Haunted

  And someone pinches one by the nipple, tweaking it and saying, “Shake 'em, sexy mama.”

  Someone else says, “We just want to see where you put your balls, bitch.”

  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.

  The two women digging between his legs, they stop. Someone says, “Wait.”

  The one holding the little flashlight says, “Hold him still,” and she leans in, forcing the flashlight deeper. She asks him, “Is this what you wanted to happen?”

  “Miranda,” spread-eagled on the table, he sobs, trying to bring his knees together. To roll to one side and curl into a ball.

  “Miranda” is sobbing, saying: No. Saying: Please stop. Saying: It hurts.

  Oh, it hurts. Boo-hoo. You're hurting me.

  The woman with the flashlight, she looks the longest time, squinting and frowning, twisting the flashlight and poking it around. Then she stands straight and says, “The batteries are dead,” and towers there, looking down on “Miranda,” his legs still spread open in front of her.

  The woman looks down at the table smeared with makeup and tears, the pearls scattered on the floor, and she says for us to let go. She swallows nothing, her eyes touching all over the body on the table. Then she sighs and tells “Miranda” to get up. Get up and get dressed. Get dressed and get out. Get out and not to come back.

  Someone says maybe the flashlight's just turned off and asks to look at it.

  And the woman puts her flashlight in her tote bag and says, “Don't.”

  Someone says, “What did you see?”

  We saw what we wanted to see, the woman says. We all did.

  The woman with the flashlight, she says, “What just happened here?” She says, “How did we get this way?”

  From the minute he sat down, we tried to explain. We don't allow men. This is a women-only safe space. The purpose of our group . . .

  16

  To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. The lights come on when Sister Vigilante raises the sun, but at sunrise today, it's a smell that pulls us out of bed. The perfect dream of a smell that pulls us out of our dressing rooms, into the hallway. Us, zombie-walking, pulled along by the nose.

  Director Denial steps into the hall, falling halfway to the floor before her hands brace against the wall opposite her open door. Wedged against the wall to stay upright, she says, “Cora? Kitty, kitty?”

  In the hallway, Reverend Godless struggles with both hands to zipper his matador pants, the pants that fit yesterday. “The ghost,” he says, “must be shrinking our clothes.”

  The choker of brass bells cuts into the skin of Mother Nature's neck, so tight that every time she swallows you hear them jingle. “Damn,” she says, “I shouldn't have had that extra helping of Comrade Snarky.”

  Out of the next door comes the Missing Link, his head tipped back so far his nostril hair is the tallest part of him. He sniffs and steps past Director Denial and Reverend Godless. Still sniffing the air, his nostrils flared into big black-hairy holes, he takes another step toward the stage and the auditorium beyond.

  Director Denial says, “Cora . . .” and slides to the floor.

  Out of another door comes Mrs. Clark, saying, “We'll need to wrap up Comrade Snarky today. She needs to go with Mr. Whittier.”

  From the floor, Director Denial says, “Cora . . .”

  “Fuck that cat,” Miss America says. Wearing a long Mandarin Chinese coat, embroidered with dragons, she leans in the doorway to her dressing room, her spidery hands clutching the doorframe. Her face is pale around the black smear of her mouth as Miss America says, “My head is killing me,” rubbing her face with one open hand.

  Miss America shrugs the Mandarin coat off one shoulder and snakes out a thin white arm. She lifts the arm over her head, the hand limp, dark hair sprouting in her armpit. She says, “Feel my lymph nodes. They're huge.”

  Up and down her thin, bare arm run long red scratches. Cat scratches, running close together. Trails and miles of cat scratch marks.

  Looking up-close at her face, the Missing Link says, “You look terrible.” He says, “Your tongue is black.”

  And Miss America drops her arm to hang limp along the doorframe. Her thick, black tongue licking her lips, leaving her lips black, she says, “I was so hungry. Last night, I ate all my lipsticks.”

  Stepping over Director Denial, she says, “What is that smell?”

  You can smell breakfast toast and eggs fried in grease. A greasy-fat smell. A shared hallucination of our hunger. It's the smell of escargots and lobster tails. The smell of English muffins, dripping.

  The Earl of Slander follows the Missing Link follows Mrs. Clark follows Sister Vigilante. We're all following the smell across the stage and up the center aisle toward the lobby.

  Miss Sneezy blows her nose. Then she sniffs the air and says, “It's butter.”

  The smell of hot butter.

  The ghost in every movie theater.

  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.

  The only other smell is Mother Nature's breath, from eating a bayberry aromatherapy candle.

  Halfway up the center aisle, we stop.

  Faint and outside, we hear hail falling. Or machine-gun fire. Or a drumroll.

  A blizzard of snaps and bangs come on top of each other. This fast, faint rattle comes from the lobby.

  Us, standing there in the black plaster center of the Egyptian auditorium, with the dusty, spiderwebbed stars dim above us, we clutch the gold-painted back of the black seats for support. We stand and listen.

  And the gunfire, the hailstorm, it stops.

  Something exciting needs to happen.

  Something amazing needs to happen.

  In the blue velvet lobby, the microwave oven dings once, twice, three times.

  The ghost of Comrade Snarky.

  Still tugging at her necklace, Mother Nature slides down into the rough black mohair of a seat.

  Saint Gut-Free looks at Reverend Godless, who looks at the Matchmaker, who looks at the Earl of Slander taking notes, who nods, Yes. And they start up the aisle, the rest of us a step behind them. Agent Tattletale's camera spotlight following them.

  Through the auditorium doors, the French velvet lobby is empty. Shadows hide behind every palace chair and sofa. The light from the few bulbs we left, it's not bright enough to show the walls on the far side of the room. The doors to the lobby bathrooms are propped open, and the tile floor inside shines with water from the toilets. Here and there, melted lumps of toilet paper are stranded in the puddle.

  On top of the toilet smell, the smell of rotten turkey Tetrazzini, the smell of Comrade Snarky's cooked ass, you can still smell . . . butter.

  Through the smoked glass of the microwave door, you can see something white almost filling the oven.

  It's the Missing Link who yelps. Our hairy man-animal. He yelps and slams both hands down on the snack bar so hard he swings his legs up to one side and vaults over it. Behind the snack bar, he yanks open the microwave, and grabs what's inside.

  He yelps, again, and drops it.

  By then, the Baroness Frostbite is vaulted over the marble counter of the snack bar.

  The Countess Foresight rushes over to see.

  Mother Nature says, “It's popcorn.” Her bells ringing with every word.

  Another yelp comes from behind the counter, and the something white bounces high up into the air. Hands follow it, volleyball-slapping it, a white paper ball, keeping it out of the reach of any one person. In the camera spotlight, it becomes a spinning, steaming white moon.

  Miss Sneezy is laughing and coughing. Countess Foresight, crying behind her sunglasses. All of us, reaching for it. Stretching to catch the spinning, greasy, hot smell of it.

/>   The Matchmaker shouts, “We can't.” Waving his arms, he shouts, “We can't eat any!”

  The paper ball batted between hands, it spins and bounces near the ceiling.

  And Countess Foresight shouts, “He's right.” She shouts, “We could be rescued, today!”

  One man-animal jump, and the Missing Link has both hands on the bag.

  The Link passes to the Countess, who passes to the Matchmaker, who runs for the bathroom.

  The rest of us—the Saint and Miss America and the Sister and the Baroness—we race after, screaming and weeping. Behind us all, Agent Tattletale follows after with the camera, saying, “Please don't let's fight. Please don't fight. Please . . .”

  The Earl of Slander, already rewinding his tape recorder to hear the drumroll sound of the popcorn still hot in the microwave oven. Then the little “ding” that says it's ready.

  Behind the snack bar, only Chef Assassin and Mrs. Clark are left.

  To Mother Nature, her friend Lentil is our ghost. To Miss Sneezy, the ghost is her English teacher with cancer. The same way we ruined the food, our ghost might be the combined work of any two or three people. Of us.

  From the bathroom, you hear a toilet flush. The toilet flushes, again. A chorus of moans echo from the tile inside the open bathroom door. A fresh sheet of water fans out the doorway, lapping at the edge of the lobby's blue carpet.

  The water, spotted here and there with melted paper. Paper and popcorn. Another gift from our ghost.

  Still staring into the open microwave oven, Mrs. Clark says, “I still can't believe we killed her . . .”

  Still sniffing the buttered air, Agent Tattletale says, “It could've been worse.”

  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.

  By now, Director Denial has followed us from her dressing room. She's just in time to see the little-toothed skull, picked clean by someone and then coughed up by the toilet.

  Engraved on the collar, a tag that says “Miss Cora.”

  Looking away from the expression on Director Denial's face, watching her reflected small in the mirror behind the snack bar, Mrs. Clark says, “How? How could killing anyone get any worse?”

  American Vacations

  A Poem About Agent Tattletale

  “Americans do drugs,” says Agent Tattletale, “because they don't do leisure very well.”

  Instead, they do Percodans, Vicodins, OxyContin.

  Agent Tattletale onstage, one hand holds his video camera as a mask

  to hide half his face.

  The rest of him, off-the-rack in a brown suit. Brown shoes.

  A mustard-yellow vest. His straight brown hair combed back.

  A yellow bow tie and a white button-down dress shirt.

  There, the white of his shirt shimmers,

  patterned with movie actors.

  Instead of a spotlight, Agent Tattletale is a screen for stock footage:

  a shot of some theater audience.

  Rows and rows of people, all of them,

  their crowds of hands all clapping without a single

  sound.

  Onstage stands Agent Tattletale, favoring his left leg,

  leaning a little more to the right all the time.

  Instead of one eye, that spot filled by the red

  RECORD

  light of the video camera, watching.

  Instead of an ear, on that side the built-in

  microphone. To hear nothing but himself.

  Agent Tattletale, he says, “Americans are the world's best at doing their work.”

  And studying and competition.

  But we suck when it comes time to relax.

  There's no profit. No trophy.

  Nothing at the Olympic Games goes to the Most Laid-Back Athlete.

  No product endorsements for the World's Laziest

  anything.

  His camera eye on auto-focus, he says, “We're great at winning and losing.”

  And nose grindstoning,

  but not accepting. Not shoulder shrugging and tolerance.

  “Instead,” he tells himself, “we have marijuana and television. Beer and Valium.”

  And health insurance.

  To refill, as needed.

  Crippled

  A Story by Agent Tattletale

  Right this minute, Sarah Broome's looking at her best wooden rolling pin. She swings it, testing how heavy it feels. The hard slap of it against her open palm. She's moving around cans and bottles on the shelf above her washing machine, shaking the jug of bleach to hear how much is left.

  If she could hear, if she'd just listen, I'd tell her it's okay to kill me. I'd even tell her how.

  My rented car is just down the road, maybe one song away if you're listening to the radio. Maybe two hundred steps if you count steps when you're scared. She could hike down and drive it back. A dark-red Buick, covered with dust by now from cars going past on the gravel. She could park it close enough to this toolshed or garden shed or whatever she's got me locked inside.

  In case she's outside, near enough to hear, I shout, “Sarah? Sarah Broome?”

  I shout, “You've got nothing to feel bad about.”

  Me locked here inside, I could coach her. Walk her through it. Tell her how. Next, she'll need to get a screwdriver and loosen the clamps that hold the tinfoil accordion duct to the back of the clothes dryer. Then she can use this same clamp to anchor one end of the duct around the tailpipe of my car. Those ducts, they stretch out, longer than you'd expect. My gas tank is almost full. Maybe she's got a power drill to put some holes in the wooden side of the shed, or in the door. Being a woman, she can drill where it won't show later.

  How nice her place looks is important. Seeing how it's everything she has.

  “Her life used to be mine,” I say. “I can see the way she thinks things are.”

  She can tear off strips of duct tape to hold the hose against the shed. To speed up killing me, she could throw a plastic tarp over the top half of the shed, then wrap it tight to the sides with rope. Turn this into a tight little smokehouse. In five hours, she'll have two hundred pounds of beefstick summer sausage.

  Most people, they've never killed a chicken, much less a human being. People, they have no idea how tough this is going to be.

  I promise to just breathe deep.

  The report from the insurance company, it says her name is Sarah. Sarah Broome, she's forty-nine years old. A senior baker in a commercial bakery for seventeen years, she used to throw a sack of flour up on one shoulder, heavy as a ten-year-old boy, she could balance the flour there while she ripped out the pull-string at the front edge and poured the flour, little by little, into a spinning mixer. According to her account, on her last day at work the floor was still wet from mopping the night before. The lighting wasn't too good, neither. The weight of the flour tipped her over backward, bouncing her head on the rolled-steel edge of a table, resulting in memory loss, migraine headaches, and general weakness that left her unfit for any kind of labor.

  The CAT scans showed nothing. The MRIs, nothing. The X-rays, nothing. But Sarah Broome never went back to work.

  Sarah Broome, married three times. No kids. She gets a little Social Security. A little company settlement money every month. She gets twenty-five milligrams of OxyContin to treat the chronic pain that follows her spine from her brain and radiates down both arms. Some months, she'll ask for Vicodins or Percodans.

  Not three months after her settlement, she moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors.

  Right this minute, sitting here inside her shed, my right foot looks put on backward. The knee's got to be broken, the nerves and tendons inside twisted halfway around. Everything below that knee, numb. It's too dark to see, but where I sit smells cow-shitty. The slick feel of plastic must be bags of composted steer manure ready for her new garden plot. Leaning against the w
alls are a shovel, a hoe, a garden rake.

  Poor Sarah Broome, right this minute, she's looking at her power tools. She's sick with the idea of sinking a skill saw into me. Instead of sawdust, the spinning blade spraying a wet rooster-tail of blood and flesh and bone. Well, that's if she has an extension cord long enough. She's reading the labels on paint cans, slug bait, cleaning fluid, looking for the skull and crossed bones. The green frowny face of Mr. Yuck. She's calling the local Poison Control hotline, asking how much barbecue lighter fluid a man would have to drink to die. When the poison expert asks why, then Sarah hangs up, fast.

  How I know this is . . . ten years ago I was running kegs of beer between a distributor and too many little bars and taverns. These were places too small to have a loading zone, so you double-parked. Or you parked in the suicide lane, between lanes of fast traffic cutting past you in both directions. I humped kegs. I stacked cases of bottled beer on a handcart and waited for a gap in traffic big enough to run through. Always behind schedule, until, by complete accident, a keg rolled off the rack and creamed me out flat on the pavement.

  After that, I got a place almost this nice. A rusted Winnebago motor home that wasn't going anywhere, parked next to a one-hole shithouse, along a wide spot in a gravel road through the woods. I had a four-banger Ford Pinto with a manual transmission to get me into town. A pension for being totally disabled, and all the time in the world.

  The rest of my life, all I had to do is keep my car running. I stayed high on so much Vicodin that just taking a walk in the sun felt as good as any massage. As good as a massage with a hand job, even.

  Just watching the birds at the birdfeeder. The hummingbirds. Putting out peanuts, stoned and laughing as the squirrels fight the chipmunks, it's a good enough life. The American dream of living without an alarm clock. Without having to punch a time clock or wear a damn hairnet. A dream life, where you don't need to ask some asshole's permission before you can go take a crap.

  No, until this afternoon, Sarah Broome had nothing to do but read paperback books from the library. Watch the hummingbirds. Pop those little white pills. A kind of dream vacation that's never supposed to end.