But, for enough cash money, he wouldn't squeal to the cops. Ten grand, and she wouldn't suffer through an ugly courtroom drama. Front-page headlines. All her lifetime of good works and investments reduced to nothing. All for a quick fuck with a little kid. Worse than nothing—her the pedophile, now a sex criminal who would need to register her whereabouts for the rest of her life. Maybe get divorced and lose her kids. Sex with a minor carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence.
On the other hand, in another year he'd be dead of old age. Ten grand was a small price to pay for the rest of her life.
Ten grand and maybe just one little knob job for old times' sake . . .
So of course she paid. They all paid. All the volunteers. The angels.
None of them ever went back to the old-folks' home, so they never met each other. To each angel, she was the only one. Really, there were a dozen or more.
And the money? It just kept piling up. Until Mr. Whittier was too old and tired and bored to just fuck.
“Look at the stains in the lobby carpet,” he said. “See how those stains have arms and legs?”
The same as the volunteer ladies, we were trapped by a boy in the body of an old man. A thirteen-year-old kid dying of old age. The part about his family abandoning him, that much was true. But Brandon Whittier was no longer dying ignored and alone.
And, the same way he'd bagged one angel after another, this wasn't his first experiment. We weren't his first batch of guinea pigs. And—until one of those stains came back to haunt him—he told us, we would not be his last.
7
Morning starts with a woman yelling. The woman's voice, the shouting, is Sister Vigilante. Between each shout, you can hear the butt of a fist pound on wood. You can hear a wooden door boom and bounce in its frame. Then the yelling again.
Sister Vigilante yells, “Hey, Whittier!” Sister Vigilante shouts, “You're late with the fucking sunrise . . . !”
Then the fist, pounding.
Outside our rooms, our backstage dressing rooms, the hallway is dark. Beyond that, the stage and auditorium are dark. Pitch-dark except for the ghost light.
We're each getting up, grabbing some clothes, not sure if we've been asleep an hour or a night.
The ghost light is a single bare bulb on a pole that stands center stage. Tradition says it keeps any ghost from moving in when a theater is empty and dark.
In theaters before electricity, Mr. Whittier would say, the ghost light acted as a pressure-relief valve. It would flare and burn brighter, to keep the place from exploding if there was a surge in the gas lines.
Either way, the ghost light meant good luck.
Until this morning.
First it's the yelling that wakes us. Then it's the smell.
Here's the sweet smell of the black muck Lady Baglady might find slumming in the bottom of a Dumpster. It's the smell of a garbage truck's gummy, sticky back mouth. The smell of swallowed dog mess and old meat. Chewed and swallowed and packed tight together. The smell of old potatoes melting into a black puddle under the kitchen sink.
Holding our breath, trying not to smell, we're feeling our way out our doors and down the black hallway, through the dark, toward all the yelling.
Here, night and day are a matter of opinion. Until now, we just agreed to trust Mr. Whittier. Without him, whether it's a.m. or p.m. is a matter for debate. No light comes from the outside. No telephone signals. No sounds.
Still pounding the door, Sister Vigilante shouts, “Civil dawn was eight minutes ago!”
No, a theater is built to exclude the outside reality and allow actors to build their own. The walls are double layers of concrete with sawdust packed between them. So no police siren or subway rumble can wreck the spell of someone's fake death onstage. No car alarms or jackhammer can turn a romantic kiss into a belly laugh.
Each sunset is just when Mr. Whittier looks at his watch and says good night. He climbs up to the projection booth and throws the breakers, blacking out the lights in the lobby, the foyers, the salons, then the galleries and lounges. The darkness herds us toward the main auditorium. This twilight, it falls room by room until the only light left is in the dressing rooms, backstage. There, each of us sleeps. Each room with one bed, one bathroom, a shower, and a toilet. Room enough for one person and one suitcase. Or wicker hamper. Or cardboard box.
Morning is when we hear Mr. Whittier in the hallway outside our rooms, shouting good morning. A new day is when the lights come back on.
Until this morning.
Sister Vigilante shouts, “This is a law of nature you're violating . . .”
Here, with no windows or daylight, the Duke of Vandals says we could be trapped in an Italian Renaissance space station. We could be deep underwater in an ancient Mayan submarine. Or what the Duke calls a Louis XV coal mine or bomb shelter.
Here, in the middle of some city, inches away from the millions of people walking and working and eating hot dogs, we're cut off.
Here, anything that looks like a window, draped with velvet and tapestry, or fitted with stained glass, it's fake. It's a mirror. Or the dim sunlight behind the stained glass is lightbulbs small enough to make it always dusk in the tall arched windows of the Gothic smoking room.
We still hunt for ways out. We still stand at the locked doors and scream for help. Just not too hard or too loud. Not until our story would make a good movie. Until each of us becomes a character skinny enough for a movie star to play.
A story to save us from all the stories of our past.
In the hallway outside Mr. Whittier's
