Doomed

modesty or any intervening closed and locked door. Having left the bed and padded across the room barefoot, he’s installed himself astride the commode in the en suite bathroom, from whence the tiled surfaces amplify a host of wet sounds.

In his absence Babette once more cranes her head to peer up into the lamp shade where I take refuge. “Madison, don’t be angry,” she whispers. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you.”

My father’s voice calls out, “Babs, you say something?”

Ignoring him, Babette whispers, “Don’t delude yourself. Do you think it was an accident when the autodialer connected you with your parents?” Whisper-yelling, she says, “Nothing that’s happened to you is an accident! Not The Voyage of the Beagle. Not EPCOT.” Exasperated, she says, “And the people you think are your dead friends… they’re not your friends. The nerd and the jock and the punk, they’re in Hell for very good reasons!”

If Babette is to be believed, you, HadesBrainiacLeonard, PattersonNumber54, and MohawkArcher666, you’re all miscreants. She claims you’re bent on subverting creation and imposing your own eternal plans. You befriended me in Hell. You put me to work on the phones. She says this is all part of a grand scheme that goes back for centuries.

“They call themselves ‘emancipated entities,’” Babette insists. “They refuse to take sides with either Satan or God.”

In the background a toilet flushes.

“Don’t let them fool you, Maddy.” Wagging a chocolate-smeared finger at me, she says, “Girlfriend, you wouldn’t believe the kinky shit your so-called friends planned for you….”

She hisses, “I’m still your best friend. That’s why I’m warning you.” As footsteps approach from the bathroom, she whispers, “You just watch, Maddy. Satan is going to win this thing! Satan is going to get all the marbles, and you need to get on his side while you still can.”

DECEMBER 21, 8:25 A.M. EST The Tryst, Part Three

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Gentle Tweeter,

Tinny music fills the hotel bedroom. It’s the Beastie Boys singing “Brass Monkey.” It’s the PDA on the bedside table announcing a new text message.

Restored to the bed, my dad explains, “We asked a panel of doctors to study the security videos.” His hairy hand reaches into view, patting the tabletop in search of the ringing phone.

Words Ctrl+Alt+Fail me. Not even emoticons can convey the horror I feel upon hearing this. Like the subject of some patronizing panocular coming-of-age saga in the dirt-eating hinterlands of New Guinea, my not-clothed childhood antics have been observed! My formerly faithful, formerly devoted father is blatantly cheating on my mother, yet he deems me flawed and not likable! Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I might be emotionally withheld and lacking in superfluous, superficial social bonds, but I am not unproud of the fact that I failed to self-stimulate my virginal hoo-hoo for the Peeping Tom anthropological kicks of some voyeuristic child psych consultants. It’s monstrous, the idea that strangers watched me. Even my parents. Especially my parents.

Babette asks, “Antonio?”

My father hums something in reply.

Simpering, she asks, “Why are we here?”

My father’s hairy suntanned hand, it retrieves the PDA, and his voice says, “We’re accompanying Camille’s ghost hunter in room sixty-three fourteen.” Encircling his finger, his gold wedding ring looks like a tiny dog collar. “You remember, the guy who Leonard told us to hire? From People magazine?” he says. “The one who takes boatloads of that animal tranquilizer?” The pace of his delivery slows, punctuated by the faint beeps of him pressing PDA buttons. My dad’s still talking, but he’s distracted, checking his messages. He proceeds to describe the out-of-body effects of tripping on some anesthetic, ketamine, what the counterculture hero Timothy Leary described as “experiments in voluntary death.” He explains how this freelance ghost hunter triggers at-will near-death experiences by ingesting intentional overdoses of it. My father, Gentle Tweeter, can talk any subject into the ground. He describes what scientists call “emergence phenomena,” wherein the ketamine abusers swear their souls take leave of their bodies and can commune in the afterlife.

Babette says, “You miss my point.”

“Leonard told us to hire this freak and to camp out here, at the Rhinelander.”

“But why am I here?” Babette prompts.

“I picked you up on Halloween—”

“The day after Halloween,” Babette interrupts.

“I picked you up for the same reason I spit in the elevator on our way here this afternoon,” my dad says. He talks even slower, as if he’s giving orders to a stone-deaf, Somali-speaking maid. “I want to get my wings, too,” he says. “Babs, honey, I’m only porking you because the tenets of Boorism command me to.”

The bed creaks with his weight shifting. The shrieking mattress sounds begin anew, shrill arpeggios less like love-making than like the substitute screams in a movie where someone’s getting stabbed to death in a motel shower.

Breathless, my dad’s voice says, “Even if my daughter wasn’t perfect, I love her.” He says, “I’d lie, cheat, and kill to get my little girl back.”

The incoming message on the PDA, it was from Camille Spencer. The “Brass Monkey” song is unmistakable; it’s my mom’s signature ring tone. And the message? It consisted of three words: “SHE IS RISEN.”

DECEMBER 21, 8:28 A.M. EST A Tourist among the Dead

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Gentle Tweeter,

It was always my mother’s coping mechanism to acquire far-flung maisons. In Stockholm and Sydney and Shanghai, a backup plan to every backup plan; that way she’d always have a refuge. Such was her fail-safe strategy: redundant places to retreat. If tax laws changed in one nation, or not-favorable publicity exposed her to public ridicule, my mom fled to sanctuary in Malta, in Monaco, in Mauritius.

For my father, girlfriends served the same function. In the same way my mother never fully committed to living in one domicile, my dad never favored one Miss Warty MacWanton. The subtle, largely unacknowledged appeal of extra homes and lovers relies on not making actual use of them. That unfulfilled longing, the idea of a gorgeous vacant home or a pining concubine, sustains the object’s attraction. Picture Playboy centerfolds or the idle harem ladies painted by Delacroix or the vacant rooms depicted in the pages of Architectural Digest. All of them empty vessels waiting to be filled.

So upon shocked exposure to my dad’s extramarital hanky-panky, I retreat. I bleed backward along the copper wiring of the Rhinelander hotel. Confronted, I quickly retrace my route back to the penthouse foyer and emerge like a bubble of my ghost self from the outlet I first entered. The process involves expanding, inflating my balloon of ectoplasm to roughly my chunky thirteen-year-old size. My facial features solidify, then my horn-rimmed glasses, followed by my school cardigan sweater and tweedy skort. Last to take shape are my Bass Weejun loafers. At that, the remainder of my ghost self trickles from the outlet, intact but Ctrl+Alt+Disillusioned.

And it would seem I’m not alone. A man stands among the furniture, the chairs and tables humped beneath their white dustcovers. He stands below the chandelier in its cheesecloth shroud. Ghost me, my ghost eyes are