And Mrs. Clark shrugs. She says, “Does that matter?”
Sitting on the fake fur next to Mother Nature, Director Denial has twisted a nylon stocking around the wrist of her left hand. With her right hand, she twists the stocking tighter as the fingers of her left hand turn white. So white, even the pale cat hair looks dark against her blue-white skin. Until those white feeling-nothing fingers wilt and hang, limp from her wrist.
In his lap, Saint Gut-Free works the thumb of his right hand, stroking the thumb up and down with the fist of his left hand. Feeling the bumps and knuckles of his thumb so he'll never forget. For after it's gone.
We all sit here, watching each other. Waiting for the next plot point or bit of dialogue to catch and squirrel away for our marketable version of the truth.
Agent Tattletale moves his camera spotlight from person to person. The Earl of Slander's little-mesh microphone peeks out of his shirt pocket.
This moment foreshadowing the real horror of the next. This moment's already taping over the death of Mr. Whittier, which taped over the death of Lady Baglady, which taped over Miss America holding a knife to Mr. Whittier's throat.
To Mrs. Clark, Mother Nature says, “So why did you love him?”
“I didn't come here because I loved him,” Mrs. Clark says. To Agent Tattletale, she says, “Do not point that camera at me. I look terrible on video . . .” Still, in the heat of the camera's spotlight, Mrs. Clark smiles with her teeth clenched, a clown's smile with her water-balloon lips, saying, “I came here because I saw an advertisement . . .”
And she trusted herself to this man she didn't know? She followed him and helped him? Even knowing he'd trap her behind a locked door? It doesn't make sense.
The Reverend Godless, with his stitched-meat face, his eyebrows shaved off, his fingernails so long he can't make a fist, he says, “But you cried . . .”
“Every apostle or disciple,” Mrs. Clark says, “as much as they're running to follow their savior—they're running just as hard to escape something else.”
With the warriors carved to watch us, the paper orchids dyed and folded to look natural, Mrs. Clark says how she used to have a daughter. A husband.
“Cassie was fifteen,” she says.
She says, “Her name was Cassandra.”
Mrs. Clark says, sometimes when the police find a shallow grave or the dumped body of a murder victim, the detectives will hide a microphone there. It's standard procedure.
She nods at the Earl of Slander, at the tape recorder in his pocket.
The police will hide nearby, and listen for days or weeks. Because almost always the killer will come back and talk to the victim. Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone, and the killer can only discuss his crime with a person who won't punish him. His prey.
Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he'll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that—he was right.
That's why the police wait.
Still smiling, she says, “And that's why I'm here.” Mrs. Clark says, “Like the rest of you, I only wanted some way to tell my story . . .”
Still in the warm circle of Agent Tattletale's spotlight, Mrs. Clark says, “Please.” She cups both hands to cover her face, and through her fingers tight together, she says, “It was a video camera that wrecked my marriage . . .”
Looking Back
A Poem About Mrs. Clark
“You're training a new employee,” says Mrs. Clark, “to take over your boring old job.”
When you raise a child.
Mrs. Clark onstage, her arms wrap across the front of her,
each hand cupping the other elbow
to cradle breasts chosen by a much braver woman.
With a much stronger back.
This chest, now a reminder of every mistake she hoped would save her.
Her eyelids are tattooed the orange that looked so chic
two decades ago,
her lips siliconed to the size and shape of suction cups,
then tattooed a forgotten shade of frosty peach.
Her Mrs. Clark hairdo and clothes, frozen from a time
when she lost her nerve, and stopped taking any new risk.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
Home movies show a little girl wearing a party hat of paper, strapped
under her chin with a string of elastic,
blowing out five birthday candles.
“Before you get fired,” Mrs. Clark says, “you train this new person by telling her . . .”
Don't touch. Hot!
Feet off the sofa!
And—never buy anything with a nylon zipper.
With every lecture, you're forced to look again at every choice you've made
over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life.
And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with,
how limited your life and education have been.
How scant was your courage and curiosity.
Not to mention your expectations.
Mrs. Clark onstage, she sighs, her breasts rising big as soufflés
or loaves of bread, then falling, settling, resting.
She says how maybe the best advice is what you can't tell her at all:
To preserve yourself as the center of the world,
to stay your own best authority on everything,
your own expert on all topics,
infallible,
omniscient.
Always, every time of the month, forever:
Use birth control.
Post-Production
A Story by Mrs. Clark
Tess and Nelson Clark, the first couple of days, they lived as if nothing had happened. This meant getting into work clothes and unlocking the door of their car. They'd drive to the office. That night, they'd sit not-talking at the kitchen table. They'd eat some food.
So what.
The rental place would call about needing their camera equipment back.
Nelson was home, with Tess, or he wasn't.
By the third day, she only got out of bed to use
