Chuck Palahniuk: Doomed

I’m not a snob. You can’t call me a snob, because I’d long ago forgiven my nana for living on a farm upstate. I’d forgiven her for buying domestic Havarti and for not knowing the difference between sorbet and gelato. To her credit, it was my Nana Minnie who introduced me to the novels of Elinor Glyn and Daphne du Maurier. To score a point in my favor, I tolerated her obsession with growing her own heirloom tomatoes when Dean & Deluca could’ve FedExed us infinitely better Cherokee Purples. I loved her that much. But no matter how judgmental this sounds, I still have not forgiven her for dying.

Picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue, using the chopstick-long fingernails my mom had her retrofitted with for her funeral, my nana says, “Your ma hired some fella to ghost-hunt you, so stay on your toes.” She adds, “I can tell you this much: He’s like a private dick who finds dead folks, and he’s here in this very hotel!”

Sitting here in my old hotel bedroom, surrounded by my Steiff monkeys and Gund zebras, all I can see is that lit cigarette. That legalized form of suicide. And, yes, in response to the comment posted by HadesBrainiacLeonard, this is distinctly ungenerous of me. Allow me to be frank. I’m not entirely without empathy, but to my mind she left me behind. My nana abandoned me because cigarettes were more important. I loved her, but she loved tar and nicotine more. And today, finding her in my bedroom I resolve not to make the mistake of ever loving her again.

My mom never forgave her for not being Peggy Guggenheim. I never forgave her for smoking and cooking and gardening and dying.

“So,” my Nana Minnie says, “Pumpkinseed, where you been keeping yourself?”

Oh, I tell her, around. I don’t tell her anything about how I died. Nor do I offer a word about being condemned to Hell. My fingers keep typing away on my PDA; my fingertips are screaming everything I can’t bear to say aloud.

“I’ve been there. To Heaven,” says Nana Minnie. She jabs her cigarette toward the ceiling. “We was both of us saved, me and your Papadaddy Ben. The problem is Heaven adopted one of them strict no-smoking rules.” Henceforth, she says, in the same way office workers must brave the weather and huddle outdoors in order to puff their cancer sticks, my dead nana must descend as a ghost to indulge her vile addiction.

Mostly I just listen and search her face for signs of myself. Child and crone, we create a kind of before-and-after effect; her hooked parrot’s nose is my cute button nose, except irradiated by the ultraviolet rays of a hundred thousand upstate summer days. Her cascade of variously sized chins duplicates my dainty girlish chin, only in triplicate. I steer the conversation to the weather. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, where she lies inhaling a cigarette, I ask whether Papadaddy Ben is also skulking around the Rhinelander hotel.

“Sweet pea,” she says, “stop fussing with that pocket calculator and be sociable.” Nana Minnie rolls her ghost head from side to side on the pillow. She blows a jet of smoke at the ceiling and says, “No, your papadaddy ain’t hereabouts. He wanted to be in Heaven to welcome Paris Hilton when she come.”

Please, Dr. Maya, give me the strength to not use an emoticon.

Paris Hilton is going to Heaven?

This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.

Sitting here, looking at my nana’s face, it strikes me that I can’t see her thoughts. Thoughts… thinking… the very proof which René Descartes cites for our existence is as equally invisible as ghosts. As our souls. It seems that if science is going to dismiss the possibility of a soul for lack of physical proof, scientists should also deny that thinking occurs. With this observation I glance at my sturdy, functional wristwatch and observe that only a minute has passed.

My nana catches me with my elbow cocked, my wristwatch twisted for me to look at the time, and she says, “Did you miss your old grandma, kitty-kins?” She exhales another plume of smoke toward the ceiling.

“Yes,” I lie, “I did. I missed you,” but I keep keyboarding to the contrary.

It doesn’t escape me that this is the central conflict of my life: I love and adore all of my family, except when I’m with them. No sooner do I enjoy a reunion with my long-dead Nana Minnie than I yearn to have my chain-smoking, half-blind beloved granny euthanized.

The unhappy reality is that medical euthanasia is at best a onetime solution.

Then it happens: a sound.

From the PH foyer it comes: a laugh.

I ask, “Is that your long-haired paranormal private detective?”

Nana Minnie points her cigarette in the direction of the ruckus, a man’s laugh, and she says, “That’s how come you ought not be here, duckling.” She taps the ghost ash off her ghost cigarette and brings the butt back to her mouth. “Myself, I’m conducting a little covert investigation,” she says, taking another puff. “You think I enjoys laying here surrounded by your lousy kiddy toys? Maddy, honey,” she says, “you done walked into a stakeout.”

Gentle Tweeter,

From elsewhere in the hotel suite comes the sound of a door, the dead bolt snapping open with a heavy clunk. No knock heralds it. No polite announcement of “Housekeeping!” or “Room service!” It’s the door which opens from the hotel hallway into the living room. The latch clicks. The hinges give a little sigh, and muffled footsteps sound against the marble tile of the suite’s foyer.

Sad to say, the dead can still suffer excruciating bouts of self-consciousness. Like you, the predecomposed, the postalive can feel utterly mortified by their own sordid confessions.

Take, for example, the following admission: I spent the fondest hours of my childhood with my ear pressed to the outside of my parents’ bedroom door. On the not-infrequent occasion when sleep eluded me in Athens or Abu Dhabi or Akron, I took great pleasure in eavesdropping on my parents’ carnal panting. Their coital groaning acted upon me as the sweetest lullaby. To my childhood ear those grunts and snorts were assurance of continued familial bliss. My parents’ bestial ejaculations guaranteed that my home wouldn’t crack up as had all those of my wealthy playmates. Not that I had playmates.

Rapping. Tapping. The culture of spiritualists is rife with ghosts knocking loudly. For souls stranded in a physical world it’s only common courtesy. Plainly put, no one wants to enter a room and witness a predead person pooing or vigorously engaged in performing the Hot Nasty.

Thus, ghosts always knock before they enter a room. Including me. Especially me. In the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, as I follow the sound of my father’s laugh, the unmistakable Thoroughbred stallion clip-clop of his shoes, accompanied by the time bomb tick-tock of Manolo Blahnik high heels, my pursuit leads to the closed door of my parents’ New York bedroom. The instant before I step through the enameled wood, a voice from within says, “Hurry, my love; we’re desperately behind schedule. We should’ve been screwing hours ago….”

The voice, my father’s voice, arrests my entry. What’s there to say concerning the renowned Antonio Spencer? The shape of his head is like that of a very handsome boulder. A landmark. Usually he speaks with a phony NPR intonation, but today his voice sounds naked and hairy.

In lieu of dissolving through the door and possibly witnessing a primal scene, I pace the foyer, enervated with guilt.

In the PH foyer, an electrical outlet catches my eye. We’ll revisit this practice in greater detail soon, but for the present please accept the fact that I pour my ghost ectoplasm into the tiny holes of a three-pronged outlet and worm along the copper wires buried within the hotel walls. Picture Charles Darwin navigating the steamy Amazonian river system. Arriving at a junction box, I guess the next wire and follow it to a new outlet. Soon I encounter the prongs of an extension cord. Shimmying along copper, I jump the gap of an open switch. Tunneling upward, I reach a dead end, lodged within a lightbulb. Not a roomy Thomas Edison incandescent bulb, mind you; this is a convoluted compact fluorescent lightbulb installed in a bedside lamp. Surrounding me, a vellum shade screens my view of the hotel room. I’m twisted inside a dark bulb, exactly the energy-efficient, eco-friendly option that my parents would choose, and the mercury tastes Ctrl+Alt+Foul. Surrounded by the lamp shade, I can only gaze down onto the wood-grain surface of a bedside table. There, like the elements of some torrid modern still life, my cramped view includes a PDA, a room key attached to a brass fob, an alarm clock, and the torn packaging leftover from a not-present condom.