Crescent nods.
“You’ve spoken with him?”
Ye gods. My drug-demented escort is about to expose me as a panicked public toilet pee-pee mangler.
Again, Crescent City nods. As he leans forward, the room’s candles uplight his haggard face, like footlights on a stage, the glow gilding his wrinkles and the stubble on his chin. “Your pa, Mr. Benjamin, he told me he wasn’t murdered.”
“Then you, Mr. City,” snaps my mom, “you are a charlatan!”
Wasn’t murdered?
“You, Mr. City!” shouts my mom. With a wide sweep of her arm she thrusts a pointing finger, and this broad, theatrical gesture evicts the tabloid magazine from her lap. “You are a fraud!” The magazine flutters the short distance to the floor, where it lies faceup. “Because my child is not dead! My father was butchered by a psychopath! And my child is alive!”
She’s gone crazy. I am neither alive nor a psychopath.
On the floor at our feet, the tabloid headline reads, “Maddy Spencer Resurrected.” Printed in an only slightly smaller typeface, a subhead trumpets, “And She’s Lost 60 Pounds!”
“You don’t have to believe anything,” says Mr. K, and he tunnels one hand into the rank denim abscess of a pants pocket. He produces a vial of familiar white powder and says, “I can show you.” He reaches the vial toward her and says, “Go ahead, Holy Mother Camille. Talk to Madison yourself.”
DECEMBER 21, 12:18 P.M. HAST
Camille Becomes a Tourist in the Afterlife
Gentle Tweeter,
In the ship’s salon, my mom accepts the vial of ketamine offered by Mr. Crescent City, and she scoops a polished fingernail deep into the white powder. She repeats this one-two-three times, inhaling each snootful with a snort so violent that her coiffed head whiplashes backward on her swanlike neck. Only when her fingernail can no longer find its way to the vial does Camille Spencer slump sideways on her divan, and the rise and fall of her world-renowned bosom becomes too faint as to be discernible.
Lest it slip from her chemically slackened grasp, Mr. City quickly reclaims the vial with its precious remaining contents. He asks, “Supreme Holy Mother Spencer?”
The familiar spectacle begins with a spot of blue light glowing in the center of her chest. The blue waxes brighter, shining upward before it grows like a tendril, spiraling, twining almost to the ceiling. At its apex, the blue vine swells into a bud. This bud takes the shape of a body, vague and streamlined. The color, it’s the blue your skin sees when you slide between starched-and-ironed sixteen-hundred-thread-count Pratesi sheets. It’s the blue your tongue sees when you eat peppermint.
Lastly the features of the blue face appear, my mother’s wide cheekbones tapering to her delicate chin. Her eyes come to rest on me, on the vision of my ghost seated beside her, and her mouth blooms, her voice like a perfume. It’s this, this elegant spirit, which says, “Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—stop biting your fingernails!”
Oh, Gentle Tweeter, success at last. I irritate; therefore I am.
After securing his cache of Special K, Mr. City gently lays two fingers against the side of my mother’s slack neck, checking for a pulse. He places a hand on her brow and raises one eyelid, smudging his thumb with coppery eye shadow while making certain that her pupil slowly dilates.
Looking down upon him, my mom’s blue spirit observes wistfully, “Maddy never understood why I took so many drugs.”
No longer biting my fingernails, I say, “It’s me. I’m here.”
“You’re just a sad projection of my intoxicated mind,” she insists.
“I’m Madison.”
The hovering, shimmering blue haunt shakes its head. “No,” she says. “I’ve tripped on enough LSD to recognize a hallucination.” She smiles as slowly and beautifully as any tropical sunrise. “You’re nothing but a dream.” Her ghost voice dismissive: “You’re merely a projection of my guilty conscience.”
I am, she claims, a figment of her imagination.
My mom’s spirit sighs. “You’re exactly the way Leonard told me you’d look.”
You can appreciate my frustration, Gentle Tweeter. The Devil claims me as his invention. So does God. If Babette’s to be believed, I’m part of some grand conspiracy launched by my so-called friends in Hell. Now my mother dismisses me as nothing but her own drug-induced vision. At what point do I become my own creation?
Floating, swanning around the ceiling, she explains that since she had been a small girl, pulling weeds and beating rugs on that upstate farm, a telemarketer had phoned to tell her about the future. Early on, she thought he was crazy. His voice was nasal and reedy, like a teenage boy’s. Worse, he readily claimed to be over two thousand years old, and that he’d been a priest in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais. He was young and silly, she surmised, or he was clearly a lunatic.
Smiling at the memory, she says, “The very first time he called, Leonard was conducting a marketing research study about cable television viewing habits…. You know your grandmother. She’d never let us have cable, but I lied and said we did. You know how lonely that farm can get. Leonard asked if he could call me again the next day.”
This telephone stranger, he’d known details about my mom that no one could know. And early on, he told her to buy a lottery ticket. He told her what numbers to choose, and when she won he told her where to go to have some photographs taken, and he told her exactly where to send those pictures: to what movie producer. This boy Leonard, he made her famous. He told her how she’d meet her future husband. Every day he’d telephone with more good news about my mom’s future. The lottery ticket won. The producer cast her in a film before she’d turned seventeen, and when my papadaddy refused to let her work, Leonard called and told her how to file to become a legally emancipated minor.
This guardian angel, he’d told her to gather flowers and press them between the pages of a book. To honor her father, Leonard said, just in case she never saw him again.
“Your nana seemed to understand,” my ghost mom explains. “She bought the lottery ticket for me. She told me that a similar telephone pollster had been calling her since she was a little girl.” Patterson, he said his name was. This had been decades before. “Eventually Patterson had told her the exact date she’d bear a girl baby, and he’d asked her to name it Camille.”
My mom left that upstate farm and never looked back.
In summary, it would seem that telemarketers have been steering the destiny of my family for at least three generations.
Under the unlikely tutelage of this faceless stranger, my mother’s movie career had skyrocketed. As dictated by Leonard, she’d met and married my father, and with Leonard’s advice their investments had snowballed. Wherever their far-flung projects took them, in Bilbao and Berlin and Brisbane, Leonard had always known where to call. He’d telephoned every day with new marching orders, and they’d come to trust him implicitly. Before they turned twenty-five, they were the wealthiest, loveliest, most celebrated couple in the world.
After years of coaching my parents to riches and fame, one day Leonard called my mother in Stockholm or Santiago or San Diego, to predict the date and time I’d be born.
“He whispered in my ear,” swears my drifting ghost mom. “He whispered merely the idea of you.”
And in doing so I was conceived.
The beauty of her countenance beaming down on me, her ghost eyes brimming with soulful tears, she says, “He asked me to name you Madison. We were ecstatic. He told us that you’d be a great warrior. You’d defeat evil in a terrible battle. But then Leonard went too far….”