- •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.
Instead, you’ll run toward torture. You’ll enjoy pain.
Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.
At one point, that evening, Chef Assassin walked into the salon, still holding a boning knife in one hand. He looked at Whittier and said, “The washing machine is broke. Now you have to let us go . . .”
Mr. Whittier looked up, still crunching a mouthful of dried turkey Tetrazzini, he said, “What’s wrong with the washer?”
And Chef Assassin held up something in his other hand, not the knife, something loose and dangling. He said, “Some desperate, hostage cook cut off the plug-in . . .”
The object dangling from his hand.
It’s after that we couldn’t wash clothes, another plot point for the story that would be our cash cow.
At that point, Mr. Whittier groaned and slipped the fingers of one hand inside the top of his pants. He said, “Mrs. Clark?” His fingers pressed the spot inside his belt, and he said, “Now,thathurts . . .”
Watching him, twirling his rope of cut-off plug-in, Chef Assassin said, “I hope it’s cancer.”
His fingers still in his pants, sunk in his Arabian cushions, Mr. Whittier bends double to put his head between his knees.
Mrs. Clark steps forward, saying, “Brandon?”
And Mr. Whittier slips to the floor, his knees pulled to his chest, moaning.
In our heads, for the scene in the movie, this scene only with a movie star twisting in fake pain on the red-and-blue Oriental carpet, in our heads, we’re all writing down: “Brandon!”
Mrs. Clark squats down to lift the empty Mylar bag from where he’s dropped it among the silk cushions. Her eyes twitch across the words stenciled there, and she says, “Oh, Brandon.”
All of us trying to be the camera behind the camera behind the camera. The last story in line. The truth.
In the future movie and TV miniseries version of this scene, we’re all coaching a famous beauty-queen actress to say: “Oh my God, Brandon! Oh, dear sweet suffering Jesus!”
Mrs. Clark holds the bag for him to see, and she says, “You just ate the equivalent of ten turkey dinners . . .” She says, “Why?”
And Mr. Whittier moans. “Because,” he says, “I’m still a growing boy . . .”
In the future version, the beauty queen cries: “You’re splitting apart inside! You’re going to explode like a burst appendix!”
In the movie version, Mr. Whittier is screaming, his shirt stretched tight over his swelling belly, his fingernails claw the buttons open. Just then the tight skin starts to tear, the way a nylon stocking gaps open. Red blood spouts straight out, the way a whale clears its blowhole. A blood fountain that makes the audience scream.
In reality, his shirt looks a little tight. His hands unbuckle his belt. They pop open the top button of his pants. Mr. Whittier cuts a fart.
Mrs. Clark holds out a glass of water, saying, “Here, Brandon. Drink something.”
And Saint Gut-Free says, “No water. He’ll only bloat more.”
Mr. Whittier, his body twists until he’s stretched out on his stomach against the red-and-blue carpet. Each breath comes fast and short as a dog panting.
“It’s his diaphragm,” Saint Gut-Free says. The food expanding in his stomach, it’s already absorbing moisture and blocking the duodenum at the bottom. The ten turkey Tetrazzini dinners are expanding upward, compressing his diaphragm, making it so his lungs can’t inhale.
Saying this, Saint Gut-Free is still eating handfuls of dried something from his own silver bag. Chewing and talking at the same time.
Another happening inside could be the stomach splitting, fouling the abdominal cavity with blood and bile and growing bits of turkey meat. Bacteria spilling from the small intestine. Leading to peritonitis, Saint Gut-Free says, an infection of the cavity wall.
In our movie version, Saint Gut-Free is tall with a straight nose and thick-framed glasses. He has a shock of thick, wild hair. A stethoscope hangs on his chest as he saysduodenumandperitoneum. Notwith his mouth full. In the movie, he holds out one hand, palm-up, and demands: “Scalpel!”
In the version based-on-a-true-story, we boil water. We give Mr. Whittier shots of brandy and a bullet to bite. We mop Saint Gut-Free’s forehead with a little sponge while a clock tick-tocks, tick-tocks, tick-tocks, loud.
The noble victims saving their villain. The way we helped comfort poor Lady Baglady.
In reality, we just stand here. Our hands, waving away his fart smell. We’re maybe wondering how Whittier will play this scene, if he’ll live or die. We really need a director. Someone to tell each one of us what our character would do.
Mr. Whittier just moans, stroking his sides with his hands.
Mrs. Clark just leans over him. Her breasts looming, she says, “Here, someone help me get him to his room . . .”
Still nobody moves to help. We need for him to die. We can still make Mrs. Clark the evil villain.
Then Miss America says it. She steps up beside his bloated stomach, face-down, his shirttails pulled out of his pants, the elastic of his underwear showing as his waistband rides down. Miss America steps up and—oomph!—her shoe kicks into the stretched-tight side of his belly. It’s then she says, “Now, where’s the goddamn key?”
And Mrs. Clark bends an arm and elbows her back, away from the body. Mrs. Clark says, “Yes, Brandon. We need to get you to a hospital.”
In his own way, Mr. Whittier did. He gave us the key. His stomach pulling apart on the inside, the cavities of him filling with blood, the dried chips of turkey still expanding, soaking up blood and water and bile, getting bigger until the skin of his belly looks pregnant. Until his bellybutton pops out, poked out stiff as a little finger.
All of this, it takes place in the spotlight of Agent Tattletale’s camera, him taping over the death of Lady Baglady. Replacing yesterday’s tragic scene with today’s.
The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder close, using the same cassette, betting this horror will be worse than the last.
This moment, it’s a plot point we’ve never dared dream. The first-act climax that would make our lives worth cash money. Mr. Whittier’s busting open, the event we could witness to become someone famous, a famous authority. Like Lady Baglady’s ear, Mr. Whittier’s belly splitting open was our ticket. A blank check. A free pass.
We were all soaking it up. Absorbing the event. Digesting the experience into a story. A screenplay. Something we could sell.
The way his pumpkin belly subsided a little, going a bit flat when the pressure collapsed his diaphragm. We studied how his face, his mouth stretched open, his teeth biting for more air. More air.
“An inguinal hernia,” Saint Gut-Free said. And we all said those words under our breath to better remember.
“To the stage . . . ,” Mr. Whittier says, his face buried in the dusty carpet. He says, “I’m ready to recite . . .”
An inguinal hernia . . . ,we all echo in our heads. What’s happened so far wouldn’t make a good joke. All these idiots fooled into a building and trapped. The ringleader gets gas, and we escape. That’s just NOT going to play.
Already, Mother Nature is planning to take off her choker of brass bells and sneak him some water.
Director Denial is planning to walk Cora Reynolds past his room and smuggle in a big pitcher of water.
The Missing Link sees himself tiptoeing to Mr. Whittier’s dressing room all night long, ladling water down his throat until the man goes: ka-boom.
“Please, Tess?” Mr. Whittier says. He says, “Would you help me to bed?”
And we all jot a note in our heads:Tess and Brandon, our jailers.
“Hurry, to the stage . . . I’m cold,” Mr. Whittier says while Mother Nature helps him to his feet.
“Probably shock,” Saint Gut-Free says.
In the version we’ll sell, he’s already a goner. One villain will die, and his she-villain will torment the rest of us in her rage. Mistress Tess, holding us captive. Depriving us of food. Forcing us to wear dirty rags. We, being her innocent victims.
Saint Gut-Free stands to put an arm around Mr. Whittier. Mother Nature helps. Mrs. Clark follows with her glass of water. The Earl of Slander with his tape recorder. Agent Tattletale, his video camera.
“Trust me,” Saint Gut-Free says. “I happen to know a lot about human insides.”
As if we still needed her to die, Miss Sneezy sneezes into her fist. Miss Sneezy, the future ghost of here.
Wiping the spray from her arm, Comrade Snarky says, “Gross!” She says, “Were you raised in a plastic bubble or what?”
And Miss Sneezy says, “Yeah, pretty much.”
The Matchmaker excuses himself, saying he’s tired and needs some sleep. And he sneaks down to the subbasement to sabotage the furnace.
He couldn’t guess, but the Duke of Vandals has already beat him to that punch.
This leaves the rest of us sitting on the silk cushions and pillows spotted with mildew under the Arabian Nights dome. The silver bag of turkey Tetrazzini empty on the carpet. The carved elephant pillars.