memories… how often did I walk into the kitchen of our house in Amsterdam, in Athens, in Antwerp, to find my mom wearing pearls and a flowered apron, sliding an aromatic tray of fresh-baked Special K out of the oven? To me the meth-lab reek of cat urine and battery acid evoke the same flood of comforting associations that my peers might find in warm Tollhouse cookies.

Once you’ve chopped the grains to a fine white powder, simply sniff it as you would cocaine for a euphoric buzz that lasts roughly an hour. Bon appétit . Not that I ever did. Again—our poor dog, Dorothy Barker, never knew a full week of sobriety.

In room 6314, as if to demonstrate all of the preceding, Mr. Crescent City leans over his cache of powdered K. One of his hands holds his braided pigtail to the side of his head lest it flop. His other hand squishes one nostril shut while the other nostril tracks the dusty trail. Like an upstate farmer plowing a dirt field, he completes one line and begins the next. When his nose has left the glass table clean, still bent double at the waist, Mr. Crescent City freezes for a moment. Not looking up, not standing upright, he says, “Don’t be scared, little dead girl….” His voice muffled near the tabletop, he says, “I’m a professional. This is what I do for a living….” His arms go limp. His braid flops loose.

“It’s ironical,” he says, “but I’ve got to die to make a living.” At that Mr. Psychic Bounty Hunter pitches forward, crashing face-first through the glass.

Gentle Tweeter,

In room 6314 a dead scarecrow lies splayed in an explosion of broken coffee table. Strange as this admission may seem, this is not the first time I’ve stood alone in a room with a dead man on the floor at my feet, surrounded by shattered glass. Be patient, and a pattern will soon emerge.

How to describe what happens next? To date, I’ve suffered as an inmate of Hell. I’ve done battle with demons and tyrants and stood atop lofty cliffs overlooking majestic oceans of bodily fluids. Alive, I’ve been born aloft from Brisbane to Berlin to Boston in a Gulfstream as groveling minions plied my greedy mouth with peeled grapes. I’ve watched, albeit unimpressed, as my mother rode the back of a computer-generated dragon to a castle built of simulated rubies while drinking a Diet Coke in dramatic slow motion. Still, none of that has prepared me for the following. I step around the fallen Mr. Crescent City and crouch for a closer look. The floor is graveled in crystals of shattered safety glass. The rolled paper, the cover from Parade magazine, has slipped from his nose and slowly opens, blossoming against the sparkling nuggets. My mom, the perfect version of hair and teeth and human potential for everyone in the whole world. Me, the bane of her existence.