We draw straws to see who has to weep.
More and more, we leave room open in every group for Agent Tattletale's camera. We speak so the Earl of Slander's tape recorder will get every word. The same tape or memory card or compact disk getting used, over and over. We erase our past with our present, on the gamble that the next moment will be sadder, more horrible or tragic.
More and more, something worse needs to happen.
Mr. Whittier's been dead for days or hours. It's hard to tell since Sister Vigilante started turning the lights on and off. At night, we hear someone walking around, great booming footsteps, a giant coming down the lobby stairs in the dark.
Still, something more terrible needs to happen.
For market share. For dramatic appeal.
Something more awful needs to happen.
From his dressing room, backstage, we carry Mr. Whittier across the stage and up the center aisle of the auditorium. We carry him through the blue velvet lobby and down the stairs to the orange-and-gold Mayan foyer in the first basement.
Sister Vigilante says her watch keeps resetting itself. That's a classic sign of a haunting. The Baroness Frostbite claims she found a cold spot in the Gothic smoking room. In the Arabian Nights gallery, you can see your breath steaming in the cold air above the cushion where Mr. Whittier used to sit. The Countess Foresight says it's the ghost of Lady Baglady we hear walking around after lights-out.
Following behind in the funeral procession, Director Denial: “Has anybody seen Cora Reynolds?”
Sister Vigilante says, “Whoever took my bowling ball, give it back and I promise not to kick your ass . . .”
Leading the procession, cradling the lump that would be Mr. Whittier's head, Mrs. Clark says, “Has anyone seen Miss America?”
After this is over, it would never work to shoot the movie here. After we're discovered, this place will become a landmark. A National Treasure. The Museum of Us.
No, whatever production company will just have to build sets to copy each of the big rooms. The blue velvet French Louis XV lobby. The black mohair Egyptian auditorium. The green satin Italian Renaissance lounge. The yellow leather Gothic smoking room. The purple Arabian Nights gallery. The orange Mayan foyer. The red imperial-Chinese promenade. Each room a different deep color, but all with the same gold accents.
Not rooms, Mr. Whittier would say, but settings. We carry his wrapped body through these echoing big boxes where people become a king or an emperor or duchess for the price of a movie ticket.
Locked in the office behind the lobby snack bar, that little closet of varnished pine walls with its ceiling sloped under the lobby staircase, there the filing cabinets are packed solid with printed programs and invoices, booking schedules and time-clock punch cards. Those sheets of paper turning to dust along their edges, printed across the top of each page it says: Liberty Theater. Some are printed: Capital Theater. Some printed: Neptune Vaudeville House. Others printed: Holy Convention Church. Others: Temple of Christian Redemption. Or: Assembly of Angels. Or: Capital Adult Theater. Or: Diamond Live Burlesque.
All these different places, they all had this same address.
Here, where people have knelt in prayer. And knelt in semen.
All the screams of joy and horror and salvation still contained and stifled inside these concrete walls. Still echoing in here, with us. Here, our dusty heaven.
All these different stories will end with our story. After the thousand different realities of plays and movies, religion and strippers, this building will become, forever, the Museum of Us.
Every crystal chandelier, the Matchmaker calls it a “peach tree.” The Gothic smoking room, Comrade Snarky calls it the “Frankenstein Room.”
In the Mayan foyer, Reverend Godless says the orange carvings are bright as a runway spotlight shining through the silk petals of a tulip sewn to a vintage Christian Lacroix bustle . . .
In the Chinese promenade, the silk wallpaper is a red dye that's never been in the daylight. Red as the blood of a restaurant critic, says Chef Assassin.
In the Gothic smoking room, the wing chairs are covered in a rich yellow leather that's never bleached a moment in the sun. Not since it covered a cow, says the Missing Link.
The walls of the Italian Renaissance lounge are dark green, streaked and clotted with black, a coat of paint that turns to malachite stone if you look hard enough.
In the Egyptian auditorium, the walls are plaster and papier-mâché, carved and molded into the pyramids, the sphinx. Giant seated pharaohs. Pointed-nose jackals. Rows and rows of big-eyed hieroglyphics. Above all this dangle the fronds of fake palm trees made from ribbons of black paper sagging with mold. Above the dusty treetops, the black plaster of the night sky is studded with a heaven of electric stars. The Big Dipper. Orion. The constellations, just stories people make up so they can understand that night sky. These stars, hazy behind clouds of cobweb.
Black mohair covers the seats, scratchy as dried moss on tree bark. The carpets are black, worn to the gray grid of canvas down the center of each aisle.
The trim in all the rooms is gold. Gold paint, bright as neon piping. Everything black in the auditorium, every seat-back and carpet-edge, it's outlined in this same bright gold.
If you want hard enough, the trim is real gold. Every room depends on your faith.
The group of us in our fairy-tale silk and velvet and dried blood, we're black moving against the blackness. In dim light, Mr. Whittier must seem to float in his red velvet cocoon, wound around with gold rope. No longer a character, Mr. Whittier has become a prop. Our puppet. A constellation we can put stories on to say we understand.
Her face behind a lace handkerchief, Comrade Snarky says, “I don't know why we should be crying.” She's breathing through the old perfume of
