Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

Seated directly in my mom’s eye line, I pop my ghost knuckles. I fidget and pick my ghost nose and bite my ghost fingernails, always hoping she’s only pretending not to see me; she’s just ignoring me and her attention will snap in my direction at any moment, and she’ll shout, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer— KNOCK IT OFF! ”

However, drunk or sober, there she is: Camille Spencer sprawled on her divan, a drink in her hand, a tabloid magazine nested in her lap. In the wonderfully stagey voice she normally uses only for Somali maids and the Dalai Lama, she demands of her psychic bounty hunter, “Mr. City, can you honestly say you’ve found Madison’s spirit?”

Her voice, it sounds like a trap. Like a cobra ready to strike.

From Mr. K, from under the bushy filth of his lip-colored mustache come the words, “Ma’am, I have found your daughter.”

In my mom’s eyes is the burning pain your tongue sees when you bite down on a too-vigorously microwaved slice of pizza quattro stagioni . “Your proof, Mr. City?” she asks.

“A long time ago,” says Mr. K, “you ate some cat shit, and your mama pulled a worm as long as spaghetti out of your ass.”

My mom chokes on her drink. Coughing red grenadine blood against the back of her hand, coughing like her own mom, my nana, coughed, she manages to croak, “Did my dead mother tell you that?”

No, Crescent shakes his head. “Your kid told me; I swear.”

“And my murdered father?” she asks, stifling her cough with another sip. “I expect you’ve found him, also?”

Crescent nods.

“You’ve spoken with him?”

Ye gods. My drug-demented escort is about to expose me as a panicked public toilet pee-pee mangler.

Again, Crescent City nods. As he leans forward, the room’s candles uplight his haggard face, like footlights on a stage, the glow gilding his wrinkles and the stubble on his chin. “Your pa, Mr. Benjamin, he told me he wasn’t murdered.”

“Then you, Mr. City,” snaps my mom, “you are a charlatan!”

Wasn’t murdered?

“You, Mr. City!” shouts my mom. With a wide sweep of her arm she thrusts a pointing finger, and this broad, theatrical gesture evicts the tabloid magazine from her lap. “You are a fraud!” The magazine flutters the short distance to the floor, where it lies faceup. “Because my child is not dead! My father was butchered by a psychopath! And my child is alive !”

She’s gone crazy. I am neither alive nor a psychopath.

On the floor at our feet, the tabloid headline reads, “Maddy Spencer Resurrected.” Printed in an only slightly smaller typeface, a subhead trumpets, “And She’s Lost 60 Pounds!”

“You don’t have to believe anything,” says Mr. K, and he tunnels one hand into the rank denim abscess of a pants pocket. He produces a vial of familiar white powder and says, “I can show you.” He reaches the vial toward her and says, “Go ahead, Holy Mother Camille. Talk to Madison yourself.”

Gentle Tweeter,

In the ship’s salon, my mom accepts the vial of ketamine offered by Mr. Crescent City, and she scoops a polished fingernail deep into the white powder. She repeats this one-two-three times, inhaling each snootful with a snort so violent that her coiffed head whiplashes backward on her swanlike neck. Only when her fingernail can no longer find its way to the vial does Camille Spencer slump sideways on her divan, and the rise and fall of her world-renowned bosom becomes too faint as to be discernible.

Lest it slip from her chemically slackened grasp, Mr. City quickly reclaims the vial with its precious remaining contents. He asks, “Supreme Holy Mother Spencer?”

The familiar spectacle begins with a spot of blue light glowing in the center of her chest. The blue waxes brighter, shining upward before it grows like a tendril, spiraling, twining almost to the ceiling. At its apex, the blue vine swells into a bud. This bud takes the shape of a body, vague and streamlined. The color, it’s the blue your skin sees when you slide between starched-and-ironed sixteen-hundred-thread-count Pratesi sheets. It’s the blue your tongue sees when you eat peppermint.

Lastly the features of the blue face appear, my mother’s wide cheekbones tapering to her delicate chin. Her eyes come to rest on me, on the vision of my ghost seated beside her, and her mouth blooms, her voice like a perfume. It’s this, this elegant spirit, which says, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—stop biting your fingernails!”

Oh, Gentle Tweeter, success at last. I irritate; therefore I am.

After securing his cache of Special K, Mr. City gently lays two fingers against the side of my mother’s slack neck, checking for a pulse. He places a hand on her brow and raises one eyelid, smudging his thumb with coppery eye shadow while making certain that her pupil slowly dilates.

Looking down upon him, my mom’s blue spirit observes wistfully, “Maddy never understood why I took so many drugs.”

No longer biting my fingernails, I say, “It’s me. I’m here.”

“You’re just a sad projection of my intoxicated mind,” she insists.

“I’m Madison.”

The hovering, shimmering blue haunt shakes its head. “No,” she says. “I’ve tripped on enough LSD to recognize a hallucination.” She smiles as slowly and beautifully as any tropical sunrise. “You’re nothing but a dream.” Her ghost voice dismissive: “You’re merely a projection of my guilty conscience.”

I am, she claims, a figment of her imagination.

My mom’s spirit sighs. “You’re exactly the way Leonard told me you’d look.”

You can appreciate my frustration, Gentle Tweeter. The Devil claims me as his invention. So does God. If Babette’s to be believed, I’m part of some grand conspiracy launched by my so-called friends in Hell. Now my mother dismisses me as nothing but her own drug-induced vision. At what point do I become my own creation?

Floating, swanning around the ceiling, she explains that since she had been a small girl, pulling weeds and beating rugs on that upstate farm, a telemarketer had phoned to tell her about the future. Early on, she thought he was crazy. His voice was nasal and reedy, like a teenage boy’s. Worse, he readily claimed to be over two thousand years old, and that he’d been a priest in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais. He was young and silly, she surmised, or he was clearly a lunatic.

Smiling at the memory, she says, “The very first time he called, Leonard was conducting a marketing research study about cable television viewing habits…. You know your grandmother. She’d never let us have cable, but I lied and said we did. You know how lonely that farm can get. Leonard asked if he could call me again the next day.”

This telephone stranger, he’d known details about my mom that no one could know. And early on, he told her to buy a lottery ticket. He told her what numbers to choose, and when she won he told her where to go to have some photographs taken, and he told her exactly where to send those pictures: to what movie producer. This boy Leonard, he made her famous. He told her how she’d meet her future husband. Every day he’d telephone with more good news about my mom’s future. The lottery ticket won. The producer cast her in a film before she’d turned seventeen, and when my papadaddy refused to let her work, Leonard called and told her how to file to become a legally emancipated minor.

This guardian angel, he’d told her to gather flowers and press them between the pages of a book. To honor her father, Leonard said, just in case she never saw him again.