For food, we had green beans sealed in Mylar bags you couldn't tear with your bare hands. “Vermin-proof” was stenciled in black paint on each silver bag. We had vermin-proof green beans and chicken pot pie and golden-sweet whole-kernel corn. Inside each bag, something rattled, loose twigs and rocks and sand. Each bag inflated to a silver pillow with a puff of nitrogen to keep the contents dead. The lasagna with meat sauce or cheese ravioli.

Vermin-proof or not, our Missing Link could rip a bag open with his bare pubic-hairy hands.

To cook dinner, most people cut the bag open with scissors or a knife. You reached in and dug around until you found the little tea bag of iron oxide—added to absorb any trace of oxygen. You fished out the tea bag and dumped in so many cups of boiling water. We had a microwave. We had plastic forks and spoons. Paper plates. And running water.

You read ten pages in a vampire novel, and dinner was served. Instead of sticks and hot water, the silver pillow was full of home-style meatloaf or beef Stroganoff.

We'd sit on the blue carpet of the lobby stairs, a rippling blue waterfall, each step so wide we could all share the same one and our elbows not poke each other. This was the same beef Stroganoff the President and Congress would be eating deep underground during a nuclear war. It was from the same maker.

Other silver bags were stenciled “Chocolate Devil's Food Cake” and “Bananas Foster.” Mashed potatoes. Macaroni and cheese. Freeze-dried French fries.

All of it, comfort food.

Every bag had a good until date that wouldn't come until we were dead. A shelf life until after most babies would be dead.

Strawberry cupcakes with a hundred-year life span.

We ate freeze-dried lamb with freeze-dried mint jelly while Lady Baglady discovered in her heart's own heart that she really did love her dead husband. She loved him, she cried into her hands. Her shoulders hunched and jerking with sobs inside her mink coat. Cradling the fat diamond in her palm, she needed to get out and bury her three-carat husband in their family plot.

We ate Denver omelets while the Duke of Vandals snapped and popped his nicotine gum and said this was a terrible time to give up smoking. And Saint Gut-Free lost the feeling in his left hand, a repetitive-motion injury, trying to climax without a picture.

The cat of Director Denial, the cat named Cora Reynolds, ate leftover striped sea bass while Countess Foresight and the Reverend Godless worried we weren't safe enough. We'd walked into a trap. They worried someone might find us and . . . They told Mr. Whittier they needed to keep moving, hiding, running to stay safe.

Reverend Godless, clutching a Barbra Streisand album, his split, blood-sausage lips moving as he read the lyrics in the liner notes, he told the Earl of Slander's tape recorder, “I just assumed we'd have a stereo, here.”

In the viewfinder of Agent Tattletale's video camera, Chef Assassin lifted dripping green spoonsful of spinach soufflé into his fat face, saying, “I'm a professional chef. I'm not a food critic. But I can't go three months on instant coffee . . .”

Of course, everyone said they'd still write their work, their poems and stories. They'd complete their masterpiece. Just not here. Not now. Later, outside.

Our first week here, we got nothing done. Except complain.

“It's not an excuse,” Miss America said, holding her flat stomach in both hands, “it's a human life.”

Miss Sneezy coughed into her fist. She sniffed, her eyes bulging and bloodshot behind tears, and said, “My life's at stake, here.” One hand digging in her pocket for another pill.

And, of course, Mr. Whittier shook his head no.

Sitting there in his blue velvet chair, the lobby scrolling gold and velvet around him, Mr. Whittier spooned clam chowder out of a Mylar bag and said, “Tell me a story about the baby's father.” To Miss America, he said, “Write me the scene of how you met him.”

And Agent Tattletale's camera zoomed in on Miss America's face for a close-up reaction shot.

Product Improvements

A Poem About Miss America

“I'm always looking,” says Miss America, “for what's NOT to like.”

Every time she looks in a mirror.

Miss America onstage, her blond hair coils and spirals, billows and looms,

to make her face look as small as possible.

One high-heeled foot, placed just a little in front of the other

to make her legs overlap

so her hips look more

narrow.

Standing sideways, she twists her shoulders

to face the audience head-on.

All this breathless contortion to make her waist look

itty-bitty.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

Her face veiled with exercise videos.

Her features, her eyes and lips, made up with hot-pink leotards and leg warmers.

Her Miss America skin jumps and dances with a crowd of women,

each of those women watching herself in a mirror.

The film: a shadow of a reflection of an image of an illusion.

She says, “My every glance in a mirror, it's a secret market survey.”

She's her own test audience.

Rating her curb appeal on a scale of one to ten.

Every day, beta-testing a new upgraded version of herself-point-five.

Fine-tuning to follow market trends.

Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight,

her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles, going nowhere

at a thousand calories an hour.

“For the Talent portion of my program,” she says, “I'll show you how to unswallow.”

A bellyful of peach ice cream,

a Halloween bag of miniature candy bars,

six frosted doughnuts,

two double cheeseburgers.

The usual stuff.

And sometimes, sperm.

Her face swimming and flickering with aerobic work, her immediate ambition is

to diminish initial buyer resistance.

With a long-term goal of becoming someone's long-term investment.

As a durable consumer good.

Green Room

A Story by Miss America

It's nothing personal when bombs explode. Or when a gunman in a stadium takes a hostage. When the Net Monitor shows a special alert, any television station is going to toss to the talent on the national feed coming through.

If you're watching television, first the local booth producer and director will cut to the double-box format. A split screen to most people. Then the local talent says something like, “With the latest on the sinking ocean liner, here's Joe Blow in New York.” That's what they call “the toss.” Or “the kick.”

The network feed takes over, and the local boys sit on their hands and wait for the network bump to signal the end of the special-alert feed.

No publicist thinks to explain all this to each newbie they send on the road, selling an investment video, a book, a new-fangled carrot peeler.

So, sitting in the green room, backstage at Wake Up Chattanooga!, a young guy with his hair slicked back, he explains some facts of life to this blonde.

She's super, way-too blond, he tells her. That kind of bleach blond, it drives the floor producer nuts, because you can't light it well without it flaring. Some floor producers, they call it “blowout.” The blond head just looks on fire.

“Whatever you do,” the slick guy tells the blonde, “if you got notes, don't reference them or the camera will be shooting the top of your head.”

Floor producers, he says, they hate guests who bring notes. They hate guests who don't try to bury their agenda. Producers will tell you: “Be your product. Don't push it.”