And Mrs. Clark was too afraid to look.

13

We have no food. No hot water. Pretty soon, we may be trapped here in the dark, Brailling our way from room to room, feeling, hand over hand, every moldy, soft patch of the wallpaper. Or crawling over the sticky carpet, our hands and knees crusted, heavy with dried mouse turds. Touching every stiff carpet stain, branched with arms and legs.

We have no heat, now that the furnace is broken, again—the way it should be.

Every so often, you hear Saint Gut-Free shout for help, but a shout soft as the last echo off a wall a long ways away.

The Saint calls himself the People's Committee for Getting Attention. All day, he's walking the length of every outside wall, banging on the locked metal fire-doors, screaming. But only banging with his open hand. And not yelling too loud. Just loud enough to say he tried. We tried. We made the best of the situation by being brave, strong characters.

We organized committees. We stayed calm.

We're still suffering, despite the ghost who snaked the sewer pipes one night and got the toilets to work. The ghost used pliers to turn the gas back on to the water heater, after Comrade Snarky threw away the valve handle. It even spliced the power cord to the washing machine and started a load of clothes.

To the Reverend Godless, our ghost is the Dalai Lama. To the Countess Foresight, it's Marilyn Monroe. Or it's Mr. Whittier's empty wheelchair, the chrome shining in his room.

During the rinse cycle, the ghost adds fabric softener.

With collecting the lightbulbs and shouting for help and undoing the ghost's good deeds, we have almost no time left over. Just keeping the furnace broken is a full-time job.

What's worse is, this is nothing we can put in the final screenplay. No, we have to look in pain. Hungry and hurting. We should be praying for help. Mrs. Clark should be ruling us with an iron fist.

None of this is going bad enough. Even our hunger is less than we'd want. A letdown.

“We need a monster,” Sister Vigilante says, her bowling ball in her lap and her elbows propped on it. Using a knife to pry up her fingernails, wedging the knife tip under and rocking the blade side to side to pop each nail up, then pull it off, she says, “The basis of any horror story is, the building has to work against us.”

Flicking away each fingernail, she shakes her head, saying, “It doesn't hurt when you think how much money the scars are worth.”

It's all we can do not to drag Mrs. Clark out of her dressing room and force her at knife point to bully and torture us.

Sister Vigilante calls herself the People's Committee for Finding a Decent Enemy.

Director Denial limps around with both feet wrapped in silk rags. All of her toes hacked off. Her left hand is nothing, just a paddle of skin and bone, just the palm, with all the fingers and thumb hacked off, this paddle wrapped huge with rags. Her right hand is just her thumb and index finger. Between them, she holds a severed finger with her dark-red polish still on the nail.

Holding this finger, the Director walks from room to room, the Arabian Nights gallery to the Italian Renaissance lounge, her saying, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” Saying, “Cora? Come to Mama, Cora, my baby. Dinner's ready . . .”

Every so often, you hear the voice of Saint Gut-Free shouting soft as a whisper, “Help us . . . Someone, please, help us . . .” Then the soft clap of his hands patting the exit doors.

Extra soft and quiet, just in case someone is right outside.

Director Denial calls herself the People's Committee for Feeding the Cat.

Miss Sneezy and the Missing Link, they're the People's Committee for Flushing the Rest of the Ruined Food. With every bag they flush, they force down a cushion or a shoe, anything that will make sure the toilets stay clogged.

Agent Tattletale knocks at Mrs. Clark's dressing-room door, saying, “Listen to me.” Saying, “You can't be the victim, here. We've voted you the next villain.”

Agent Tattletale calls himself the People's Committee for Getting Us a New Devil.

The lightbulb “peaches” the Matchmaker picks, that he lowers to Baroness Frostbite . . . That she packs so careful into boxes padded with old wigs . . . At the end of every day, the Earl of Slander takes them to the subbasement and breaks them on the concrete floor. He throws them the exact same way he'll tell the world Mrs. Clark broke them.

Already, the rooms seem bigger. Dimmer. The colors and walls disappear into the dark. Agent Tattletale videotapes the broken bulbs and Sister Vigilante's thrown-away fingernails on the floor. Identical half-moon shards of white.

Despite the ghost, our life is almost bad enough.

To Sister Vigilante, the ghost is a hero. She says we hate heroes.

“Civilization always works best,” Sister Vigilante says, picking the knife under another fingernail, “when we have a bogeyman.”

Voir Dire

A Poem About Sister Vigilante

“Some man sued for a million bucks,” Sister Vigilante says, “because of a dirty look.”

On her first day doing jury duty.

Sister Vigilante onstage, she holds a book to shield the front of her blouse.

Her blouse, frilly-yellow and edged with white lace.

The book, black leather with the title stamped in gold leaf across the cover:

Holy Bible

On her face, black-framed eyeglasses.

Her only jewelry, a charm bracelet of jiggling, trembling silver reminders.

Her hairdo dyed the same deep black as her shoe polish. As her Bible.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

Each lens of her glasses, it glares with the reflected image of electric chairs

and gallows. Grainy newsreel footage of prisoners sentenced to the gas chamber

or the firing squad.

Where her eyes should be,

no eyes.

That first day on jury duty, the next trial, a man tripped over a curb and sued

the luxury car he fell against.

Asking an award of fifty grand for being such a stupid butterfingers.

“All these people with no sense of physical coordination,” Sister Vigilante says.

They all had excellent blaming skills.

Another man wanted a hundred grand from a homeowner who left the garden hose

stretched across the backyard that tripped him,

breaking his ankle,

while he fled from the police in an otherwise totally unrelated case

of rape.

This crippled rapist, he wanted a fortune for his pain and suffering.

There, up onstage, the silver charms flashing against the lace of her cuff,

her Bible gripped between the fingers of both hands,

her fingernails painted the same yellow as her frills,

Sister Vigilante says she pays her taxes on time.

She never jaywalks. Recycles her plastic. Rides the bus to work.

“At that point,” says Sister Vigilante, her first day of jury duty, “I told the judge”

Some charm-bracelet version of:

“Fuck this shit.”

And the judge held her in contempt . . .

Civil Twilight

A Story by Sister Vigilante

It was the summer people quit complaining about the price of gasoline. The summer when they stopped bitching about what shows were on television.

On June 24, sunset was at 8:35. Civil twilight ended at 9:07. A woman was walking uphill on the steep stretch of Lewis Street. On the block between 19th and 20th Avenues, she heard a pounding sound. It was the sound a pile driver might make, a heavy stomping sound she could feel through her flat shoes on the concrete sidewalk. It came every few seconds, getting louder with each stomp, getting closer. The sidewalk was empty, and the woman stepped back against the brick wall of an apartment hotel. Across the street, an Asian man stood in the bright glass doorway to a delicatessen, drying his hands on a white towel. Somewhere in the dark between streetlights, something glass broke. The stomp came again and a car alarm wailed. The stomp came closer, something invisible against the night. A newspaper box blew over sideways, crashing into the street. The crash came again, she says, and the windows blew out of a glass telephone booth only three parked cars away from where she stood.