- •If you were planning to be stranded on a desert island for three months, what would you bring along?
- •It was all Japanese, Germans, Koreans, all with English as a second language, with phrase
- •Inhale.
- •It’s this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.
- •It’s after dinner when the kid’s guts start to hurt. It’s wax, so he figured maybe it would just melt inside him and he’d piss it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can’t stand straight.
- •In the end, it’s never what you worry about that gets you.
- •It’s a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
- •In the dim streetlight, his rhinestone buttons sparkle.
- •It’s because of all this, we brought nothing that could save us.
- •Instead of a smile or frown, a movie fragment of night sky washes across her face.
- •Into the cell phone she says, “I’m en route.” She says, “I can take the three o’clock, but only for a half-hour.” She says good-bye and hangs up.
- •It’s just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.
- •Inside, it’s just you and Angelique and Lenny.
- •In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”
- •Vermin-proof or not, our Missing Link could rip a bag open with his bare pubic-hairy hands.
- •Itty-bitty.
- •In their last minute alone, just them in the green room, the slick guy asks if he can do our blonde girl another favor.
- •It’s then the floor producer walks in with the old goober.
- •In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take—what you do or say or how you choose to appear—is automatically right the moment you act.
- •It’s then the bag lady looks up and says, “Muffy? Packer?” The wino’s hand still feeling around deep in the front of her stretch pants, she pats the bench beside her and says, “What a nice surprise.”
- •In the newspaper the next week, the kidnapped heiress was found dead.
- •It’s after that Evelyn goes cold turkey. She cancels the newspaper. To replace the television, she buys the glass tank with a lizard that changes color to match any paint scheme.
- •It’s that moment, some people walked away.
- •In the movie–book–t-shirt story, we’d all love Miss Sneezy . . . Her deep courage . . . Her sunny humor.
- •In the viewfinder of his camera, Agent Tattletale rewinds and watches as Lady Baglady tells her story onstage. Telling and retelling it.
- •In his shirt pocket blinks the small red light of a tape recorder taking down every word.
- •In the phone book, when I found him, I was blind with crying, afraid my dog might die. Still, there was his listing: Kenneth Wilcox, d.V.M. A name I loved, somehow. For some reason. My savior.
- •I say, Who does?
- •It’s the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl onDiff’rent Strokes,got arrested, posed naked inPlayboy,and took too many sleeping pills.
- •I tell him, Trust me. Good writing means you take the regular facts and deliver them in a sexy way. Don’t worry about your life story, I tell him, that’s my job.
- •I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I’m getting every quote perfect.
- •Instead, you’ll run toward torture. You’ll enjoy pain.
- •It’s after that we couldn’t wash clothes, another plot point for the story that would be our cash cow.
- •In our heads, we’re all jotting down the line:I happen to know a lot about human insides . . .
- •In so many ways, this old man seems younger than any of the volunteers in their thirties or forties. These middle-aged angels a half or a third his age.
- •It’s only normal that, someday, an angel will gush. To the head nurse or an orderly, a volunteer will gush about what a wonderful youthful spirit Mr. Whittier has. How he’s still so full of life.
- •In another year, he’ll be dead of heart disease. Of old age, before he’s twenty.
- •It’s then he’d tell her—he lied. About his age.
- •Into the Earl of Slander’s tape recorder, Comrade Snarky says, “Do you know there’s no hot water?”
- •In the blue velvet lobby, we’ll have nothing for breakfast.
- •It goes round and round, kneading and grinding
- •In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.
- •Infallible,
- •In two days with a rented camera, they’d used up their lifetime allowance of interest in each other. Neither of them held any mystery.
- •In our version of what happened, every toe or finger, it was eaten by the villains whom no one will believe.
- •If that next bullet has your name on it.
- •If someone wanted a doll right away, she’d offer the old rag dolls.
- •It’s then Cora goes to lunch and buys a razor blade. Two razor blades. Three razor blades. Five.
- •It’s after that, Cora must talk to somebody at the county health clinic.
- •It’s the furnace, running full-blast. The blower pumping hot air into the ducts. The gas burner chugging. The furnace that Mr. Whittier destroyed.
- •Into twin-penciled arches, with, underneath each,
- •It’s the ammonium nitrate their buddy Jenson had ready for them in Florida. Their buddy from the Gulf War. Our Reverend Godless.
- •It got so their getups were cutting into the bottom line. But say a word about it and Flint would tell you, “You got to spend it to make it.”
- •In the pockets of his bib overalls.
- •It was lacquered black, waxed and smudged gray with fingerprints.
- •It could run for a month, always ticking. Or it could run for another hour. But the moment it stopped, that would be the moment to look inside.
- •If you’re tall enough, you can see her nipples.
- •It’s all we can do not to drag Mrs. Clark out of her dressing room and force her at knife point to bully and torture us.
- •Voir Dire
- •It was the summer people quit complaining about the price of gasoline. The summer when they stopped bitching about what shows were on television.
- •In the pitch-dark, Sister Vigilante says, it would hit—bam—a bolt of black lightning.
- •It was a bowling ball, the police reported.
- •In times like that, every man is a suspect. Every woman, a potential victim.
- •It’s the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.
- •It’s with this in mind I started my project.
- •It’s an interesting juxtaposition. A fascinating sociopolitical power relationship, being fully clothed and examining a naked person held down, wearing only his high heels and jewelry.
- •It’s the greasy ghost of Comrade Snarky, what we’ll have to smell every time we use the microwave. We’re breathing her spirit. Her sweet buttery stink will haunt us.
- •In the blue velvet lobby, the microwave oven dings once, twice, three times.
- •In the wash of water backed up from the toilet, washed up and stranded on the lobby carpet, you can see fur. Tabby-cat fur. A thin black leather collar. Some pencil-thin bones.
- •I promise to just breathe deep.
- •It’s a marriage.
- •In that future world, the world outside here, the only animals will be the ones in zoos and movies. Anything not human will just be a flavor for dinner: chicken, beef, pork, lamb, or fish.
- •Inside the curtained walls of the emergency room, Mrs. Clark leaned over the chrome rails of her daughter’s bed and said, “Baby, oh, my sweet baby . . . Who did this to you?”
- •In her hospital bed, her skin looked purple with bruises. Her head was shaved bald. The plastic band around her wrist, it said: c. Clark.
- •It’s the prison or the asylum you’ll eventually call home.
- •It’s five-thirty, and the store closes at six.
- •In Claire’s vision, the man’s face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.
- •Instead, Miss America asks, Is this how it will go? Her voice shrill and shaky, a bird’s song. Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another—until we’re all dead?
- •It’s here that she’d work hard to make the story boring, saying how water heated to 158 degrees Fahrenheit causes a third-degree burn in one second.
- •It screamed, “What did I do?”
- •If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.
- •In the deputy’s headphones, the buzz of flies gives way to the crackle of grubs tunneling forward one bite at a time.
- •In the sheriff deputy’s earphones, the mice munched the beetles. Snakes arrived to swallow the squealing mice. Everything looking to be last in the food chain.
- •It was the voice of Mrs. Clark saying, “I’m sorry, but you should’ve stayed missing. When you came back, you weren’t the same.” She says, “I loved you so much more when you were gone . . .”
- •It’s over dinner, Miss Sneezy blows her nose. She sniffs and coughs and says she really, really needs to tell us a story . . .
- •In white coats, holding test tubes,
- •I didn’t mean to kill you.
- •Instead, I want to know the stuff Shirlee can’t say. The stuff I’ve started to forget—like how does rain feel on your skin? Or stuff I never knew—like how to French-kiss?
- •It was my senior year in high school when people around me started to die. They died the same way my folks had died ten years before.
- •I ask again, about my grandma.
- •It’s when the light comes on, when the mirror in your suite turns into a window, then you can see the camera that’s always there. Always watching. Recording you.
- •In case you’re wondering how I got out . . .
- •In New Keegan, not one of the tombstones had writing you could still read.
- •If we could’ve read the headstones, we’d see how almost the entire town had died in one month. The first cluster of what doctors would call the Keegan virus. Rapid-onset viral brain tumors.
- •I can show him the ropes. Calm him down. Help him adjust to life here at The Orphanage.
- •It’s how we can eat all the shit that happens.
- •If you could not die.
- •If we died in enough pain, cursing old Mr. Whittier, then he begged for us to come back.
- •It takes four. One bodybuilder to screw in the bulb, and three others to watch and say, “Really, dude, you lookhuge!”
- •In the alley’s narrow blue sky, birds soar back and forth. Birds and clouds that aren’t cobwebs. In a blue that isn’t velvet or paint.
- •In the alley, Mr. Whittier’s voice shouts from closer and closer, for them to stop.
- •It doesn’t matter who we were as people, not to old Mr. Whittier.
In their last minute alone, just them in the green room, the slick guy asks if he can do our blonde girl another favor.
“You want to give me your block?” she says. And she smiles, just like in the picture. And her teeth aren’t too awful.
“No,” he says. “But when somebody’s being charming . . . when they tell you a joke . . . ,” the slick guy says, and he tears her uglybeforepicture in half. The two halves he puts together and tears into quarters. Then eighths. Then whatever. Shreds. Little bits. Confetti. He says, “If you’re going to succeed on television, you need to at least fake a smile.”
At least pretend to like people.
There in the green room, the blonde’s pink-lipstick mouth, it peels open and open and open until it hangs. Her lips go open and shut two, three times, the way a fish will gasp for breath, and she says, “Youass . . .”
It’s then the floor producer walks in with the old goober.
The producer says, “Okay, I think we’ll go with the investment video for this last segment . . .”
The old goober looks at the slick guy, the way you’d look at some department-store buyer who orders a half-million units, and he says, “Thomas . . .”
The blonde’s just sitting there, holding her cup of cold black coffee.
The floor producer is unclipping the radio mike off the back of the man’s belt. She’s handing it to the slick guy.
And to the old goober, he says, “Good morning, Dad.”
Grabbing the slick guy’s hand and shaking it, the goober says, “How’s your mom?”
The Nev-R-Run Pantyhose Girl. The girl you leave behind.
Our Miss Blonde stands. She gets to her feet, to give up, go home, fail.
And, taking the radio mike, checking the switch, to make sure it’s not hot, the slick guy says, “She’s dead.”
She’s dead and buried, and he’ll never say where. Or, if he does, he’ll lie about the city.
And, splash.
His hair and face, cold and wet.
He’s covered all over in coffee. Cold coffee. His shirt and tie, ruined. His slick hair washed down across his face.
Our blonde reaches to take the radio mike, and she says, “Thanks for the advice.” She says, “I think this makes menext . . .”
And tons worse than being too blonde, worse than wrecking his slick clothes and hair, our skinny girl has fallen in fucking love with him.
4.
In the blue velvet lobby, something comes thudding down the stairs from the shadows of the first balcony. Step by step, the thudding gets louder until it’s rumbling, round-dark, rolling down from the dim second floor. It’s a bowling ball, thudding down the center of the staircase. Rolling black-silent across the lobby’s blue carpet, Sister Vigilante’s bowling ball passes Cora Reynolds where he licks his paws, then past Mr. Whittier drinking instant coffee in his wheelchair, then past Lady Baglady and her diamond husband, then the ball knocks, heavy-black, through the double doors, disappearing into the auditorium.
“Packer,” Lady Baglady tells her diamond, “there’s something locked in here with us.” Making her voice low, almost a whisper, she asks the diamond, “Is ityou?”
That little square of glass you’re only supposed to break in the event of a fire, Miss America has already broken it. Every little window framed in red-painted metal with a little hammer hanging next to it on a chain, she breaks the glass and pulls the switch inside. Miss America does this in the lobby. Then in the red-lacquered, Chinese-restaurant-styled promenade with all its carved plaster Buddhas. Then in the Mayan-temple-styled foyer in the basement with its leering carved warrior faces. Then the Arabian Nights gallery behind the second-balcony boxes. Then in the projection booth tucked up against the roof.
Then nothing happens. No bells ring. No one comes to chop through the locked fire doors to rescue her. To rescue us.
Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.
Mr. Whittier sits on a blue velvet sofa in the lobby, under the glass leaves of a chandelier big as a sparkling gray cloud above him.
Already, the Matchmaker was calling the chandeliers “trees.” The row of them hanging down the center of each long salon or gallery or lounge. He called them orchards of glass grown out of chains wrapped in velvet and rooted in the ceiling.
Each of us seeing our own private at-home reality in these same big rooms.
The Earl of Slander is writing in his notepad. Agent Tattletale, videotaping. Countess Foresight, wearing her turban. Saint Gut-Free, eating.
With her whole arm, Director Denial tosses a fake mouse, and it lands halfway to the auditorium doors. With the other hand, she rubs the shoulder of her throwing arm while the cat, Cora Reynolds, brings the mouse back, his paws raising a rooster tail of boiling dust from the carpet.
Watching them, one arm folded across her chest to support her breasts, one hand twisted around to rub the back of her neck, Mrs. Clark says, “In the Villa Diodati, they had five cats.”
Saint Gut-Free eats instant crêpe Suzette out of a Mylar bag with a plastic spoon.
Shaping her fingernails with an emery board, Lady Baglady watches every dripping pink spoonful move from the bag to his mouth, and she says, “Thatcan’tbe any good.”
And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.
That’s until Miss America comes to stand in the middle of us, saying, “This is illegal.” What Mr. Whittier has done is kidnapping. He’s holding people against their will, and that’s a felony.
“The sooner you do as you promised,” Mr. Whittier says, “the sooner these three months will go by.”
Throwing the fake mouse, Director Denial says,“Whatis the Villa Diodati?”
“It’s a house on Lake Como,” Lady Baglady tells her fat diamond.
“LakeGeneva,” Mrs. Clark says.
Looking back, it was Mr. Whittier’s stand that we’re always right.
“It’s not a matter of right and wrong,” Mr. Whittier would say.
Really, there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality.
You can never set off to do thewrongthing.
You can never say thewrongthing.