Sister Vigilante excuses herself and starts down the stairs toward the lobby, toward bed, disappearing step by step, growing shorter, until the top of her black-tinted hair is gone.
Our Miss America is somewhere else, kneeling at a doorknob, trying to pick the lock. Or pulling a fire alarm we know won't work.
Thanks to the Reverend Godless.
The red light glows on the Earl of Slander's tape recorder. Agent Tattletale shifts his video camera from one eye to the other.
And from down the stairs comes up a scream. A woman's long wail. The voice of Sister Vigilante, telling us to come quick. She's stumbled over something.
The Lady Baglady. A new stain. A knife wrapped in the fingers of one hand. All around her, a dark lake of her blood melting into the lobby's blue carpet.
Long dark hair seems to twine down one side of her face and disappear into the collar of her fur coat. But at the bottom step, when she's life-sized, the braided dark hair is blood. Under the sculpted hair on that side of her face, her ear is gone. Sprawled there, she holds out one hand filled with red and pink, a shining pearl earring in the center of the oyster-mess, catching the fake firelight. In her palm, cupped next to the pink ear, the diamond of her dead husband.
With all of us looking down the stairs at her, the Lady Baglady smiles. Her head rolls to one side, to look up at us, and she says, “I'm bleeding . . . so heavily . . .” Beyond her pale face and hands, a path of blood seems to trail off forever. Her fingers relax, and the knife slips to the carpet, and she says, “Now, Mr. Whittier, you must let me go home . . .”
Elbowing the Earl of Slander, Comrade Snarky says, “What did I tell you? Look.” She nods toward the top of the bloody braid and says, “Now you can see the facelift scar.”
And Lady Baglady is dead. Sister Vigilante says this, holding a finger to her neck. Blood smeared on the Sister's finger.
At this point, our future is set. Done. This will be our meal ticket, telling people how we witnessed an innocent human being driven to commit suicide, plus adding the story of Lady Baglady slumming. The tragedy of her husband. The Brazilian oil heiress, kidnapped. Screw the idea of inventing monsters. Here, we just had to look around. Pay attention.
In the viewfinder of his camera, Agent Tattletale rewinds and watches as Lady Baglady tells her story onstage. Telling and retelling it.
Our puppet. Our plot event.
The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape recorder and we hear Sister Vigilante's scream, over and over.
Our parrot.
And in the red-and-yellow light from the glass fire, Mr. Whittier says, “So it's started already . . .”
“Mr. Whittier?” Mrs. Clark says.
Mr. Whittier, our villain, our master, our devil, whom we love and adore for torturing us, he sighs. Watching Lady Baglady's dead body, one of his shaking, quivering, trembling hands rises to cup his mouth, and he yawns.
Watching the dead body, Director Denial is petting the cat in her arms, tabby-orange cat hair drifting to settle everywhere.
The Baroness Frostbite and Countess Foresight kneel over the body. Not crying, but their eyes so open you can see white all around the iris, the way your eyes would look at a winning lottery ticket.
Watching the body, Saint Gut-Free is spooning cold spaghetti out of a silver bag. Bits of cat hair in every dripping red bite.
This is us against us against us for the next three months.
From the top of the stairs, sitting in his wheelchair, Mr. Whittier watches. Beside him, the Earl of Slander fiddles with his pen and pad, still taking notes.
Pointing a blurred finger, Mr. Whittier says, “You, you're writing this down?”
Not looking up from his version of the truth, the Earl nods, yes.
“So—tell us a story,” Mr. Whittier says. “Come back to the fire,” he says, and, with a twist of his trembling hand, “Please.”
And the Earl of Slander smiles. He flips to the next clean page in his notepad and caps his pen. Looking up, he says, “Does anybody remember that old TV show Danny-Next-Door?” Making his voice slow and rumbling-deep, he says, “One day . . .” He says, “One day, my dog ate some garbage wrapped in aluminum foil . . .”
Trade Secrets
A Poem About the Earl of Slander
“Those people in line,” the Earl says, “a week early for the opening of some movie . . .”
Those people are paid to wait in line.
The Earl of Slander onstage, he stands with one hand raised, holding a sheet of paper,
the white paper, blocking his face.
The rest of him in a blue suit, a red necktie. Buffed brown shoes.
On the wrist of his raised hand, a gold watch,
engraved with: “Congratulations”
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, instead of a face,
projected on the paper is the 72-point headline:
Local Reporter Wins Pulitzer Prize
Behind this headline, the Earl says, “Those people live their lives standing in line . . .”
For one summer blockbuster after another.
The movie studios bus those supposed fan-kids from town to town.
From sci-fi film to superhero fantasy.
Each week, a new town, a new motel, a new PG-13 to pretend they adore.
Those cardboard and tinfoil costumes, so obviously homemade,
the Wardrobe Department makes them and ships them ahead.
All this effort to fool the local media into running a real news story, for free publicity.
To build a credible buzz about how much folks will love this film.
All this time and money, it's called “seeding the audience.”
In his shirt pocket blinks the small red light of a tape recorder taking down every word.
As the Earl asks, “Who's the bigger fool?”
The reporter who refuses to invent a meaning for life?
Or the reader who wants it?
And stands ready to accept this meaning presented in the words of a
