It’s a marriage.

 

 All afternoon, slapping mosquitoes up on the hillside behind her trailer, I was squatted down, hidden back in the bushes. Watching her through the viewfinder on my video camera, I was waiting for my chance to hit theRECORD button. All Sarah had to do was bend over and pick up a white tank of propane. Just five minutes of her unloading heavy bags of cat food from her old hatchback car, and this job would be done. Nothing left to do but check in my rental car and catch the next plane home.

 

 Of course, I’m sitting here in her shed because I tripped and fell. She came and found me, after it got dark, after the mosquitoes were worse than anything—gunshots, knife wounds—she could ever do to me. I had to yell for help, and she put one arm around my waist and half carried me this far. She set me here. To rest a minute, she said.

 

 Nobody’s saying I’m too original. I’m a bird-watcher, I tell her. This area is famous for the red-crested hairy plover. This time of year the blue-necked pheasant comes here to mate.

 

 She’s got my video camera, fooling with the little playback screen pulled out, and she says, “Oh, please. Show me.” The camera makes a buzz, a click, and the redPLAY light blinks on, bright. She watches the screen, smiling, stoned.

 

 I tell her, No. I reach for the camera, to take it back, but too fast. I tell her, No. Too loud.

 

 And Sarah Broome, she steps away, pulling her elbows and her hands holding the camera out of my reach. Light from the little screen flickering soft as candlelight on her face, she smiles and keeps watching.

 

 She keeps watching, but her face relaxes, her smile drooping, her cheeks sagging into jowls.

 

 It’s footage of her lifting sacks of steer manure, slippery white plastic bags packed with cow crap. Each bag printed in black letters: Net Weight Fifty Pounds.

 

 Her eyes still pinned on the little screen, all the muscles of her face squeeze together in the middle. Her eyebrows. Her lips. Here’s the five minutes that will end life as she knows it. My short stalk-umentary that’s going to put her back into blue-collar slavery.

 

 It could be her back healed. It could be she faked it all, but what’s clear is, she’s no invalid. With the arms on her, she could wrestle alligators for a living.

 

 Sarah Broome, I just want to tell you I understand. Right this minute, while you read the back of a box of rat poison, I want you to know—that first week of being totally crippled, completely helpless and disabled, it was hands-down the best week of my adult life.

 

 Here’s the dream of every farmer. Every railroad brakeman and waitress who ever took a week’s vacation to go camping. One lucky day, a freight train takes a corner too fast and derails, or they step in a spilled milkshake, and they end up living down some no-name gravel road. Happy cripples.

 

 It’s maybe not the Good Life, but it’s the Good-Enough Life. The washer and dryer sitting on a covered deck next to the trailer. Everything painted metal, pimpled and blistered with rust.

 

 If she’d just listen, I could tell Ms. Broome just where to find my carotid artery. Or where on my head to connect when she swings the sledgehammer.

 

 No, Sarah Broome just tells me to wait a spell. She shuts the doors to the shed and leaves me sitting here inside. A padlock snaps.

 

 Right this minute, she’s sharpening a knife. She’s looking through her clothes, her slacks and blouses, jeans and sweaters, looking for an outfit she’ll never again want to wear.

 

 Waiting for her, I’m yelling for her not to feel bad. I’m yelling that what she’s doing is all right. It’s the only perfect way for all of this to end.

 

  

 

 Standing behind the lobby snack bar, Agent Tattletale tells us, “Turns out, she was smarter than me, that Sarah Broome.”

 

 Instead of killing him, she left the video camera recording. She got the story of his past on tape. The murder of Lewis Lee Orleans. And after she’d hidden the tape, she drove him to the hospital.

 

 “That,” the Agent tells us, “is what I’ll take for a happy ending . . .”

 

 

 

 

17.

 

 Some stories, Mr. Whittier would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up.

 

 Miss America is clutching her belly in both hands, squatting on the yellow seat of a wing chair in the Gothic smoking room, rocking forward and back with a shawl around her shoulders. If her belly looks big, or if she’s just overdressed, we can’t tell. She rocks, her arms and hands lined with the swollen red welts and scabs from cat scratches. She says, “You ever hear of CMV, cytomegalovirus? It’s deadly to pregnant women, and cats carry it.”

 

 “If you feel bad about that cat,” the Missing Link says, “you should.”

 

 Holding her belly and rocking, Miss America says, “It was either that cat or me . . .”

 

 We’re all of us sitting in the “Frankenstein Room,” in front of the yellow-and-red glass fireplace, watching each other. Making mental note of each gesture and line of dialogue. Taping over every moment, every event, every emotion with the next.

 

 Sitting in a yellow leather wing chair, the Missing Link turns to the Countess Foresight in the next chair and says, “So? Who did you kill to get here?”

 

 Everyone pretends not to know what he means.

 

 Each of us trying to be the camera, not the subject.

 

 “Doesn’t it seem like we’re all hiding out from something?” the Missing Link says. With his long nose, his awning of a single dense eyebrow, his beard, he says, “Why else would people walk through that door with Whittier—a man they don’t really know?”

 

 On the yellow silk wallpaper, between the tall, pointed windows of stained glass with the eternal twilight of fifteen-watt lightbulbs behind them, on the yellow wallpaper, Saint Gut-Free has drawn hash marks to count off our days so far. With just the thumb and forefinger he has left on one hand, he holds a pastel crayon and makes one mark for every day Sister Vigilante turns on the power.

 

 On the fit-stone floor, Agent Tattletale rolls back and forth with the pink exercise wheel, trying to lose more weight.

 

 The furnace is broken—again. The water heater, too. The toilets, stuffed and choked with popcorn and dead cat. The washing machine and dryer are both hairy with yanked and hacked-off wires.

 

 People piss in a bowl and carry it to a sink. Or they hike their skirt and piss in the dark corner of some huge, grand room.

 

 Us in our fairy-tale wigs and velvet, killing each day in these echoing cold chambers, in the stink of piss and sweat, this is what fancy court life was like for the aristocracy a couple centuries ago. All those palaces and castles that look clean and elegant in today’s movie version, in reality—brand-new, they were stinking and cold.

 

 According to Chef Assassin, the kitchens in French châteaux were so far from the royal dining rooms that the food would arrive at dinner cold. That’s why the French invented their zillion thick sauces, as blankets to keep food hot until it arrived at the table.

 

 Us, we’ve found all the scavenger-hunt items: the bowling ball, the exercise wheel, the cat.

 

 “Our humanity isn’t measured by how we treat other people,” the Missing Link says. Fingering the layer of cat hair on his coat sleeve, he says, “Our humanity is measured by how we treat animals.”

 

 He looks at Sister Vigilante, who looks at her wristwatch.

 

 In a world where human rights are greater than at any time in history . . . in a world where the overall standard of living is at a peak . . . in a culture where each person is held responsible for their life—here, the Missing Link says, animals are fast becoming the last real victims. The only slaves and prey.

 

 “Animals,” the Missing Link says, “are how we define humans.”

 

 Without animals, there would be no humanity.

 

 In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .

 

 “Maybe that’s how the folks at the Villa Diodati kept from killing each other, all those rainy days, trapped indoors,” the Missing Link says.

 

 By having their big collection of dogs and cats and horses and monkeys, to make them behave like human beings.

 

 Looking at Miss America, her eyes red and her face sweating with fever, the Missing Link says how, in the future, the people protesting outside clinics—those people holding picket signs that show smiling babies, those people cursing and spitting on expectant mothers—in that miserable, crowded world, the Link says, “Those folks will rail against the few selfish women who still choose to give birth . . .”