The walls of the Italian Renaissance lounge are dark green, streaked and clotted with black, a coat of paint that turns to malachite stone if you look hard enough.

In the Egyptian auditorium, the walls are plaster and papier-mâché, carved and molded into the pyramids, the sphinx. Giant seated pharaohs. Pointed-nose jackals. Rows and rows of big-eyed hieroglyphics. Above all this dangle the fronds of fake palm trees made from ribbons of black paper sagging with mold. Above the dusty treetops, the black plaster of the night sky is studded with a heaven of electric stars. The Big Dipper. Orion. The constellations, just stories people make up so they can understand that night sky. These stars, hazy behind clouds of cobweb.

Black mohair covers the seats, scratchy as dried moss on tree bark. The carpets are black, worn to the gray grid of canvas down the center of each aisle.

The trim in all the rooms is gold. Gold paint, bright as neon piping. Everything black in the auditorium, every seat-back and carpet-edge, it's outlined in this same bright gold.

If you want hard enough, the trim is real gold. Every room depends on your faith.

The group of us in our fairy-tale silk and velvet and dried blood, we're black moving against the blackness. In dim light, Mr. Whittier must seem to float in his red velvet cocoon, wound around with gold rope. No longer a character, Mr. Whittier has become a prop. Our puppet. A constellation we can put stories on to say we understand.

Her face behind a lace handkerchief, Comrade Snarky says, “I don't know why we should be crying.” She's breathing through the old perfume of the lace, trying to escape the stink. She says, “My character wouldn't be crying.” She says, “I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me.”

Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us—just her supporting cast.

Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back and says, “He what?”

And from behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, “Me, too. He raped me first.”

Saint Gut-Free says, “Well, what the hell . . . He poked me, too.”

As if poor skinny Saint Gut-Free had enough ass left to poke.

And Mrs. Clark says, “This is not funny. Not in the least.”

“Tough,” the Matchmaker tells her. “It's wasn't funny, either, when you raped me.”

Shaking his ponytail, the Duke of Vandals tells the Matchmaker, “You couldn't pay to get raped.”

And Mother Nature laughs—blowing scabs and blood all over.

The devil is dead. Long live the devil.

Here is our funeral for Satan. Mr. Whittier, he's the demon who'll make all our past sins look like nothing by comparison. The story of his crimes will leave us buffed and polished to the virgin-white color of victim.

More sinned against than sinning.

Still, his being dead leaves a job opening at the bottom that no one wants.

So, in the movie version, you'll see us weeping and forgiving Mr. Whittier while Mrs. Clark cracks the whip.

The devil is dead. Long live the devil.

We wouldn't last a moment without someone to blame.

Up the black-carpet aisle of the auditorium, through the red Chinese promenade, down the blue French stairs, we carry Mr. Whittier. Through the bright orange of the Mayan foyer, there Mother Nature pushes some white wig hair off her forehead, her brass bells jingling. She's wearing a pile of gray curls left over from some opera. The curls hang, wet from the sweat on her face, and Mother Nature says, “Is anybody else hot?”

The Duke of Vandals is panting with his shoulder under the weight of Mr. Whittier, panting and pulling at the collar of his tuxedo jacket.

Even the red silk bundle feels damp with sweat. The airplane-glue smell of ketones. Starvation.

And Reverend Godless says, “It's no wonder you're hot. Your wig's on backward.”

And the Matchmaker says, “Listen.”

Below us, the subbasement is dark. The wood stairs, narrow. Beyond that dark, something rumbles and growls.

Something mysterious needs to happen.

Something dangerous needs to happen.

“It's the ghost,” says the Baroness Frostbite, the greasy pucker of her mouth sagging open.

It's the furnace, running full-blast. The blower pumping hot air into the ducts. The gas burner chugging. The furnace that Mr. Whittier destroyed.

Somebody's fixed it.

From somewhere in the dark, a cat screams, just one time.

Something needs to happen. So we start down the wood stairs with Mr. Whittier's body.

All of us sweating. Wasting even more energy in this impossible new heat.

Following the body down, into the dark, Mother Nature says, “What do you know about wearing wigs?” With the stumps of both hands, her diamond ring flashing, she twists the gray wig around on her head, saying to Reverend Godless, “A big lug like you, what do you know about a vintage Christian Lacroix anything?”

And the Reverend Godless says, “A Lacroix tulip-skirt bustle?” He says, “You'd be surprised.”

Babble

A Poem About Reverend Godless

“Until Genesis, chapter eleven,” says the Reverend Godless, “we had no war.”

Until God set us to fight each other, for the rest of human history.

Reverend Godless onstage, his eyebrows are plucked and shaped

into twin-penciled arches, with, underneath each,

a rainbow of sparkle eye shadow in shades from red to green.

And on one bare bicep muscle, bulging,

below the spaghetti strap of a red-sequined evening gown,

tattooed there is a skull face with, under the chin, these words:

Death Before Dishonor.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

A travelogue that shows churches, mosques, and temples.

Religious leaders in jeweled robes

waving to crowds from bulletproofed town cars.

Reverend Godless, he says, “On a plain in the land of Shinar, all people toiled together.”

All humanity with a shared vision,

a great noble dream they worked side by side to fulfill

in this time before armies and weapons and battles.

Then God looked down to see their tower, the people's shared dream,

inching up, just a little too close for comfort.

And God said, “Behold, they are one people . . . and this is only the beginning

of what they will do . . . Nothing that they propose to do

will now be impossible for them . . .”

His words, in His Bible. The Book of Genesis, chapter eleven.

“So our God,” says Reverend Godless, his bare arms and calf muscles stippled

with the black marks of a shaved hair growing back in each pore,

he says, “Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race

across the face of the earth,

and shattered their language to keep His children apart.”

Part female impersonator, part retired U.S. Marine, the Reverend Godless,

sparkling in his red sequins, says,

“An almighty God this insecure?”

Who pits his children against each other, to keep them weak.

He says, “This is the God we're supposed to worship?”

Punch Drunk

A Story by the Reverend Godless

Webber looks around, his face pushed out of shape, one cheekbone lower than the other. One of his eyes is just a milk-white ball pinched in the red-black swelling under his brow. His lips, Webber's lips are split so deep in the middle he's got four lips instead of two. Inside all those lips, you can't see a single tooth left.

Webber looks around the jet's cabin, the white leather on the walls, the bird's-eye maple varnished to a mirror shine.