Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

Screening my mouth with the side of my hand, I whispered, “They’re loaded with Xanax.”

These people were strangers to me, but something about them seemed familiar. But not known . They were more like inevitable .

The Roman legionnaire winced at the sight of the orange balls and asked, “Do you know what these are worth in Hell?” He made a fist and knocked at his forehead, saying, “Hello? Earth to Madison Spencer… these are worth jack shit!”

Indignant, I asked the group, “Do I know you?”

“No,” the girl said. She was wearing blue eye shadow, and her white nail polish was chipped. Crassly oversize dazzle-cut cubic zirconia hung from her earlobes. The girl said, “You don’t know us, but you will soon enough. I’ve seen your file.” Her eyes fixed on my wristwatch, the girl asked, “What’s the time?”

I twisted my arm enough to show her it was after eleven o’clock. My nana’s coughs came between every sentence, between every word. And when I looked again for the scarecrow Papadaddy, he was gone. Vanished. None of the four teenagers took popcorn pumpkins. As they turned their backs on me and started down the porch steps, I asked, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

The coughing stopped.

Without turning back, the Egyptian shouted, “Only by about two thousand years.”

Shaking his fist in the air, his index finger pointing skyward, the punk rocker shouted, “Remember, Maddy, Earth is Earth. Dead is dead.” Walking into the night, he shouted, “It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.” And as they receded into the dark, I thought I saw another figure join them. This new person wore a calico apron wrapped around a gingham Mother Hubbard. The lady smoked a cigarette without coughing. The punk touched her elbow and she extracted a pack from her apron pocket and shook him out a butt. As she smacked her lighter against the palm of her hand and flicked it, the tiny flame showed her careworn face. She waved back at me, and the group of them disappeared down the road and into the Halloween night.

Eventually, when I stepped back inside the parlor door, only my nana’s body was left on the sofa. The best of her—her laugh, her stories, even her coughing—was gone.

It was from Solon that great Plato learned of the eventual end times. In turn Plato taught the Doomsday mythos to his student Xenocrates, who taught it to his student Crantor, who taught it to Proclus, and thus was the advent of the thing-baby prophesied before synthetic polymers ever existed.

Minute traces of human saliva still cling to it, our inflated idol. Wearing a war paint of chocolate and lipstick muck, it rallies its forces of polystyrene and polypropylene in the waters of Los Angeles Harbor. As foreseen by the visions of the ancients, reinforcements will arrive steadily from the north, from the Yukon River and Prince William Sound.

And what had been a trickle of Styrofoam packing peanuts, adrift in the tributaries of Puget Sound, the Skagit and Nooksack rivers, these are present to welcome the thing-baby to the Pacific Ocean. More constant and numerous than the salmon and steelhead, these plastic emissaries will converge off the temperate coast of Long Beach to await the birth of the thing-baby. Far exceeding the birds of any flock or the fish of any school, these objects are baked by the sun and degrading to become a rich soup of plastic corpuscles. These nurdles. These mermaid tears. Fluoropolymers and malamine-formaldehyde. They create a simmering broth not unlike the murk isolated within the skin of the thing-baby.

Thusly do the unresolved fragments of the past linger, according to Plato, and in that manner do they coalesce to create the future. And off the shores of Long Beach one infinitesimal speck of plastic comes into contact with the thing-baby and remains, stuck. And a second fleck of plastic cleaves itself unto the graven image until the infant idol is coated in a layer of such specks. And that first layer accumulates a second layer, and the thing-baby begins to accrete layer upon layer, and to grow. And the larger the whole of it grows, the more specks it draws, becoming a fledgling. Becoming a thing-child.

And in that manner, Plato foretold that plastic will be fed plastic. A skin accrues atop its skin. Fed an ample diet of juice boxes and disposable diapers, the ordinary grows to become an abomination.

Gentle Tweeter,

CanuckAIDSemily asks, “Do ghosts sleep?” My experience as a supernaturalist attests that no, they do not. As the occupants of this aircraft doze or peruse a wide selection of films featuring Camille Spencer—my mother is inescapable—my ghost self updates my blog. I check my texts.

The longer I consider my parents’ new role as global religious leaders, the less I’m surprised by this sacrilegious turn of events. For a decade I’ve watched my mother in filmic roles where she was China-syndromed while investigating melty overheated nuclear power stations… ax-handled by strike-breaking Pinkerton thugs who resented her efforts to organize the loomy weavers of a Deep South textile mill… poisoned Erin Brockovich–style with ground-water tainted by Republican plutocrat Christians allied with the military-industrial complex. Even at this airborne moment, the jetliner passengers surrounding me nibble peanut snacks while watching Alsatian police dogs and racist Klansmen tear the clothing from her flawless bosom.

A career of cathartic martyrdoms. Date movies. She’s died a thousand deaths so the members of her audience can live happily ever after.

Yet despite the piercing arrows and savage biting wolves, she returns to us… ever more ravishing. The woman we watch die horribly, she reappears on the red carpet at Cannes looking divine in an Alexander McQueen ball gown. As the spokeswoman for Lancôme cosmetics she’s reborn, glowing with diamonds and good health.

My point is that Camille Spencer is the closest thing our world has to a secular martyr. She is the saint of our modern era—nothing less than our Moral Compass—ritualistically sacrificed time and time again. She and my dad are the social consciousness of a generation, saving endangered species from extinction, curing pandemic plagues. No famine exists until my parents call it to our international attention and record a hit song, with all the profits going for food relief. This woman whom we’ve seen suffer and survive every cruel atrocity, for years she and my father have determined what’s good and bad for the entire globe. No political figure holds higher moral authority; thus when Camille and Antonio Spencer renounce their nondenominational lifestyle and embrace a single true faith, Boorism, three billion rudderless agnostics are bound to heel to.

Thrilled as I am to have the world’s attention, I wish it wasn’t for an ill-considered lie. My blog followers in the underworld advise me that living conditions—living conditions?—in Hades are in rapid decline. Already my calls for more expletives, more belching, more coarseness are resulting in a steady uptick in the number of inbound souls. According to CanuckAIDSemily, these newly dead are arriving with the expectation that they’ll be in Heaven. Not only are they disappointed—but they’re ticked off! Everyone blames me. Everybody’s going to Hell, and they’re all going to hate me. Even worse, they’re all going to hate my parents in every language. Perhaps my dad could handle that, but my mom’s going to hate being hated. She’s a skinny beautiful lady with perfect hair; she’s just not equipped to deal with hate.