The interview, I write all fourteen thousand words before Ken Wilcox even opens his mouth. Before we even sit down together.

Still, to keep up appearances, I bring my tape recorder. I bring a notepad and pretend to take notes with a couple dried-out pens. I bring a bottle of red wine spiked with Vicodin and Prozac.

At Ken's little house in the suburbs, you'd expect a glass case crammed with dusty trophies, glossy photos, civic awards. A memorial to his childhood. There's nothing like that. Any money he's got, it's in the bank, drawing interest. His house is just brown rugs and painted walls, striped curtains on each window. A bathroom with pink tile.

I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I'm getting every quote perfect.

And he's right. His life is more boring than a black-and-white summer rerun.

On the other hand, the story I already wrote is great. My version is all about little Kenny's long slide from the spotlight to the autopsy table. How he lost his innocence to a long list of network executives in his campaign to become Danny. To keep the sponsors happy, he was farmed out as a sexual plaything. He took drugs to stay thin. To delay the onset of puberty. To stay up all night, shooting scene after scene. No one, not even his friends and family, nobody knew the depths of his drug habit and perverted need for attention. Even after his career collapsed. Even becoming a D.V.M. was just to get access to good drugs and sex with small animals.

The more wine Ken Wilcox drinks, the more he says his life didn't start until Danny-Next-Door was canceled. Being little Danny Bright for eight seasons, that's only real the way your memories of second grade might seem real. Only blurry moments not connected. Each day, each line of dialogue was just something you learned long enough to pass a test. The pretty farmhouse in Heartland, Iowa, was just a false front. Inside the windows, behind the lace curtains, was bare dirt scattered with cigarette butts. The actor who played Danny's grandma, if they were speaking in the same shot, she used to spray spit. Her spit sterilized: more gin than saliva.

Sipping red wine, Ken Wilcox says his life now is so much more important. Healing animals. Saving dogs. With every swallow, his talking breaks up into single words spread wider and wider apart. Just before his eyes close, he asks how Skip is doing.

My dog, Skip.

And I tell him, Good, Skip is doing great.

And Kenny Wilcox, he says, “Good. I'm happy to hear it . . .”

He's asleep, still smiling, when I slip the gun into his mouth.

“Happy” doesn't do anybody any good.

A gun not registered to anybody. My hand in a glove, the gun in his mouth with his finger wrapped around the trigger. Little Kenny's on his sofa, stripped of his clothes, his dick smeared with cooking grease, and a video of his old show playing on the television. The real clincher is the kiddie porn downloaded to his computer hard drive. The hard-copy pictures of kids getting screwed, they're printed and taped to the walls of his bedroom.

The bags of painkillers are stashed under his bed. The heroin and crack buried in his sugar canister.

Inside of one day, the world will go from loving Kenny Wilcox to hating him. Little Danny-Next-Door will go from a childhood icon to a monster.

In my version of that last evening, Kenneth Wilcox waved the gun around. He bellowed about how no one cared. The world had used and rejected him. He drank and popped pills all evening and said he wasn't afraid to die. In my version, he died after I'd gone home.

That next week, I sold the story. The last interview with a child star loved by millions of people all over the world. An interview done just hours before his neighbor found him dead, the victim of suicide.

The week after, I'm nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

A few weeks later, I win. That's only two thousand dollars, but the real payoff is long-term. Anymore, not a day goes by when I'm not turning work down. When my agent's fielding offers for me. No, I only do high-profile, big-money work. Big magazine cover stories. National audiences.

Anymore, my name means Quality. My byline means The Truth.

You look in my address book, and it's all names you know from movie posters. Rock stars. Best-selling authors. Everything I touch, I turn to Famous. I move from my apartment to a house with a yard for Skip to run around. We have a garden and a swimming pool. A tennis court. Cable television. We pay off the thousand-plus bucks we owe for the X-rays and the activated charcoal.

Of course, you can still turn on some cable network and see Kenneth Wilcox, the little boy he used to be, whistling and pitching baseballs, before he turned into a monster with gin spit on his face. Little Danny and his dog, walking barefoot through Heartland, Iowa. His syndicated ghost keeps my story alive, the contrast. People love knowing my truth about that little boy who seemed so happy.

“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”

This week, my dog digs up an onion and eats it.

Me, I'm calling vet after vet, trying to find someone who'll save her. At this point, money's no problem. I can pay anything.

Me and my dog, we have a great life. We're so happy. It's while I'm still on the phone, flipping through the telephone book, when my Skip, my baby, she stops breathing.

6

“Let's start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.

He'd say, “Let's start with a plot spoiler.”

The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.

We'd all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Mylar bag.

He'd say, “Let's get the big, big surprise over and done with.”

The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth.

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

That's what Mr. Whittier would tell you.

Smooth as glass, that's our Mr. Whittier. Buffed by pain. Polished and shining.

That's why we love conflict, he says. We love to hate. To stop a war, we declare war on it. We must wipe out poverty. We must fight hunger. We campaign and challenge and defeat and destroy.

As human beings, our first commandment is:

Something needs to happen.

Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.

The more Mrs. Clark talked, the more we could see this wouldn't be the Villa Diodati. The babe who wrote Frankenstein, she was the kid of two writers: professors famous for think-tank books called Political Justice and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They had famous smart people crashing at their house all the time.

We were no summer-house party of brainy bookworms.

No, the best story we'd bring out of this building would be just how we survived. How crazy Lady Baglady died cradled in our weeping arms. Still, that story would have to be good enough. Exciting enough. Scary and dangerous enough. We'd have to make sure it was.