The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon
Page 1
THE NEON PALM OF
MADAME MELANÇON
WILL CLARKE
middlefinger.press
Dallas ♦ New York ♦ London ♦ Hong Kong ♦ Yazoo City
The Neon Palm of Madame Melançon Copyright © 2017 by Will Clarke.
For Michelle. You are my lifeline.
Contents
Dedication
Legal
Part I. Main Body
1. March 18, 2010 Two days before the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
2. March 22, 2010 Two days after the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
3. May 4, 2010 Forty-six days after the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
4. Eve of St. George’s May 5, 2010
5. St. George's Feast May 6, 2010 (Russian Orthodox)
Will Clarke
6. May 7, 2010 Over forty-eight hours since Mama disappeared
7. My Feet Ache
8. May 8, 2010 Fifty days after the Explosion
9. Mother's Day Where are you?
10. “Duke!”
11. "Why?" She always asks
12. May 10, 2010 Five days since Mama chased that cat out the house
13. Tonight There are no stars in the sky
14. Midnight Mama has now been missing for six days
15. 7:00 AM Snuck up on me
16. 8:42 AM May 11, 2010
17. Everything Hurts
18. May 12, 2010 Mama has been missing for eight days
19. The Legend of The Loup Garou
20. May 13, 2010 Fifty-five days since the Explosion
21. May 14, 2010 U.S. bans new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
22. Under the Buzz & Glow The red neon flickers
23. May 15, 2010 Mama has been missing for ten days
24. "Mandala Shortcuts Led To Spill" THE NEW YORK TIMES Headline: May 17, 2010
25. Turn to Page 5 of Dracula! May 17, 2010
26. May 18, 2010 Over 10 million gallons of oil have now spilled into the Gulf
27. Back in the McMansion May 22, 2010
28. Tempest in a Coffee Pot
29. We All Got a Boss May 27, 2010
30. Lit Up May 28, 2010
31. Presser May 28, 2010
32. May 29, 2010 210,000,000 gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf since the explosion
33. May 31, 2010 6,814 dead animals have been collected since the Spill
34. June 2, 2010 Mama has been missing for over four weeks
35. Cab Smells Like SpaghettiOs & Febreze
36. Mysterious Drones & Sudden Honeycombs
37. June 6, 2010 Not a word from the police
38. June 10, 2010 The oil from the disaster has affected over 1,300 miles of U.S. coastline
39. June 11, 2010 Mama has been missing for 38 days
40. What We Never Thought Was Possible
41. June 12, 2010 9:28 AM
42. The Answer
Part II.
Other Books by the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
P.O. Box 181583, Dallas, Texas 75218
Copyright © 2017 Will Clarke. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in any form. Published in the USA by MiddleFinger.Press, Dallas, Texas. MiddleFinger.Press is a division of Dunning Kruger Media. This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this story are products of the author’s often overactive, albeit defective, imagination, or they are used fictitiously, even satirically. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
Book Design by Will Clarke // Cover image by CSA ©csaimages
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(hardback) ISBN: 978-0-9726588-3-6
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(e-book) ISBN: 978-0-9726588-4-3
MELANÇON
muh-LAHN-sahn
Means “melancholic man.”
I
Main Body
March 18, 2010
Two days before the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
“When the sea turned to honey, the poor man lost his spoon.”
— Madame Melançon, New Orleans, Louisiana
March 22, 2010
Two days after the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
“Make no mistake, this is a baptism by fire, but Mandala will come back galvanized by this.”
— Christopher Shelley , Mandala Worldwide CEO
May 4, 2010
Forty-six days after the Sub-Ocean Brightside Explosion
I have come to realize that pythons do not make good family pets.
However, this epiphany, like most epiphanies in my life, has arrived a little too late. The only thing I can figure is that Emily must have forgotten to feed Dolly this month. Now our snake smells some smaller mammal on my clothes, and she thinks it’s dinnertime. So Dolly is doing what Dolly does best: squeezing her prey to death.
It’s the natural order of things, I guess.
Or maybe, just maybe, a 20-foot reticulated python isn’t the kind of animal that you let take free rein of your home, no matter how sweet and docile you once thought she was—no matter how much you thought you could keep the natural order of things under control by feeding it freeze-dried rodents, and even a few live goats. Either way, Dolly has wrapped herself, at first playfully, around my thigh. But now, after striking me twice in the face, she is crushing my rib cage. I have both hands around her neck so that she won’t strike me a third time. I try to remain calm. I try to get Dolly to remember who I am, to get her to realize that my heart is bigger than a rabbit’s—that I am the source of her food, not her food.
“Please,” I whisper to her black and caramel coils. “Let me go.”
Blood runs down my forehead into my eyes, and all I can really see is Dolly’s open mouth—a black hole surrounded by pink and white sinew, a reverse-birth canal lined with saw-like teeth. She is stronger than I am. She is one undulating swell of muscle, squeezing the blood from my leg, twisting my internal organs, and tightening my breath into gasps.
This will be how I die: On the floor of our playroom among the scattered Goldfish crackers and Berenstein Bears books. Emily is at the grocery store, and Jo-Jo and Stewart are in the next room playing trains. I pray that they stay in there, that they don’t hear my thrashing and groaning. I pray that they don’t come to me for more juice or a blanky. They are little boys, only three and five, easy prey once Dolly realizes that I am perhaps too big for her to swallow.
She coils around my neck. Constricting. I can’t breathe. I can feel every vein in my head.
I need a knife.
A rock.
A heavy book.
Something to bash her head in.
I start to black out, and to top things off, my iPhone won’t quit chirping, taunting me. Buzzing and chirping, reminding me that Emily is not at the store, that Stewart and Jo-Jo are not playing trains, and that we don’t own a twenty-foot reticulated python named Dolly. Chirping and buzzing, waking me up to the fact that I hate snakes, that this is just another impossible scenario in tonight’s medley of panic dreams.
My iPhone is actually on my bedside table, and I am not in the playroom. I am in my bed, fighting the pillow and sheets.
I roll over in the dark and answer the chirping.
“Hello?”
“They’re pursuing a criminal investigation!” Someone is shouting at me on the other end.
“Who is it?” Emily pu
ts her hand on my shoulder.
I don’t know. All I really know right now is how much I fucking hate snakes.
“Duke, you there?” the voice asks.
“Yeah, yeah. Who is this?”
“Wake up. It’s Gary.”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s happening. The DOJ wants us to preserve evidence. They’re pursuing a criminal investigation. I need you to come in.”
“Now?”
“We need to get ahead of this.”
I focus my eyes on the clock radio on the bedside table. It’s four a.m.
“The networks are breaking the story on the East Coast within the hour. We’re at DEFCON 5.”
“You mean DEFCON 1. DEFCON 5 is actually the lowest level of alert. DEFCON 1 is, you know, the highest.”
“This isn’t a joke, Duke.”
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I yawn.
“Get here now.” Gary hangs up. No apologies for calling me at this ungodly hour. No thanks for coming into the office at four-in-the-fucking morning. Just a click.
“What was that all about?” Emily asks.
“Gary. I have to go in.”
“Try not to wake the boys.”
I put my phone back on the bedside table and get up to take a shower in the dark.
* * *
When I walk into the New Orleans offices of Mandala Worldwide, it might as well be 5:30 in the afternoon, not 5:30 in the morning. Everyone is popping up and down, turning their heads back and forth above their cubicles like meerkats. The glare of the office lights casts everything in the present tense. We are all wide awake and shell-shocked, running around, sloshing coffee, printing emails, slamming phones, and kicking printers. We are all scrambling to cap an oil spill[1] that threatens to destroy the Gulf of Mexico as well as our company.
“Today is going to be a real gang-bang.” Gary walks me back to his office. “The DOJ is going to be so far up our rectum, I can’t stand it. And we got Christopher Shelley down in Venice today. And to top it off, Wilkers just green-lit lowering the containment dome.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Game changer.” Gary hands me a file folder stamped CONFIDENTIAL. “But the press is going to grill Christopher today about the DOJ, so he needs us to craft the answers to sidestep all that. Constanze is going to need your crisis-management plan within the hour.”
“Within the hour?”
“You’re going to have to wrestle this python to the ground, Duke. The press conference starts at noon.”
“You just say python?”
“Yeah.” Gary squints. “So what?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nevermind.”
“The intern’s making a Starbucks run when they open,” Gary yawns. “Tell him I want a venti double latte extra hot and get something for yourself.”
So I put in my coffee order, and then I get busy pulling together another memo for our CEO’s press conference. I will give Christopher Shelley the precise words to explain how this oil spill is not entirely Mandala Worldwide’s fault. Words are strange and powerful devices, and most people I work with have no idea how strange and powerful their words actually are—especially Christopher. The shit that comes out of his mouth blows the mind. Every single word we utter at a time like this is a grenade, and it’s my job to make sure we lob them all in the right direction.
Not to put too fine a point on a very complex situation, but the Chinese drilling tools and equipment that we thought we had ordered for this well were not, in fact, the drilling tools and equipment that we actually purchased. This bait and switch will become the cornerstone of our legal defense once this thing inevitably goes to trial, and it’s never too soon to start building this narrative. So within a matter of about fifteen minutes, I will distill these very arcane petroleum engineering facts into easy-to-repeat sound bites for Christopher Shelley. My brief this morning won’t be my best work, but it will at least give him enough talking points to help deflect the press—reporters who, by the way, have no idea how geologically disastrous things really are.
Despite my best efforts, the press and the bloggers are sharpening their knives for us. Even with the breaking news of dropping the containment dome, they will be coming after big bad Mandala Worldwide and our Sun King CEO. Every end-of-the-world scenario needs an Antichrist, and Christopher Shelley is perfect casting right now.
The fact is capping a well as deep as the Sub-Ocean Brightside is closer to NASA than it is to Exxon. This disaster is Apollo 13, not the Valdez. No one has ever had to kill a well a mile beneath the ocean. We have to make this shit up as we go. We have to invent something as complex as a mission to the moon in a matter of days.
The first few days of the Spill were exhausting, but as the days have passed, as it has become apparent that we may have opened a hole in the earth that can never be closed, the exhaustion has metastasized into wide-eyed terror, and that terror is now grabbing us all by the throats.
Every day, gossip blazes through our office like a forest fire. The burning rumor last week involved a megaton of tennis balls. The idea is to cram them into the hole to plug it up.
My friend Josh in accounting told me that he saw the purchase order for the tennis balls. Millions of dollars’ worth of tennis balls. Which is better than the rumor week before last, which involved detonating an atom bomb on the ocean floor. Thankfully, as of today, Dan Wilkers, our Chief Operating Officer and resident George Clooney look-alike, isn’t moving forward with the millions of dollars’ worth of tennis balls or the nukes.
The current plan is to drop an enormous steel dome on top of the well and then suck the oil out. The press should be all over this, but they are not. They are manic with catastrophe. They’d rather replay the explosion that killed fifty of our workers. They’d rather say we’ve stabbed New Orleans in the neck, that we’ve killed the wetlands and murdered the fishing industry.
* * *
Earlier this year, before the Sub-Ocean Brightside exploded, Emily and I had been living in Houston. My most challenging day at Mandala Worldwide U.S. headquarters usually involved our ad agency putting a trademark symbol in the wrong place in a Time Magazine ad. That was once considered a five-alarm fire for External Affairs. That’s because life back then within America’s Energy Corridor was good, beautiful actually—oil prices were soaring along with our stock price, and we were “drill-baby-drilling.” The money was practically printing itself. As a result, our office park was a perk-filled neverland: Free snacks. On-site baristas. Chair massages on Wednesdays. I had just hung my favorite Shepard Fairey print in my new office overlooking the Mandala Worldwide Zen sand garden when I got the call from my boss Gary.
“I need you in New Orleans ASAP,” he said with his mouth full.
“What are you eating?”
“Pumpkin ravioli. Chef really outdid himself today.”
“I’ll have travel book my flight tomorrow,” I said. “Who am I meeting in New Orleans?”
“Oh, this isn’t a trip. We’re moving you.”
“What?”
“We need External Affairs on the ground in New Orleans,” he said.
“Stewart just started school.”
“I need you in New Orleans, Duke.”
“I’m going to have to talk to Emily about this.”
“We’ve got you in corporate housing. I’ll send you a link to the house. It’s on a golf course in Covington, just outside the city.”
“Covington is not just outside the city. It’s across the Pontchartrain, Gary.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be moving too.”
“I haven’t passed the bar in Louisiana,” I remember saying.
“Nice try,” Gary said. “HR will be coming by to give you the details.”
A week later, Emily and I were bubble-wrapping her grandmother’s Wedgwood china and bossing the movers not to break our shit, and whether I liked it or not, Mandala was moving my young family back to the city and t
he woman that I had spent my entire life scrambling to escape.
* * *
The Sub-Ocean Brightside Oil Spill started on March 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico when the Mandala Worldwide-owned and operated deepwater rig exploded, killing 50 men and sinking the entire structure after a 72-hour inferno. The Sub-Ocean Brightside flooded the ocean with petroleum for 146 days until it was contained on August 13, 2010. 5.9 million barrels were estimated to have been spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from this spill. The Sub-Ocean Brightside was declared sealed on September 11, 2010, by the U.S. government. However, reports in late 2013 have established that the site is still leaking. ↵
Eve of St. George’s
May 5, 2010
Ever since Mandala moved me back to Louisiana in April, my mother, the infamous doomsayer, has done her level best to make me miserable. The woman seems intent on punishing me for abandoning her and this town, for defying her predictions, for marrying Emily and fathering my two sons despite her dire warnings against doing both. So now that I am back, Mama picks fights with Emily and throws tantrums constantly.
Take tonight, for example. She has decided to pull a vanishing act.
Poof!
Just like that, Mama has disappeared, and nobody can find her. She didn’t take her purse or her phone. Daddy says that a calico cat ran into her kitchen shortly after Jay Leno’s monologue, and my mama, whose superstitions compel her to believe that calico cats are basically text messages sent from the devil, chased the filthy animal with a broom, out the house, down Magazine Street.