All of us, still trying to get the last word. Rewinding his tape recorder, the Earl of Slander plays the words “headstone . . . headstone . . .” And the recorded echo, it echoes. An echo of an echo of an echo.
Echoing, until a voice from far away, from behind the sun, says, “You're playing to an empty house.”
It's a voice from beyond the grave. It's the same as our story about Comrade Snarky coming back from the dead, staggering down the lobby stairs to beg for a bite of her own rose tattoo. Against the bright light, nobody sees our ghost come down the center aisle of the auditorium. Nobody hears him walking down toward the stage on the black carpet. Nobody can tell what's coming closer in the bright glare until the voice says, again, “You're playing to an empty house . . .”
It's old trembling, teenaged Mr. Whittier. Our dying skater punk. Our spotted little devil.
Walking. A cadaver in tennis shoes. A stereo headset looped around the back of his withered neck.
“Listen to yourselves,” he says. Shaking his head, his few hairs swinging, he says, “You're so busy telling your stories to each other. You're always turning the past into a story to make yourselves right.”
What Sister Vigilante would call our culture of blame.
It never changes, he says. The other group he brought here, it ended this same way. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.
Some stories, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories . . . and Whittier gestures at our skin and bones.
“Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us,” Mr. Whittier says. “It's how we digest our lives. Our experience.”
Mr. Whittier would say. This little boy dying of old age.
For a ghost he looks good. His spotted scalp, combed. His necktie knotted under his chin. His fingernails clean, shaky white half-moons. So very much the grown-up.
“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,” he says, “the same way this theater seems to digest people.” With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.
Other events—the ones you can't digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can't talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you're Cassandra's wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good.
Those are stories as important as food.
Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead. Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.
It's how we can eat all the shit that happens.
Mr. Whittier would say.
Looking at Mr. Whittier, the Countess Foresight says, “Satan.” And her word hisses soft as the voice of a snake.
From Sister Vigilante, clutching her Bible, comes, “Devil . . .”
Hearing this, Mr. Whittier just sighs and says, “How we do love to have our evil enemies . . .”
“Here you go,” Chef Assassin says, and he tosses a paring knife so it clatters across the stage and stops at Mr. Whittier's black shoes.
The Chef says, “Get some fingerprints on that. When they pry open that door, you'll be the most hated man in America.”
“Correction,” Mr. Whittier says. “The most hated juvenile offender, dude . . .”
“You might recognize that knife,” Agent Tattletale says. His camera next to him, so heavy he can't lift it.
Her parole-officer security bracelet, it's gone. Her hand starved so small, so bony, the bracelet slipped off, Countess Foresight says, “You butchered me with that knife.”
“And slit my nose,” says Mother Nature, tilting her head back to show the scabbed scars. The diamond of Lady Baglady, it rattles so loose on her finger she has to make a fist not to lose it.
And Mr. Whittier looks from her split nose to the Earl of Slander's bloody-bandaged hands to the rind of scar tissue that used to be Reverend Godless's ear. He claps his hands, once, loud, in front of his chest, and says, “Well, the good news is . . . your three months are finished.” He fishes in the front pocket of his trousers and brings out a key, saying, “You're all free to go.”
The lock is still stuffed with a thin shard of plastic fork. No way can you put in a key.
“Last night,” Mr. Whittier says, and he shakes the key in the air, “your friendly ghost picked the lock clean. I assure you, it works fine.”
All of us, we're still sitting in our circle, some of us stuck to the stage boards by our own dried blood. Our clothes, the fabric of our gowns and cassocks and jodhpurs, it glues us to the spot.
Mr. Whittier leans down a little to offer his hand to Miss Sneezy, and he says, “And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all . . .” Wiggling his fingers for her to take, he says, “Shall we go now?”
And she doesn't take the hand. Miss Sneezy says, “We saw you die . . .”
And Mr. Whittier says, “You've seen a lot of people die.”
The dried-turkey Tetrazzini split his stomach from the inside. He died screaming. We wrapped his dead body in red velvet and carried him to the subbasement.
“Not quite,” Mr. Whittier says. With Mrs. Clark's help, they faked his death so he could watch events run their course. All he did was watch—the last camera—even when Mrs. Clark died, stabbing herself for sympathy—but doing too good a job. Even when Director Denial found the body and ate half a leg. All Mr. Whittier did was watch.
Director Denial lifts her head from her chest. She belches and says, “He's right.”
Again, Mr. Whittier stoops to offer his spotted hand to Miss Sneezy. He says, “I can give you all the love you want. If you can overlook our difference in age.”
Her being twenty-two. Him being thirteen—fourteen next month.
The Earl of Slander says, “You're not going to rescue us. We're staying here until we're found.”
We always do this, Mr. Whittier says. For the same reason our children's children's children's children will always have war and famine and disease. Because we love our pain. We love our drama. But we will never, ever admit that.
Miss Sneezy reaches to take the hand.
And Mother Nature says, “Don't be stupid.” From her pile of rags and hair, she says, “He knows you're infected with that . . . brain virus.” She laughs, her brass bells ringing, and scabs everywhere, and she says, “How can you possibly believe he really loves you?”
Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier's hand.
“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”
And Saint Gut-Free says, “He doesn't love you.” The Saint, his face is nothing but teeth and eyes as he says, “Whittier only wants to destroy the rest of the world.”
Still reaching toward Miss Sneezy, Mr. Whittier shakes the key in his other hand, saying, “Shall we go?”
If we can forgive what's been done to us . . .
If we can forgive what we've done to others . . .
If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims.
Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer.
Shaking his head, clucking his tongue, Mr. Whittier says, “Would it be so bad? To be the last two people in the world?” His hand slips around, wraps around, tight around Miss Sneezy's limp fingers, and Mr. Whittier says, “Why can't the world end the same way it started?” And he pulls Miss Sneezy to her feet.
Proof
Another Poem About Mr. Whittier
“How would you live?” asks Mr. Whittier.
If you could not die.
/> Mr. Whittier onstage, he stands straight,
on two feet, not stooped.
Not trembling.
The stereo earphones looped around his neck,
leaking loud drum-and-bass music.
Both feet in tennis shoes, the laces untied and one foot
tapping.
Onstage, instead of a movie fragment, a spotlight,
not a fragment of some old story projected to hide him.
A spotlight shines so hard it erases his wrinkles.
Washes away his age spots.
And, watching him, we were God's children he held hostage, to make God show
Himself.
To force God's hand.
And if we suffered enough, if we died . . . if Whittier could just torture us,
starve us,
maybe we would hate him from even beyond this life.
Hate him so much, we'd come back for revenge.
If we died in enough pain, cursing old Mr. Whittier, then he begged for us to come back.
To haunt him.
To give him proof of a life after death.
Our ghosts, our hate would prove the Death of Death.
Our role, when he finally told us: We were only here to suffer and suffer,
and suffer and suffer,
and suffer and die.
To create just one ghost—fast.
To comfort old, old dying Mr. Whittier—before he died.
That was his real plan.
Leaning over us, he says, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough
to change costume and come back
as a new character . . .
Would you slow down? Or speed up?
If every life is just a basketball game or a play that begins and ends
while the players go on to new games, new productions . . .
In the face of that fact, how would you live?
Dangling the key between two fingers, Mr. Whittier says, “You can stay here.”
But when you die, then come back
just for a moment.
To tell me. To save me. With proof of our eternal life.
To save us all,
please, tell someone.
To create real peace on earth.
Let us all be—
Haunted.
Obsolete
A Story by Mr. Whittier
For their last family vacation, Eve's dad herded them all into the car and said to get comfortable. This trip could take a couple hours, maybe more.
They had snacks, cheese popcorn and cans of soda and barbecue potato chips. Eve's brother, Larry, and she sat in the back seat with their Boston terrier, Risky. In the front seat, her dad turned the key to start the engine. He turned the ventilation to high and opened all the electric windows. Sitting next to him, Eve's future ex-stepmom, Tracee, said, “Hey, kids, listen to this . . .”
Tracee waved a government pamphlet called It's Great to Emigrate. She flipped it open, bending the spine backward to crack it, and started to read out loud. “Your blood uses hemoglobin,” she read, “to carry oxygen molecules from your lungs to the cells in your heart and brain.”
Maybe six months ago, everybody got this same pamphlet in the mail from the Surgeon General. Tracee slipped her feet out of her sandals and put her toes up on the dashboard. Still reading out loud, she said, “Hemoglobin actually prefers to bond with carbon monoxide.” The way she talked, as if her tongue were too big, it was supposed to make her sound girly. Tracee read, “As you breathe car exhaust, more and more of your hemoglobin combines with carbon monoxide, becoming what's called carboxyhemoglobin.”
Larry was feeding cheese popcorn to Risky, getting the bright-orange cheese powder all over the car seat between him and Eve.
Her dad switched on the radio, saying, “Who wants music?” He looked at Larry in the rearview mirror and said, “You're going to make that dog sick.”
“Great,” Larry said, and fed Ricky another piece of bright-orange popcorn. “The last thing I'll see is the inside of the garage door, and the last song I'll hear will be something by the Carpenters.”
But there's nothing to hear. There's been nothing on the radio for a week.
Poor Larry, poor goth rocker Larry, with black makeup smeared around his white-powdered face, his fingernails painted black and his long stringy hair dyed black, compared to real people with their eyes pecked out by birds, real dead people with their lips peeling back from their big dead teeth, compared to real death, Larry could just be a really sad-faced clown.
Poor Larry, he'd stayed in his room for days after the final Newsweek cover story. The headline, big and bold, it said: “It's Hip to Be Dead!”
All those years of Larry and his band dressing like zombies or vampires in black velvet and dragging dirty shrouds, stomping around graveyards all night wrapped in rosary necklaces and capes, all that effort wasted. Now even soccer moms were emigrating. Old church ladies were emigrating. Lawyers wearing business suits were emigrating.
The last issue of Time magazine, the cover story said: “Death Is the New Life.”
Now poor Larry, he's stuck with Eve and his dad and Tracee, the whole family emigrating together in a four-door Buick parked in a suburban split-level ranch-house garage. All of them breathing carbon monoxide and eating cheese popcorn with their dog.
Still reading, Tracee says, “As less hemoglobin is available to carry oxygen, your cells begin to suffocate and die.”
There was still television on some channels, but all they played was the video sent back by the space mission to Venus.
It was the stupid space program that had started all this. The manned mission to explore the planet Venus. The crew sent back their video of the planet surface, the face of Venus as this garden paradise. After that, the accident wasn't because of chipped insulation panels or broken O-rings or pilot error. It wasn't an accident. The crew just chose not to deploy their landing parachutes. Fast as a meteor, the outer hull of their spacecraft burst into flame. Static and—The End.
The same way that World War II gave us the ballpoint pen, the space program had proved the human soul was immortal. What everybody called the Earth was just a processing station that all souls had to pass through. A step in some kind of refining process. Like the cracking tower used to turn crude oil into gasoline or kerosene. As soon as human souls had been refined on Earth, then we would all incarnate on the planet Venus.
In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process.
Sure, it sounded nuts, but there was the video sent back by the space mission that crashed itself on purpose.
On television, all they played was the video. As the mission's landing vehicle orbited lower and lower, dipping down inside the cloud layers covering the planet, the astronauts sent back this footage of people and animals living as friends, everyone smiling so hard their faces seemed to glow. In the video the astronauts sent back, everyone was young. The planet was a Garden of Eden. The landscape of forests and oceans, flower meadows and towering mountains, it was always springtime, the government said.
After that, the astronauts refused to deploy the parachutes. They drove straight down, pow, into the flowers and sweet lakes of Venus. All that was left was this grainy, hazy few minutes of video they sent back. What looked like fashion models wearing glittery tunics in a science-fiction future. Men and women with long legs and hair, sprawled, eating grapes on the steps of marble temples.
It was heaven, but with sex and booze and God's complete permission.
It was a world where the Ten Commandments were: Party. Party. Party.
“Beginning with headache and nausea,” Tracee read
s from her government pamphlet, “symptoms include a faster and faster pulse as your heart tries to get oxygen to your dying brain.”
Eve's brother, Larry, he never really adjusted to the idea of eternal life.
Larry used to have this band, called Wholesale Death Factory. He had this one groupie slut called Jessika. They used to tattoo each other with a sewing needle dipped in black ink. They were so cutting-edge, Larry and Jessika, the very margin of the marginalized. Then death got to be so mainstream. Only it wasn't suicide anymore. Now it was called “emigration.” People's dead, rotting bodies aren't corpses, not anymore. The stinking, bloated piles of them, heaped around the base of each tall building, or poisoned and sprawled on bus-stop benches, now these were called “luggage.” Just left-behind luggage.
The way people had always looked at New Year's Eve as some kind of line drawn in the sand. Some kind of new beginning that didn't ever really happen. That's how people saw emigration, but only if everyone emigrated.
Here was actual proof of life after life. According to government estimates, as many as 1,760,042 human souls were already freed and living a party lifestyle on the planet Venus. The rest of humanity would have to live on through a long series of lifetimes, of suffering, before they were refined enough to emigrate.
Going around, eroding in the Big Rock Tumbler.
Then the government had its big brainstorm:
If all of humanity died at once, then there would be no wombs and no way to reincarnate souls here on Earth.
If humanity went extinct, then we'd all emigrate to Venus. Enlightened or not.
But . . . if only one breeding couple was left behind, the birth of a child could call back a soul. From just a handful of people, the whole process could start again.
Until a couple days ago, you could watch on television as the emigration movement dealt with people who were still noncompliant. You could watch the backward populations that weren't enrolled in the movement, you could see them being forced to emigrate by Emigration Assistance Squads, dressed all in white, carrying clean white machine guns. Whole screaming villages, carpet-bombed to relocate them to the next step in the process. Nobody was going to let a pack of Bible-waving hillbillies keep the rest of us here, here on dirty old planet Earth, the less-than-hip planet, not when we could all hurry on to the next great step in our spiritual evolution. So the hillbillies were poisoned to save them. The African savages were nerve-gassed. The Chinese hordes were nuked.