Doomed (24 page)

In the days and weeks to come, in Nairobi and Nagasaki and Naples, my father would not-subtly transfer his affections from me to this surly refugee waif. As I had so recently channeled my unhappiness through my kitten, my father would come to make indirect statements such as “Goran? Would you tell your sister that she isn’t getting anything for Christmas—except perhaps a seat belt extender.” Not that we celebrated Christmas. Not that my father even acknowledged me; no, I was Goran’s sister or my mom’s daughter, but I’d become invisible to him. For my part, as he could no longer see me, I could not speak to him. Thus we ceased to exist for one another.

In Reykjavik and Rio and Rome, I’d already become a ghost to him.

After that came the unhappy episode of Goran slashing the pony’s throat at EPCOT Center. After that came Goran stealing my mom’s People’s Choice awards and hawking them over the Internet. By then my father had begun to soften, but it was too late, because it was soon after that, very soon, that I would be dead for real.

Writing in the third century, the Neoplatonist Zoticus predicted that one day a single mighty nation would rule all others. This nation will occupy an island in the center of a great ocean. It will rapidly collect all the wealth of the whole world, and all the kings of the world shall come to reside here. Writing in the fifth century, the Neoplatonist Proclus described this future nation as a beautiful mirage. According to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it will float on the horizon.

And here will the thing-child wash ashore. It will stride the cloud-colored beaches with no more awareness of its nudity than had the original humans.

There all plastic comes to a final rest. There the center holds, becalmed, in that Sargasso of plastics. The North Pacific Gyre, as that graveyard is known.

And arriving on this scene will stroll a human mother, wandering along that same beach, deep in her own grief. And the woman is essentially alone, accompanied by only one stylist, a publicist, four armed bodyguards, a yoga instructor, two lifestyle gurus, and a dietitian. This woman glimpses the thing-child: a slender sylphlike figure with skin as perfect as only plastic can be perfect. A face as smooth as only a photograph can be smooth. Its hair, a great bale
of floss combed to rich fullness by infinite ocean waves. And from all outward appearances is the thing-child a she-child.

And the she-child is of impossible beauty.

And from a distance, upon first catching sight of the she-child, Plato claims that the lonely woman will call out. Stopped, paralyzed by the sight, she’ll gasp. The woman shall stumble forward a few steps, her arms raised involuntarily to embrace this vision, and she’ll cry out, “Madison?”

For here, to the eyes of a bereft mother, this gift from the sea appears to be a resurrection. And this woman strolling along the beach will be the nominal queen of this wealthy kingdom.

And here is a long-lost child seemingly reunited with its mourning parent. A miracle witnessed by all the attendant entourage.

Tears leap to the woman’s eyes. For this stranger, who stands nude on that gleaming beach … this stranger is slender and enigmatically calm—not pudgy and grouchy, not willful and sullen—but, still, the resemblance is otherwise perfect. This is the murdered child, glorified. Before she might call out a second time, Plato writes that the woman is choked with emotion.

And thus will evil plant his she-child in the nest of an unknowing bird.

Thus will goodness be cuckolded, according to the papyri of Sais. And evil seeks to fit goodness with a pair of horns.

For this otherworldly beauty, this she-child begotten of plastic and fostered by the sea, it opens its winsome arms to
the human woman. With its sweet voice it says, “Mother.” The she-child advances to embrace the woman, and it says, “Camille Spencer, I am returned to you.” Embracing the bereaved woman, it says, “I return to you as proof of life everlasting. I bring you tidings of paradise.”

Gentle Tweeter,

Ultimately this is a tale about three islands. As was Lemuel Gulliver’s tale. Our first island was Manhattan. The second was a traffic island upstate. The third, we’re about to discover.

After our humiliating debacle at LAX, I accompanied my psychic shepherd to a customized CH-53D Sea Stallion, the
Gaia Wind
, for a lengthy low-altitude commute across open ocean. Considering the afternoon sun on the Pacific, the crystalline December air, it’s all quite thrilling.

As we fly westward, what I notice initially is a faint glow on the horizon. Even in broad daylight, in the wrong direction, a freakish, premature dawn seems to be rising. A shimmering, blue glow. Little more than three hours after lifting off from LAX, the
Gaia Wind
comes within sight of a new shore. As Gulliver and Darwin before me, I’m glimpsing a new foreign landmass. Carried along as we are by the
whop-whop-whop
of the helicopter’s broad propeller, we hover ever closer to this strange, impossible territory of luminous, jagged alps. The sun glints off vast plains. The shadows of passing clouds mottle the land’s surface, and pinnacles of breathtaking height thrust themselves up, into the mist. This, this fantasy landscape resembles not terra firma so much as peaks and whorls of whipped cream, all of it enlarged to a massive scale and colored the sparkling
crystallite white of table salt. Not that, as former hippies and former macrobiotic dieters, my parents had ever exposed me to salt.

My inebriated consort, Mr. Crescent City, leans forward, his amply veined eyes fixed on this growing vision. His mouth hangs slack, exaggerating his already not-alert facial expression as he says but a single, rapt word. “Madlantis!”

Ye gods.

Contrary to the old adage “Buy land … they’re not making it anymore,” immediately before us is proof that people are, indeed, making land. At least, Camille and Antonio are.

My parents had often mentioned a scheme. It was their stated ambition to resolve many of the globe’s most-dire problems with a single dramatic fix. Foremost in their minds was the swirling Sargasso of discarded postconsumer plastic known as the Pacific debris field. Second was global climate change. Third was the dwindling habitat available for wild bears of the polar variety, and fourth was the onerous burden of income taxes they were compelled to pay.

In truth, Gentle Tweeter, their income taxes occupied the lion’s share of my parents’ attention, but bear with me for the time being.

As a solution to all of these annoyances, Antonio and Camille Spencer had proposed a radical public works project. Even prior to my demise, they’d been busily lobbying world leaders. Like the master puppeteers they were, my mom and dad were shaping popular opinion toward their dream: to create a new continent—a vast floating raft of aerated polystyrene and bonded polymers, with a surface area double that of Texas. In this approximately mid-Pacific
location, constantly shifting, perpetually growing, had been the aforementioned Pacific debris field, that far-reaching soup of plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles and LEGO blocks, and every other bobbing, floating form of plastic refuse that’s been caught in the circling currents of the Pacific Gyre.

In the name of ecological restoration, my parents have spearheaded an international fund to meld together the ever-growing mass of plastic, and by churning this stew of Styrofoam, this morass of shredded cellophane … simply by partially melting it with injections of superheated air and introducing chemical bonding agents, they’ve reinvented this sodden ecological horror as a white confection. This synthetic wonderland covers millions of acres, heaped into gleaming mountains and spread in rolling hills where rainwater pools to form freshwater lakes and inland seas. This whipped-foam landscape floats, impervious to earthquakes, and rides high atop the worst tsunami. Its most striking quality is its pristine whiteness, a pearlized … an iridescent, immaculate whiteness, with the faintest suggestion of silver.

From a distance, it’s a heavenly paradise. Here are the baroque turrets and domes you imagine among cumulus clouds as you lie on your back in a Tanzanian meadow during Easter recess. Not that we celebrated Easter. Yes, I hunted for the requisite dyed eggs, but my parents told me these had been hidden by Barney Frank, who also furnished me an annual oversize basket of carob treats. Not that my mom ever allowed fatty, pig-pig me to actually eat that carob. Not that
anyone
really likes carob.

In my folks’ puffed-plastic dreamscape, looming tall are
white spires cresting above bowers of white roses, arches and buttresses, courtyards and gateways bright as spun sugar. It’s the white your tongue sees when you lick vanilla ice cream. Approaching the coastline of Madlantis you can discern white ravines and peaks. Before us are reconstituted plastics, seared by high-temperature blasts of air until they look polished. Glazed to glassy smoothness, these pinnacles and slopes aren’t subject to geological physics. In a dreamscape, a Maxfield Parrish arcadia: They rise impossibly steep, sheer faces of shining ivory that jut straight up from white beaches as slick as a mirror. Bright as klieg lights.

And yes, I might be a carob-gobbling, sucrose-addicted tubby, chubby dead girl, but I know the word
Arcadian
. I also know a louche tax dodge when I see one.

In the reverse of previous continents, Madlantis existed as maps before it existed as peaks and valleys. This puffed-and-blanched, polygarbage terrain, every slope and crag was planned and modeled by artists, diagrammed on blueprints prior to its creation. Preconceived. Predestined. Every square inch predetermined.

The opposite of tabula rasa.

As they’d believed in the harmonic convergence of the planets and in pyramid power, so did Camille and Antonio promote this virgin continent as a New Atlantis.

Madlantis.

It’s doubtful you can fly high enough to notice, but the overall shape of the continent is no mere accident of nature. The stretches of coastline and occasional bays aren’t shaped by river systems. No, from outer space you can see how the new landmass is shaped like a human head in profile. The
severed neck is oriented toward the south, the crown of the head toward the north. This milk-white, alabaster-white profile forms an enormous cameo surrounded by the cerulean blue of the Pacific Ocean. This Brobdingnagian silhouette, its saggy double chin dwarfs the nearby islands of Japan. The nape of its fatty neck crowds northern California, while its chipmunk cheeks threaten to block the shipping lanes above Hawaii. Needless to say, the newly minted continent of Madlantis was sculpted to look exactly like me.

Seen from outer space, the Earth now resembles nothing so much as a giant coin struck with my likeness. This is the satellite image I’d seen on television monitors and magazine covers at LAX. Here is the white plastic Heaven on Earth named in my honor.

A roundish, landlocked sea serves as my eye. On the opposite shoreline, rambling plastic glaciers suggest the strands of my unruly hair. And despite the fact that the whole is not particularly flattering, it is accurate. It’s me but on a gigantic scale. If you asked my mother, she’d tell you that it’s only
slightly
larger than life-size. My grieving parents would tell you that they’d conceived of this unheralded experiment in plastic reclamation as a staggering tribute to my memory. To finance their endeavor with public money corralled from every government in the world, my dad promised that it would serve to contain all the petrol-product debris of humanity. Its whiteness would reflect solar heat away from the planet and counteract climate change. Because it floated, the continent could even be towed north to serve as subsidized housing for displaced polar bears. Politicians flocked to support the endeavor.

In actuality, now that it’s complete, Mr. Ketamine
informs me that the land’s handful of physical residents is already in international court suing for their independence as a sovereign nation. It’s no coincidence that these patriotic zealots—known as “Madlantians,” and seeking freedom from colonialist oppressors—they are also the wealthiest people in the world, and that under the freshly inked constitution of Madlantis none of them will be subject to taxes upon their lofty incomes. Neither will inheritances be taxed. In addition, this small cadre of residents will all be named ambassadors of their plastic nation and therefore be granted the freedom of diplomatic immunity in all their international treks. That, Gentle Tweeter, is my parents’ noble dream: infinite money and infinite freedom. Every major corporation in the world is scrambling to relocate its headquarters there.

By now we’ve crossed into Madlantian airspace. We’re skimming above white plastic mountaintops. We’re careening through white plastic valleys. Ahead lies a speck of not-whiteness. Located at the approximate center of my vast global, fat-girl profile is a ship. Mired there, in a whorled pit that suggests the opening of my auditory canal—my ear hole, according to Orthodox Christians, the orifice through which the Holy Spirit impregnated the Virgin—locked in this wasteland as effectively as any explorer’s vessel crushed by advancing ice—or as Satan trapped in Dante’s icy lake—there is my parents’ megayacht, the
Pangaea Crusader
.

Gentle Tweeter,

Don’t imagine for a moment that solar panels and wave energy power any portion of this thunderous helicopter, and approximately a million gallons of dinosaur juice later we set down atop the
Pangaea Crusader
. Ah, the imperial seagoing
palais
that is the
Crusader
 … Despite the fact that the vessel is virtually an oceangoing space station, painted a gleaming, arctic white and only slightly smaller than Long Island, the
Crusader
’s central salon has been decorated to simulate the interior of a typical shantytown hovel found among the favelas of most Third World megalopolises. Were it not for the fact that we’re rocking gently, rolling smoothly atop salty Pacific swells, the yacht’s interior could be located in the primitive outskirts of Soweto or Rio de Janeiro.