Dismal as he looks, it’s no worse than I looked dead on the floor of a Beverly Hills hotel suite surrounded by leftover room service meals. Do not, Gentle Tweeter, imagine that you’ll look any better.
I watch the spirit rise from his corpse, but not the way your eyes see smoke or mist. It’s more the way your nose sees a smell. It’s the inside way your whole head feels a headache. The way blood has poured from his chest, pooling on the floor, his soul drains upward in a flood of blue as thick as liquid, collecting in the air against the ceiling. At first the blue forms a lump, a clump, a cloud, but that quickly takes the shape of a textbook embryo, then a fetus. It hangs there. The blue is the blue your tongue sees when you eat whipped cream. Not an instant passes before a full-size blue version of the man is staring down at his dead self.
He gapes at his own mortal remains, working his mouth like someone choking on a fact too large to swallow. The assembled mob of airport strangers, for their part they study his final moments as if a quiz will follow. Only I see his ghost leak away and balloon into the air. I watch, and Satan watches. One of Satan’s hands, sheathed skintight in a leather driving glove, reaches toward the puzzled spirit. The bystanders, their eyes follow the gloved hand into the air, but can’t see why. We all hear Satan say, “Harvey, is it? Harvey Parker Peavey?” He says, “If you’ll come this way, please…”
The ghost’s eyes find the offered hand. His ears find the question. “You’re my ride to Heaven, right?”
Satan sneers. His eyes eclipsed behind the visor of his cap, he says, “Tell him, Madison.”
The newbie ghost’s eyes turn to find me, and he asks, “Madison Spencer? The Madison Spencer? Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer?” He smiles as if he’s meeting God.
“Tell him about Heaven, Maddy,” taunts Satan. Everyone present, our audience of living-alive busybodies, they all follow Satan’s voice in my direction, but they can’t see me. My escort, Crescent, looks as well, muttering, “Little dead girl?” A team of paramedics comes crashing through the crowd.
Oh, Gentle Tweeter, the road to perdition is paved with short-term, stopgap mercies. Even as Satan’s grip closes around the man’s blue ghost wrist, I say, “Yes.” As the Devil begins to drag his smiling victim away, I assure him, “It might take a smidgen longer than you expected, but yes, I promise, you’ll get to Heaven, Harvey.” Satan tows the floating bulbous blue form as if it were something in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Poor Harvey, even as Satan is dragging him into the distance, he’s saying, “Thank you, angel child!” His blue head lolls happily on his neck as he sings my name, Madison. Madison Spencer. The messiah who returned from death to lead mankind to joyous salvation.
My papadaddy was right. I am cursed and despicable. I am a coward.
As the paramedics squat beside the abandoned body, I seize my opportunity. As they peel the backing from sticky electrodes and paste them on the messy fingernail-clawed torso, I step forward and kneel beside the head. I cup my girlish hands over the glassy eyes. In the posture of a snake-handling, strychnine-swilling faith healer, I gingerly touch the icky forehead skin of this dead stranger. At the same instant, one of the paramedics shouts, “Clear!”
To you future-dead people, do not attempt this at home. If you’re familiar with the custom of saying, “Bless you,” when someone sneezes, you might understand what’s taking place. The electric shock from a defibrillator doesn’t startle one’s failed heart back to life so much as it opens a portal for the lingering spirit to return. Picture pulling the plug from a bathtub in the Hotel Danieli, and the way the accumulated Venetian bathwater spirals into the drain. The momentary charge from a defibrillator opens such a route and allows the departed’s spirit to reenter.
In the event the soul has taken permanent leave—as Harvey’s clearly has—any spirit making contact may take up residence. Thus, when I open my eyes my perspective is that of someone sprawled on the not-clean carpet of LAX, corralled by the bovine gaze of curious passersby, hemmed in by the steady drone of tiny wheels as roller bags eddy in a stream past my sweat-chilled face. I reside within the damaged body of a stranger, the taste of curry still in my strange new mouth, but I am alive.
Ye gods, Gentle Tweeter, I had forgotten how awful it feels to be alive. Even when a living-alive person is in good health, there’s the torment of dry skin, ill-fitting shoes, scratchy throats. As a child on the cusp of puberty, I have not been much troubled by what an adult body entails. However, from this instant I’m abraded by coarse underarm hairs. I’m suffocated by my own pungent endocrine musk, so like the masculine reek of an upstate public potty. As a girl, I’d always imagined the joy of having a pee-pee: like having a best friend and confidant, only attached. The reality is that I’m no more aware of my newfound wiener than I am of my appendix. I twist my impossibly thick neck and cast my glance in every direction. A female voice asks, “Mr. Peavey, can you hear me?” It’s a paramedic leaning over me, the one who administered the shock, shining a penlight into my eyes. She says, “Mr. Peavey, may I call you Harvey? Don’t try to move.”
The beam of the penlight is a searing agony. My bowels roil and ache. My newly acquired chest throbs where the torn skin begins to leak fresh blood, and my ribs burn where the sticky electrodes are still plastered. My intention is merely to brush the attending paramedic aside, but the gesture, a robust sweep of my arm, knocks her over backward. Imagine being Venetian water sucked down a drain and taking the shape of some strange, new plumbing. I don’t know my own strength. Nor do I fully realize my size. I’m inside a colossal fleshy robot, trying to make the arms and legs function. These arms and legs are huge. To stand upright takes a skillful feat of engineering; I overcompensate and stagger a step. Pinwheeling my arms for balance, I scatter paramedics and security guards like tenpins. I’m upright and stumbling, staggering stiff-legged. This is my nightmare: I’m a demure schoolgirl who finds herself stripped half-naked in one of the world’s busiest air travel crossroads. Realizing that my breasts are exposed—also, they’re hirsute and padded with muscle—I squeal and tuck my beefy elbows tight to my ribs to hide my mortified, large brown nipples. My massive hands flapping frantically around my stubbly face, I squeal and take off running. “Golly, I’m sorry,” I chirp, lumbering through the horrified airport masses. “Excuse me,” I shrill as my considerable spurting of man-blood dapples the recoiling gawkers.
Despite my linebacker size I gallop along like a gamine, clutching my bosoms, my shoulders shrugged up to my hairy ears. My steps splayed. Every stride crashes against wheelchairs, baby strollers, luggage carts. In my attempt to pussyfoot I barge and bulldoze my way through the stunned airport malingerers while a team of peace officers sprints after me, their walkie-talkies crackling with static and officious chatter.