- •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 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.
His hand shaking as he lifts his cup, Mr. Whittier says, “Even if you were to tell yourself, ‘Today, I’m going to drink coffee thewrongway . . . from a dirty boot.’ Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.”
Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right.
Even when you say, “I’m such an idiot, I’m so wrong . . .” you’re right. You’re right about being wrong. You’re right even when you’re an idiot.
“No matter how stupid your idea,” Mr. Whittier would say, “you’re doomed to be right because it’s yours.”
“Lake Geneva?” Lady Baglady says with her eyes closed. Pinching her temples, rubbing them between the thumb and index finger of one hand, she says, “The Villa Diodati is where Lord Byron raped Mary Shelley . . .”
And Mrs. Clark says, “It wasnot.”
We’re all condemned to be right. About everything we can consider.
In this shifting, liquid world where everyone is right and any idea is right the moment you act on it, Mr. Whittier would say, the only sure thing is what you promise.
“Three months, you promised,” Mr. Whittier says through the steam of his coffee.
It’s then something happens, but not much.
In that next look, you feel your asshole get tight. Your fingers fly to cover your mouth.
Miss America is holding a knife in one hand. With her other hand, she grips the knot of Mr. Whittier’s necktie, pulling his face up toward her own. Mr. Whittier’s coffee, dropped, spilled steaming-hot on the floor. His hands hang, shaking, swirling the dusty air at each side.
Saint Gut-Free’s silver bag of instant crêpe Suzette drops, spilled out on the cornflower-blue carpet, the sticky red cherries and reconstituted whipped cream.
And the cat runs over for a taste.
Her eyes almost touching Mr. Whittier’s, Miss America says, “So I’m right if I kill you?”
The knife, one of the set that Chef Assassin brought in his aluminum suitcase.
And Mr. Whittier looks back into her eyes, so close their lashes touch when they blink. “But you’ll still be trapped,” he says, his few gray hairs hanging loose from the back of his skull. His voice choked to a croak by his necktie.
Miss America waves the knife at Mrs. Clark, saying, “What about her? Does she have a key?”
And Mrs. Clark shakes her head, No. Her eyes popped-open wide, but her baby-doll pout still silicone-frozen.
No, the key is hidden somewhere in the building. A place only Mr. Whittier would look.
Still, even if she kills him she’s right.
If she sets fire to the building and hopes the firemen will see the smoke and rescue her before we all suffocate—she’s right, again.
If she sticks the knife point in Mr. Whittier’s milky-cataract eyeball and pops it out on the floor for the cat to bat around—she’s still right.
“In the face of that,” Mr. Whittier says, his necktie pulled tight in her fist, his face turning dark red, his voice a whisper, “let’s start by doing what we promised.”
The three months. Write your masterpiece. The end.
The chrome wheelchair clatters when he lands, dropped by Miss America’s hand. Carpet dust fills the air, and the chair’s two front wheels lift off the carpet when he lands so hard. Both Mr. Whittier’s hands go to his collar, to pull his tie loose. He leans down to take his coffee cup off the floor. His gray comb-over hairs, hanging straight down, fringe around the sides of his spotted bald head.
Cora Reynolds keeps eating the cherries and cream off the dusty carpet beside Saint Gut-Free’s chair.
Miss America says, “This isso notover . . .” And she shakes the blade of the knife at everyone in the lobby. One fast sweep of her arm, a shudder and twitch of her muscles, and the knife is now stuck in the back of a palace chair across the room. The blade buried and humming in blue velvet, the handle still shivers.
From behind his video camera, Agent Tattletale says,“Printit.”
Cora Reynolds, his pink suede tongue still lick-lick-licking the sticky carpet.
The Earl of Slander writes something in his notebook.
“So, Mrs. Clark,” Lady Baglady says, “the Villa Diodati?”
“They hadfivecats there,” Mr. Whittier says.
“Five cats and eight big dogs,” Mrs. Clark says, “three monkeys, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon.”
It was a summer house party in 1816, where a group of young people spent most days trapped in a house because of rain. Some of them were married, some not. Men and women. They read ghost stories to each other, but the books they had were terrible. After that, they all agreed to write a story. Any sort of scary story. To entertain each other.
“Like the Algonquin Round Table?” Lady Baglady asks the diamond on the back of her hand.
Just a group of friends sitting around, trying to scare each other.
“So what did they write?” Miss Sneezy says.
Those middle-class, bored people just trying to kill time. People trapped together in their moldy-damp summer house.
“Not much,” Mr. Whittier says. “Just the legend ofFrankenstein.”
Mrs. Clark says, “AndDracula . . .”
Sister Vigilante comes down the stairs from the second floor. Crossing the lobby, she’s looking under tables, behind chairs.
“It’s inthere,” Mr. Whittier says, lifting a blurred finger to point at the auditorium double doors.
Lady Baglady looks off, sideways, to the auditorium doors where Miss America and the bowling ball have both disappeared. “My late husband and I were experts at being bored,” says Lady Baglady, and she makes us wait as she takes three, four, five steps across the lobby to pull the knife out of the chair back.
Holding the knife, looking at the blade, feeling how sharp with her finger, she says, “I could tell you all about how rich, bored people kill time . . .”
Think Tank
A Poem About Lady Baglady
“It only takes three doctors,” says Lady Baglady, “to make you disappear.”
For the rest of your natural life.
Lady Baglady onstage, her legs are waxed smooth. Her eyelashes, dyed thick-black.
Her teeth bleached bright as her pearls. Her skin, massaged.
Her diamond ring flashes, lighthouse-bright.
Her linen suit, first pinned and chalked, then tucked and trimmed
until it will fit no one else in the world.
All of her, a monument to sitting still
while a team of trained experts toiled long and hard,
for a lot of money.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
A veil of women dragging fur coats. The feeling of silk settles over her face.
On film, the armor of gold and platinum jewelry, warning you
with the red flash of rubies and canary-yellow sapphires.
Lady Baglady says, “It’s no fun, having a genius for a father.”
Or a mother or husband or wife, ask anyone. Anyone rich.
Still, she says, it only takes three doctors . . .
Thanks to the Think Tank Sanitarium.
“Really brilliant people,” she says, “they’re really most-happy, being . . .
fully committed.”
If Thomas Edison were alive. Madame Curie. Albert Einstein.
Their husbands, wives, sons, daughters would all sign the necessary paperwork.
In an instant.
“To protect their income stream,” says Lady Baglady.
That flow of money from fees and royalties for patents and inventions.
The veil of spa treatments and pedicures, charity balls and opera boxes, wiping
Lady Baglady’s smooth face,
she says, “My own father included. For his own good.”
“He was . . . acting out,” she says. “Seeing a younger woman. Wearing a toupee.”
Not sharing the income from his product line. Neglecting his work.
So—three doctors later—there he is:
With all the other genius inventors. Behind locked doors.
Without telephones.
For the rest of his natural life.
From inside her veil of private islands . . . horse shows . . . estate auctions,
Lady Baglady says, “The acorn never does fall far.”
She says, “We’re all . . . some kind of genius.
“Just,” she says, “some of us in other ways.”
Slumming
A Story by Lady Baglady
After you give up television and newspapers, the mornings are the worst part: that first cup of coffee. It’s true, that first hour awake, you want to catch up with the rest of the world. But her new rule is: No radio. No television. No newspaper. Cold turkey.
Show her a copy ofVoguemagazine, and Mrs. Keyes still gets choked up.
The newspaper comes, and she just recycles it. She doesn’t even take off the rubber band. You never know when the headline will be:
“Killer Continues to Stalk the Homeless”
Or: “Bag Lady Found Butchered”
Most mornings over breakfast, Mrs. Keyes reads catalogues. You order just one single miracle shoe-tree over the telephone, and every week, for the rest of your life, you’ll get a stack of catalogues. Items for your home. Your garden. Time-saving. Space-saving gadgets. Tools and new inventions.
Where the television used to be, there on the kitchen counter, she put an aquarium with the kind of lizard that changes color to match your decor. An aquarium, you flip the switch for the heat lamp and it’s not going to tell you another transient wino was shot to death, his body dropped in the river, the fifteenth victim in a killing spree targeting the city’s homeless, their bodies found stabbed and shot and set on fire with lighter fluid, the street people panicked and fighting their way into the shelters at night, despite the new tuberculosis. The outbound boxcars packed full. The social advocates claiming the city has put out a hit on panhandlers. You get all this just glancing at a newsstand. Or getting into a cab with the radio turned up loud.
You get a glass tank, put it where the TV used to be, and all you get is a lizard—something so stupid that every time the maid moves a rock the lizard thinks it’s been relocated miles away.
It’s called Cocooning, when your home becomes your whole world.
Mr. and Mrs. Keyes—Packer and Evelyn—they didn’t use to be this way. It used to be not a dolphin died in a tuna net without them rushing out to write a check. To throw a party. They hosted a banquet for people blown apart by land mines. They threw a dinner dance for massive head trauma. Fibromyalgia. Bulimia. A cocktail party and silent auction for irritable bowel syndrome.
Every night had its theme:
“Universal Peace for All Peoples.”
Or: “Hope for Our Unborn Future.”
Imagine going to your senior prom every night for the rest of your life. Every night, another stage set made of South American cut flowers and zillions of white twinkle lights. An ice sculpture and a champagne fountain and a band in white dinner jackets playing some Cole Porter tune. Every stage set built to parade Arab royalty and Internet boy wonders. Too many people made rich fast by venture capital. Those people who never linger on any landmass longer than it takes to service their jet. These people with no imagination, they just flop openTown & Countryand say:
I want that.
At every benefit for child abuse, everyone walked around on two legs and ate crème brûlée with a mouth, their lips plumped with the same derma fillers. Looking at the same Cartier watch, the same time surrounded with the same diamonds. The same Harry Winston necklace around a neck sculpted long and thin with hatha yoga.
Everyone climbed in or out different colors of the same Lexus sedan.
No one was impressed. Every night was a complete and utter social stalemate.
Mrs. Keyes’s best friend, Elizabeth Ethbridge Fulton Whelps, “Inky,” used to say there’s only one “best” of anything. One night, Inky said, “When everyone can afford the best, the truth is, it does look a little—common.”
All the Old Society had gone missing. The more newly minted media barons showed up at any event, the fewer old-money railroad or ocean-liner crowd would.
Inky always said being absent is the new being present.
It’s after some cocktail reception for victims of gun violence that the Keyeses walk out to the street. Packer and Evelyn are coming down the art-museum steps, and there’s the usual long line of nobodies waiting in fur coats for the parking valets. This is right on the sidewalk, near a bus-stop bench. Sitting on the bench are a wino and a bag lady everyone’s trying not to see.
Or smell.
These two, they’re not young, dressed in clothes you might find in the trash. Bits of thread showing at every seam, the fabric stiff and blotchy with stains. The bag lady has on tennis shoes flopping open with no laces. Her hair shows through, matted and crushed inside the webbing of a wig, the fake plastic hair as rough and gray as steel wool.
The wino has a knitted brown stocking cap pulled down on his head. He’s pawing the bag lady, shoving one hand down the front of her stretch-polyester pants and crawling his other hand up under her sweatshirt. The bag lady, she’s twisting inside her clothes, moaning, her tongue rolling around her open lips.
The bag lady, where her sweatshirt is pulled up, her stomach looks flat and tight, her skin massaged pink.
The wino, his baggy sweatpants are tented in front with an erection. The peak of his tent shows a dark spot of wet leaked through.
Packer and Evelyn, they must be the only ones watching these two grope each other. The parking valets run between here and the parking garage down the block. The mob of new money looks at the sweep-second hand go around and around on their diamond watches.
The wino pulls the bag lady’s face against the outline in his pants. The bag lady’s lips, they crawl around on the dark stain growing there.
The bag lady’s lips, Evelyn tells Packer, she knows those lips.
You hear a little sound, the kind of shrill ring that makes everyone waiting for a valet reach into a fur-coat pocket for their cell phone.
Oh my God, Mrs. Keyes says. She tells Packer, That bag lady getting pawed by the wino, that could almost be Inky. Elizabeth Ethbridge Fulton Whelps.
The shrill little ring sounds again, and the bag lady reaches down. She pulls up the bottom of one pant leg, unhemmed and unraveling beige polyester, to show her leg wrapped thick with a dirty elastic bandage. Her lips still on the wino’s crotch, from between layers of bandages her fingers take a little black handful.
The shrill ring comes again.
The last Evelyn heard, Inky ran a magazine. MaybeVoguemagazine. She spent half of each year in France, deciding the hemline for next season. She sat ringside at the shows in Milan, and taped a fashion commentary that ran on some cable news network. She stood on red carpets and talked about who wore what to the Academy Awards.
This bag lady on the bus-stop bench, she holds the black object to the side of her gray plastic wig. She fingers it and says, “Hello?” She takes her mouth off the wet bulge in the wino’s pants, and she says, “Are you writing this down?” She says, “Lime is the new pink.”
The bag lady’s voice, Mrs. Keyes tells her husband, she knows that voice.
She says, “Inky?”
The bag lady slips the little phone back between the bandages around her leg.
“That stinky wino,” Packer says, “that’s the president of Global Airlines.”