Turning to face both of them, dropping my voice to a dragging growl, I said, “You knew?” My tears instantly boiled away. The corpse in my tender hands was teeming with maggots. My voice like a distant Swiss avalanche bearing down upon them with a billion-billion tons of ice and rock, I said, “All along, you knew you’d gotten me a dying kitty?”
A muted bell began to toll. It was the suite’s front doorbell. It rang again. The gaggle of Somali maids lingered, watching us from the bathroom doorway. The security cameras were watching.
“You knew my kitten was a goner, and you just let me suffer?”
His face flushed almost purple, his jaw clenched, my father shot a dark look at my mother.
My voice a siren, I wailed, “You should’ve told me that my baby was going to die!” Cradling my pain, I demanded, “Don’t you understand? How could you let me love something that was going to die?”
My mom filled a glass with water and brought it to me. Cupped in her other hand, she offered the pills. “Gumdrop,” she said, “we just wanted to see you happy before you turned thirteen.” So distraught was she that she actually expected me to drink tap water. Los Angeles tap water.
Not looking at me, instead gazing upon my cowering mother, my father squared his shoulders and stretched himself to his full height. “Trust me, young lady,” he said. His voice cold, subdued, and resigned, he said, “No one wants to know when their child is doomed to die.” For the first time, I could smell fifty-year-old Chivas on his breath. My father was loaded.
I snarled, “Maybe we ought to get Tigerstripe some liposuction and tattoos, and dress him to look like a Whorey von Whoreski version of Peggy Guggenheim!”
Even before the reality of their conspiracy had fully registered, my father strode across the bathroom and snatched the fragile remains from my grasp. He pitched them into the yawning toilet bowl and summarily pressed the flush lever. And, no, Gentle Tweeter, I am not oblivious to how many of my recent dramas had occurred in bathrooms, be they the noxious men’s rooms of upstate or the gilded ones of the Beverly Wilshire. And with that, my precious Tigerstripe was gone. Water swirled and splashed, and his tiny corpse was washed away. Lost.
And, whispering in my ear, my mom’s voice said, “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
I stared at both of them in mute outrage.
But was Tigerstripe truly gone? As my anger built, as the bile swelled within me, fueled by this shocking cystic revelation, the troubled waters also rose within the commode. My loving, former-supportive, former-caring, former-adoring parents had set me up. They’d gifted me a pet they knew would soon perish. The swirling toilet water rose as the acrid emotions climbed in my throat. Tigerstripe was gone, but his corpse had stuck somewhere in the craw of the hotel’s luxurious plumbing, and now not-fresh toilet water spiraled upward to crest the lip of the ceramic tomb and gush forth, splashing across the stone-tiled floor.
The doorbell rang once more, and, as my father turned to answer it, I stepped into his path. Standing between my dad and the bathroom doorway, I swung… as I’d once swung the Beagle book to decimate a lurid dog dinger… I now swung my open hand, jumping, leaping as needed to land a blow across my father’s close-shaved cheek.
His expression was Ctrl+Alt+Shocked. The toilet disgorged water. Choked with the dead body of my tiny kitty, it vomited, erupting beside us. No longer a mere commode, it became a cauldron boiling over with decayed cat parts and evil magic.
Not unnoticed by me, even in my churlish state, a strange boy had stepped into the bathroom doorway, a surly urchin whose thorny brow suggested Romanesque ruins and gothic goings-on. Wolves. Stooped Gypsy hags. At the sight of this brooding waif… and at the toilet’s fury… and in response to my violent lashing out, my mother shrieked, and as fast as an echo from my original blow, my father slapped me back.
DECEMBER 21, 10:58 A.M. PST
A Kitten’s Tragic Denouement
Gentle Tweeter,
Yes, my father slapped me.
And yes, I might be an uppity preteen romantic with aspirations to become a long-suffering Helen Burns, but I do know that getting walloped across my sassy, too-fresh-for-my-own-good mouth was a lot less fun than I’d always imagined it would be.
In the well-appointed bathroom of the Beverly Wilshire, as the chilled waters of that kitten-choked commode overflowed beside us, my father’s blow fell, scarcely hard enough to turn my head, but the sharp sound of it reverberated hugely in the tiled space. My meaty child’s hand hurt more from swatting his rugged face than my cheek hurt from his counterswat. The ready expanses of mirror showed us both: my tiny handprint reddening his face, my own rage darkening my visage. My mom stood nearby accompanied by maids and PAs and assorted hangers-on, her tapered fingers having flown up to mask her eyes from the brutal scene. Bits of orange fur rode the cresting tide, and we were—all of us—swamped. Only the unlikely adopted stranger stood apart from this domestic tragedy. The surly blackguard youth, he was a harbinger of disaster from some distant, strife-torn, blood-besotted fiefdom. This, the glowering countenance of a man-child no doubt suckled by rapacious wolves, this was Goran. This was the taut moment of our first encounter.
In the days and weeks to come, in Nairobi and Nagasaki and Naples, my father would not-subtly transfer his affections from me to this surly refugee waif. As I had so recently channeled my unhappiness through my kitten, my father would come to make indirect statements such as “Goran? Would you tell your sister that she isn’t getting anything for Christmas—except perhaps a seat belt extender.” Not that we celebrated Christmas. Not that my father even acknowledged me; no, I was Goran’s sister or my mom’s daughter, but I’d become invisible to him. For my part, as he could no longer see me, I could not speak to him. Thus we ceased to exist for one another.
In Reykjavik and Rio and Rome, I’d already become a ghost to him.
After that came the unhappy episode of Goran slashing the pony’s throat at EPCOT Center. After that came Goran stealing my mom’s People’s Choice awards and hawking them over the Internet. By then my father had begun to soften, but it was too late, because it was soon after that, very soon, that I would be dead for real.
DECEMBER 21, 11:59 A.M. PST
The Abomination Arrives
Writing in the third century, the Neoplatonist Zoticus predicted that one day a single mighty nation would rule all others. This nation will occupy an island in the center of a great ocean. It will rapidly collect all the wealth of the whole world, and all the kings of the world shall come to reside here. Writing in the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Proclus described this future nation as a beautiful mirage. According to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it will float on the horizon.
And here will the thing-child wash ashore. It will stride the cloud-colored beaches with no more awareness of its nudity than had the original humans.
There all plastic comes to a final rest. There the center holds, becalmed, in that Sargasso of plastics. The North Pacific Gyre, as that graveyard is known.
And arriving on this scene will stroll a human mother, wandering along that same beach, deep in her own grief. And the woman is essentially alone, accompanied by only one stylist, a publicist, four armed bodyguards, a yoga instructor, two lifestyle gurus, and a dietitian. This woman glimpses the thing-child: a slender sylphlike figure with skin as perfect as only plastic can be perfect. A face as smooth as only a photograph can be smooth. Its hair, a great bale of floss combed to rich fullness by infinite ocean waves. And from all outward appearances is the thing-child a she-child.