Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 8:30 A.M. EST} My Parents Dispatch an Emissary

Gentle Tweeter,

Here and now in the Rhinelander hotel, I trace the electrical lines from my parents’ penthouse to room 6314. This, in response to the mysterious advice from the ghostly vision, the translucent man with his not-clean hair tortured into a hippie braid no less off-putting than the soiled tail of some incontinent upstate hay burner. My thanks to CanuckAIDSemily for asking, but yes, a ghost can be haunted by ghosts. My nana, case in point, she remains in my penthouse bedroom, smoking, loitering, by her very presence reminding me of our shared summer in the tedious Empire State, and the myriad horrors that were to occur there.

Skating along electrical circuits, past solderless connections and with a not-small number of wrong turns, I emerge from the slotted holes of an outlet in room 6314. The setting: a room in the back of the house, overlooking Barneys and the pond in Central Park South, two upholstered chairs near the window, a chest of drawers, a bed—every surface, no doubt, alive with blood-besotted bedbugs. Between the two chairs stands a small glass-topped table, and streaked across the glass are white trails of powder. A scale model of the Andes. The Apennines. The rugged Galápagos Islands, only rendered in peaks of crystalline white dust. A single-edged razor blade lies beside the heaps. Sprawled beneath the glass-topped table is my enigmatic visitor, chest down, his head twisted to one side. He lies there on the carpet, to all appearances dead. A tightly rolled tube of paper juts from one nostril. This tube is likewise dusted with the table’s white residue.

Gentle Tweeter, life with my former-stoner, former-crackhead, former-snow-blind parents has left me too acclimated to this tableau. Even as I situate my ghost self on the edge of the bed, the sprawled denizen moans. His eyelids flutter. You’d mistake his torso and limbs for a not-fresh pile of sweat-stained laundry save for the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. His trembling hands push against the room’s carpet, and the scarecrow ensemble of patched blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, a fringed suede jacket, it clutches at a chair and hauls itself to a standing position. No longer magically transparent, this not-appealing flesh-depleted person casts his gaze around the hotel room, asking, “Little dead girl?”

This, this must be the parapsychological private detective dispatched by my mom.

You’d be hard-pressed to guess his age. The skin of his face is pebbled and flushed as if it were a delicious crème caramel bombe frosted with a raspberry-ricotta streusel of festering boils. What at first I took to be a huge upper lip is merely a bushy lip-colored mustache. Creases web every trace of his exposed neck, his arms and hands, as if he’s been folded over and folded over, like strudel dough, and now he can never again be smoothed flat. His bloodshot eyes sweep back and forth across the room, and he says, “Little dead girl, are you here? Did you come like I told you?”

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.