Moment by moment, she tells me, my life had occurred exactly the way Leonard foretold it would.
“Then he told us exactly when and how you would die.”
On some level, she muses, all mothers know their children will suffer and die; that’s the horrible unspeakable curse of giving birth. But to know the exact place and time of your child’s death is too much to bear. “I knew I was destined to be the mother of a murdered child. All of my film roles had been a rehearsal for that night….”
Camille Spencer. Camille Spencer. Turn on cable television at any hour of any day, and there she is: The long-suffering nun who coaxes deathbed remorse from serial killers. She’s the stoic single-mother waitress whose teen son is shot to death in drive-by gangsta violence. The Great Wise Survivor Woman. The Veteran Radical with All the Answers.
Unaware of her ghost, Mr. Crescent City addresses the whole salon, asking, “Do you see the angel Madison? Do you see I’m not a liar?”
It was knowing how I’d die that tempered their love for me. My mom closes her ghost eyes and says, “We knew the agonies you’d suffer, so we kept you at arm’s length. I couldn’t bear to witness the pain you’d be forced to endure, so we used criticism to prevent ourselves from loving you too much. By fixating on your flaws we tried to save ourselves from the full brunt of your eventual murder.”
And by drinking and pill popping. “Why do you think your father and I took so many drugs? How else could anyone live with the certainty of their child’s impending death?”
Smiling wistfully, she whispers, “You remember how awful it was when your little cat died?” Her breath catches, and she closes her ghost eyes for a moment. She steadies her composure. “That’s why we couldn’t tell you that your Tigerstripe was doomed.”
Leonard had told them that I’d invent salacious diary entries inspired by my stuffed toys. They sent me to boarding school… to ecology camp… to upstate, because it was too agonizing to see me every day, knowing what they knew.
“I even lied about your age,” says my mom. “I told the world you were eight years old because Leonard had always foretold you would die on the evening of your thirteenth birthday.”
A telemarketer had given her complete foreknowledge of my entire truncated life.
The night my mother had stood onstage at the Academy Awards and wished me a happy birthday, she knew I was breathing my last. As her televised image towered above me on the high-definition screen in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, saying, “Your daddy and I love you very, very much…,” she was fully aware that I was being garroted. As she bade me, “… good night, and sleep well, my precious love…,” my mother already knew I was dying.
DECEMBER 21, 12:25 P.M. HAST
Camille Disembodied
Gentle Tweeter,
You’ve watched my mother play this scene so many times: a dramatic heroine delivering the expository monologue that provides backstory for some current plot crisis. You’ve witnessed her in this role so often that it’s difficult to separate fiction from this new reality, but never has the scene played with such surrealism. The glimmering blue wraith of her hovers in the salon of the Pangaea Crusader. Her words… in this new role, my mother’s voice is not that of a character. It’s measured and frank, the subdued voice of a narrator in a documentary film.
Her blueness kiting about the ceiling, she says, “All preexisting religious doctrines must be made to seem ridiculous, outdated, oppressive, or hateful. That was the mission Leonard decreed.”
To make room for a new world religion, Leonard had stated that all religions had to be discredited. Everything held to be sacred and holy had to be reduced to a joke. No one could be allowed to discuss good or evil without sounding like a fool, and the mention of God or the Devil must be met with universal eye rolling. Most important, Leonard had insisted, intelligent people must be made to feel ashamed of their need for a higher power. They must be starved for a spiritual life until they would greedily accept any that would be offered to them.
Since my mother’s upstate childhood, all of Leonard’s promises had come true. The only reason she’d let me be killed is because he’d promised I would return to my family in even greater happiness. Leonard had long pledged that I would telephone from beyond life and dictate the rules for a new world religion. He commanded my parents to gather the garbage of the seas and to build a heaven on earth. There, on its highest peak, they were to construct a temple. They were to espouse the doctrines decreed by their dead child, and only when they’d done so and the world was swept by this new faith, only then would their daughter return from her grave to lead all people to the actual kingdom of paradise.
“We completed what Nietzsche had begun,” says my floating mother. “God would have to be thoroughly killed before we could resurrect him.”
Leonard preached that mankind would always long for an organized system of religious beliefs, but, like a scared insecure child, people would hide their need behind a mask of sarcasm and ironic detachment. Each person, he’d claimed, would grow tired of acting as his or her own deity. They would want to belong to something larger, to a sort of family who accepted them despite their worst behavior. This family would be the Boorites.
Boorism, as Leonard had planned, would be a brotherhood that accepted and celebrated the worst aspects of its adherents. Even the details which they themselves despised—their secret prejudices, their bodily odors, their piggish rudeness.
Captivating is my mother, the consummate storyteller. “Through Boorism,” she explains, “Leonard teaches us that salvation relies on making your life an ongoing act of forgiveness.”
No matter what others say or do, you must never take offense. According to Boorist doctrines, the greatest sin is reproaching others, and humans are given life on earth so that we might test one another with small and large slights. Anyone may spit or swear or break wind, but no one may accept that act as a personal affront.
Every unkind remark or crude gesture by others is a blessing, an opportunity to exercise our own capacity to forgive.
“In theory it sounds vile,” says my mom, “but it’s really quite simple and lovely in practice.”
From even his earliest telephone conversations, Leonard had described Camille’s child as a modern Persephone.
As my mother’s spirit flits about the room, describing her outlandish scenario—all human destiny covertly string-pulled by dead telemarketers—Mr. City tips his vial of ketamine. He taps a small pile of white onto his thumbnail and snorts it in a single breath. He snorts another.
To touch the hearts of everyone in the world, the child who would die horribly and be returned to life, she would have to be famous. Like a modern Abraham called to sacrifice his son Isaac, the child’s parents would need to capture the eyes and ears of the world media. For that lofty purpose, Leonard had made Camille and Antonio Spencer such global role models. All of humanity would know their child and mourn her untimely death. The world would embrace my parents’ disdain for organized religions, and the world would subsequently convert en masse when my parents made public their proof of an afterlife.
As they had flocked to soy and hemp, so would people ultimately flock to Boorism.
That’s why, Gentle Tweeters, the ultrasound snapshot of my fetus had been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, months before I was born. The video of my delivery had played on prime-time television and won an Emmy. That squalling, slimy newborn me was known to billions of viewers. As was my kitten, Tigerstripe, showcased on myriad magazine covers. Birthday by birthday, the entire planet had watched me grow from an infant to a toddler to my fleshy girlhood.