Leaning in to the Earl of Slander, whispering close to his tape recorder, Comrade Snarky says, “Oh my God . . .”
As the Baroness Frostbite takes her seat, only Agent Tattletale watches her, from safe behind the lens of his video camera.
At the next stop, Miss America waits with her exercise wheel, a pink plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate with black rubber grips poking out each side of the hub. You'd hold each grip and kneel down on the floor. You'd lean forward to balance on the wheel, then roll forward and back by clenching your stomach. Miss America brought the wheel and some pink leotards, honey-blond hair coloring, and a home pregnancy test.
Walking down the aisle in the center of the bus—smiling at Mr. Whittier with his wheelchair, not smiling at the Missing Link—with every step, Miss America overlaps one foot a little in front of the other, making her hips look thin, always the forward leg hiding the one behind.
“The Fashion-Model Waddle,” Comrade Snarky calls it. She leans over the Earl of Slander's notepad and says, “That color of blond is what women call lifting the color.”
Miss America had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, smeared there for her boyfriend to find in the motel room they'd shared, for him to find before his morning television appearance: “I am NOT fat.”
We had all left some kind of note behind.
Director Denial, petting her cat, she told us she'd written a memo to her entire agency, telling them: “Find your own objects to fuck.” That memo she left on every desk, last night, ready for her staff to find, this morning.
Even Miss Sneezy wrote a note, even if she had nobody to read it. In red spray paint on a bus-stop bench, she wrote, “Call me when you find a cure.”
The Matchmaker left his note folded to stand on the kitchen table, so his wife wouldn't miss it. The note said: “It's been fourteen weeks since I had that head cold, and you still have not kissed me.” He wrote, “This summer, you milk the cows.”
The Countess Foresight had left a note telling her parole officer he could reach her by dialing 1-800-FUCK-OFF.
The Countess Foresight steps out of the shadows wearing a turban and wrapped in a lace shawl. Floating down the aisle of the bus, she stops a moment next to Comrade Snarky. “Since you're wondering,” the Countess says, and dangles a limp hand, a plastic bracelet loose around the wrist. The Countess Foresight says, “It's a global-positioning sensor. A condition of my early release from prison . . .”
One, two, three steps, past the Comrade and the Earl, their mouths still hanging a little loose, without looking back, the Countess Foresight says, “Yes.”
She touches her turban with the fingernails of one hand and says, “Yes, I did read your mind . . .”
Around the next corner, past the next shopping center and franchise motel, beyond another fast-food restaurant, Mother Nature sits on the curb in a perfect lotus position, her hands painted with dark henna vines and resting on each knee. A choker of brass temple bells tinkling around her neck.
Mother Nature brings on board a cardboard carton of clothes wrapped to protect bottles of thick oil. Candles. The box smelling of pine needles. The campfire smell of pine pitch. The salad-dressing smell of basil and coriander. The import-market smell of sandalwood. A long fringe sways along the hem of her sari.
Comrade Snarky's eyes roll up to show all white, and she fans the air with her floppy black felt beret, saying, “Patchouli . . .”
Our writers' colony, our desert island, should be nicely heated and air-conditioned, or so we've been led to believe. We'll each have our own room. Lots of privacy, so we won't need a lot of clothes. Or so we've been told.
We have no reason to expect otherwise.
The borrowed tour bus would be found, but we wouldn't. Not for the three months we'd leave the world. Those three months we'd spend writing and reading our work. Getting our stories perfect.
Last on board, around another block and through another tunnel, waiting at our last pickup spot, was the Duke of Vandals. His fingers smudged and stained from pastel crayons and charcoal pencils. His hands blotched with silk-screen inks, and his clothes stiff with drabs and spatters of dried paint. All these colors still only gray or black, the Duke of Vandals is sitting, waiting there on a metal toolbox heavy with tubes of oil paint, brushes, watercolors, and acrylics.
He stands, making us wait while he shakes back his blond hair and twists a red bandana around to make a ponytail. Still standing in the doorway of the bus, the Duke of Vandals looks down the aisle at us all, spotlighted by Agent Tattletale's video camera, he says, “It's about time . . .”
No, we weren't idiots. We'd never agree to be stranded if we were really going to be cut off. None of us were so bored with this silly, below-average, watered-down, mediocre world that we'd sign our own death wish. Not us.
A living situation like this, of course, we expected fast access to emergency health care, just in case someone stumbled on the stairs or their appendix decided to burst.
So all we had to decide was: What to bring in our one suitcase.
This workshop, it's already supposed to have hot and cold running water. Soap. Toilet paper. Tampax. Toothpaste.
The Duke of Vandals left his landlord a note that said: Screw your lease.
Even more important was what we didn't bring. The Duke of Vandals didn't bring cigarettes, his mouth teeth-grinding wads of nicotine gum. Saint Gut-Free didn't bring pornography. Countess Foresight and the Matchmaker didn't bring their wedding rings.
As Mr. Whittier would say, “What stops you in the outside world, that will stop you in here.”
The rest of the
