Haunted

  And now this wife, she's pissed off, bad.

  And no way could any wife know this is the rubber-doll version of getting crabs from a toilet seat. No doubt the story her husband would tell. But that's all Cora could rustle up from County Health. You can't keep spirochetes alive on silicone. You can't pass hepatitis unless you got broken skin. Blood. Saliva. No, the dolls are real, but not that real.

  Any wife lets this go, and next week he'll bring home herpes to her and the kids. Gonorrhea. Chlamydia. AIDS. So she's all over Cora, asking: “Who's my husband banging on his lunch hour?”

  One good look at Cora, her hair-spray hairstyle and pearls and knee-high nylons and pants suit, and no wife would cast blame in that direction. Cora with old tissues tucked up the sleeve of her cardigan sweater. Cora with a dish of hard ribbon candy on her desk. The Family Circus cartoons pinned to her cork bulletin board.

  Still, nobody's saying Cora Reynolds is unattractive.

  Then the wife sees Director Sedlak with her red-red fingernails.

  Nobody was not amazed when Cora got called in for a little sit-down.

  Nobody could tell Cora Reynolds her days were numbered.

  The director, she sits Cora across from her big wooden desk. The director's office with its high-up window. The director sitting, outlined in the sunshine and the view of cars in the county parking lot. With the fingers of one hand, she waves Cora to lean closer.

  “It was a tough call,” the director says, “deciding if my entire team is crazy, or if you are . . . overreacting.”

  Nobody felt how Cora's heart dropped off a cliff at that moment. She sat, frozen. It's what we do: turn ourselves into objects. Turn objects into ourselves.

  Those millions of people, all over the world, still trying to save Breather Betty. Maybe they should just mind their own business. Maybe it is too late.

  It's the kids, the director says, who tear up the dolls. It always has been. Abused kids abuse what they can. Each victim will find a victim. It's a cycle. She says, “I think you should take some time off.”

  If it helps, just think of Cora Reynolds as a 120-pound condom . . .

  Nobody says that last part. But nobody has to.

  Nobody tells her to go home and get set for the worst.

  As part of keeping her job, Cora will have to return the Breather Betty doll she's reported to have taken. She's to relinquish the stuffed toys she purchased with county funds. She's to surrender her keys to the health room. Immediately. And make the room and the anatomically correct dolls available to all staff members. First come, first served. Immediately.

  How Cora felt, it was like coming to your first stoplight after driving a million billion miles, too fast, wearing no seat belt. Resignation mixed with tired relief. Cora, just a skin tube with a hole at either end. It was a terrible feeling, but it gave her a plan.

  The next day, coming into work, nobody sees her duck into the evidence room. In there were knives that smelled of blood and Superglue, there for anyone to take.

  Already, a line is forming beside her desk. All of them waiting for the last detective to bring back a kid. Either kid. They both look the same, silicone-face down.

  Cora Reynolds, she's nobody's fool. Nobody pushes her around.

  A detective arrives with the boy hanging under one arm, the girl hanging under his other arm. The man heaves them both on the desk, and the crowd surges forward, clutching the pink silicone legs.

  Nobody knows who are the real crazy people.

  And Cora, she's holding a gun, the evidence tag still hanging off it on a string. The case number written there. She waves the gun at the two dolls.

  “Pick them up,” she says. “And come with me.”

  The little boy wears just his white underpants, dark with grease in the seat. The girl, a white satin slip, stiff with stains. The detective scoops them both, the weight of two kids, with just one arm and hugs them to his chest. Their nipple rings and tattoos and crab lice. Their stink of dope smoke and what drips from Breather Betty.

  Waving with the gun, Cora walks him toward the office door.

  The men stalking her, circling her, Cora works the detective backward down the hall, dragging the girl and boy past the director's office, past the health room. To the lobby. Then the parking lot. There, the detectives wait while she unlocks her car.

  With the boy and girl sitting in her back seat, Cora hits the gas, spraying the men with gravel. Before she's even through the gate in the chain-link fence, you can hear sirens on their way.

  Nobody knew Cora Reynolds would be so ready. Breather Betty was already in the car, riding shotgun, with a scarf tied over her red hair, dark sunglasses on her rubber face. A cigarette hanging between her red-red lips. This French girl returned from the dead. Rescued and seat-belted to keep her torso upright.

  This person made into an object, now made back into a person.

  The crippled stuffed animals, the ratty tigers and orphaned bears and penguins, they're all lined up in the car's rear window. The cat among them, asleep in the sun. All of them waving good-bye.

  Cora hits the freeway, her back tires fishtailing, already doing twice the posted speed limit. Her four-door brown sedan already pulls a kite's tail of police cruisers, their lights flashing blue and red. Helicopters. Angry detectives in unmarked county cars. Television camera crews, each in a white van with a big number painted on the side.

  Already there's no way Cora can't win.

  She has the girl. She has the boy. She has the gun.

  Even if they run out of gas, nobody will fuck her kids.

  Even if the troopers shoot out her tires. Even then, she'll shoot up their silicone bodies. Cora will blow off their faces. Their nipples and noses. She'll leave them nothing any man would stick his dick into. She'll do the same to Breather Betty.

  And she'll shoot herself. To save them.

  Please understand. Nobody says what Cora Reynolds did was right.

  Nobody is even saying Cora Reynolds was sane. But she still won.

  This is just what human beings do—turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat.

  This is what the police will find if they get too close. The children mutilated. All of them dead. The animals soaked with her blood. Them all dead, together.

  But until that moment, Cora has a full tank of gas. She has a bag full of evidence-room cocaine to keep her awake. A bag of sandwiches. A few bottles of water and the cat, purring asleep.

  She has nothing but a few hours of freeway between her and Canada.

  But, more than all that, Cora Reynolds has her family.

  10

  Mother Nature slips into some kind of black coat. It's a military uniform or an ice-skating costume, black wool with a double row of brass buttons up the front. A black velvet majorette with her split nose scabbed together with dark red. She gets her arms through each long sleeve, then says, “Button me up?” to Saint Gut-Free.

  She wiggles what's left of her hands, and says, “I don't have the fingers I need.”

  Her fingers are just stubs and knuckles. Only her index fingers are left for dialing telephones after she's famous. Punching buttons on a cash machine. Fame already reducing her from something with three dimensions to something flat.

  Mother Nature, Saint Gut-Free, Reverend Godless, we're all dressing in black before we carry Mr. Whittier down to the subbasement. Before we play this next important scene.

  Never mind that our funeral is just a rehearsal. We're just stand-ins for the real funeral, to be played by movie stars in front of cameras after we're discovered. By doing this, wrapping Mr. Whittier and tying his body into a bundle, then delivering him to the subbasement for a ceremony—this way we'll all have the same experience. We'll all be telling the same tragic story to the reporters and police.

  If Mr. Whittier is stinking or not, it's hard to tell. Miss Sneezy and Reverend Godless carry the silver bags of spoiled food, each bag leaking a trail of stink juice. Trailing dr
ips and spots of stink, they carry the bags across the lobby to the restrooms and flush them down the toilet.

  “Not being able to smell,” Miss Sneezy says, and sniffs, hard, “it helps.”

  This works fine, one bag at a time. Until Reverend Godless tries to hurry, when the smell gets choking-bad. Dry-heaves-bad. The stink soaks into their clothes and hair. The first time they try to flush two bags together, the toilets start to clog and overflow. Another toilet clogs. Already, the water is flooding out, swamping the blue carpet in the lobby. The bags, stuck in some main sewer pipe, they soak up water, swelling the way the turkey Tetrazzini killed Mr. Whittier, clogging the main pipe so even the toilets that look fine, they back up.

  None of the toilets will work. The furnace and water heater are broken. We still have boxes of food, rotting. Mr. Whittier is not our biggest problem.

  According to Sister Vigilante's calendar watch and Miss America's grown-out brown roots, we've been here about two weeks.

  As he does the last of her brass buttons, Saint Gut-Free leans in to kiss Mother Nature, saying, “Do you love me?”

  “I pretty much have to,” she says, “if the romantic subplot is going to work.”

  Dead Lord Baglady sparkling on her finger, Mother Nature wipes the back of one hand across her lips, saying, “Your saliva tastes terrible . . .”

  Saint Gut-Free spits in his palm and licks the spit back into his mouth. He sniffs his empty hand, saying, “Terrible, how?”

  “Ketones,” Mrs. Clark says to nobody. Or to everybody.

  “Sour,” Mother Nature says. “Like a lemon-and-airplane-glue aromatherapy candle.”

  “It's starvation,” Mrs. Clark says, tying a gold silk rope around the bundle of Mr. Whittier. “As you burn up your body fat, the acetone concentration increases in your blood.”

  Saint Gut-Free sniffs his hand, the snot rattling inside his head.

  Reverend Godless lifts one arm to sniff underneath. There, the damp taffeta is darker black with sweat, in his pores, the memory of too much Chanel No. 5.

  Lugging a body up- and downstairs, we're wasting our valuable body fat.

  Still, we should have a gesture of mourning, says Sister Vigilante, still clutching her Bible. With Mr. Whittier wrapped and being carried to the subbasement, rolled tight in a red velvet curtain from the imperial-Chinese promenade, and tied with gold silk ropes from the lobby, we should stand around him to talk profound. We should sing a hymn. Nothing too religious, just whatever will play best.

  We draw straws to see who has to weep.

  More and more, we leave room open in every group for Agent Tattletale's camera. We speak so the Earl of Slander's tape recorder will get every word. The same tape or memory card or compact disk getting used, over and over. We erase our past with our present, on the gamble that the next moment will be sadder, more horrible or tragic.

  More and more, something worse needs to happen.

  Mr. Whittier's been dead for days or hours. It's hard to tell since Sister Vigilante started turning the lights on and off. At night, we hear someone walking around, great booming footsteps, a giant coming down the lobby stairs in the dark.

  Still, something more terrible needs to happen.

  For market share. For dramatic appeal.

  Something more awful needs to happen.

  From his dressing room, backstage, we carry Mr. Whittier across the stage and up the center aisle of the auditorium. We carry him through the blue velvet lobby and down the stairs to the orange-and-gold Mayan foyer in the first basement.

  Sister Vigilante says her watch keeps resetting itself. That's a classic sign of a haunting. The Baroness Frostbite claims she found a cold spot in the Gothic smoking room. In the Arabian Nights gallery, you can see your breath steaming in the cold air above the cushion where Mr. Whittier used to sit. The Countess Foresight says it's the ghost of Lady Baglady we hear walking around after lights-out.

  Following behind in the funeral procession, Director Denial: “Has anybody seen Cora Reynolds?”

  Sister Vigilante says, “Whoever took my bowling ball, give it back and I promise not to kick your ass . . .”

  Leading the procession, cradling the lump that would be Mr. Whittier's head, Mrs. Clark says, “Has anyone seen Miss America?”

  After this is over, it would never work to shoot the movie here. After we're discovered, this place will become a landmark. A National Treasure. The Museum of Us.

  No, whatever production company will just have to build sets to copy each of the big rooms. The blue velvet French Louis XV lobby. The black mohair Egyptian auditorium. The green satin Italian Renaissance lounge. The yellow leather Gothic smoking room. The purple Arabian Nights gallery. The orange Mayan foyer. The red imperial-Chinese promenade. Each room a different deep color, but all with the same gold accents.

  Not rooms, Mr. Whittier would say, but settings. We carry his wrapped body through these echoing big boxes where people become a king or an emperor or duchess for the price of a movie ticket.

  Locked in the office behind the lobby snack bar, that little closet of varnished pine walls with its ceiling sloped under the lobby staircase, there the filing cabinets are packed solid with printed programs and invoices, booking schedules and time-clock punch cards. Those sheets of paper turning to dust along their edges, printed across the top of each page it says: Liberty Theater. Some are printed: Capital Theater. Some printed: Neptune Vaudeville House. Others printed: Holy Convention Church. Others: Temple of Christian Redemption. Or: Assembly of Angels. Or: Capital Adult Theater. Or: Diamond Live Burlesque.

  All these different places, they all had this same address.

  Here, where people have knelt in prayer. And knelt in semen.

  All the screams of joy and horror and salvation still contained and stifled inside these concrete walls. Still echoing in here, with us. Here, our dusty heaven.

  All these different stories will end with our story. After the thousand different realities of plays and movies, religion and strippers, this building will become, forever, the Museum of Us.

  Every crystal chandelier, the Matchmaker calls it a “peach tree.” The Gothic smoking room, Comrade Snarky calls it the “Frankenstein Room.”

  In the Mayan foyer, Reverend Godless says the orange carvings are bright as a runway spotlight shining through the silk petals of a tulip sewn to a vintage Christian Lacroix bustle . . .

  In the Chinese promenade, the silk wallpaper is a red dye that's never been in the daylight. Red as the blood of a restaurant critic, says Chef Assassin.

  In the Gothic smoking room, the wing chairs are covered in a rich yellow leather that's never bleached a moment in the sun. Not since it covered a cow, says the Missing Link.

  The walls of the Italian Renaissance lounge are dark green, streaked and clotted with black, a coat of paint that turns to malachite stone if you look hard enough.

  In the Egyptian auditorium, the walls are plaster and papier-mâché, carved and molded into the pyramids, the sphinx. Giant seated pharaohs. Pointed-nose jackals. Rows and rows of big-eyed hieroglyphics. Above all this dangle the fronds of fake palm trees made from ribbons of black paper sagging with mold. Above the dusty treetops, the black plaster of the night sky is studded with a heaven of electric stars. The Big Dipper. Orion. The constellations, just stories people make up so they can understand that night sky. These stars, hazy behind clouds of cobweb.

  Black mohair covers the seats, scratchy as dried moss on tree bark. The carpets are black, worn to the gray grid of canvas down the center of each aisle.

  The trim in all the rooms is gold. Gold paint, bright as neon piping. Everything black in the auditorium, every seat-back and carpet-edge, it's outlined in this same bright gold.

  If you want hard enough, the trim is real gold. Every room depends on your faith.

  The group of us in our fairy-tale silk and velvet and dried blood, we're black moving against the blackness. In dim light, Mr. Whittier must seem to float in his red ve
lvet cocoon, wound around with gold rope. No longer a character, Mr. Whittier has become a prop. Our puppet. A constellation we can put stories on to say we understand.

  Her face behind a lace handkerchief, Comrade Snarky says, “I don't know why we should be crying.” She's breathing through the old perfume of the lace, trying to escape the stink. She says, “My character wouldn't be crying.” She says, “I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me.”

  Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us—just her supporting cast.

  Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back and says, “He what?”

  And from behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, “Me, too. He raped me first.”

  Saint Gut-Free says, “Well, what the hell . . . He poked me, too.”

  As if poor skinny Saint Gut-Free had enough ass left to poke.

  And Mrs. Clark says, “This is not funny. Not in the least.”

  “Tough,” the Matchmaker tells her. “It's wasn't funny, either, when you raped me.”

  Shaking his ponytail, the Duke of Vandals tells the Matchmaker, “You couldn't pay to get raped.”

  And Mother Nature laughs—blowing scabs and blood all over.

  The devil is dead. Long live the devil.

  Here is our funeral for Satan. Mr. Whittier, he's the demon who'll make all our past sins look like nothing by comparison. The story of his crimes will leave us buffed and polished to the virgin-white color of victim.

  More sinned against than sinning.

  Still, his being dead leaves a job opening at the bottom that no one wants.

  So, in the movie version, you'll see us weeping and forgiving Mr. Whittier while Mrs. Clark cracks the whip.

  The devil is dead. Long live the devil.

  We wouldn't last a moment without someone to blame.