Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 12:15 P.M. HAST} At Home with Camille Spencer

Gentle Tweeter,

Don’t imagine for a moment that solar panels and wave energy power any portion of this thunderous helicopter, and approximately a million gallons of dinosaur juice later we set down atop the Pangaea Crusader. Ah, the imperial seagoing palais that is the Crusader… Despite the fact that the vessel is virtually an oceangoing space station, painted a gleaming, arctic white and only slightly smaller than Long Island, the Crusader’s central salon has been decorated to simulate the interior of a typical shantytown hovel found among the favelas of most Third World megalopolises. Were it not for the fact that we’re rocking gently, rolling smoothly atop salty Pacific swells, the yacht’s interior could be located in the primitive outskirts of Soweto or Rio de Janeiro.

Through the magic of fiberglass and trompe l’oeil painting, one bulkhead of the salon appears to be a wall of crumbling, asbestos-infused cinder block. To this, the world’s leading graffiti artists have hand-applied layer upon layer of gang tags using faux-lead-based spray paint. The overall impression is one of menace, a sympathetic political oneness with the world’s violent masses, not unlike the sordid interior of a men’s comfort station situated along a densely traveled highway in tedious upstate.

In answer to HadesBrainiacLeonard, yes, this does feel like an awful lot of scene setting, but please bear with me. We’re approaching a poignant episode, a prodigal child returning to the seminurturing bosom of her mother. Thus I focus on the set dressing only because I’m not prepared for the depth of emotion I’m about to suffer.

Eventually, he of the flailing, not-clean pigtail, Mr. Crescent City presents himself before my mom in the yacht’s spacious main salon. Unseen, I accompany him for this audience.

Even as I’m posting this, my mom’s clutching a tall glass of cherry-flavored cough syrup mixed with an equal part of dark rum, garnished with a dagger of fresh organic pineapple and three maraschino cherries skewered on the balsa-wood stem of a living-wage paper parasol fashioned by dusky hands enabled through first-world microfinancing.

For someone who protests environmental degradation, it’s ironic that my mother is always so polluted herself. It doesn’t help that I’m sitting next to her. My ghost self is close enough to share a photo caption with her in People magazine, but she’s still completely not seeing me.

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.”