Ye gods.
It’s at that moment that I see my parents. They push back their hoods and stare, their faces exploded in looks of stricken horror.
And without taking another breath, Mr. Crescent City, Mr. K, my psychic bounty hunter, he falls down dead.
DECEMBER 21, 2:22 P.M. HAST
The Beating I So Richly Deserve
Gentle Tweeter,
No one gets it. Everyone gets it wrong.
In the sky-high temple of repurposed plastic, the familiar blue ghost bleeds out of Mr. Ketamine’s collapsed body. “I’m not going back,” says the blue Mr. K–shaped ectoplasm standing next to me, shaking its head. No one can see us. Every hooded figure is staring at his postalive remains in the center of the courtyard. That pockmarked, pigtailed rag doll. Even now, a team of paramedics pushes through the crowd and begins to check for vital signs.
The ghost of Mr. K tells me, “It’s my heart, finally. Hallelujah. I’m gone for good this time.”
Under our feet, the topography of Madlantis gives a tiny sideways tug.
Revealed, my parents observe while the medics inject Mr. K’s corpse with various lifesaving agents. The bearers of the velvet-draped sedan chair have deposited their burden nearby, but its veiled contents remain a mystery.
Their ceremony interrupted for a moment, the assembled celebrants push back their scarlet hoods. Still holding their flickering tapers, they continue to mutter genital and excretory obscenities. When the attending medics strip the not-clean tunic from Mr. K’s not-healthy chest and make ready to attach the leads for a cardiac defibrillator, I see my chance.
The ghost Mr. K sees me and says, “Don’t do it, angel Madison.”
I have to. There’s so much to tell my parents. Not the least of which is how much I love and miss them. That, and how stupid they’re being.
“If you’re going to use my old body,” says Mr. K, “just be aware I was in the middle of a gnarly herpes flare-up.”
I look at the ghost him. I look at his crumpled corpse.
“Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into,” he warns.
I’m so Ctrl+Alt+Grossed-out.
The paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I can’t do it. I can’t make the jump, Gentle Tweeter, not into that disgusting, inflamed, drug-abused cadaver. The medics deliver their jolt of heart-starting amperage, but nothing happens. All life signs stay flat.
My parents will die without knowing I loved them. They’ll go to Hell and be diced by demons with razor blades dipped in margarita salt. They’ll get paper cuts across their eyeballs and be subjected to high colonics of liquid Drano.
Once more the paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I don’t take the opportunity.
All humanity will be wiped off the face of the Earth. Satan will claim all of God’s children. Satan will win. All this is because I can’t bring myself to comingle my virginal, intelligent soul with the jaundiced, skeletal remains of a creepy, predecomposed loser man.
“I don’t blame you,” says ghost Mr. K. “I didn’t much like being in there myself.”
For a third and final effort, the paramedics shout, “Clear!”
My brains growl a warning: Satan will find my cat.
And I make my jump.
Not since I was entombed in the overly sullied environs of an upstate public toilet have I felt so degraded. These leprous hands! These withered, spindly limbs! The helpful medics have stripped away the majority of my soiled garments, and I find myself with barely a malodorous pair of undershorts veiling my vile pendulous
My mother and father, they stand beside the curtained sedan chair. Their jaws hang slack. As I careen my monstrous new body toward them, my arms thrown wide to give them a loving bear hug, they shudder with not- concealed revulsion.
So weak am I that I fall—Gentle Tweeter, I am always falling—sprawled on the plastic cobblestones.
I, who had once fretted over the prospect of pubescent acne, now I crawl before my father, pitted with the stinging craters of the virulent herpes virus. I who sought to wed Jesus Christ in order to forestall my budding girlhood physicality, I squirm on dying knees, soliciting in a quaking moribund voice for my mother to pay me her loving regard. Prone, covered in sores, I approach my makers on my irredeemably pestilent belly. This form modeled from corruption, once I constituted my parents’ bright future, the living confirmation that they had made the politically progressive choices. Now I slither on my naked stomach, exposing my ribbed, emaciated back and dragging the burdensome shame of my heavily soiled pigtail. That braid, so like an exposed prereptilian brainstem. Me, Madison Spencer, their emissary into a better, more enlightened future, I’m reduced to this slinking lizard.
In my gravelly voice, borrowed from a dead man, I declare, “Mommy! Daddy!” Dragging my mostly nude, bony, sweat-lubricated new self toward them, I cry out, “I love you!” I pucker my cracked, well-lesioned lips to bestow an adoring kiss, and I beg, “Don’t you know me? I’m Madison!” I cry, “I’m your little sugarplum!”
My new breath tastes the way a pet store smells.
My father’s handsome face is a grimace of teeth-baring disgust, revolted by this creature he finds himself forced to punch. To smite mightily. My father, oh, my beloved father, to defend himself and my mother, he’s dealt the bothersome task of pummeling me with his closed fists. My hot infectious blood sallies forth. Sickened by my hair and bodily fluids on his knuckles, he’s still grimly determined to stop my advance.
With broken fingers I beseech. “I tore off Papadaddy’s turgid dinger,” I confess, “and I abandoned him to die in a puddle of blood.” I tell my parents that I’ve never actually performed analingus on the lofty bottoms of exotic giraffes. I tell them how I only invented my love affair with Jesus Christ. I tell them everything. My strength fading, I paw the air, and my entreaties are met by the hard soles of my father’s Prada wingtips. This atrocity of blood and pus I find myself trapped within, I’m taunting them. Challenging them. Daring them to love me. I’m testing to see whether they recognize, in this tormented grotesque, any sign of their own troubled little girl.
Those two shining paragons, I grovel before them. Showing them what a monster I’ve become, I beg them to accept me.
“Forgive me for assaulting you in the bathroom at the Beverly Wilshire,” I beseech my father. To my mother I say, “I promise to lose weight.”
Looking on is Babette, chuckling secretly. The wench, the buxom succubus. Looking on are the blue ghost of Mr. K and the hummingbird-fluttering, golden sprite of Festus. I slither around the feet of my horror-struck family. In nightmarish slow motion I’m reaching my thin strange fingertips to stroke my mom’s terrified ankle. “Mommy, I’m here to rescue you.”
In response to my professed love, my father continues to hammer me with his fists and feet. Pain blooms within my wasted rib cage. My borrowed heart seizes. And the suffering is indescribable as my blood ceases to flow.
The truth is, Gentle Tweeter, I am always testing their love.
A voice calls out, “The candle! Madison, get the candle!” The source of the voice is Mr. K’s ghost. His ghost hand directs my gaze to a spot on the plastic paving stones. There, the lit candle he’d held at the moment of his death has landed. Its wick has ignited the styrene-foam faux cobblestones, and a bubbling fire rises and makes
