That next week, I sold the story. The last interview with a child star loved by millions of people all over the world. An interview done just hours before his neighbor found him dead, the victim of suicide.
The week after, I'm nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
A few weeks later, I win. That's only two thousand dollars, but the real payoff is long-term. Anymore, not a day goes by when I'm not turning work down. When my agent's fielding offers for me. No, I only do high-profile, big-money work. Big magazine cover stories. National audiences.
Anymore, my name means Quality. My byline means The Truth.
You look in my address book, and it's all names you know from movie posters. Rock stars. Best-selling authors. Everything I touch, I turn to Famous. I move from my apartment to a house with a yard for Skip to run around. We have a garden and a swimming pool. A tennis court. Cable television. We pay off the thousand-plus bucks we owe for the X-rays and the activated charcoal.
Of course, you can still turn on some cable network and see Kenneth Wilcox, the little boy he used to be, whistling and pitching baseballs, before he turned into a monster with gin spit on his face. Little Danny and his dog, walking barefoot through Heartland, Iowa. His syndicated ghost keeps my story alive, the contrast. People love knowing my truth about that little boy who seemed so happy.
“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”
This week, my dog digs up an onion and eats it.
Me, I'm calling vet after vet, trying to find someone who'll save her. At this point, money's no problem. I can pay anything.
Me and my dog, we have a great life. We're so happy. It's while I'm still on the phone, flipping through the telephone book, when my Skip, my baby, she stops breathing.
6
“Let's start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.
He'd say, “Let's start with a plot spoiler.”
The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.
We'd all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Mylar bag.
He'd say, “Let's get the big, big surprise over and done with.”
The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth.
Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.
That's what Mr. Whittier would tell you.
Smooth as glass, that's our Mr. Whittier. Buffed by pain. Polished and shining.
That's why we love conflict, he says. We love to hate. To stop a war, we declare war on it. We must wipe out poverty. We must fight hunger. We campaign and challenge and defeat and destroy.
As human beings, our first commandment is:
Something needs to happen.
Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.
The more Mrs. Clark talked, the more we could see this wouldn't be the Villa Diodati. The babe who wrote Frankenstein, she was the kid of two writers: professors famous for think-tank books called Political Justice and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They had famous smart people crashing at their house all the time.
We were no summer-house party of brainy bookworms.
No, the best story we'd bring out of this building would be just how we survived. How crazy Lady Baglady died cradled in our weeping arms. Still, that story would have to be good enough. Exciting enough. Scary and dangerous enough. We'd have to make sure it was.
Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark were too busy droning on. We needed them to get rough with us. Our story needed them to flog and beat us.
Not bore us to death.
“Any call for world peace,” Mr. Whittier would say, “is a lie. A pretty, pretty lie.” Just another excuse to fight.
No, we love war.
War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.
“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”
We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.
We love terrorists. Hijackers. Dictators. Pedophiles.
God, how we love the television news. The pictures of people lining up beside a long, open grave, waiting to be shot by another new firing squad. The glossy newsmagazine photos of more everyday people torn to bloody shreds by suicide bombers. The radio bulletins about freeway pile-ups. The mud slides. The sinking ships.
His quivering hands telegraphing the air, Mr. Whittier would say, “We love when airplanes crash.”
We adore pollution. Acid rain. Global warming. Famine.
No, Mr. Whittier had no idea . . .
The Duke of Vandals found every bag of anything that included beets. Any silver Mylar pillows rattling with the sliced beets inside, dry as poker chips.
Saint Gut-Free poked a hole in every bag that held any kind of pork or chicken or beef. Meat being something he can never digest.
All the Mylar bags puffed
