And, yes, while the dead do miss everything and everybody, they don't hang around the earth forever.
This one time, my dad flew our Learjet to attend some stockholder meeting in Prague, except that same day, my mom needed to be in Nairobi to collect some harelip-and-cleft-palate orphan or a film-festival award or some dumb something, so she leased a jet to fly her and me, except the leasing time-share jet people... they sent the exact diametrically WRONG kind of jet from what my mother had ordered, thoughtlessly dispatching one with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and hand-painted frescoes on the ceilings, exactly the sort of jet which younger members of the Saudi royal family would hire to fly a harem of Miss Coozey Coozerbilt call girls to Kuwait, and it was too late to send a different jet, and my mom went nuts, she was just so way-aesthetically freaked out.
Well, walking into the hotel suite after the Academy Awards and stepping into about a billion half-eaten plates of old club sandwiches, then finding me dead and strangulated by a strip of Hello Kitty condoms—let's just say my mom freaked out even worse.
At that time my spirit was still hovering in the room, crossing my spiritual fingers that somebody might bother to call the paramedics, and they'd rush in and perform some resuscitation miracle. Needless to say Goran was long gone. He and I had hung the Do Not Disturb sign so the maid hadn't performed the turndown service. No chocolates rested on the bed pillows. All the lights were turned off, plunging the suite into total pitch-darkness. My parents enter, tiptoeing because they think Goran and I are fast asleep. It wasn't pretty.
No, it's never a special treat to watch your mom just scream and scream your name, then fall to her knees in a mess of ketchupy onion rings and cold prawn cocktails, grabbing at your dead shoulders, shaking you and yelling for you to wake up. It was my dad who called 911, but that was really, really way too late. The EMTs who came did more to treat my mom's hysterics than to rescue me. Of course the police came; they took as many photographs of me dead as People magazine had taken of me as a newborn baby. The homicide detectives lifted about a million of Goran's fingerprints off the strip of condoms. My mom took about a million Xanax, one after another. During all of this, my dad stalked over to the closet where Goran's new clothes were stored, threw open the closet door, and ripped the Ralph Lauren sportswear from the hangers, rending, shredding without a word shirts and trousers, buttons popping and ricocheting around the suite.
All that time, all night, I could merely watch, as detached and distant as my mother accessing security cameras on her laptop. Maybe I drew the hotel curtains closed, or turned on a light, but nobody seemed to notice. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.
It's power, but a kind of pointless, impotent power.
No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies... vampires... ghosts, always something threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.
That said, go ahead and laugh at me. You're still alive, so apparently you're doing something right. I'm dead, so go right ahead and kick sand in my fat, deceased face.
In the prejudiced, bigoted modern world, alive is alive. Dead is dead. And the two factions must not interact. This attitude is entirely understandable when you consider what the dead would do to property values and stock prices. Once the dead informed the living that material possessions were a big joke—ARE a big joke—well, the De Beers people could never sell another diamond. Pension funds would truly wither.
In reality, the dead are always around the living. I hung around with my parents for a month; seriously, it beat tagging along to watch the Mr. Skeazy Vanderskeaze mortuary guy pump out my blood and monkey with my naked thirteen-year-old corpse. My environmentalist parents chose a biodegradable casket of pressed-wood pulp guaranteed to rapidly break down and encourage bacterial subsoil life-forms. This is typical of how little respect you get once you're dead. I mean, the well-being of earthworms gets a higher priority.
Consider that as proof positive that you're never too young to record a final directive.
It was like being buried inside a piñata.
If I'd managed to call the shots I'd have been buried in an all-bronze, hermetically sealed casket studded with rubies, not even buried but laid to rest in a crypt of carved white marble. On a tiny wooded island in the center of a lake. In the Italian Alps. However, my parents pursued their own vision. Instead of something elegant, they chose a caterwauling gospel choir from some church that needed to garner national exposure for an album they were ready to launch. Somebody reworked that Elton John song about the candle so it went, "Good-bye, Madison Spencer, though I never knew you at all..." They even released about a zillion white doves. Talk about clichéd. Talk about derivative.
Among the loitering dead, even JonBenet Ramsey felt sorry for me. Even the Lindbergh baby was embarrassed on my behalf.
Here I was, dead, and all the little Miss Skanky Von Skankenbergs at my boarding school were still alive and attending my memorial service. The three Slutty MacSluts stood there, all pious, heads bowed, not saying a word about how they'd taught me the French-kissing Game. Those three Whorey Vander Whores took their printed funeral programs to my mom and asked her to autograph them. The president of the United States helped carry the papier-mâché, eco-friendly biotainer to my grave. So did the prime minister of Great Britain.
Movie stars were in somber attendance. Some famous poet said some crap flowery poem that didn't even rhyme. World leaders were there to pay their vaunted respects. Connected by satellite, the entire planet was there to say, "Good-bye."
Except Goran, my beloved, my one true love... Goran wasn't.
XXVI.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It dawns on me that I've never adequately thanked you for sending the car, and I ought to; it was an extremely sensitive, thoughtful gesture on your part. You acted very kindly toward me at a time when I desperately needed such courtesy, and I want you to know that I'll always appreciate that generosity.
It's no easier to be a just-dead spirit than it is to be a just-born infant, and I'm pathetically grateful for any modicum of care and nursemaiding. Clustered around my grave site at Forest Lawn, everyone was crying: my mom and dad were crying, the president of Senegal was crying. Everyone was just boo-hooing with the notable exception of me, and that's because me crying at my own funeral strikes me as awfully egocentric. It goes without saying that no one can see the real me, the spirit me, standing in their grieving midst. I know, I know, in that totally archetypal Tom Sawyer scenario it's supposed to be way satisfying to attend your own funeral and witness how everyone secretly loved and adored you, but the sad truth is that most people are just as fakey-fake to you after you're dead as when you're alive. If there's even a thin margin of profit in it, everyone who hated you will rend their garments and flop around like phony crybabies. Case in point: the trio of Miss Trampy McTramptons station their skeazy preteen selves around my bereft mother and tell her how much they loved me, even as their spidery anorexic fingers and French manicures toy with bejeweled rosaries all lumpy with Tahitian black pearls and fat rubies and emeralds designed by Christian Lacroix for Bulgari that they ran off and bought on Rodeo Drive just for today's funeral. These three Miss Slutty Sluttenheimers keep whispering to my bereft mom that they've each been receiving psychic messages from me, that I keep visiting them in their dreams and begging them to pass along messages of love and support to my family, and my poor mom seems traumatized enough to listen to these three horrid harpies and take their lies seriously.