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….”
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.
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.
The entire planet watched my funeral. Kings and presidents carried my biodegradable casket.
For obvious reasons the person who’d slay me would have to be a reviled Judas. My parents had searched long. They’d adopted the basest of blackguards and young cutthroats in the hope that one would be my executioner. It was only when they’d tested Goran, scurrilous Goran, that they knew they’d found their villain. No, what happened at EPCOT was no accident, but rather a carefully choreographed experiment. When they’d given Goran a knife and paraded an innocent, endearing pony before him… it was when he’d slashed its throat without hesitation that my mom and dad knew they’d found the player who would eventually end my life.
Gentle Tweeter,
In Athens or Aspen or Adelaide, my parents and I had always created a family. Anytime we were together, our love was intact. We weren’t like normal families who live tied to one plot of moldy compost, growing potatoes and carding wool. We had so many houses, in Dublin and Durban and Dubai, that none of them felt like our home. We weren’t like those genetically isolated finches Mr. Darwin had found in the Galápagos. No, we were more like those lost tribes wandering around in the pages of the Bible book. In Vancouver or Las Vegas or Van Nuys, all we had that was stable and consistent was each other.
For years, my faults were the glue that kept my parents united. My fat, my quiet bookwormish, misanthropic misbehavior, these were the flaws they sought to correct. And when I seemed to throw myself at Jesus Christ, well, nothing could’ve cemented their marital bond more effectively. Please forgive me my boast, but for years I was a genius at keeping my mom and dad hitched while the parents of my boarding school peers were constantly wedding and divorcing new partners. In Miami and Milan and Missoula, while our surroundings constantly changed, we had one another.
That is, until now. Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddhartha, whenever any dead person has come back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets every word of it. Wars ensue. Witch burnings. For example, when Bernadette Soubirous stepped into the water at Lourdes in the year 1858, the Virgin Mary materialized only to say, “Hey, don’t play here, kid. It’s a filthy-dirty medical-waste dump.” Even worse, in 1917 when she appeared to impoverished Portuguese shepherd children at Fatima, Mary was only trying to sneak them the number for a winning lottery ticket. Talk about good intentions! Here a helpful dead lady was merely trying to lend them a hand, and those predead urchins Ctrl+Alt+Overreacted.
In summation, the predead get everything wrong. But at this point in history, you can hardly blame them for being so spiritually famished that they’d gobble down anything. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, we may have polio vaccines and microwave popcorn, but secular humanism really only covers the good times. Nobody in a foxhole ever said a prayer to Ted Kennedy. Nobody on a deathbed clasps his hands in weeping despair and petitions for the aid of Hillary Clinton. My parents were in a position to proselytize. I gave them some misguided advice, and now, the headlines: “Camille Files for Divorce!”
I’ve failed in my eternal mission to keep them together.
Gentle Tweeter,
“Who’s Persef…?” I ask my mother.