4

In the blue velvet lobby, something comes thudding down the stairs from the shadows of the first balcony. Step by step, the thudding gets louder until it's rumbling, round-dark, rolling down from the dim second floor. It's a bowling ball, thudding down the center of the staircase. Rolling black-silent across the lobby's blue carpet, Sister Vigilante's bowling ball passes Cora Reynolds where he licks his paws, then past Mr. Whittier drinking instant coffee in his wheelchair, then past Lady Baglady and her diamond husband, then the ball knocks, heavy-black, through the double doors, disappearing into the auditorium.

“Packer,” Lady Baglady tells her diamond, “there's something locked in here with us.” Making her voice low, almost a whisper, she asks the diamond, “Is it you?”

That little square of glass you're only supposed to break in the event of a fire, Miss America has already broken it. Every little window framed in red-painted metal with a little hammer hanging next to it on a chain, she breaks the glass and pulls the switch inside. Miss America does this in the lobby. Then in the red-lacquered, Chinese-restaurant-styled promenade with all its carved plaster Buddhas. Then in the Mayan-temple-styled foyer in the basement with its leering carved warrior faces. Then the Arabian Nights gallery behind the second-balcony boxes. Then in the projection booth tucked up against the roof.

Then nothing happens. No bells ring. No one comes to chop through the locked fire doors to rescue her. To rescue us.

Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.

Mr. Whittier sits on a blue velvet sofa in the lobby, under the glass leaves of a chandelier big as a sparkling gray cloud above him.

Already, the Matchmaker was calling the chandeliers “trees.” The row of them hanging down the center of each long salon or gallery or lounge. He called them orchards of glass grown out of chains wrapped in velvet and rooted in the ceiling.

Each of us seeing our own private at-home reality in these same big rooms.

The Earl of Slander is writing in his notepad. Agent Tattletale, videotaping. Countess Foresight, wearing her turban. Saint Gut-Free, eating.

With her whole arm, Director Denial tosses a fake mouse, and it lands halfway to the auditorium doors. With the other hand, she rubs the shoulder of her throwing arm while the cat, Cora Reynolds, brings the mouse back, his paws raising a rooster tail of boiling dust from the carpet.

Watching them, one arm folded across her chest to support her breasts, one hand twisted around to rub the back of her neck, Mrs. Clark says, “In the Villa Diodati, they had five cats.”

Saint Gut-Free eats instant crêpe Suzette out of a Mylar bag with a plastic spoon.

Shaping her fingernails with an emery board, Lady Baglady watches every dripping pink spoonful move from the bag to his mouth, and she says, “That can't be any good.”

And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.

That's until Miss America comes to stand in the middle of us, saying, “This is illegal.” What Mr. Whittier has done is kidnapping. He's holding people against their will, and that's a felony.

“The sooner you do as you promised,” Mr. Whittier says, “the sooner these three months will go by.”

Throwing the fake mouse, Director Denial says, “What is the Villa Diodati?”

“It's a house on Lake Como,” Lady Baglady tells her fat diamond.

“Lake Geneva,” Mrs. Clark says.

Looking back, it was Mr. Whittier's stand that we're always right.

“It's not a matter of right and wrong,” Mr. Whittier would say.

Really, there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality.

You can never set off to do the wrong thing.

You can never say the wrong thing.

In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take—what you do or say or how you choose to appear—is automatically right the moment you act.

His hand shaking as he lifts his cup, Mr. Whittier says, “Even if you were to tell yourself, ‘Today, I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way . . . from a dirty boot.' Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.”

Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right.

Even when you say, “I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong . . .” you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot.

“No matter how stupid your idea,” Mr. Whittier would say, “you're doomed to be right because it's yours.”

“Lake Geneva?” Lady Baglady says with her eyes closed. Pinching her temples, rubbing them between the thumb and index finger of one hand, she says, “The Villa Diodati is where Lord Byron raped Mary Shelley . . .”

And Mrs. Clark says, “It was not.”

We're all condemned to be right. About everything we can consider.

In this shifting, liquid world where everyone is right and any idea is right the moment you act on it, Mr. Whittier would say, the only sure thing is what you promise.

“Three months, you promised,” Mr. Whittier says through the steam of his coffee.

It's then something happens, but not much.

In that next look, you feel your asshole get tight. Your fingers fly to cover your mouth.

Miss America is holding a knife in one hand. With her other hand, she grips the knot of Mr. Whittier's necktie, pulling his face up toward her own. Mr. Whittier's coffee, dropped, spilled steaming-hot on the floor. His hands hang, shaking, swirling the dusty air at each side.

Saint Gut-Free's silver bag of instant crêpe Suzette drops, spilled out on the cornflower-blue carpet, the sticky red cherries and reconstituted whipped cream.

And the cat runs over for a taste.

Her eyes almost touching Mr. Whittier's, Miss America says, “So I'm right if I kill you?”

The knife, one of the set that Chef Assassin brought in his aluminum suitcase.

And Mr. Whittier looks back into her eyes, so close their lashes touch when they blink. “But you'll still be trapped,” he says, his few gray hairs hanging loose from the back of his skull. His voice choked to a croak by his necktie.

Miss America waves the knife at Mrs. Clark, saying, “What about her? Does she have a key?”

And Mrs. Clark shakes her head, No. Her eyes popped-open wide, but her baby-doll pout still silicone-frozen.

No, the key is hidden somewhere in the building. A place only Mr. Whittier would look.

Still, even if she kills him she's right.

If she sets fire to the building and hopes the firemen will see the smoke and rescue her before we all suffocate—she's right, again.

If she sticks the knife point in Mr. Whittier's milky-cataract eyeball and pops it out on the floor for the cat to bat around—she's still right.

“In the face of that,” Mr. Whittier says, his necktie pulled tight in her fist, his face turning dark red, his voice a whisper, “let's start by doing what we promised.”

The three months. Write your masterpiece. The end.

The chrome wheelchair clatters when he lands, dropped by Miss America's hand. Carpet dust fills the air, and the chair's two front wheels lift off the carpet when he lands so hard. Both Mr. Whittier's hands go to his collar, to pull his tie loose. He leans down to take his coffee cup off the floor. His gray comb-over hairs, hanging straight down, fringe around the sides of his spotted bald head.

Cora Reynolds keeps eating the cherries and cream off the dusty carpet beside Saint Gut-Free's chair.

Miss America says, “This is so not over . . .” And she shakes the blade of the knife at everyone in the lobby. One fast sweep of her arm, a shudder and twitch of her muscles, and the knife is now stuck in the back of a palace chair across the room. The blade buried and humming in blue velvet, the handle still shivers.

From behind his video camera, Agent Tattletale says, “Print it.”