Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, NOON HAST} Fata Morgana

Gentle Tweeter,

Ultimately this is a tale about three islands. As was Lemuel Gulliver’s tale. Our first island was Manhattan. The second was a traffic island upstate. The third, we’re about to discover.

After our humiliating debacle at LAX, I accompanied my psychic shepherd to a customized CH-53D Sea Stallion, the Gaia Wind, for a lengthy low-altitude commute across open ocean. Considering the afternoon sun on the Pacific, the crystalline December air, it’s all quite thrilling.

As we fly westward, what I notice initially is a faint glow on the horizon. Even in broad daylight, in the wrong direction, a freakish, premature dawn seems to be rising. A shimmering, blue glow. Little more than three hours after lifting off from LAX, the Gaia Wind comes within sight of a new shore. As Gulliver and Darwin before me, I’m glimpsing a new foreign landmass. Carried along as we are by the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter’s broad propeller, we hover ever closer to this strange, impossible territory of luminous, jagged alps. The sun glints off vast plains. The shadows of passing clouds mottle the land’s surface, and pinnacles of breathtaking height thrust themselves up, into the mist. This, this fantasy landscape resembles not terra firma so much as peaks and whorls of whipped cream, all of it enlarged to a massive scale and colored the sparkling crystallite white of table salt. Not that, as former hippies and former macrobiotic dieters, my parents had ever exposed me to salt.

My inebriated consort, Mr. Crescent City, leans forward, his amply veined eyes fixed on this growing vision. His mouth hangs slack, exaggerating his already not-alert facial expression as he says but a single, rapt word. “Madlantis!”

Ye gods.

Contrary to the old adage “Buy land… they’re not making it anymore,” immediately before us is proof that people are, indeed, making land. At least, Camille and Antonio are.

My parents had often mentioned a scheme. It was their stated ambition to resolve many of the globe’s most-dire problems with a single dramatic fix. Foremost in their minds was the swirling Sargasso of discarded postconsumer plastic known as the Pacific debris field. Second was global climate change. Third was the dwindling habitat available for wild bears of the polar variety, and fourth was the onerous burden of income taxes they were compelled to pay.

In truth, Gentle Tweeter, their income taxes occupied the lion’s share of my parents’ attention, but bear with me for the time being.

As a solution to all of these annoyances, Antonio and Camille Spencer had proposed a radical public works project. Even prior to my demise, they’d been busily lobbying world leaders. Like the master puppeteers they were, my mom and dad were shaping popular opinion toward their dream: to create a new continent—a vast floating raft of aerated polystyrene and bonded polymers, with a surface area double that of Texas. In this approximately mid-Pacific location, constantly shifting, perpetually growing, had been the aforementioned Pacific debris field, that far-reaching soup of plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles and LEGO blocks, and every other bobbing, floating form of plastic refuse that’s been caught in the circling currents of the Pacific Gyre.

In the name of ecological restoration, my parents have spearheaded an international fund to meld together the ever-growing mass of plastic, and by churning this stew of Styrofoam, this morass of shredded cellophane… simply by partially melting it with injections of superheated air and introducing chemical bonding agents, they’ve reinvented this sodden ecological horror as a white confection. This synthetic wonderland covers millions of acres, heaped into gleaming mountains and spread in rolling hills where rainwater pools to form freshwater lakes and inland seas. This whipped-foam landscape floats, impervious to earthquakes, and rides high atop the worst tsunami. Its most striking quality is its pristine whiteness, a pearlized… an iridescent, immaculate whiteness, with the faintest suggestion of silver.

From a distance, it’s a heavenly paradise. Here are the baroque turrets and domes you imagine among cumulus clouds as you lie on your back in a Tanzanian meadow during Easter recess. Not that we celebrated Easter. Yes, I hunted for the requisite dyed eggs, but my parents told me these had been hidden by Barney Frank, who also furnished me an annual oversize basket of carob treats. Not that my mom ever allowed fatty, pig-pig me to actually eat that carob. Not that anyone really likes carob.

In my folks’ puffed-plastic dreamscape, looming tall are white spires cresting above bowers of white roses, arches and buttresses, courtyards and gateways bright as spun sugar. It’s the white your tongue sees when you lick vanilla ice cream. Approaching the coastline of Madlantis you can discern white ravines and peaks. Before us are reconstituted plastics, seared by high-temperature blasts of air until they look polished. Glazed to glassy smoothness, these pinnacles and slopes aren’t subject to geological physics. In a dreamscape, a Maxfield Parrish arcadia: They rise impossibly steep, sheer faces of shining ivory that jut straight up from white beaches as slick as a mirror. Bright as klieg lights.

And yes, I might be a carob-gobbling, sucrose-addicted tubby, chubby dead girl, but I know the word Arcadian. I also know a louche tax dodge when I see one.

In the reverse of previous continents, Madlantis existed as maps before it existed as peaks and valleys. This puffed-and-blanched, polygarbage terrain, every slope and crag was planned and modeled by artists, diagrammed on blueprints prior to its creation. Preconceived. Predestined. Every square inch predetermined.

The opposite of tabula rasa.

As they’d believed in the harmonic convergence of the planets and in pyramid power, so did Camille and Antonio promote this virgin continent as a New Atlantis.

Madlantis.

It’s doubtful you can fly high enough to notice, but the overall shape of the continent is no mere accident of nature. The stretches of coastline and occasional bays aren’t shaped by river systems. No, from outer space you can see how the new landmass is shaped like a human head in profile. The severed neck is oriented toward the south, the crown of the head toward the north. This milk-white, alabaster-white profile forms an enormous cameo surrounded by the cerulean blue of the Pacific Ocean. This Brobdingnagian silhouette, its saggy double chin dwarfs the nearby islands of Japan. The nape of its fatty neck crowds northern California, while its chipmunk cheeks threaten to block the shipping lanes above Hawaii. Needless to say, the newly minted continent of Madlantis was sculpted to look exactly like me.

Seen from outer space, the Earth now resembles nothing so much as a giant coin struck with my likeness. This is the satellite image I’d seen on television monitors and magazine covers at LAX. Here is the white plastic Heaven on Earth named in my honor.

A roundish, landlocked sea serves as my eye. On the opposite shoreline, rambling plastic glaciers suggest the strands of my unruly hair. And despite the fact that the whole is not particularly flattering, it is accurate. It’s me but on a gigantic scale. If you asked my mother, she’d tell you that it’s only slightly larger than life-size. My grieving parents would tell you that they’d conceived of this unheralded experiment in plastic reclamation as a staggering tribute to my memory. To finance their endeavor with public money corralled from every government in the world, my dad promised that it would serve to contain all the petrol-product debris of humanity. Its whiteness would reflect solar heat away from the planet and counteract climate change. Because it floated, the continent could even be towed north to serve as subsidized housing for displaced polar bears. Politicians flocked to support the endeavor.

In actuality, now that it’s complete, Mr. Ketamine informs me that the land’s handful of physical residents is already in international court suing for their independence as a sovereign nation. It’s no coincidence that these patriotic zealots—known as “Madlantians,” and seeking freedom from colonialist oppressors—they are also the wealthiest people in the world, and that under the freshly inked constitution of Madlantis none of them will be subject to taxes upon their lofty incomes. Neither will inheritances be taxed. In addition, this small cadre of residents will all be named ambassadors of their plastic nation and therefore be granted the freedom of diplomatic immunity in all their international treks. That, Gentle Tweeter, is my parents’ noble dream: infinite money and infinite freedom. Every major corporation in the world is scrambling to relocate its headquarters there.

By now we’ve crossed into Madlantian airspace. We’re skimming above white plastic mountaintops. We’re careening through white plastic valleys. Ahead lies a speck of not-whiteness. Located at the approximate center of my vast global, fat-girl profile is a ship. Mired there, in a whorled pit that suggests the opening of my auditory canal—my ear hole, according to Orthodox Christians, the orifice through which the Holy Spirit impregnated the Virgin—locked in this wasteland as effectively as any explorer’s vessel crushed by advancing ice—or as Satan trapped in Dante’s icy lake—there is my parents’ megayacht, the Pangaea Crusader.