Her fingers are just stubs and knuckles. Only her index fingers are left for dialing telephones after she's famous. Punching buttons on a cash machine. Fame already reducing her from something with three dimensions to something flat.

Mother Nature, Saint Gut-Free, Reverend Godless, we're all dressing in black before we carry Mr. Whittier down to the subbasement. Before we play this next important scene.

Never mind that our funeral is just a rehearsal. We're just stand-ins for the real funeral, to be played by movie stars in front of cameras after we're discovered. By doing this, wrapping Mr. Whittier and tying his body into a bundle, then delivering him to the subbasement for a ceremony—this way we'll all have the same experience. We'll all be telling the same tragic story to the reporters and police.

If Mr. Whittier is stinking or not, it's hard to tell. Miss Sneezy and Reverend Godless carry the silver bags of spoiled food, each bag leaking a trail of stink juice. Trailing drips and spots of stink, they carry the bags across the lobby to the restrooms and flush them down the toilet.

“Not being able to smell,” Miss Sneezy says, and sniffs, hard, “it helps.”

This works fine, one bag at a time. Until Reverend Godless tries to hurry, when the smell gets choking-bad. Dry-heaves-bad. The stink soaks into their clothes and hair. The first time they try to flush two bags together, the toilets start to clog and overflow. Another toilet clogs. Already, the water is flooding out, swamping the blue carpet in the lobby. The bags, stuck in some main sewer pipe, they soak up water, swelling the way the turkey Tetrazzini killed Mr. Whittier, clogging the main pipe so even the toilets that look fine, they back up.

None of the toilets will work. The furnace and water heater are broken. We still have boxes of food, rotting. Mr. Whittier is not our biggest problem.

According to Sister Vigilante's calendar watch and Miss America's grown-out brown roots, we've been here about two weeks.

As he does the last of her brass buttons, Saint Gut-Free leans in to kiss Mother Nature, saying, “Do you love me?”

“I pretty much have to,” she says, “if the romantic subplot is going to work.”

Dead Lord Baglady sparkling on her finger, Mother Nature wipes the back of one hand across her lips, saying, “Your saliva tastes terrible . . .”

Saint Gut-Free spits in his palm and licks the spit back into his mouth. He sniffs his empty hand, saying, “Terrible, how?”

“Ketones,” Mrs. Clark says to nobody. Or to everybody.

“Sour,” Mother Nature says. “Like a lemon-and-airplane-glue aromatherapy candle.”

“It's starvation,” Mrs. Clark says, tying a gold silk rope around the bundle of Mr. Whittier. “As you burn up your body fat, the acetone concentration increases in your blood.”

Saint Gut-Free sniffs his hand, the snot rattling inside his head.

Reverend Godless lifts one arm to sniff underneath. There, the damp taffeta is darker black with sweat, in his pores, the memory of too much Chanel No. 5.

Lugging a body up- and downstairs, we're wasting our valuable body fat.

Still, we should have a gesture of mourning, says Sister Vigilante, still clutching her Bible. With Mr. Whittier wrapped and being carried to the subbasement, rolled tight in a red velvet curtain from the imperial-Chinese promenade, and tied with gold silk ropes from the lobby, we should stand around him to talk profound. We should sing a hymn. Nothing too religious, just whatever will play best.

We draw straws to see who has to weep.

More and more, we leave room open in every group for Agent Tattletale's camera. We speak so the Earl of Slander's tape recorder will get every word. The same tape or memory card or compact disk getting used, over and over. We erase our past with our present, on the gamble that the next moment will be sadder, more horrible or tragic.

More and more, something worse needs to happen.

Mr. Whittier's been dead for days or hours. It's hard to tell since Sister Vigilante started turning the lights on and off. At night, we hear someone walking around, great booming footsteps, a giant coming down the lobby stairs in the dark.

Still, something more terrible needs to happen.

For market share. For dramatic appeal.

Something more awful needs to happen.

From his dressing room, backstage, we carry Mr. Whittier across the stage and up the center aisle of the auditorium. We carry him through the blue velvet lobby and down the stairs to the orange-and-gold Mayan foyer in the first basement.

Sister Vigilante says her watch keeps resetting itself. That's a classic sign of a haunting. The Baroness Frostbite claims she found a cold spot in the Gothic smoking room. In the Arabian Nights gallery, you can see your breath steaming in the cold air above the cushion where Mr. Whittier used to sit. The Countess Foresight says it's the ghost of Lady Baglady we hear walking around after lights-out.

Following behind in the funeral procession, Director Denial: “Has anybody seen Cora Reynolds?”

Sister Vigilante says, “Whoever took my bowling ball, give it back and I promise not to kick your ass . . .”

Leading the procession, cradling the lump that would be Mr. Whittier's head, Mrs. Clark says, “Has anyone seen Miss America?”

After this is over, it would never work to shoot the movie here. After we're discovered, this place will become a landmark. A National Treasure. The Museum of Us.

No, whatever production company will just have to build sets to copy each of the big rooms. The blue velvet French Louis XV lobby. The black mohair Egyptian auditorium. The green satin Italian Renaissance lounge. The yellow leather Gothic smoking room. The purple Arabian Nights gallery. The orange Mayan foyer. The red imperial-Chinese promenade. Each room a different deep color, but all with the same gold accents.

Not rooms, Mr. Whittier would say, but settings. We carry his wrapped body through these echoing big boxes where people become a king or an emperor or duchess for the price of a movie ticket.

Locked in the office behind the lobby snack bar, that little closet of varnished pine walls with its ceiling sloped under the lobby staircase, there the filing cabinets are packed solid with printed programs and invoices, booking schedules and time-clock punch cards. Those sheets of paper turning to dust along their edges, printed across the top of each page it says: Liberty Theater. Some are printed: Capital Theater. Some printed: Neptune Vaudeville House. Others printed: Holy Convention Church. Others: Temple of Christian Redemption. Or: Assembly of Angels. Or: Capital Adult Theater. Or: Diamond Live Burlesque.

All these different places, they all had this same address.

Here, where people have knelt in prayer. And knelt in semen.

All the screams of joy and horror and salvation still contained and stifled inside these concrete walls. Still echoing in here, with us. Here, our dusty heaven.

All these different stories will end with our story. After the thousand different realities of plays and movies, religion and strippers, this building will become, forever, the Museum of Us.

Every crystal chandelier, the Matchmaker calls it a “peach tree.” The Gothic smoking room, Comrade Snarky calls it the “Frankenstein Room.”

In the Mayan foyer, Reverend Godless says the orange carvings are bright as a runway spotlight shining through the silk petals of a tulip sewn to a vintage Christian Lacroix bustle . . .

In the Chinese promenade, the silk wallpaper is a red dye that's never been in the daylight. Red as the blood of a restaurant critic, says Chef Assassin.

In the Gothic smoking room, the wing chairs are covered in a rich yellow leather that's never bleached a moment in the sun. Not since it covered a cow, says the Missing Link.