Doomed Read online

  To PattersonNumber54, yes, even a ghost can feel sadness and terror.

  Death isn’t the end of peril. There are deaths beyond death. Like it or not, death isn’t the end of anything.

  Nobody wants to wander into a lonely, way-quiet hotel room and find a dead body, especially not one lying in her very own childhood bed. It’s the corpse of an inconsiderate stranger abandoned here, no doubt some Honduran hotel maid who elected to commit suicide in my nice bed, surrounded by my imported Steiff bears and limited-edition Gund giraffes, probably with a belly full of my mother’s Xanax, decomposing her nasty Honduran bodily fluids into my hand-stitched Hästens mattress, ruining my sixteen-hundred-thread-count Porthault sheets.

  As my mounting rage surpasses my fear, I step forward. I grip the top edge of the muslin dustcover and begin to draw it down, revealing the body: an ancient mummy. A hag. Her gums pucker and frill without teeth to support them. Sunk in a pillow, sparse gray hairs wreath her head. I pull back the white fabric in a single yank, throwing it to the bedroom floor. The old woman lies, legs together and hands crossed over her chest, every bony finger sparkling with flashy cocktail rings. Her dress I recognize, a haze of aquamarine velvet heavily trimmed with sequins, rhinestones, and seed pearls. A slit cut in the skirt reveals a skeletal leg from wasted thigh to the blue-veined foot encased in a Prada sling-back sandal. The shoes are so new the price tag pasted to the sole of one is still legible. The blond wig, the gown, they all look vaguely familiar. I know them. I recognize them from a funeral held about a hundred thousand years ago. Miracle of miracles, I can smell the old lady’s cigarette smoke. No, I swear, ghosts can’t smell or taste anything in the alive world, but I can smell the cigarette stench that wafts from her. And without thinking, without conscious intent, I say, “Nana Minnie?”

  The old woman’s eyelashes flutter. The outside end of one spidery false eyelash is peeling off, making her look a touch demented. The old lady blinks, lifting herself to her elbows and squinting her milky eyes in my direction. A smile splits the wrinkled width of her face, and her pink lisping gums say, “Pumpkinseed?”

  To CanuckAIDSemily, this blows. Even after you’re dead it hurts just as bad when your heart swells up, stretched bigger and bigger like an aneurysm of tears getting ready to boom.

  My nana’s gaze bounces from me to the skirt of her dress, from me to the sequins and velvet that fall away to reveal her aged legs, and the woman says, “For crying out loud … would you just look at the whore’s costume your mama buried me in?” With one shaky, bejeweled hand she reaches to the bedside table and plucks at the pack of Gauloises. Saying, “Come on and give your Nana Minnie a light,” she brings the butt of a cigarette to her mouth, and her slack, wrinkled lips collapse into a kiss shape around the filter tip.

  DECEMBER 21, 8:09 A.M. EST

  An Ick-inducing Reunion

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  Sprawled on the satin coverlet of my bed, Nana crosses her spindly legs at the ankle, affording me an unwelcome glimpse up her slit skirt. Cringing, I ask, “Did we bury you … not wearing underpants?”

  “Your stupid mama,” she says by way of an answer. Her gown is sleeveless, and she stares down at a thorny tribal tattoo that encircles her wrist and marches up her arm to her elbow, continuing to her shoulder. The inky black forms barbed letters, like briars, that spell out, “I [heart shape] Camille Spencer … I [heart shape] Camille Spencer …” with a tattooed rose blooming between each iteration. Nana spits on her thumb and rubs at the words on her wrist, saying, “What’s this happy horseshit?” She can’t see it, but the words run from her shoulder to circle her neck like a choker, terminating in a large tattooed rose that covers most of her right cheek. These repetitive declarations were needled into her aged, sunbaked hide postmortem, at my mother’s insistence.

  Her head propped on the bed’s pillow, Nana Minnie glances down at the full breasts swelling within the bodice of her dress. “For the love of Pete … What did your mama do to me?” With the gnarled talon of an elderly index finger, she pokes tentatively at one firm breast, obviously another postmortem renovation.

  She’s smoking a ghost cigarette, blowing secondhand smoke everywhere, and with her free hand she pats the bed for me to come sit beside her. Of course I sit. I’m bitter and resentful and angry, not impolite. I merely sit, not talking, certainly not hugging and kissing her. My borrowed fake Coach bag rests on the bed beside my hip, and I dip a hand into it and dig among the turquoise Avon eye shadows, Almond Joys, and condoms. I fish out a strange PDA and start keyboarding my evil thoughts into words … sentences … bitchy blog entries.

  If I’m honest here, you’ll decide that I’m simply the most hard-hearted thirteen-year-old ghost ever to walk the face of the Earth, but I am already wishing my beloved long-dead Nana Minnie would get lung cancer and die a second time.

  Between drags on her coffin nail my nana asks, “You ain’t seen a spiritualist skulking around, have you? Terrible skin? A big, tall drink a water with his long hair braided down his back like a Chinaman?” She cocks a wrinkled eye at me.

  To reassure you, HellHottieBabette, I am taking good care of your handbag.

  My Nana Minnie was my mom’s mother, and in her palmier days she was probably a madcap jazz baby bobbing her hair and rouging her knees, dancing the jitterbug on cocaine-dusted speakeasy tables with Charles Lindbergh and roaring through the West Egg night in Stutz Bearcats, wrapped in raccoon coats and gorging on live goldfish, but by the time I knew her, my nana was fairly worn down to dust. Probably raising my mom didn’t help her stay young any.

  By the time I was born Nana Minnie was already collecting buttons and nursing her sciatica. And chain-smoking. I remember that when I’d go visit her upstate, she’d brew tea by sticking an old pickle jar full of water in a sunny window. All that Norman Rockwell–ness aside, my nana’s house smelled like vacationing with dirty cavemen, as if she cooked every meal by combining raw ingredients she wrenched from some plot of dirt, and then heated to create food right inside her house and never just texted Spago or the Ivy or the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and had them deliver moules marinières tout de suite.

  After you used my nana’s bathroom, no Somali maids slipped in quietly to sanitize everything and distribute new pamplemousse-scented shampoos. It’s no mystery why my mother opted to run away as a teenager, become a world-famous Hollywood star, and marry my billionaire father. There’s only so long you can pretend to be Laura Ingalls Wilder before that barefoot-hillbilly game wears thin. While I was banished to the Elba of tedious upstate, my mother would be off with a UNESCO film crew teaching safer-sex condom techniques to the bushmen of the Kalahari. My father would be orchestrating the hostile takeover of Sony Pictures or cornering the international market on weapons-grade plutonium, and I’d be stuck feigning interest in the rustic mating calls of wild birds.

  I’m not a snob. You can’t call me a snob, because I’d long ago forgiven my nana for living on a farm upstate. I’d forgiven her for buying domestic Havarti and for not knowing the difference between sorbet and gelato. To her credit, it was my Nana Minnie who introduced me to the novels of Elinor Glyn and Daphne du Maurier. To score a point in my favor, I tolerated her obsession with growing her own heirloom tomatoes when Dean & Deluca could’ve FedExed us infinitely better Cherokee Purples. I loved her that much. But no matter how judgmental this sounds, I still have not forgiven her for dying.

  Picking a fleck of tobacco off her tongue, using the chopstick-long fingernails my mom had her retrofitted with for her funeral, my nana says, “Your ma hired some fella to ghost-hunt you, so stay on your toes.” She adds, “I can tell you this much: He’s like a private dick who finds dead folks, and he’s here in this very hotel!”

  Sitting here in my old hotel bedroom, surrounded by my Steiff monkeys and Gund zebras, all I can see is that lit cigarette. That legalized form of suicide. And, yes, in response to the comment posted by Ha
desBrainiacLeonard, this is distinctly ungenerous of me. Allow me to be frank. I’m not entirely without empathy, but to my mind she left me behind. My nana abandoned me because cigarettes were more important. I loved her, but she loved tar and nicotine more. And today, finding her in my bedroom I resolve not to make the mistake of ever loving her again.

  My mom never forgave her for not being Peggy Guggenheim. I never forgave her for smoking and cooking and gardening and dying.

  “So,” my Nana Minnie says, “Pumpkinseed, where you been keeping yourself?”

  Oh, I tell her, around. I don’t tell her anything about how I died. Nor do I offer a word about being condemned to Hell. My fingers keep typing away on my PDA; my fingertips are screaming everything I can’t bear to say aloud.

  “I’ve been there. To Heaven,” says Nana Minnie. She jabs her cigarette toward the ceiling. “We was both of us saved, me and your Papadaddy Ben. The problem is Heaven adopted one of them strict no-smoking rules.” Henceforth, she says, in the same way office workers must brave the weather and huddle outdoors in order to puff their cancer sticks, my dead nana must descend as a ghost to indulge her vile addiction.

  Mostly I just listen and search her face for signs of myself. Child and crone, we create a kind of before-and-after effect; her hooked parrot’s nose is my cute button nose, except irradiated by the ultraviolet rays of a hundred thousand upstate summer days. Her cascade of variously sized chins duplicates my dainty girlish chin, only in triplicate. I steer the conversation to the weather. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, where she lies inhaling a cigarette, I ask whether Papadaddy Ben is also skulking around the Rhinelander hotel.

  “Sweet pea,” she says, “stop fussing with that pocket calculator and be sociable.” Nana Minnie rolls her ghost head from side to side on the pillow. She blows a jet of smoke at the ceiling and says, “No, your papadaddy ain’t hereabouts. He wanted to be in Heaven to welcome Paris Hilton when she come.”

  Please, Dr. Maya, give me the strength to not use an emoticon.

  Paris Hilton is going to Heaven?

  This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.

  Sitting here, looking at my nana’s face, it strikes me that I can’t see her thoughts. Thoughts … thinking … the very proof which René Descartes cites for our existence is as equally invisible as ghosts. As our souls. It seems that if science is going to dismiss the possibility of a soul for lack of physical proof, scientists should also deny that thinking occurs. With this observation I glance at my sturdy, functional wristwatch and observe that only a minute has passed.

  My nana catches me with my elbow cocked, my wristwatch twisted for me to look at the time, and she says, “Did you miss your old grandma, kitty-kins?” She exhales another plume of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Yes,” I lie, “I did. I missed you,” but I keep keyboarding to the contrary.

  It doesn’t escape me that this is the central conflict of my life: I love and adore all of my family, except when I’m with them. No sooner do I enjoy a reunion with my long-dead Nana Minnie than I yearn to have my chain-smoking, half-blind beloved granny euthanized.

  The unhappy reality is that medical euthanasia is at best a onetime solution.

  Then it happens: a sound.

  From the PH foyer it comes: a laugh.

  I ask, “Is that your long-haired paranormal private detective?”

  Nana Minnie points her cigarette in the direction of the ruckus, a man’s laugh, and she says, “That’s how come you ought not be here, duckling.” She taps the ghost ash off her ghost cigarette and brings the butt back to her mouth. “Myself, I’m conducting a little covert investigation,” she says, taking another puff. “You think I enjoys laying here surrounded by your lousy kiddy toys? Maddy, honey,” she says, “you done walked into a stakeout.”

  DECEMBER 21, 8:12 A.M. EST

  A Tryst Revealed!

  Posted by [email protected]

  Gentle Tweeter,

  From elsewhere in the hotel suite comes the sound of a door, the dead bolt snapping open with a heavy clunk. No knock heralds it. No polite announcement of “Housekeeping!” or “Room service!” It’s the door which opens from the hotel hallway into the living room. The latch clicks. The hinges give a little sigh, and muffled footsteps sound against the marble tile of the suite’s foyer.

  Sad to say, the dead can still suffer excruciating bouts of self-consciousness. Like you, the predecomposed, the postalive can feel utterly mortified by their own sordid confessions.

  Take, for example, the following admission: I spent the fondest hours of my childhood with my ear pressed to the outside of my parents’ bedroom door. On the not-infrequent occasion when sleep eluded me in Athens or Abu Dhabi or Akron, I took great pleasure in eavesdropping on my parents’ carnal panting. Their coital groaning acted upon me as the sweetest lullaby. To my childhood ear those grunts and snorts were assurance of continued familial bliss. My parents’ bestial ejaculations guaranteed that my home wouldn’t crack up as had all those of my wealthy playmates. Not that I had playmates.

  Rapping. Tapping. The culture of spiritualists is rife with ghosts knocking loudly. For souls stranded in a physical world it’s only common courtesy. Plainly put, no one wants to enter a room and witness a predead person pooing or vigorously engaged in performing the Hot Nasty.

  Thus, ghosts always knock before they enter a room. Including me. Especially me. In the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, as I follow the sound of my father’s laugh, the unmistakable Thoroughbred stallion clip-clop of his shoes, accompanied by the time bomb tick-tock of Manolo Blahnik high heels, my pursuit leads to the closed door of my parents’ New York bedroom. The instant before I step through the enameled wood, a voice from within says, “Hurry, my love; we’re desperately behind schedule. We should’ve been screwing hours ago.…”

  The voice, my father’s voice, arrests my entry. What’s there to say concerning the renowned Antonio Spencer? The shape of his head is like that of a very handsome boulder. A landmark. Usually he speaks with a phony NPR intonation, but today his voice sounds naked and hairy.

  In lieu of dissolving through the door and possibly witnessing a primal scene, I pace the foyer, enervated with guilt.

  In the PH foyer, an electrical outlet catches my eye. We’ll revisit this practice in greater detail soon, but for the present please accept the fact that I pour my ghost ectoplasm into the tiny holes of a three-pronged outlet and worm along the copper wires buried within the hotel walls. Picture Charles Darwin navigating the steamy Amazonian river system. Arriving at a junction box, I guess the next wire and follow it to a new outlet. Soon I encounter the prongs of an extension cord. Shimmying along copper, I jump the gap of an open switch. Tunneling upward, I reach a dead end, lodged within a lightbulb. Not a roomy Thomas Edison incandescent bulb, mind you; this is a convoluted compact fluorescent lightbulb installed in a bedside lamp. Surrounding me, a vellum shade screens my view of the hotel room. I’m twisted inside a dark bulb, exactly the energy-efficient, eco-friendly option that my parents would choose, and the mercury tastes Ctrl+Alt+Foul. Surrounded by the lamp shade, I can only gaze down onto the wood-grain surface of a bedside table. There, like the elements of some torrid modern still life, my cramped view includes a PDA, a room key attached to a brass fob, an alarm clock, and the torn packaging leftover from a not-present condom.

  Hark, the comforting slurp-some din of my parents frantically taxing their aged pleasure centers.

  Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.

  Even now, coiled within a dark bulb, I indulge my ghost self by covert eavesdropping. Screened as I am, I can’t see them, but I can detect my father’s hoarse endearments. “Oh,” he says, “slow down.” My dad says, “I love what you’re doing, baby, but wait.” He says, “You’re going to send me right over the edge.…
”

  At that, a hand snakes under the bottom edge of the lampshade. It’s a bony spider of a hand. Plaited with smooth muscle, it’s a serpent of an arm, its skin as smooth as a lizard’s scales. The fingernails are painted with chipped white polish, and pink stripes run from the base of the palm down the inside of the forearm, like a few furrows plowed in a fallow upstate field. These parallel pink lines run almost to the elbow. Ragged, they suggest the scant few inches of sodbusting accomplished by some old dirt farmer before he dropped dead of a lonely heart attack.

  These scars, so rudely cut and freshly healed, they brand the bearer as a would-be suicide. Gentle Tweeters, I recognize these scars. I know this arm.

  I know the desolate visuals of a hardscrabble upstate lifestyle.

  A thin crescent of brown shows under each nail. It’s chocolate, the brown. To an expert eater, it’s clearly milk chocolate smudged from the outer layer of a Baby Ruth. Her touch is slippery with sweat and sticky with caramel. Her fingers fumble against the glass sides of the bulb, effectively fondling my face, soiling my hair. Caressing and molesting the ghost me contained here. These fingers smell like my father’s undershorts fermenting in the bottom of an overly heated Tunis laundry hamper. They smell the way my mother smelled when she’d giggle and stay belted in her bathrobe all morning. Those mornings, my mother would serenely pour organic wheatgrass juice, her cheeks ruddy and raw from my father’s morning stubble.

  Not wearing my mother’s canary yellow engagement ring, this groping hand is not my mother’s hand.

  Attached to the spidery fingers is the snake arm, a skinny shoulder, a slender neck. A face cranes from the bed, and two eyes peer under the lower edge of the lamp shade, looking directly at me as the fingers locate the switch and twist it. A face no older than that of a pretty high-schooler, in the new sixty-watt glare, it’s not my mother’s face.

  Lipstick is smudged around this stranger’s mouth. Her cheeks are livid from whiskers which ought to be abrading my mother’s face. She’s looking up the bottom of the lamp shade as if she’s peering up a skirt. This strange lecher smiles into the glow of my hiding place, and she whispers, “What time is it?”