- •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.
It’s just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.
You do all this just to pay the interest on money you borrowed from Lenny and his Russian Mafia. Money borrowed to buy stocks that tanked. Stocks recommended by Lenny. Or to buy the jewelry and shoes Lenny said you’d need to fit in.
You’re in the lobby bar at the Park Hampton Hotel, trying to talk a drunk businessman into a ten-dollar foot job in the men’s room. That’s when you see her, Angelique, walking across the lobby, headed for the elevators. Her hair shining. Her furs dragging on the carpet behind her high-heeled feet. Angelique still looking great. Your eyes catch her, and with one gloved hand, she waves you over.
When the elevator comes, she says she’s going up to Lenny’s penthouse suite. The clinic.
She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, “Come see what the next growth industry will be . . .”
The elevator stops on the fiftieth floor, the whole penthouse leased to Lenny, where two pin-striped suits full of muscle stand guarding a door. It’s these goons you pay Lenny’s cut to, half of everything you make. One guard says your names into a microphone pinned to his lapel, and the doors unlock with a loud buzz.
Inside, it’s just you and Angelique and Lenny.
Don’t laugh, but, lonely and isolated as your life is, doing footwork—Lenny’s life looks worse. Locked up here on the penthouse floor, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe all day, counting his money, and talking on the telephone. The only furniture is a desk chair, the seat stained and dirty. A mattress is flopped near walls of glass that look out over the whole city. On a computer screen, stock prices scroll up without stopping.
Lenny comes to the both of you, his bathrobe hanging open, wearing wrinkled striped boxer shorts inside, white socks turned yellow on his feet. Lenny reaches both hands toward Angelique’s face and says, “My Angel, my favorite.” He cups her face in his hands and says, “How are you?”
In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”
And Lenny smacks her, hard, one hand across her face, and he says, “You’re cheating on me, that’s how you are.” He holds one hand up, the palm open and ready to smack her, again, and Lenny says, “You’re taking outside assignments, aren’t you?”
Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Lenny’s hand, Angelique says, “Baby, no . . .”
And Lenny drops his hand. He turns his back to her. Lenny goes to look out the windows, the city spread out right next to his mattress.
“Baby,” Angelique says. “Let me show you something new.”
Angelique looks at me.
She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, “Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby . . .”
She steers Lenny to sit on the mattress. Then to lie back. She slips the yellowed sock off each of his feet.
“Come on, baby,” she says. Taking off her gloves, she says, “You know I givegreatfoot . . .”
Then Angelique does what you’ve never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny’s sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny’s heel, and Lenny starts to moan.
Don’t laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he’s found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.
We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.
This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattresses, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped, Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap.
On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Lenny, and now she was out of the business for good.
In the lobby bar, the two of you have a cocktail to get the taste of Lenny’s foot out of her mouth. Just one last, good-bye drink. Then Angelique says to look around the hotel lobby. The men in suits. The women in fur coats. They’re all Rolfing killers, she says. Reiki killers. Colonic-irrigation assassins.
Angelique says, in gem therapy, just by putting a quartz crystal on someone’s heart, then an amethyst on his liver and a turquoise on his forehead, you induce a coma that results in death. Just by sneaking into a room and rearranging someone’s bedroom set, a feng-shui expert can trigger kidney disease.
“Moxibustion,” she says, the science of burning cones of incense on someone’s acupuncture points, “it can kill. So can shiatsu.”
She drinks the last of her cocktail, and takes off the strand of pearls from around her neck.
All those cures and remedies that claim to be 100-percent natural ingredients, therefore 100-percent safe, Angelique laughs. She says, Cyanide is natural. So is arsenic.
She hands the pearls to you and says, “From now on, I’m back to being ‘Lentil.’”
That’s how you want to remember Angelique, not the way she looked in the newspaper the next day, fished out of the river in a soggy mink coat. Her earrings and diamond watch taken to make it look like a robbery. Not with her feet fondled to death, but dead the old-fashioned way, with a hollow-point bullet to the back of her perfect French braid. A warning to all the Dirks and Dominiques who might jump ship.
The clinic calls, not Lenny, but some other Russian accent, trying to send you to clients, but you don’t trust them. The guards saw you with Lentil. Up at the penthouse. They must have another hollow-point ready for the back of your head.
Your folks call from Florida to say a black town car keeps following them, and somebody calls to ask if they know how to find you. By now, you’re already running from flophouse to flophouse, giving back-alley foot jobs for enough cash to stay alive.
You tell your folks: Be careful. You tell them not to get massaged by anybody they don’t know. Calling them from a pay phone, you tell them to never mess with aromatherapy. Auras. Reiki. Don’t laugh, but you’re going to be traveling for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.
You can’t explain. By now, you’ve run out of quarters, so you tell your folks good-bye.
3.
Our first week, we ate beef Wellington while Miss America knelt at every doorknob and tried to pick the lock with a palette knife borrowed from the Duke of Vandals.
We ate striped sea bass while Miss Sneezy ate pills and capsules from the rattling jars in her suitcase. While she coughed into her fist, and wiped her nose on her sweater sleeve.
We eat turkey Tetrazzini while Lady Baglady toys with her diamond ring. With the platinum band turned around, she talks to the big diamond that seems to sit cupped in her palm. “Packer?” she says. “This isnothinglike I’ve been led to expect.” Lady Baglady says, “How can I write anything profound if my environment isn’t . . . ideal?”
Of course, Agent Tattletale’s videotaping her. The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder to catch every word.
A cough-cough, here. A cough-cough, there. Here, a gripe. There, a bitch. Everywhere, a complaint. Miss Sneezy says the air is swimming with toxic mold spores.
A rattle-rattle, here. A cough-cough, there. No one working. No writing getting done.
Skinny Saint Gut-Free, his face was always looking up, his mouth baby-bird gaped open as he poured in chili or apple pie or shepherd’s pie from a silver Mylar bag. His Adam’s apple bobbed with each swallow, his tongue funneling the lukewarm mess past his teeth.
Chewing his tobacco, the Matchmaker spit on the stained carpet and said this dank building, these dim-dripping rooms, had nothing in common with the writers’ colony he’d pictured: people writing longhand, looking down rolled green lawns; writers eating box lunches, each in their own private cottage. Orchards of apricot trees in a blizzard of white flower petals. Afternoon naps under chestnut trees. Croquet.
Even before she started to outline her screenplay, her life’s masterpiece, Miss America said she couldn’t. Her breasts were too sore to write. Her arms, too tired. She couldn’t smell today’s veal cutlets without vomiting a little of the crab cakes from the day before.
Her period was almost a week late.
“It’s sick-building syndrome,” Miss Sneezy told her. Her raw-red nose, already staying sideways, wiped in profile against one cheek.
Trailing her fingers along the railings and the carved backs of chairs, Lady Baglady showed us the dust. “Look,” she told the fat diamond in her hand, she said, “Packer? Packer, this is not acceptable.”
In our first week locked away, Miss Sneezy was coughing, breathing in the slow, deep notes a pipe organ would make.
Miss America was rattling locked doors. Yanking aside the green velvet drapes in the Italian Renaissance lounge to find windows bricked over. With the handle of her pink plastic exercise wheels, she broke a stained-glass window in the Gothic smoking room, only to find a cement wall wired with bulbs to fake daylight behind it.
In the French Louis XV lobby, the chairs and sofas all cornflower-blue velvet, the walls crowded and busy with plaster curls and scrolls painted gold, there, Miss America stood in her pink spandex active wear and asked for the key. Her hair, an ocean wave of blond breaking in curls and flips against the back of her head, she needed the key so she could go out, just for a few days.
“You’re a novelist?” Mr. Whittier said. Even resting flat on the chrome arms of his wheelchair, his fingers tapped an invisible telegram. Veined and chased with wrinkles, the bones of his hands trembled in a constant blur.
“A screenwriter,” Miss America said. A fist on each pink spandex hip.
Looking at her, tall and willowy, “Of course,” Mr. Whittier said. “So write a movie script about being tired.”
No, Miss America needed to see an obstetrician. She needed blood work done. She needed prenatal vitamins. “I need to see someone,” she said. Her boyfriend.
And Mr. Whittier said, “This is why Moses led the tribes of Israel into the desert . . .” Because those people had lived for generations as slaves. They’d learned to be helpless.
To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of people how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.
Sitting at the edge of a blue velvet chair, Miss America kept nodding her blond head. Her hair flip-flopping. She understood. She understood. Then she said, “The key?”
And Mr. Whittier told her, “No.”
He balanced a silver Mylar bag of chicken Marsala on his knees, all around him the blue carpet patched and sticky with dark mold. Each soggy patch, a shadow branched with arms and legs. A mildewed ghost. Spooning up chicken Marsala, Mr. Whittier says, “Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise,” he says, “you’ll always be controlled by the world.”
“And what do you call this?” Miss America says, stirring the dusty air with her hands.
And Mr. Whittier says, for the first of a million times, “I’m only holding you to your word.” And, “What stops you here is what stops your entire life.”
The air will always be too filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.
“But what if something happened? What if we ran out of food?” Miss America says. “You’d open the door then, wouldn’t you?”
“But we’re not,” Mr. Whittier says, his mouth full of chewed chicken and capers. “We’re not running out of food.”
And, no, we weren’t. Not yet.
That first week inside, we ate vegetable curry over rice. We ate teriyaki salmon. All of it freeze-dried.
For food, we had green beans sealed in Mylar bags you couldn’t tear with your bare hands. “Vermin-proof” was stenciled in black paint on each silver bag. We had vermin-proof green beans and chicken pot pie and golden-sweet whole-kernel corn. Inside each bag, something rattled, loose twigs and rocks and sand. Each bag inflated to a silver pillow with a puff of nitrogen to keep the contents dead. The lasagna with meat sauce or cheese ravioli.