In Claire’s vision, the man’s face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.

 

 That reflected face, it’s the old-man cashier, without his wrinkles. With lots of brown hair.

 

 Behind the counter, the jar just sits there, throbbing with energy. Glowing with power. A sacred relic trying to tell her something important. A time capsule of stories and events wasted here, locked in a glass case. More compelling than the best television series. More honest than the longest documentary. A primary history source. A real player. The child sits there, waiting for Claire to rescue it. To listen.

 

 Wanting justice. Revenge.

 

 Still watched by the security cameras, Claire holds up the straight razor. She says, “I want to buy this, but I don’t see a price on it . . .”

 

 And the old man leans over the counter for a closer look.

 

 Outside the shopwindows, the street is empty. The security video monitors show the store, every aisle and corner, empty.

 

 In the monitor, the old man falls backward, smashing the glass curio cabinet behind him, then sliding to the floor in a mess of broken glass and blood. The jar tipping, then falling, then broken.

 

 Calling now, from a bathroom stall, Claire Upton tells her husband, “It was a doll. A plastic baby doll.”

 

 Her purse and coat and umbrella spattered with sticky red.

 

 On the phone, she says, “Do you know what this means?”

 

 And again, she asks how best to destroy a video camera.

 

 

 

 

20.

 

 The Baroness Frostbite leans closer, a steaming bowl of something liquid cupped in her hand, and she says, “No carrots. No potatoes. Now, drink it.”

 

 And, curled on her bed, in the camera spotlight, Miss America says, “No.” She looks at the rest of us crowded outside the doorway, Director Denial included, then Miss America turns away to face the concrete wall, saying, “I know what that is . . .”

 

 The Baroness Frostbite says, “You’re still bleeding.”

 

 Leaning into the room, Director Denial says, “You need to eat something soon or you’ll die.”

 

 “Then let me die,” Miss America says, her face muffled in the pillow.

 

 All of us in the hallway, listening. Recording. Witnesses.

 

 The camera behind the camera behind the camera.

 

 The Baroness Frostbite leans closer with the soup. In the rising steam of it, her mutilated lips reflected in the shimmering hot grease that floats on top, the Baroness says, “But we don’t want you to die.”

 

 Still facing the wall, Miss America says, “Since when? The rest of you, you’ll only have to split the story one less way.”

 

 “We don’t want you to die,” the Reverend Godless says, from the doorway, “because we don’t have a freezer.”

 

 Miss America turns to look at the bowl of hot soup. She stares at our faces, leaned halfway into her dressing room. The teeth inside our mouths, waiting. Our tongues, swimming in drool.

 

 Miss America says, “Freezer?”

 

 And the Reverend Godless makes a fist and knocks on his forehead, the way you’d knock on a door, saying, “Hello?” He says, “We need you to stay alive until the rest of us are hungry again.”

 

 Her baby was the first course. Miss America will be the main course. Dessert is anybody’s guess.

 

 The tape recorder in the Earl of Slander’s hand, it’s ready to tape over her last scream with her next. Agent Tattletale’s camera is focused to videotape over everything so far, in order to catch our next big plot point.