Wiping the spray from her arm, Comrade Snarky says, “Gross!” She says, “Were you raised in a plastic bubble or what?”
And Miss Sneezy says, “Yeah, pretty much.”
The Matchmaker excuses himself, saying he's tired and needs some sleep. And he sneaks down to the subbasement to sabotage the furnace.
He couldn't guess, but the Duke of Vandals has already beat him to that punch.
This leaves the rest of us sitting on the silk cushions and pillows spotted with mildew under the Arabian Nights dome. The silver bag of turkey Tetrazzini empty on the carpet. The carved elephant pillars.
In our heads, we're all jotting down the line: I happen to know a lot about human insides . . .
And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.
Until the rest of us unfold our legs and slap the dust from our clothes. We head for the auditorium, our fingers crossed we'll hear Mr. Whittier's last words.
Erosion
A Poem About Mr. Whittier
“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.”
So maybe we're supposed to fight and hate and torture each other . . .
Mr. Whittier rolls his wheelchair to the edge of the stage,
with his spotted hands, his bald head.
The folds of his slack face seem to hang
from his too-big eyes, his cloudy, watery-gray eyes.
The ring looped through one of his nostrils, the earphones of his CD player looped around the wrinkles and folds of his beef-jerky neck.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a black-and-white movie fragment:
Mr. Whittier's head is wallpapered with newsreel armies marching.
His mouth and eyes lost in the shadow boots and bayonets that worm across his cheeks.
He says, “Maybe suffering and misery is the point of life.”
Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory.
Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks:
A rolling drum filled with water and sand.
Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock,
some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore.
And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,
polishes our souls, refines us,
teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.
Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and again,
knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth.
Mr. Whittier, his teeth crowded too many in his narrow jawbone,
his dead-tumbleweed eyebrows, Mr. Whittier's bat-wing ears spread wide
with the shadow armies marching across,
he says,
“The only alternative is, we're all just eternally stupid.”
We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight.
We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money.
And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us.
Leaning forward, both his hands clawed on the arms of his wheelchair,
as the newsreel armies march over his face, those moving tattoos
of their machine guns and tanks and artillery,
Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we're living the exact way we're meant to live.”
Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls . . . just fine.
Dog Years
A Story by Brandon Whittier
These angels, they see themselves being. These agents of mercy.
Put together so much more nice than God had planned, with their rich husbands and good genetics and orthodontia and dermatology. These stay-at-home mothers with teenaged kids in school. At-home, but not homemakers. Not housewives.
Educated, sure, but not too smart.
They have help for all the rough work. Hired experts. They use the wrong scouring powder, and their granite countertops or limestone tile is worthless. The wrong fertilizer, and their landscaping gets burned. The wrong color paint, and all their careful effort, their investment, suffers. With the kids in school, and God at his office, the angels have all day to kill.
So here they are. Volunteers.
Where they can't screw up anything too important. Pushing the library cart around a retirement center. Between yoga and their book group. Hanging the Halloween decorations at an old-folks' home. Any old-age hospice, you'll find them, these angels of boredom.
These angels with their flat-soled shoes handmade in Italy. Their good intentions and art-history degrees and long afternoons to kill until the kids get home from soccer or ballet after school. These angels, pretty in their flower-print sundresses, their clean hair tied back. And smiling. Smiling. Every time you sneak a look.
With a nice word to say for every patient. A comment about what a nice collection of get-well cards you've arranged on the dresser. What nice African violets you grow in pots on your windowsill.
Mr. Whittier loves these angel women.
Always, for Mr. Whittier, the spotted, bald old man at the end of the hall, they say: What nice black-light, butt-rock concert posters he has taped above his bed. What a colorful skateboard he has propped beside the door.
Old Mr. Whittier, bug-eyed dwarf Mr. Whittier, he asks, “What's shaking, ladies?”
And the angels, they laugh.
At this old man who still plays at being so young. It's so sweet, his being so young at heart.
Sweet, goofy Mr. Whittier with his Internet surfing and snowboarder magazines. His CDs of hip-hop music. A brimmed cap, turned around backward on his head. Just like a high-school kid.
An ancient version of their own teenagers in school. They can't not flirt back. They can't not like him a little, with his spotted, backward-capped head between earphones, listening to head-banger rock so loud it leaks out.
Mr. Whittier in the hallway, parked in his wheelchair with one hand open, palm-up, he says, “Gimme five . . .”
And all the volunteer ladies slap his hand as they walk past.
Yes, please. That's how the angels want to turn ninety years old: Still with-it. Still hip to new trends. Not fossilized, the way they feel now . . .
In so many ways, this old man seems younger than any of the volunteers in their thirties or forties. These middle-aged angels a half or a third his age.
Mr. Whittier with his fingernails painted black. A silver ring looped through one honking-big, old-man nostril. Around his ankle, a tattoo of barbed wire shows
