Doomed

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The mountain itself rears skyward, tapering to balance an ornate wax-colored temple at its tip. A much-ornamented cupola, ringed with columns and crowned with turrets. Some colossal shrine graces that lofty apex, but from this far away it looks no larger than a many-tiered, much-decorated wedding cake.

  Even as I marvel at this view, I spy Mr. K sprinting down the gangplank in pursuit of the scarlet train of pilgrims. His loping, stumbling marionette figure attains the mountainside steps as I swiftly follow suit. His face, pallid. His breathing, labored. Clearly in cardiac distress, he shouts, “The boats have started! They’re starting the boats!”

  His words lost in exhausted panting, Mr. Ketamine shouts, “You have to understand, little dead girl, they’re launching Madlantis.” He throws each word to the winds.

  Animated, smiling, he chatters, waving his hands above his head. “You’re going to see tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes.” His words are gleeful. Punctuated with breathless laughter. “Since we’re all going to Heaven, it’s okay. Everybody’s going to die horribly … isn’t that great!”

  Around me, as we climb higher, the dream continent spreads in every direction, a glaring wasteland of immaculate white meadows and tooth-hued villas. At the base of this alpine stairway the Pangaea Crusader is mired, embedded in the plasticized lowlands. Judging from her copious exhaust smoke, her megayacht engines are running at full throttle, as if her crew were attempting to escape these millions and millions of acres of seamless heat-processed polygarbage. A black plume spews skyward from her smokestack. At the waterline, the puffed, foamed recycled trash squeaks along her trapped steel hull. The streamlined bow rises and falls like that of a polar icebreaker.

  Identical plumes of black smoke funnel up from locations along the horizon, each revealing the site of a similarly embedded, heaving ship.

  “The plan is,” continues Mr. K, almost singing, “they only need to push Madlantis into the prevailing current. In just a couple miles, the currents will catch us.”

  It pains me to admit this, but great fortunes have been expended toward the exercising of my perennially not-lean body. Like an aspiring Olympian or a dressage gelding, I’ve been bullied around indoor tracks. A host of fitness trainers have herded me the lengths of lap pools beyond remembering, and still it seems that I have absolutely no aerobic capacity. None whatsoever.

  Mr. K stammers, gulping for air, “We use the continent to shift the alignment of the planet. When the giant huge tonnage of Madlantis comes crashing into North America it’s going to wreck everything.”

  Gentle Tweeter, I am not unaware of this irritating metaphor taking shape. In death, as in life, my blubbery self is going to smash itself against the Americas, the Hawaiian Islands, the Galápagos, Japan, Russia, and Alaska. Giant blubbery fatty-fat-fat me is going to wreak havoc like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

  To make matters worse, as I climb, the steps are spongy soft, compressing slightly under my weight. Like foam rubber. Like Styrofoam. Slick with rain, they’re treacherous, threatening to springboard me backward into some bottomless pearl-tinted abyss.

  Despite our late start we’re already coming abreast of the slowest among the red-robed pilgrims. Between the dreamscape and the robes and the billowing diesel exhaust all is bold white, red, and black. Of the people in procession some carry lighted tapers. Others swing censers attached to lengths of chain and trailing tendrils of incense smoke. To a person they all chant the repeating refrain, “Fuck … shit … cocksucker …”

  The early winter dusk burnishes every crag to an antique gold. This magic-hour light is the gold my tongue sees when I eat fondue au Gruyère.

  We’re overtaking more pilgrims pushing and dodging past them on the steep stairway. Most have slowed their gait, for now it feels as if the mountain is shifting, moving almost imperceptibly, as the portly, jowly continent is nudged northward. A thousand million horsepower of marine engines strain to dislodge us from the calm center of the Pacific Gyre, and their gradual success sends jellied tremors through the polyfake tectonic plate on which we’re buoyed. The surrounding mountains jiggle like sky-high mounds of vanilla aspic. The less sure-footed pilgrims stumble and fall, screaming dramatically. Perhaps due to his wide experience with drug-induced unsteadiness, Mr. Ketamine remains upright. He bounces ever upward, hurtling two, three, four stair steps in a single stride.

  “We must hurry,” says Festus, fluttering along. “In less time than it took the Almighty to people this lovely world, the Boorists shall destroy it!”

  My running steps begin to slow. My stride slackens with the idea of letting Boorism run its course and complete its not-holy war against humanity, these veal-eating, CO2-emitting, self-replicating vermin. As the child of Gaia-aware, tree-sitting, monkey-wrenching parents, I can’t deny the appeal of a people-free planet. Even more enticing is the thought of having the entire Earth to myself, at least until next Halloween. So blissfully isolated, I’ll gorge my way through whole books at one sitting. I’ll take up the lute.

  “Make haste!” urges Festus, winging along at my side. “Lest your eternally damned parents be force-fed hot excrement!”

  Nor can I deny the evil, gleeful idea of that scenario—not after all the macrobiotic muck they’ve crammed down my throat.

  It’s difficult to accept the idea that everyone’s about to die, everything’s about to be destroyed, because everyone seems so happy. Smiling. Their manic eyes flashing. Blacks and Asians, Jews and gays, Québécoise and Palestinians and Amerindians, white supremacists, prochoice and prolife, they’re all holding hands. They’re hugging, kissing even. There’s no fear of disease. No social pretense or status indicators or power hierarchies separate them. The crowd is singing my name, grateful for the salvation they believe is imminent. They’re happy in the way people are happy while burning books or beheading kings; they’re righteous.

  All the while, Mr. Ketamine’s mumbling to keep my message fresh in his mind. His sunset-illuminated face, drawn and gaunt, stained the color of flame, fiercely he’s repeating, “No stem cells.”

  The thoughtful gray bowels of my brain are queasy with motion sickness. They’re nauseated with the indigestible memory of my father in New York City saying, “Madison was a little coward.”

  Ahead of us the procession has come to a bottleneck. The berobed penitents await admittance at a great archway, the entrance to the mountaintop temple. Among us, a quartet of giants shoulders the corners of a sedan chair, a boxed-and-curtained affair whose occupants remain concealed within its red velvet draperies. To my mind, Camille and Antonio are its most likely passengers, and I crane my neck to get a better look. Meanwhile the crowd surges into a not-historically-inaccurate reproduction of a courtyard from some Renaissance Venetian palazzo, the flamboyant dadoes and corbels reproduced in copious amounts of sculpted blah-colored hardened-cellulose froth.

  Among this throng of hooded figures Mr. K stands on tiptoe and shouts, “Listen! Everybody listen to me!” Someone has given him a lit candle, and he holds this flaming taper overhead like a stuttering, bright star.

  Gentle Tweeter, please understand that effective communication is paramount to me. My parents are so rich because people have outsourced the skills with which they once conveyed their emotions. The public has contracted out their own self-expression. All love must be mediated through greeting cards, assembly-line diamond jewelry, or professionally arranged, factory-farmed bouquets of roses. All epiphanies must be modeled by my mother. People feel only those emotions she prompts them to feel. For them, she is Aphrodite. My father, my dad, is the zeitgeist.

  All of my greatest concerns, I’ve entrusted them to this ravaged ketamine hound who now leaps in place, waving his candle and shouting to attract everyone’s attention. Imagine my horror when Mr. K shouts, “Stop!” He whistles for silence, then shouts, “Madison says you’re all going to Hell unless you listen!” The assembled crowd begins to turn and stare. “The angel Madison,” he shouts, “wants you all to stop cuss
ing and burping.…”

  Here I’ve entrusted one person to express all the love I could not. I’ve asked him to bear all my regrets and resolve all my lies. I sense the tide slowly turning.

  Their faces framed in the openings of their red hoods, the confused audience regards Mr. K. They wait, restive, blinking with expressions of puzzlement.

  “Madison,” shouts Mr. K. He pauses for a moment of absolute hushed silence. “Madison Spencer says the only true path to salvation lies in sucking donkey dicks!”

  Ye gods.

  It’s at that moment that I see my parents. They push back their hoods and stare, their faces exploded in looks of stricken horror.

  And without taking another breath, Mr. Crescent City, Mr. K, my psychic bounty hunter, he falls down dead.

  DECEMBER 21, 2:22 P.M. HAST

  The Beating I So Richly Deserve

  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell

  Gentle Tweeter,

  No one gets it. Everyone gets it wrong.

  In the sky-high temple of repurposed plastic, the familiar blue ghost bleeds out of Mr. Ketamine’s collapsed body. “I’m not going back,” says the blue Mr. K–shaped ectoplasm standing next to me, shaking its head. No one can see us. Every hooded figure is staring at his postalive remains in the center of the courtyard. That pockmarked, pigtailed rag doll. Even now, a team of paramedics pushes through the crowd and begins to check for vital signs.

  The ghost of Mr. K tells me, “It’s my heart, finally. Hallelujah. I’m gone for good this time.”

  Under our feet, the topography of Madlantis gives a tiny sideways tug.

  Revealed, my parents observe while the medics inject Mr. K’s corpse with various lifesaving agents. The bearers of the velvet-draped sedan chair have deposited their burden nearby, but its veiled contents remain a mystery.

  Their ceremony interrupted for a moment, the assembled celebrants push back their scarlet hoods. Still holding their flickering tapers, they continue to mutter genital and excretory obscenities. When the attending medics strip the not-clean tunic from Mr. K’s not-healthy chest and make ready to attach the leads for a cardiac defibrillator, I see my chance.

  The ghost Mr. K sees me and says, “Don’t do it, angel Madison.”

  I have to. There’s so much to tell my parents. Not the least of which is how much I love and miss them. That, and how stupid they’re being.

  “If you’re going to use my old body,” says Mr. K, “just be aware I was in the middle of a gnarly herpes flare-up.”

  I look at the ghost him. I look at his crumpled corpse.

  “Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into,” he warns.

  I’m so Ctrl+Alt+Grossed-out.

  The paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I can’t do it. I can’t make the jump, Gentle Tweeter, not into that disgusting, inflamed, drug-abused cadaver. The medics deliver their jolt of heart-starting amperage, but nothing happens. All life signs stay flat.

  My parents will die without knowing I loved them. They’ll go to Hell and be diced by demons with razor blades dipped in margarita salt. They’ll get paper cuts across their eyeballs and be subjected to high colonics of liquid Drano.

  Once more the paramedics shout, “Clear!” And I don’t take the opportunity.

  All humanity will be wiped off the face of the Earth. Satan will claim all of God’s children. Satan will win. All this is because I can’t bring myself to comingle my virginal, intelligent soul with the jaundiced, skeletal remains of a creepy, predecomposed loser man.

  “I don’t blame you,” says ghost Mr. K. “I didn’t much like being in there myself.”

  For a third and final effort, the paramedics shout, “Clear!”

  My brains growl a warning: Satan will find my cat.

  And I make my jump.

  Not since I was entombed in the overly sullied environs of an upstate public toilet have I felt so degraded. These leprous hands! These withered, spindly limbs! The helpful medics have stripped away the majority of my soiled garments, and I find myself with barely a malodorous pair of undershorts veiling my vile pendulous membrum virilis. My own burdensome membrum puerile. Even as the decorous medics caution me to remain prone on the courtyard pavement, I launch my shambling frame to a scarcely standing posture. Placating latex-gloved hands attempt to stop me, but I stagger a step toward my aghast parents.

  My mother and father, they stand beside the curtained sedan chair. Their jaws hang slack. As I careen my monstrous new body toward them, my arms thrown wide to give them a loving bear hug, they shudder with not-concealed revulsion.

  So weak am I that I fall—Gentle Tweeter, I am always falling—sprawled on the plastic cobblestones.

  I, who had once fretted over the prospect of pubescent acne, now I crawl before my father, pitted with the stinging craters of the virulent herpes virus. I who sought to wed Jesus Christ in order to forestall my budding girlhood physicality, I squirm on dying knees, soliciting in a quaking moribund voice for my mother to pay me her loving regard. Prone, covered in sores, I approach my makers on my irredeemably pestilent belly. This form modeled from corruption, once I constituted my parents’ bright future, the living confirmation that they had made the politically progressive choices. Now I slither on my naked stomach, exposing my ribbed, emaciated back and dragging the burdensome shame of my heavily soiled pigtail. That braid, so like an exposed prereptilian brainstem. Me, Madison Spencer, their emissary into a better, more enlightened future, I’m reduced to this slinking lizard.

  In my gravelly voice, borrowed from a dead man, I declare, “Mommy! Daddy!” Dragging my mostly nude, bony, sweat-lubricated new self toward them, I cry out, “I love you!” I pucker my cracked, well-lesioned lips to bestow an adoring kiss, and I beg, “Don’t you know me? I’m Madison!” I cry, “I’m your little sugarplum!”

  My new breath tastes the way a pet store smells.

  My father’s handsome face is a grimace of teeth-baring disgust, revolted by this creature he finds himself forced to punch. To smite mightily. My father, oh, my beloved father, to defend himself and my mother, he’s dealt the bothersome task of pummeling me with his closed fists. My hot infectious blood sallies forth. Sickened by my hair and bodily fluids on his knuckles, he’s still grimly determined to stop my advance.

  With broken fingers I beseech. “I tore off Papadaddy’s turgid dinger,” I confess, “and I abandoned him to die in a puddle of blood.” I tell my parents that I’ve never actually performed analingus on the lofty bottoms of exotic giraffes. I tell them how I only invented my love affair with Jesus Christ. I tell them everything. My strength fading, I paw the air, and my entreaties are met by the hard soles of my father’s Prada wingtips. This atrocity of blood and pus I find myself trapped within, I’m taunting them. Challenging them. Daring them to love me. I’m testing to see whether they recognize, in this tormented grotesque, any sign of their own troubled little girl.

  Those two shining paragons, I grovel before them. Showing them what a monster I’ve become, I beg them to accept me.

  “Forgive me for assaulting you in the bathroom at the Beverly Wilshire,” I beseech my father. To my mother I say, “I promise to lose weight.”

  Looking on is Babette, chuckling secretly. The wench, the buxom succubus. Looking on are the blue ghost of Mr. K and the hummingbird-fluttering, golden sprite of Festus. I slither around the feet of my horror-struck family. In nightmarish slow motion I’m reaching my thin strange fingertips to stroke my mom’s terrified ankle. “Mommy, I’m here to rescue you.”

  In response to my professed love, my father continues to hammer me with his fists and feet. Pain blooms within my wasted rib cage. My borrowed heart seizes. And the suffering is indescribable as my blood ceases to flow.

  The truth is, Gentle Tweeter, I am always testing their love.

  A voice calls out, “The candle! Madison, get the candle!” The source of the voice is Mr. K’s ghost. His ghost hand directs my gaze to a spot on the plastic paving ston
es. There, the lit candle he’d held at the moment of his death has landed. Its wick has ignited the styrene-foam faux cobblestones, and a bubbling fire rises and makes ready to spread to the rest of the temple, the mountain, the continent. Even subjected to my cardiac arrest I’m forced to choose between kissing my panicked mom and dad with wormy, diseased lips … or advancing in a new direction to extinguish a rapidly spreading conflagration of potentially epic proportions.

  Even as I vacillate in indecision, a lissome hand emerges from a slit in the velvet draperies of the sedan chair. A melodious voice says, “Fear not!” The hand, this perfect ideal of a hand, elegant and otherworldly, its fingers sweep aside the red velvet to reveal the chair’s occupant: a winsome maiden. A youthful goddess.

  Even as the bubbling fire grows to feed on more plastic steps … a Styrofoam pedestal … the base of a polystyrene obelisk, the perfect maid enthroned at the center of this populous crowd, this slender girl swings her willowy legs and steps forth from the chair. Her hair is lustrous, supporting a gilded wreath of olive leaves. Her limbs smooth. Her face unmarred by eyeglasses. Her sylphlike frame is adorned in a simple yeoman’s tunic of familiar blue chambray.

  This ideal maiden points a perfect finger at me and demands, “Be gone, noxious abomination! Retreat, you overweight pretender!” She squares her shoulders and proudly announces, “Behold, for I am Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—returned from the grave to bring mankind eternal life.”

  DECEMBER 21, 2:31 P.M. HAST

  Denounced!

  Posted by Madisonspencer@aftrlife.hell

  Gentle Tweeter,

  In a leap, the beautiful stranger pounces. Even as I sprawl, dying on the plastic ground, she launches her winsome form from the sedan chair and lands squarely upon my bared, quivering spine.