Doomed

resembles a rivulet of blood flowing uphill, following a narrow channel of steps which zigzags from the base of the white mountain to its peak. If my parents are among them, it’s impossible to tell, so identical are their scarlet-hued vestments.

The mountain itself rears skyward, tapering to balance an ornate wax-colored temple at its tip. A much- ornamented cupola, ringed with columns and crowned with turrets. Some colossal shrine graces that lofty apex, but from this far away it looks no larger than a many-tiered, much-decorated wedding cake.

Even as I marvel at this view, I spy Mr. K sprinting down the gangplank in pursuit of the scarlet train of pilgrims. His loping, stumbling marionette figure attains the mountainside steps as I swiftly follow suit. His face, pallid. His breathing, labored. Clearly in cardiac distress, he shouts, “The boats have started! They’re starting the boats!”

His words lost in exhausted panting, Mr. Ketamine shouts, “You have to understand, little dead girl, they’re launching Madlantis.” He throws each word to the winds.

Animated, smiling, he chatters, waving his hands above his head. “You’re going to see tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes.” His words are gleeful. Punctuated with breathless laughter. “Since we’re all going to Heaven, it’s okay. Everybody’s going to die horribly… isn’t that great!”

Around me, as we climb higher, the dream continent spreads in every direction, a glaring wasteland of immaculate white meadows and tooth-hued villas. At the base of this alpine stairway the Pangaea Crusader is mired, embedded in the plasticized lowlands. Judging from her copious exhaust smoke, her megayacht engines are running at full throttle, as if her crew were attempting to escape these millions and millions of acres of seamless heat-processed polygarbage. A black plume spews skyward from her smokestack. At the waterline, the puffed, foamed recycled trash squeaks along her trapped steel hull. The streamlined bow rises and falls like that of a polar icebreaker.

Identical plumes of black smoke funnel up from locations along the horizon, each revealing the site of a similarly embedded, heaving ship.

“The plan is,” continues Mr. K, almost singing, “they only need to push Madlantis into the prevailing current. In just a couple miles, the currents will catch us.”

It pains me to admit this, but great fortunes have been expended toward the exercising of my perennially not-lean body. Like an aspiring Olympian or a dressage gelding, I’ve been bullied around indoor tracks. A host of fitness trainers have herded me the lengths of lap pools beyond remembering, and still it seems that I have absolutely no aerobic capacity. None whatsoever.

Mr. K stammers, gulping for air, “We use the continent to shift the alignment of the planet. When the giant huge tonnage of Madlantis comes crashing into North America it’s going to wreck everything.”

Gentle Tweeter, I am not unaware of this irritating metaphor taking shape. In death, as in life, my blubbery self is going to smash itself against the Americas, the Hawaiian Islands, the Galapagos, Japan, Russia, and Alaska. Giant blubbery fatty-fat-fat me is going to wreak havoc like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

To make matters worse, as I climb, the steps are spongy soft, compressing slightly under my weight. Like foam rubber. Like Styrofoam. Slick with rain, they’re treacherous, threatening to springboard me backward into some bottomless pearl-tinted abyss.

Despite our late start we’re already coming abreast of the slowest among the red-robed pilgrims. Between the dreamscape and the robes and the billowing diesel exhaust all is bold white, red, and black. Of the people in procession some carry lighted tapers. Others swing censers attached to lengths of chain and trailing tendrils of incense smoke. To a person they all chant the repeating refrain, “Fuck… shit… cocksucker…”

The early winter dusk burnishes every crag to an antique gold. This magic-hour light is the gold my tongue sees when I eat fondue au Gruyere.

We’re overtaking more pilgrims pushing and dodging past them on the steep stairway. Most have slowed their gait, for now it feels as if the mountain is shifting, moving almost imperceptibly, as the portly, jowly continent is nudged northward. A thousand million horsepower of marine engines strain to dislodge us from the calm center of the Pacific Gyre, and their gradual success sends jellied tremors through the polyfake tectonic plate on which we’re buoyed. The surrounding mountains jiggle like sky-high mounds of vanilla aspic. The less sure-footed pilgrims stumble and fall, screaming dramatically. Perhaps due to his wide experience with drug-induced unsteadiness, Mr. Ketamine remains upright. He bounces ever upward, hurtling two, three, four stair steps in a single stride.

“We must hurry,” says Festus, fluttering along. “In less time than it took the Almighty to people this lovely world, the Boorists shall destroy it!”

My running steps begin to slow. My stride slackens with the idea of letting Boorism run its course and complete its not-holy war against humanity, these veal-eating, CO₂-emitting, self-replicating vermin. As the child of Gaia-aware, tree-sitting, monkey-wrenching parents, I can’t deny the appeal of a people-free planet. Even more enticing is the thought of having the entire Earth to myself, at least until next Halloween. So blissfully isolated, I’ll gorge my way through whole books at one sitting. I’ll take up the lute.

“Make haste!” urges Festus, winging along at my side. “Lest your eternally damned parents be force-fed hot excrement!”

Nor can I deny the evil, gleeful idea of that scenario—not after all the macrobiotic muck they’ve crammed down my throat.

It’s difficult to accept the idea that everyone’s about to die, everything’s about to be destroyed, because everyone seems so happy. Smiling. Their manic eyes flashing. Blacks and Asians, Jews and gays, Quebecoise and Palestinians and Amerindians, white supremacists, prochoice and prolife, they’re all holding hands. They’re hugging, kissing even. There’s no fear of disease. No social pretense or status indicators or power hierarchies separate them. The crowd is singing my name, grateful for the salvation they believe is imminent. They’re happy in the way people are happy while burning books or beheading kings; they’re righteous.

All the while, Mr. Ketamine’s mumbling to keep my message fresh in his mind. His sunset-illuminated face, drawn and gaunt, stained the color of flame, fiercely he’s repeating, “No stem cells.”

The thoughtful gray bowels of my brain are queasy with motion sickness. They’re nauseated with the indigestible memory of my father in New York City saying, “Madison was a little coward.”

Ahead of us the procession has come to a bottleneck. The berobed penitents await admittance at a great archway, the entrance to the mountaintop temple. Among us, a quartet of giants shoulders the corners of a sedan chair, a boxed-and-curtained affair whose occupants remain concealed within its red velvet draperies. To my mind, Camille and Antonio are its most likely passengers, and I crane my neck to get a better look. Meanwhile the crowd surges into a not-historically-inaccurate reproduction of a courtyard from some Renaissance Venetian palazzo, the flamboyant dadoes and corbels reproduced in copious amounts of sculpted blah-colored hardened- cellulose froth.

Among this throng of hooded figures Mr. K stands on tiptoe and shouts, “Listen! Everybody listen to me!” Someone has given him a lit candle, and he holds this flaming taper overhead like a stuttering, bright star.

Gentle Tweeter, please understand that effective communication is paramount to me. My parents are so rich because people have outsourced the skills with which they once conveyed their emotions. The public has contracted out their own self-expression. All love must be mediated through greeting cards, assembly-line diamond jewelry, or professionally arranged, factory-farmed bouquets of roses. All epiphanies must be modeled by my mother. People feel only those emotions she prompts them to feel. For them, she is Aphrodite. My father, my dad, is the zeitgeist.

All of my greatest concerns, I’ve entrusted them to this ravaged ketamine hound who now leaps in place, waving his candle and shouting to attract everyone’s attention. Imagine my horror when Mr. K shouts, “Stop!” He whistles for silence, then shouts, “Madison says you’re all going to Hell unless you listen!” The assembled crowd begins to turn and stare. “The angel Madison,” he shouts, “wants you all to stop cussing and burping….”

Here I’ve entrusted one person to express all the love I could not. I’ve asked him to bear all my regrets and resolve all my lies. I sense the tide slowly turning.

Their faces framed in the openings of their red hoods, the confused audience regards Mr. K. They wait, restive, blinking with expressions of puzzlement.

“Madison,” shouts Mr. K. He pauses for a moment of absolute hushed silence. “Madison Spencer says the only true path to salvation lies in sucking donkey dicks!”