The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  “What is all this?” I say.

  “We are bringing Mama home tonight.” She puts the lily down next to St. Anthony.

  Cactus strolls in from the kitchen with an unlit candle, and La La flicks Daddy’s old Zippo at it. They have lit hundreds of tall candles to the patron saint of lost things. Mama’s house is now cast in the same miraculous shadows and mysterious lights of a church. The St. Anthony statue’s eyes blink and shift beneath the flicker of the flames. The whole scene makes me uneasy and brings back memories I have spent most of my life trying to forget: Mama’s nine days of prayers, her fasts, and her feasts, the rune stones and the tarot cards. The bullshit customers who knocked on the front door, day and night. The Nag Champa incense burns the back of my throat, and the sweet pollen from all these lilies makes my eyes water.

  “Take your shoes off.” La La doesn’t look up from the candle she’s lighting. “These are prayers for St. Anthony to bring Mama back to us.”

  “That’s really sweet, but Emily and the boys are expecting me,” I say. “I just came by to see if Daddy has heard anything from the police.”

  “Stay. We need to do this as a family.” Stevo walks into the room with Cactus, who’s carrying a billowing Japanese teapot.

  “Take your shoes off,” La La demands.

  “I have work tomorrow.”

  “Duke.” Stevo pours the tea into the fancy china cups that Mama claimed belonged to the Czarina before the revolution. “Take your shoes off.”

  “Where’s Yanko?” I say.

  “Playing a frat party in Baton Rouge.” La La rearranges the Easter lilies that flank the St. Anthony statue.

  “I bought an offering for St. Anthony.” Cactus points to a huge sack of Beehive Organic Flour, propped up under the St. Anthony statue that she has placed on top of the tarot card table.

  “Is that a hundred-pound sack of flour?” I say.

  “You have to give St. Anthony enough flour to match the weight of the missing person,” she says.

  “Mama weighed more than a hundred pounds.”

  “Don’t be that way,” La La says. “She paid for the bag with her palm reading money.”

  There is a loud bang and then a clatter on the front porch. Some animal is screeching and making an ungodly racket.

  “Oh, the Bee Maidens never disappoint!” La La swishes out of the parlor, to the front door.

  Cactus and Stevo chase after her.

  Cactus screams and La La yells at her to shut up.

  So I run out to the porch to see what’s the matter.

  And it’s a opossum: a fat one with Mama’s necklace around its neck.

  It is hissing and backing up from Stevo, who is holding his shoe over his head.

  “Don’t hurt it,” La La says.

  “Kill it!” Cactus screams. “Don’t let it bite you!”

  Stevo just stands here, unsure who to listen to.

  So I wrestle the shoe from him and lightly bop the opossum on the head.

  The hissing creature collapses and does what it was built to do, play opossum.

  I reach down and remove the gold coins from its neck.

  I hold them up to the porch light. Sure enough, they are Mama’s. All my doubts run out of me like blood from a stab wound. We are witnessing a miracle or perhaps, like Cactus proclaimed, a curse. Or something well beyond those two words, some new phenomenon that has yet to be named.

  Whatever is happening, I feel seasick. I feel the floorboards shifting and rocking beneath my feet. I quite possibly feel the nascent symptoms of another panic attack.

  “So weird.” I bring the necklace inside. La La follows right behind me.

  “The necklace wanted to come home to us and it did,” she says. “That’s how it works.”

  I hold the gold coins out in front of me and admire how they shimmer.

  “Give that to me.” La La plucks the necklace from my hand. She wraps it in a piece of purple silk. “Mama’s necklace has returned to us. We will not lose it again.”

  * * *

  “Now let us drink deep!” Stevo holds his teacup to his lips and swallows it all.

  Cactus and La La follow suit. They grimace and pucker. Then they all glare at me.

  “For once, just be a part of this family.” Stevo pushes a cup of his tea at me.

  “Do it for Mama,” Cactus says.

  “Here, you need to wear this first.” La La fastens Mama’s gold coins around my neck, and I let her.

  I don’t know if it’s guilt for having ignored them for the past ten years or just stupidity for thinking that I owe them this, but I put the tea to my lips. I throw the foul liquid past my tongue, to the back of my throat.

  “What was that?” I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and stare inside my empty teacup.

  “Ayahuasca!” Stevo throws me an adult diaper. “You’re going to need these.”

  The cold sweats hit hard. They herald the agony that Cactus and La La are in, next to me on the floor of the parlor. They are moaning, curled up in fetal positions on their yoga mats. The tea makes them violently ill. For me, the tea takes me on an amazing trip. I feel expansive and bigger than my body. Everything is aglow. I am lying on my back with my adult diapers on; the crinkling sound they make is magical.

  My heart is bursting with love, more love for my brothers and sister than I ever even knew was possible. I am feeling love for all seven billion of my brothers and sisters on this planet. We are all one. My heart feels as big as the sun. I want to call everybody and tell them how much I love them — how much life-giving warmth I have to share with the world.

  And then the cramps.

  They hit me below my waist, twisting me with sharp pain, squeezing me like that python in my dream.

  Don’t think about the python. Don’t think about the python and its horrible mouth. But it is already around me. She is squeezing my waist. Her open mouth threatens to devour me. Her grip pushes everything out of me. I grab the bucket that Stevo has placed by my head, and I heave. I fill up the bucket with a tide as unstoppable as the oceans. I can’t help it. I fill up my diapers. I look over at La La, and she is biting a towel, sweating. From the smell of things, I feel certain she’s having the same kind of distress.

  I roll around on the floor, trying to get away from the cramps.

  “It’s okay, Duke,” Cactus groans. “We’ve been trained by shamans.”

  “We are going to touch the face of God!” Stevo grabs the bucket from me and pukes into it.

  “This is not okay.” I can’t stop squirming from the pain. “This is not okay!”

  “There’s a lot in this world that is not okay,” Stevo gasps between pukes.

  “I hate you.” I grab the bucket of sick back from him.

  I heave.

  “Let the pollution go!” Stevo dances around like a mad man. “Let it go! Just let it go!”

  Mama’s necklace starts to hum and vibrate. It starts to talk to me. It makes me see things. Dreams that are not dreams. Futures that are not futures. The necklace becomes the python coiling around my neck, squeezing me around my stomach.

  I expel everything from my body. The python wrings me out like a dishrag. I lay on the floor limp, unable to lift my head, drooling. This hallucinogenic tea forces all the fluids and all the ideas I ever held out of me and onto the floor. Then my head begins to flood and overflow with thoughts that aren’t mine. The python constricts. She wraps herself across my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs.

  I don’t fight it. I can’t. I let go. All I can do is realize that this thing has been squeezing me for years. I just didn’t realize what it was. It’s the hunger that has always been with me, and it has restricted everything I have ever thought or done. This insatiable hunger for a bigger house and buying more stuff and all the while I have been blind to everything that is wondrous and real. I have held so tightly to my faith in logic, so tightly to Mandala that I have squeezed out all possibility for a better way. This python is my blind faith,
and it’s strangling me. This python is certainty—that’s the problem. This certainty is unspeakably hungry. It’s what will eventually consume us all.

  There’s so much capital-T Truth pouring into my head that it makes me vomit, but this time when I put my head over the sick bucket, I see two angels who have lost their wings in a hurricane, guarding the gates of a dying Earth. They flicker and fade into the buzz and glow of Mama’s neon sign, which then flickers and fades into a Mandala Worldwide gas station sign, and then as the waves pour out of me, I begin to ride them. I find myself upon an endless ocean. I am Kevin Costner in Waterworld. I stand on the tip of a rag and bone boat. I watch the green sea meet the brown sky.

  Like the sea and sky, we all meet. We are all doing this.

  We are all Christopher Shelley. We are all Mandala. We are all doing this because we as a species are so driven to discover and everything we discover, we exploit: fire, oil, atoms, unknown continents full of our fellow human beings. It’s so very clear to me now, and it would have always been clear, had I not traded a world of chaos and beauty for one of certainty and logic. I just kept on drilling and burning and buying and fucking and keeping the illusion that I was in control of life. I was so righteous, so certain that I had found myself within the country club of the chosen few. My certainty was so big, my righteousness so close to whom I thought I was that I had no idea that this python was swallowing me whole.

  Mama’s necklace rips away the veil. It shows me how this will end. How I will end. I see my death. I see everyone’s death. I see what we have done to the thin layer around this rare planet. I see what Mama’s letters have been trying to say to me all this time. I see what I must do tomorrow at Christopher Shelley’s press conference.

  31

  Presser

  May 28, 2010

  Forty miles north of the Sub-Ocean Brightside oil bloom, the skies over the Port Fourchon Beach are as gray and hopeless as the ocean we are trying to save. There’s a heavy gloom hanging over all of us this morning, and after what I saw last night, it’s hard not to believe that the weather isn’t somehow reflecting God’s mood today—that He has had enough of us wrecking His creation—that the earth is finally done with us too—that this is her way of kicking us off her purple mountains and out of her impossible depths. But here I am anyway with my bright orange Mandala golf shirt on, reporting for duty to handle this PR crisis.

  The Mandala Shoreline Team are geared up in their turquoise work gloves and yellow rubber boots. They line the coast from here to Florida with their booms and skimming equipment. These workers are fighting in vain to stop the unstoppable. Thimbles and oceans are what we are dealing with here today, thimbles and oceans. A man can’t very well empty the ocean with thimbles just like a corporation can’t clean up over 4 million barrels of oil with 250 men sifting through the sludge on a beach with their skimmers and their jugs of detergents and emulsifiers. It does, however, make for a heroic photo opportunity. So Christopher Shelley is here with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his khaki pants on. He wanders the ruined beach and inspects the crew’s work. Meanwhile, I am here in the parking lot with Constanze Bellingham, listening to her lecture me on how this press conference must go perfectly.

  “As of late, he’s not been himself,” Constanze says. “So we are going to have you upload your speech to Christopher’s teleprompter.”

  “I’m sure the stress is getting to him.” I watch Christopher from across the beach. He pats one of the workers on the back. They are laughing— joking around.

  “I would suppose the stress is getting to us all.” Constanze shakes her head at her jovial boss.

  “I don’t want to speak out of turn,” I say.

  “Then don’t.” Constanze shakes her head.

  “Sorry, I just have to ask. Do you really think a teleprompter is the way to go here?”

  “Yes, according to the PR team, it is the only way to go,” Constanze says.

  “I just really question the wisdom of using teleprompters at a beach-side press conference like this. It’s stagey. Creates a pretty indelible image that these aren’t Christopher’s words. That he doesn’t have the answer to this. It’s the wrong kind of visual to juxtapose next to this clean-up. It’s not going to play well. It’s terrible actually.”

  “The news crews will be here in less than two hours, Mr. Melançon.”

  “Give me an hour with Christopher. Let me coach him through his talking points. If he can do this without the teleprompters, his address will come off as much more in control and authentic. More on-brand. Trust me.”

  “You’ll have to convince the PR team.”

  “If it doesn’t work, we can always go back to the teleprompters.”

  “Well, quite frankly, Mr. Shelley doesn’t like reading from teleprompters. Says they make him stutter,” she says.

  “Then why are we doing this? He shouldn’t use them then. Seriously.”

  “It’s not me you have to convince. Tell that to the PR team.” She nods her head in the direction of the Winnebago with the giant Mandala America logo emblazoned on it.

  “Why don’t we tell Christopher first and let him tell the PR team?” I say.

  “This isn’t your first rodeo, is it?” Constanze smiles at me.

  * * *

  “You got this.” I pat Christopher on the back as the news trucks approach the beach. In a split-second, Christopher Shelley, CEO of one of the largest global concerns, goes from looking like the slightly goofy son of a British lord to looking like Mister Bean, all pinched-face, simpering, and red.

  “Look at that.” He finally exhales.

  The media trucks surround us: NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, BBC. Even Al Jazeera is here. It’s a mob scene. But instead of carrying pitchforks and torches, they’ve got their cameras and their boom mikes. The bleach-toothed reporters and their angry camera crews are here to make themselves famous for lynching this guy, and if I am going to obey my mother’s letters, I am about to help them do it.

  “You did great in the rehearsal.” I slap Christopher on the back again. “You are going to kill this.”

  “Easier said than done, chap.” Christopher waves me off as he ascends the podium. The news crews circle him. I take my place behind the flood of reporters and the flash of cameras.

  Christopher adjusts the bouquet of microphones toward his thin lips. He clears his throat and attempts to smile. And then he seems to realize that perhaps a smile is not appropriate for this moment, so he furrows his brow, lowers his head, and sighs.

  The CEO of Mandala Worldwide looks tiny behind this large podium, dwarfed by this moment. He clears his throat again and speaks:

  “The Sub-Ocean Brightside explosion is a tragedy that should have never happened.” Christopher follows the exact verbiage we rehearsed. “I speak for everyone at Mandala when I say that we are still in a deep state of continued shock and grief over the loss of our friends and co-workers who died in that explosion last month. My heart breaks for their families. But despite our collective sorrow, my team and I have been working around the clock to fight this spill. As the CEO of Mandala Worldwide, I am all too aware of how grave our situation is today. Sadly we have not located the cause of this tragedy, and for this, I cannot offer enough apologies, but regardless of the cause, I will do everything in my power to make sure this never happens again.”

  Christopher hits all my high points for an effective non-apology apology: He’s claimed more sorrow and outrage than the general public in this matter because of his personal loss. He’s apologized not for the Spill or the explosion, but for not finding its exact cause—which, to the untrained ear, sounds like a sincere admission of fault but isn’t anywhere close. And then he’s sworn to save us from something this horrible ever happening again. If he can stay on point, he will land the dismount with a “We-Are-All-In-This Together” rallying cry and Mandala Worldwide will have made crisis management history. That is if Christopher doesn’t follow the one last piece of advice that I
gave him just before the news teams showed up.

  “Our sorrow multiplies every day that we do not kill this well.” Christopher Shelley shakes his head woefully.

  He is going in for the “We-Are-All-In-this-Together” clincher. Maybe I should have done more than just take his teleprompter away. Maybe he’s going to pull this off after all.

  “Our lives have been completely consumed by this tragedy,” he says. “This is a personal loss for me and my team. After all, Mandala has over 45,000 employees who live and work on the coast. That is why I want to speak directly to the people who call this part of the world home. This is our moment. And we shall not cower. We shall not falter. We shall kill this well,” Christopher looks out over the crowd of reporters. Tears shimmering in his eyes and a defiant smile breaking across his face. “Indeed a dark tide is upon us today, and as it rises, Mandala shall stand together with the families of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, united with the good people of the Gulf Coast. Mandala will stop this Spill and we shall all rise above this together.”

  Christopher waits a couple of beats just as I instructed him to do so that this pause will create a natural editing point for a media-perfect sound byte.

  “Any questions?” he says after the exact moment of silence. And the press hurls them at Christopher like Molotov cocktails.

  “There has been a lot of speculation that Mandala wants to replace the drilling mud with seawater before they finish the plug.” This former beauty queen from ABC News smiles at Christopher. “Would that even work, Mr. Shelley?”

  The beauty queen is then one-upped by a guy from FOX News, sweating to death in a full business suit. “Are you considering detonating a nuclear bomb to plug up the hole?”

  “Does the fact that Mandala had to call on Exxon and NASA for help perhaps indicate that Mandala engineers weren’t prepared for a disaster of this magnitude?” asks the NPR reporter in her signature monotone.

  Christopher appears to remember most of my coaching. He does a pretty good job of dodging and defusing a majority of the questions. He radiates confidence bordering on arrogance. His gestures are royal and his scowls are distinctly British. He is doing okay, but that one reporter from NPR keeps politely hammering Christopher, causing Christopher’s responses to become increasingly terse and clipped.