In the steel blade of a straight razor, the handle, chromium, scrolled and heavy—reflected there, Claire can see her future.

There, among the shaving mugs and horsehair brushes. Tall stained-glass church windows. Beaded evening bags.

Alone in the shop with Marilyn Monroe's lost child. Alone in this museum of things that no one wanted. Everything dirty with the reflection of something terrible.

Telling the story now, locked in the bathroom stall, Claire says how she picked up the razor and kept walking, down every aisle, always peeking at the blade to see if it showed her the same scene.

Telling her story now, sitting in the bathroom at the back of the antique store, Claire says it's not easy, being a gifted psychic.

The truth is, Claire's not easy to be married to. Over dinner at a restaurant, she may be listening, then her entire body will shudder. One hand will fly to cover her eyes, and her head will rear back and twist away from you. Still shaking, she'll peek out at you from between her fingers. A beat later, she'll sigh and put one hand against her mouth in a fist, biting the knuckle but looking at you without a word.

When you ask her what's wrong . . .

Claire will say, “You don't want to know. It's too awful.”

But when you press her to tell . . .

Claire will say, “Just promise me. Promise you'll stay away from all cars for the next three years . . .”

The truth is, even Claire knows she can be wrong. To test herself, she picks up a polished silver cigarette-case. And reflected there is her future: her holding the straight razor.

When it's closing time, she walks to the front of the shop, just in time to watch the old man turn the sign from “Open” to “Closed.” He was pulling down the shade that covered the window in the front door. The shop display window was cluttered with egg cups. Chenille bathrobes and bedspreads. Perfume bottles shaped like Southern belles wearing hoop skirts. Dead butterflies framed behind glass. Rusted birdcages. Railroad lanterns with shades of red or green glass. Folding silk fans. No one on the street could see inside.

The old-man cashier says, “Made up your mind?” The jar is back, locked in the glass cabinet next to his register. In the white murk, only a dark eye and the shell of a tiny ear show through.

Reflected in the jar's curved side, distorted there, while the old man had told the story of Monroe's murder, Claire had seen something else: A man tipping a small bottle between two lips. A face rolling back and forth against a pillow. The man wiping the lips with his shirtsleeve. His eyes settling on the bedside table. The phone and lamp and the jar.

In Claire's vision, the man's face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.

That reflected face, it's the old-man cashier, without his wrinkles. With lots of brown hair.

Behind the counter, the jar just sits there, throbbing with energy. Glowing with power. A sacred relic trying to tell her something important. A time capsule of stories and events wasted here, locked in a glass case. More compelling than the best television series. More honest than the longest documentary. A primary history source. A real player. The child sits there, waiting for Claire to rescue it. To listen.

Wanting justice. Revenge.

Still watched by the security cameras, Claire holds up the straight razor. She says, “I want to buy this, but I don't see a price on it . . .”

And the old man leans over the counter for a closer look.

Outside the shopwindows, the street is empty. The security video monitors show the store, every aisle and corner, empty.

In the monitor, the old man falls backward, smashing the glass curio cabinet behind him, then sliding to the floor in a mess of broken glass and blood. The jar tipping, then falling, then broken.

Calling now, from a bathroom stall, Claire Upton tells her husband, “It was a doll. A plastic baby doll.”

Her purse and coat and umbrella spattered with sticky red.

On the phone, she says, “Do you know what this means?”

And again, she asks how best to destroy a video camera.

20

The Baroness Frostbite leans closer, a steaming bowl of something liquid cupped in her hand, and she says, “No carrots. No potatoes. Now, drink it.”

And, curled on her bed, in the camera spotlight, Miss America says, “No.” She looks at the rest of us crowded outside the doorway, Director Denial included, then Miss America turns away to face the concrete wall, saying, “I know what that is . . .”

The Baroness Frostbite says, “You're still bleeding.”

Leaning into the room, Director Denial says, “You need to eat something soon or you'll die.”

“Then let me die,” Miss America says, her face muffled in the pillow.

All of us in the hallway, listening. Recording. Witnesses.

The camera behind the camera behind the camera.

The Baroness Frostbite leans closer with the soup. In the rising steam of it, her mutilated lips reflected in the shimmering hot grease that floats on top, the Baroness says, “But we don't want you to die.”

Still facing the wall, Miss America says, “Since when? The rest of you, you'll only have to split the story one less way.”

“We don't want you to die,” the Reverend Godless says, from the doorway, “because we don't have a freezer.”

Miss America turns to look at the bowl of hot soup. She stares at our faces, leaned halfway into her dressing room. The teeth inside our mouths, waiting. Our tongues, swimming in drool.

Miss America says, “Freezer?”

And the Reverend Godless makes a fist and knocks on his forehead, the way you'd knock on a door, saying, “Hello?” He says, “We need you to stay alive until the rest of us are hungry again.”

Her baby was the first course. Miss America will be the main course. Dessert is anybody's guess.

The tape recorder in the Earl of Slander's hand, it's ready to tape over her last scream with her next. Agent Tattletale's camera is focused to videotape over everything so far, in order to catch our next big plot point.

Instead, Miss America asks, Is this how it will go? Her voice shrill and shaky, a bird's song. Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another—until we're all dead?

“No,” Director Denial says. Brushing cat hair off her sleeve, she says, “Just some of us.”

And Miss America says she doesn't mean just here, in the Museum of Us. She means life. Is the whole world just people eating up other people? People attacking and destroying each other?

And Director Denial says, “I know what you meant.”

The Earl of Slander writes that down in his notepad. The rest of us, nodding.

The Mythology of Us.

Still holding the soup, looking at her own reflection in the grease on top, the Baroness Frostbite says, “I used to work in a restaurant, in the mountains.” She dips a spoon into the bowl and brings it steaming toward Miss America's face.

“Eat,” the Baroness says. “And I'll tell you how I lost my lips . . .”

Absolution

A Poem About the Baroness Frostbite

“Even if God won't forgive us,” says the Baroness Frostbite, “we can still forgive Him.”

We should show ourselves to be bigger than God.

The Baroness onstage, she tells most people, “Gum disease,”

when they look too long at what's left

of her face.

Her lips are only the ragged edge of her skin,

greased red with lipstick.

Her teeth, inside:

the yellow ghost of every cup of coffee,

and every cigarette in her middle-aged life.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

The shifting, falling color of snow flurries.