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.