- •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.
I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I’m getting every quote perfect.
And he’s right. His life is more boring than a black-and-white summer rerun.
On the other hand, the story I already wrote is great. My version is all about little Kenny’s long slide from the spotlight to the autopsy table. How he lost his innocence to a long list of network executives in his campaign to become Danny. To keep the sponsors happy, he was farmed out as a sexual plaything. He took drugs to stay thin. To delay the onset of puberty. To stay up all night, shooting scene after scene. No one, not even his friends and family, nobody knew the depths of his drug habit and perverted need for attention. Even after his career collapsed. Even becoming a D.V.M. was just to get access to good drugs and sex with small animals.
The more wine Ken Wilcox drinks, the more he says his life didn’t start untilDanny-Next-Doorwas canceled. Being little Danny Bright for eight seasons, that’s only real the way your memories of second grade might seem real. Only blurry moments not connected. Each day, each line of dialogue was just something you learned long enough to pass a test. The pretty farmhouse in Heartland, Iowa, was just a false front. Inside the windows, behind the lace curtains, was bare dirt scattered with cigarette butts. The actor who played Danny’s grandma, if they were speaking in the same shot, she used to spray spit. Her spit sterilized: more gin than saliva.
Sipping red wine, Ken Wilcox says his life now is so much more important. Healing animals. Saving dogs. With every swallow, his talking breaks up into single words spread wider and wider apart. Just before his eyes close, he asks how Skip is doing.
My dog, Skip.
And I tell him, Good, Skip is doing great.
And Kenny Wilcox, he says, “Good. I’m happy to hear it . . .”
He’s asleep, still smiling, when I slip the gun into his mouth.
“Happy” doesn’t do anybody any good.
A gun not registered to anybody. My hand in a glove, the gun in his mouth with his finger wrapped around the trigger. Little Kenny’s on his sofa, stripped of his clothes, his dick smeared with cooking grease, and a video of his old show playing on the television. The real clincher is the kiddie porn downloaded to his computer hard drive. The hard-copy pictures of kids getting screwed, they’re printed and taped to the walls of his bedroom.
The bags of painkillers are stashed under his bed. The heroin and crack buried in his sugar canister.
Inside of one day, the world will go from loving Kenny Wilcox to hating him. Little Danny-Next-Door will go from a childhood icon to a monster.
In my version of that last evening, Kenneth Wilcox waved the gun around. He bellowed about how no one cared. The world had used and rejected him. He drank and popped pills all evening and said he wasn’t afraid to die. In my version, he died after I’d gone home.
That next week, I sold the story. The last interview with a child star loved by millions of people all over the world. An interview done just hours before his neighbor found him dead, the victim of suicide.
The week after, I’m nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
A few weeks later, I win. That’s only two thousand dollars, but the real payoff is long-term. Anymore, not a day goes by when I’m not turning work down. When my agent’s fielding offers for me. No, I only do high-profile, big-money work. Big magazine cover stories. National audiences.
Anymore, my name means Quality. My byline means The Truth.
You look in my address book, and it’s all names you know from movie posters. Rock stars. Best-selling authors. Everything I touch, I turn to Famous. I move from my apartment to a house with a yard for Skip to run around. We have a garden and a swimming pool. A tennis court. Cable television. We pay off the thousand-plus bucks we owe for the X-rays and the activated charcoal.
Of course, you can still turn on some cable network and see Kenneth Wilcox, the little boy he used to be, whistling and pitching baseballs, before he turned into a monster with gin spit on his face. Little Danny and his dog, walking barefoot through Heartland, Iowa. His syndicated ghost keeps my story alive, the contrast. People love knowing my truth about that little boy who seemed so happy.
“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”
This week, my dog digs up an onion and eats it.
Me, I’m calling vet after vet, trying to find someone who’ll save her. At this point, money’s no problem. I can pay anything.
Me and my dog, we have a great life. We’re so happy. It’s while I’m still on the phone, flipping through the telephone book, when my Skip, my baby, she stops breathing.
6.
“Let’s start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.
He’d say, “Let’s start with a plot spoiler.”
The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.
We’d all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Mylar bag.
He’d say, “Let’s get the big, big surprise over and done with.”
The earth, he’d say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That’s your big answer. The big truth.
Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.
That’s what Mr. Whittier would tell you.
Smooth as glass, that’s our Mr. Whittier. Buffed by pain. Polished and shining.
That’s why we love conflict, he says. We love to hate. To stop a war, we declare war on it. We must wipe out poverty. We must fight hunger. We campaign and challenge and defeat and destroy.
As human beings, our first commandment is:
Something needs to happen.
Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.
The more Mrs. Clark talked, the more we could see this wouldn’t be the Villa Diodati. The babe who wroteFrankenstein,she was the kid of two writers: professors famous for think-tank books calledPolitical JusticeandA Vindication of the Rights of Women.They had famous smart people crashing at their house all the time.
We were no summer-house party of brainy bookworms.
No, the best story we’d bring out of this building would be just how we survived. How crazy Lady Baglady died cradled in our weeping arms. Still, that story would have to be good enough. Exciting enough. Scary and dangerous enough. We’d have to make sure it was.
Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark were too busy droning on. We needed them to get rough with us. Our story needed them to flog and beat us.
Not bore us to death.
“Any call for world peace,” Mr. Whittier would say, “is a lie. A pretty, pretty lie.” Just another excuse to fight.
No, we love war.
War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.
“It’s the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”
We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we’re here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.
We love terrorists. Hijackers. Dictators. Pedophiles.
God, how we love the television news. The pictures of people lining up beside a long, open grave, waiting to be shot by another new firing squad. The glossy newsmagazine photos of more everyday people torn to bloody shreds by suicide bombers. The radio bulletins about freeway pile-ups. The mud slides. The sinking ships.
His quivering hands telegraphing the air, Mr. Whittier would say, “We love when airplanes crash.”
We adore pollution. Acid rain. Global warming. Famine.
No, Mr. Whittier had no idea . . .
The Duke of Vandals found every bag of anything that included beets. Any silver Mylar pillows rattling with the sliced beets inside, dry as poker chips.
Saint Gut-Free poked a hole in every bag that held any kind of pork or chicken or beef. Meat being something he can never digest.
All the Mylar bags puffed full of nitrogen gas, they were arranged by food, stuffed into brown boxes of corrugated cardboard. In the boxes stenciled “Dessert” were bags of dried cookies, rattling the way seeds would inside a dried gourd. Inside the boxes stenciled “Appetizers,” freeze-dried chicken wings rattled like old bones.
Out of her fear of getting fat, Miss America found every box stenciled “Desserts” and used Chef Assassin’s carving knife to poke holes in every bag.
Just to speed up our suffering. Fast-track us to enlightenment.
One hole, and the nitrogen would leak out. Bacteria and air would leak in. All the mold spores that were killing Miss Sneezy, carried on the warm damp air, they’d be eating and breeding in each silver pocket of sweet-and-sour pork, breaded halibut, pasta salad.
Before Agent Tattletale snuck into the lobby to ruin every crêpe Suzette, he’d make sure no one was around.
Before Countess Foresight crept into the lobby to stab every silver bag that might contain even trace amounts of cilantro, she made sure Agent Tattletale was gone.
We each only ruined the food we hated.
Cross-legged in the Arabian Nights gallery, among the plaster pillars carved to look like elephants standing on their back legs, rearing up to support the ceiling with their front feet, his teeth crunching another handful of dried sticks and rocks, Mr. Whittier would say, “In our secret heart’s heart, we love to root against the home team.”
Against humanity. It’s us against us. You, the victim of yourself.
We love war because it’s the only way we’ll finish our work here. The only way we’ll finish our souls, here on earth: The big processing station. The rock tumbler. Through pain and anger and conflict, it’s the only path. To what, we don’t know.
“But we forget so much when we’re born,” he says.
Being born, it’s as if you go inside a building. You lock yourself inside a building with no windows to see out. And after you’re inside any building long enough, you forget how the outside looked. Without a mirror, you’d forget your own face.
He never seemed to notice how one of us was always missing from the gallery. No, Mr. Whittier just talked and talked, while somebody was always sneaking downstairs to destroy any Mylar bag that listed green peppers as an ingredient.
That’s how it happened. How no one knew everyone else had the same plan. We each just wanted to raise the stakes a little. To make sure our rescue team wouldn’t find us pillowed in silver bags of rich food, suffering from nothing but boredom and gout. Each suffering survivor, fifty pounds heavier than when Mr. Whittier took us hostage.
Of course, we each wanted to leave enough food to last until we werealmostrescued. Those last couple days, when we were really fasting, hungry and suffering—we could stretch that to a couple weeks in the retelling.
The book. The movie. The television miniseries.
We’d starve just long enough to get what Comrade Snarky called “Death Camp Cheekbones.” The more ins and outs your face has, the better Miss America says you’ll look on television.
Those vermin-proof bags were so tough, we’d each begged to borrow a knife from Chef Assassin, from his beautiful set of paring knives, chef’s knives, cleavers, filleting knives and kitchen shears. Except for the Missing Link with his bear-trap jaw; he’d just use his teeth.
“You are permanent, but this life is not,” Mr. Whittier would say. “You don’t expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever.”
No, we’re only visiting, and Mr. Whittier knows that. And we’re born here to suffer.
“If you can accept that,” he says, “you can accept anything that happens in the world.”
The irony is, if you can accept that—you’ll never again suffer.