Chuck Palahniuk: Doomed

And it’s obvious the man is drinking champagne, because in that quiet moment even the bubbles of his champagne sound loud. And the ticking of the man’s wristwatch sounds loud. And his voice within the car says, “It’s time for all bad girls to go to bed.”

Wistful now, the young woman sighs. She licks her lips, and her smile falters. Half-coy, half-resigned, she says, “I guess I violated my curfew.”

“Being violated,” says the man, “can feel wonderful.” In turn, the Lincoln’s rear door swings open to admit her, and without hesitation the maiden steps inside. And that door constitutes a gate, the prophets sing. And that car is, itself, a mouth gobbling candy. And the Town Car shuts her within its stomach: an interior as thickly upholstered with velvet as a casket. The tinted window hums closed. The car idles, its hood steaming, its polished body streaming, edged now with a red fringe, a growing beard of coagulated blood. Crimson tire tracks lead up whence it came to where it now sits parked. Behind it, the storm lashes, but here the only sounds are the muffled ejaculations of a man crying out. The ancients describe the sound as a mewing, like rats and mice being crushed to death.

Silence follows, and after that the rear window once more slides open. The chipped white fingernails reach out. Dangling from them is a latex skin, a smaller version of the girl’s white pillowcase, a miniature sack hanging heavy. Its contents: something murky white. This latex sheath is smeared with the red -red lipstick. It’s smeared with caramel and milk chocolate. Instead of dropping this into the gutter, still seated in the car’s backseat, the girl brings her face to the open window. She places the latex sack against her lips and breathes it full of air. She inflates it and deftly knots the open end. The way a midwife would secure the umbilical cord of an infant. The way a carnival clown would knot a balloon. She ties the inflated skin, sealing the milky contents within, and her fingers twist it. She bends and twists the tube of it until the shape becomes that of a human being with two arms, two legs, a head. A voodoo doll. It’s the size of a newborn babe. This foul creation, still candy-coated from her lips, murky with the man’s mysterious soupy contents, she flings into the center of the waiting pink star.

According to the prophecies writ down by Solon, that small effigy is a sacrifice of blood and seed and sugar, laid there on that sacred pentagram shape, an offering made beside Hollywood Boulevard.

On that night, with that ritual begins the countdown to Doomsday.

And once again the automobile’s mirrored window fills its frame. And at this instant, the storm, the rain and darkness, these swallow the car. As the Lincoln departs the curb, bearing the young maiden away, the winds herd her castoff thing-baby. That knotted bladder. That graven image. The wind and rains shepherd their bountiful harvest of slaughtered vermin and plastic trash and dried chewing gum, tumbling and driving it all in the direction of gravity.

Gentle Tweeter,

It’s worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it’s within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words.

Writing an honest blog is how you unlive your life. It’s like uneating an entire peanut butter cheesecake, and just as messy.

The convoluted, creased, and folded gray entrails of my mind exist as a kind of tummy of the intellect. Tragedies ulcerate. Comedies nourish. In the end, rest assured, your memories will long outlast your flesh—witness me. My name is Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, and I’m a ghost. Meaning: Boo! I’m thirteen years old, and I’m somewhat overweight. Meaning: I’m dead and fat. Meaning: I’m a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker.

Just ask my mom.

I’m thirteen and fat—and I will stay this way forever.

And, yes, I know the word ulcerate . I’m dead, not illiterate. You’ve heard the term midlife crisis ? Simply put, I’m currently suffering a “mid-death crisis.” After some eight months lodged in the fiery underworld of Hell I now find myself stranded as a spirit in the living-alive physical world, a condition more commonly known as Purgatory. This feels exactly like flying at Mach 1 aboard my dad’s Saab Draken from Brasilia to Riyadh, only to be trapped circling the airport in a holding pattern, waiting for permission to land. Plainly and simply put, Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life story.

Regarding Hell, you mustn’t feel sorry for me. We all keep secrets from God, and it’s exhausting. If anyone deserves to burn in the unquenchable lake of eternal flames, it’s me. I am pure evil. No punishment is too severe.

For me, my flesh is my curriculum vitae. My fat is my memory bank. The moments of my past life are archived and carried in every obese cell of my ghost blubber, and to lose weight would be for Madison Spencer to disappear. Bad memories are better than none. And rest assured, whether it’s your fat or your bank account or your beloved family, someday you’ll struggle with this reluctance to abandon the living-alive world.

When you die, trust me, the most difficult person to leave behind is yourself. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I’m thirteen and a girl and I know the term curriculum vitae . What’s more, I know that not even the dead want to fully disappear.

Gentle Tweeter,

I would not be stuck here on the stony Galápagos that is Earth, drinking the warm tortoise urine that is human companionship, were it not for the Halloween caper cutting of a certain three Miss Slutty O’Slutnicks. On the Halloween in question I’d been strangled to death with my blood flushed out for only eight months, tops. I’d been damned, yes, for committing a horrible murder that will be revealed here soon enough. One of the chief torments of Hell is that we all know, secretly, why we deserve to be there. How I came to escape is, as per custom, on All Hallow’s Eve the entire population of Hades returns to Earth to forage for salted nut clusters and Raisinettes from dusk until midnight. I was thus gainfully occupied, scavenging suburban neighborhoods for Twixes and Almond Joys to enrich the treasury of Hell, when a breeze carried my name out of the nighttime distance. A chorus of girlish voices, these wheedling, piping tweenaged voices were chanting my name: “… Madison Spencer… Maddy Spencer, come to us. We command you to come do our bidding.”

To you predead people, like it or not, postalive people are not your bitches. The dead have better things to do than respond to your dumb-ass Ouija board queries concerning lottery numbers and who’s going to marry you. You and your séance games, your table-tipping, ghost-baiting shenanigans. I had, at best, four hours of darkness to gather Kit Kat bars, and here I was getting summoned by a giggling cadre of Miss Coozey Coozenheimers. They sat on my former bed, in the room of my former boarding school in Locarno, Switzerland, and bade in unison, “Appear to us, Madison Spencer. Let’s see if your big ass looks any skinnier dead.” And they laughed into their slender hands.