A rolling drum filled with water and sand.

Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock,

some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore.

And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,

polishes our souls, refines us,

teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.

Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and again,

knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth.

Mr. Whittier, his teeth crowded too many in his narrow jawbone,

his dead-tumbleweed eyebrows, Mr. Whittier's bat-wing ears spread wide

with the shadow armies marching across,

he says,

“The only alternative is, we're all just eternally stupid.”

We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight.

We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money.

And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us.

Leaning forward, both his hands clawed on the arms of his wheelchair,

as the newsreel armies march over his face, those moving tattoos

of their machine guns and tanks and artillery,

Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we're living the exact way we're meant to live.”

Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls . . . just fine.

Dog Years

A Story by Brandon Whittier

These angels, they see themselves being. These agents of mercy.

Put together so much more nice than God had planned, with their rich husbands and good genetics and orthodontia and dermatology. These stay-at-home mothers with teenaged kids in school. At-home, but not homemakers. Not housewives.

Educated, sure, but not too smart.

They have help for all the rough work. Hired experts. They use the wrong scouring powder, and their granite countertops or limestone tile is worthless. The wrong fertilizer, and their landscaping gets burned. The wrong color paint, and all their careful effort, their investment, suffers. With the kids in school, and God at his office, the angels have all day to kill.

So here they are. Volunteers.

Where they can't screw up anything too important. Pushing the library cart around a retirement center. Between yoga and their book group. Hanging the Halloween decorations at an old-folks' home. Any old-age hospice, you'll find them, these angels of boredom.

These angels with their flat-soled shoes handmade in Italy. Their good intentions and art-history degrees and long afternoons to kill until the kids get home from soccer or ballet after school. These angels, pretty in their flower-print sundresses, their clean hair tied back. And smiling. Smiling. Every time you sneak a look.

With a nice word to say for every patient. A comment about what a nice collection of get-well cards you've arranged on the dresser. What nice African violets you grow in pots on your windowsill.

Mr. Whittier loves these angel women.

Always, for Mr. Whittier, the spotted, bald old man at the end of the hall, they say: What nice black-light, butt-rock concert posters he has taped above his bed. What a colorful skateboard he has propped beside the door.

Old Mr. Whittier, bug-eyed dwarf Mr. Whittier, he asks, “What's shaking, ladies?”

And the angels, they laugh.

At this old man who still plays at being so young. It's so sweet, his being so young at heart.

Sweet, goofy Mr. Whittier with his Internet surfing and snowboarder magazines. His CDs of hip-hop music. A brimmed cap, turned around backward on his head. Just like a high-school kid.

An ancient version of their own teenagers in school. They can't not flirt back. They can't not like him a little, with his spotted, backward-capped head between earphones, listening to head-banger rock so loud it leaks out.

Mr. Whittier in the hallway, parked in his wheelchair with one hand open, palm-up, he says, “Gimme five . . .”

And all the volunteer ladies slap his hand as they walk past.

Yes, please. That's how the angels want to turn ninety years old: Still with-it. Still hip to new trends. Not fossilized, the way they feel now . . .

In so many ways, this old man seems younger than any of the volunteers in their thirties or forties. These middle-aged angels a half or a third his age.

Mr. Whittier with his fingernails painted black. A silver ring looped through one honking-big, old-man nostril. Around his ankle, a tattoo of barbed wire shows above his cardboard bedroom slipper.

A clunky skull-face ring rattles loose around one stiff, little-stick finger.

Mr. Whittier blinking his milky-cataract eyes, saying, “How about you be my date for the high-school prom . . . ?”

All the angels, they blush. Giggling at this safe, funny old man. They sit on his wheelchair lap, their muscle-toned, personal-trained thighs perched on his sharp, bony knees.

It's only normal that, someday, an angel will gush. To the head nurse or an orderly, a volunteer will gush about what a wonderful youthful spirit Mr. Whittier has. How he's still so full of life.

At that, the nurse will look back, eyes not blinking, mouth open a moment, quiet a moment, before the nurse says, “Of course he acts young . . .”

The angel says, “We should all stay so full of life.”

So filled with high spirits. Such pep. So perky.

Mr. Whittier is just so inspirational. They say that a lot.

These angels of mercy. These angels of charity.

Those foolish, foolish angels.

And the nurse or orderly will say, “Most of us did . . . have that kind of pep.” Walking away, the nurse will say, “When we were his age.”

He's not old.

Here's how the truth always leaks out.

Mr. Whittier, he suffers from progeria. The truth is, he's eighteen years old, a teenager about to die of old age.

One out of eight million kids develops Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. A genetic defect in the protein lamin A will make their cells fall apart. Aging them at seven times the normal rate. Making teenaged Mr. Whittier, with his crowded teeth and big ears, his veined skull and bulging eyes, making his body 126 years old.

“You could say . . . ,” he always tells the angels, waving away their concern with one wrinkled hand, “you could say I'm aging in dog years,”

In another year, he'll be dead of heart disease. Of old age, before he's twenty.

After this, the angel doesn't turn up for a while. The truth is, it's just too sad. Here's a kid, maybe younger than one of her own teenagers, dying alone in a nursing home. This kid, still so full of life and reaching out for help, to the only people around—to her—before it's too late.

This is too much.

Still, every yoga class, every PTA meeting, each time she looks at a teenager, this angel wants to cry.

She has to do something.

So she goes back, with her smile toned down a little. She tells him, “I understand.”

She smuggles in a pizza. A new video game. She says, “Make a wish, and I'll help make it come true.”

This angel, she wheels him out a fire exit for a day riding rollercoasters. Or hanging out at the mall. This teenaged geezer and a beautiful woman, old enough to be his mother. She lets him slaughter her at paintball, the colors wrecking her hair. His wheelchair. She takes a dive at laser tag. She half carries his wrinkled half-naked carcass to the top of a waterslide, again and again, all of one hot, sunny afternoon.

Because he's never been high, the angel steals dope from her kid's stash box and teaches Mr. Whittier how to use a bong. They talk. Eat potato chips.

The angel, she says her husband has become his career. Her kids are growing away from her. Their family is falling apart.