Текст книги "Haunted"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Movie premiers. Album releases. Book launches. It was a steady stream of work, but give the wrong opinion and you're off the gravy train. A movie studio threatens to pull their retail display advertising, and—abracadabra—your byline disappears.

Me, I'm broke because one time I tried to warn people. One movie, I wrote that people might do better to spend their money somewhere else, and since then I'm out of the loop. Just one summer slasher movie and the power behind it, and I'm begging to write obituaries. To write photo captions. Anything.

It's a bald cheat, building a house of cards you don't get to knock down. You spend all those years piling up nothing, creating an illusion. Turning a human being into a movie star. Your real payday is at the back end of the deal. Then you get to pull out the rug. Knock down the cards. Show the handsome ladies' man cramming a gerbil up his ass. Reveal the girl-next-door shoplifting and stoned on painkillers. The goddess beating her kids with a wire hanger.

The editor's right. So is Ken Wilcox. His life is an interview no one will ever buy.

For prep, the whole week before we talk, I surf the Internet. I download files from the former Soviet Union. Here's a different kind of child star: Russian schoolboys without pubic hair, sucking off fat old men. Czech girls still waiting for their first period, getting butt-fucked by monkeys. I save all these files to one thin compact disk.

Another night, I clip a leash on Skip and risk a long walk through my neighborhood. Coming back to my apartment, my pockets are stuffed with plastic sandwich bags and little paper envelopes. Squares of folded aluminum foil. Percodans. OxyContins. Vicodins. Glass vials of crack and heroin.

The interview, I write all fourteen thousand words before Ken Wilcox even opens his mouth. Before we even sit down together.

Still, to keep up appearances, I bring my tape recorder. I bring a notepad and pretend to take notes with a couple dried-out pens. I bring a bottle of red wine spiked with Vicodin and Prozac.

At Ken's little house in the suburbs, you'd expect a glass case crammed with dusty trophies, glossy photos, civic awards. A memorial to his childhood. There's nothing like that. Any money he's got, it's in the bank, drawing interest. His house is just brown rugs and painted walls, striped curtains on each window. A bathroom with pink tile.

I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I'm getting every quote perfect.

And he's right. His life is more boring than a black-and-white summer rerun.

On the other hand, the story I already wrote is great. My version is all about little Kenny's long slide from the spotlight to the autopsy table. How he lost his innocence to a long list of network executives in his campaign to become Danny. To keep the sponsors happy, he was farmed out as a sexual plaything. He took drugs to stay thin. To delay the onset of puberty. To stay up all night, shooting scene after scene. No one, not even his friends and family, nobody knew the depths of his drug habit and perverted need for attention. Even after his career collapsed. Even becoming a D.V.M. was just to get access to good drugs and sex with small animals.

The more wine Ken Wilcox drinks, the more he says his life didn't start until Danny-Next-Door was canceled. Being little Danny Bright for eight seasons, that's only real the way your memories of second grade might seem real. Only blurry moments not connected. Each day, each line of dialogue was just something you learned long enough to pass a test. The pretty farmhouse in Heartland, Iowa, was just a false front. Inside the windows, behind the lace curtains, was bare dirt scattered with cigarette butts. The actor who played Danny's grandma, if they were speaking in the same shot, she used to spray spit. Her spit sterilized: more gin than saliva.

Sipping red wine, Ken Wilcox says his life now is so much more important. Healing animals. Saving dogs. With every swallow, his talking breaks up into single words spread wider and wider apart. Just before his eyes close, he asks how Skip is doing.

My dog, Skip.

And I tell him, Good, Skip is doing great.

And Kenny Wilcox, he says, “Good. I'm happy to hear it . . .”

He's asleep, still smiling, when I slip the gun into his mouth.

“Happy” doesn't do anybody any good.

A gun not registered to anybody. My hand in a glove, the gun in his mouth with his finger wrapped around the trigger. Little Kenny's on his sofa, stripped of his clothes, his dick smeared with cooking grease, and a video of his old show playing on the television. The real clincher is the kiddie porn downloaded to his computer hard drive. The hard-copy pictures of kids getting screwed, they're printed and taped to the walls of his bedroom.

The bags of painkillers are stashed under his bed. The heroin and crack buried in his sugar canister.

Inside of one day, the world will go from loving Kenny Wilcox to hating him. Little Danny-Next-Door will go from a childhood icon to a monster.

In my version of that last evening, Kenneth Wilcox waved the gun around. He bellowed about how no one cared. The world had used and rejected him. He drank and popped pills all evening and said he wasn't afraid to die. In my version, he died after I'd gone home.

That next week, I sold the story. The last interview with a child star loved by millions of people all over the world. An interview done just hours before his neighbor found him dead, the victim of suicide.

The week after, I'm nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

A few weeks later, I win. That's only two thousand dollars, but the real payoff is long-term. Anymore, not a day goes by when I'm not turning work down. When my agent's fielding offers for me. No, I only do high-profile, big-money work. Big magazine cover stories. National audiences.

Anymore, my name means Quality. My byline means The Truth.

You look in my address book, and it's all names you know from movie posters. Rock stars. Best-selling authors. Everything I touch, I turn to Famous. I move from my apartment to a house with a yard for Skip to run around. We have a garden and a swimming pool. A tennis court. Cable television. We pay off the thousand-plus bucks we owe for the X-rays and the activated charcoal.

Of course, you can still turn on some cable network and see Kenneth Wilcox, the little boy he used to be, whistling and pitching baseballs, before he turned into a monster with gin spit on his face. Little Danny and his dog, walking barefoot through Heartland, Iowa. His syndicated ghost keeps my story alive, the contrast. People love knowing my truth about that little boy who seemed so happy.

“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”

This week, my dog digs up an onion and eats it.

Me, I'm calling vet after vet, trying to find someone who'll save her. At this point, money's no problem. I can pay anything.

Me and my dog, we have a great life. We're so happy. It's while I'm still on the phone, flipping through the telephone book, when my Skip, my baby, she stops breathing.

6

“Let's start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.

He'd say, “Let's start with a plot spoiler.”

The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.

We'd all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Mylar bag.

He'd say, “Let's get the big, big surprise over and done with.”

The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth.

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

That's what Mr. Whittier would tell you.

Smooth as glass, that's our Mr. Whittier. Buffed by pain. Polished and shining.

That's why we love conflict, he says. We love to hate. To stop a war, we declare war on it. We must wipe out poverty. We must fight hunger. We campaign and challenge and defeat and destroy.

As human beings, our first commandment is:

Something needs to happen.

Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.

The more Mrs. Clark talked, the more we could see this wouldn't be the Villa Diodati. The babe who wrote Frankenstein, she was the kid of two writers: professors famous for think-tank books called Political Justice and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They had famous smart people crashing at their house all the time.

We were no summer-house party of brainy bookworms.

No, the best story we'd bring out of this building would be just how we survived. How crazy Lady Baglady died cradled in our weeping arms. Still, that story would have to be good enough. Exciting enough. Scary and dangerous enough. We'd have to make sure it was.

Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark were too busy droning on. We needed them to get rough with us. Our story needed them to flog and beat us.

Not bore us to death.

“Any call for world peace,” Mr. Whittier would say, “is a lie. A pretty, pretty lie.” Just another excuse to fight.

No, we love war.

War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.

“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”

We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.

We love terrorists. Hijackers. Dictators. Pedophiles.

God, how we love the television news. The pictures of people lining up beside a long, open grave, waiting to be shot by another new firing squad. The glossy newsmagazine photos of more everyday people torn to bloody shreds by suicide bombers. The radio bulletins about freeway pile-ups. The mud slides. The sinking ships.

His quivering hands telegraphing the air, Mr. Whittier would say, “We love when airplanes crash.”

We adore pollution. Acid rain. Global warming. Famine.

No, Mr. Whittier had no idea . . .

The Duke of Vandals found every bag of anything that included beets. Any silver Mylar pillows rattling with the sliced beets inside, dry as poker chips.

Saint Gut-Free poked a hole in every bag that held any kind of pork or chicken or beef. Meat being something he can never digest.

All the Mylar bags puffed full of nitrogen gas, they were arranged by food, stuffed into brown boxes of corrugated cardboard. In the boxes stenciled “Dessert” were bags of dried cookies, rattling the way seeds would inside a dried gourd. Inside the boxes stenciled “Appetizers,” freeze-dried chicken wings rattled like old bones.

Out of her fear of getting fat, Miss America found every box stenciled “Desserts” and used Chef Assassin's carving knife to poke holes in every bag.

Just to speed up our suffering. Fast-track us to enlightenment.

One hole, and the nitrogen would leak out. Bacteria and air would leak in. All the mold spores that were killing Miss Sneezy, carried on the warm damp air, they'd be eating and breeding in each silver pocket of sweet-and-sour pork, breaded halibut, pasta salad.

Before Agent Tattletale snuck into the lobby to ruin every crêpe Suzette, he'd make sure no one was around.

Before Countess Foresight crept into the lobby to stab every silver bag that might contain even trace amounts of cilantro, she made sure Agent Tattletale was gone.

We each only ruined the food we hated.

Cross-legged in the Arabian Nights gallery, among the plaster pillars carved to look like elephants standing on their back legs, rearing up to support the ceiling with their front feet, his teeth crunching another handful of dried sticks and rocks, Mr. Whittier would say, “In our secret heart's heart, we love to root against the home team.”

Against humanity. It's us against us. You, the victim of yourself.

We love war because it's the only way we'll finish our work here. The only way we'll finish our souls, here on earth: The big processing station. The rock tumbler. Through pain and anger and conflict, it's the only path. To what, we don't know.

“But we forget so much when we're born,” he says.

Being born, it's as if you go inside a building. You lock yourself inside a building with no windows to see out. And after you're inside any building long enough, you forget how the outside looked. Without a mirror, you'd forget your own face.

He never seemed to notice how one of us was always missing from the gallery. No, Mr. Whittier just talked and talked, while somebody was always sneaking downstairs to destroy any Mylar bag that listed green peppers as an ingredient.

That's how it happened. How no one knew everyone else had the same plan. We each just wanted to raise the stakes a little. To make sure our rescue team wouldn't find us pillowed in silver bags of rich food, suffering from nothing but boredom and gout. Each suffering survivor, fifty pounds heavier than when Mr. Whittier took us hostage.

Of course, we each wanted to leave enough food to last until we were almost rescued. Those last couple days, when we were really fasting, hungry and suffering—we could stretch that to a couple weeks in the retelling.

The book. The movie. The television miniseries.

We'd starve just long enough to get what Comrade Snarky called “Death Camp Cheekbones.” The more ins and outs your face has, the better Miss America says you'll look on television.

Those vermin-proof bags were so tough, we'd each begged to borrow a knife from Chef Assassin, from his beautiful set of paring knives, chef's knives, cleavers, filleting knives and kitchen shears. Except for the Missing Link with his bear-trap jaw; he'd just use his teeth.

“You are permanent, but this life is not,” Mr. Whittier would say. “You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever.”

No, we're only visiting, and Mr. Whittier knows that. And we're born here to suffer.

“If you can accept that,” he says, “you can accept anything that happens in the world.”

The irony is, if you can accept that—you'll never again suffer.

Instead, you'll run toward torture. You'll enjoy pain.

Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.

At one point, that evening, Chef Assassin walked into the salon, still holding a boning knife in one hand. He looked at Whittier and said, “The washing machine is broke. Now you have to let us go . . .”

Mr. Whittier looked up, still crunching a mouthful of dried turkey Tetrazzini, he said, “What's wrong with the washer?”

And Chef Assassin held up something in his other hand, not the knife, something loose and dangling. He said, “Some desperate, hostage cook cut off the plug-in . . .”

The object dangling from his hand.

It's after that we couldn't wash clothes, another plot point for the story that would be our cash cow.

At that point, Mr. Whittier groaned and slipped the fingers of one hand inside the top of his pants. He said, “Mrs. Clark?” His fingers pressed the spot inside his belt, and he said, “Now, that hurts . . .”

Watching him, twirling his rope of cut-off plug-in, Chef Assassin said, “I hope it's cancer.”

His fingers still in his pants, sunk in his Arabian cushions, Mr. Whittier bends double to put his head between his knees.

Mrs. Clark steps forward, saying, “Brandon?”

And Mr. Whittier slips to the floor, his knees pulled to his chest, moaning.

In our heads, for the scene in the movie, this scene only with a movie star twisting in fake pain on the red-and-blue Oriental carpet, in our heads, we're all writing down: “Brandon!”

Mrs. Clark squats down to lift the empty Mylar bag from where he's dropped it among the silk cushions. Her eyes twitch across the words stenciled there, and she says, “Oh, Brandon.”

All of us trying to be the camera behind the camera behind the camera. The last story in line. The truth.

In the future movie and TV miniseries version of this scene, we're all coaching a famous beauty-queen actress to say: “Oh my God, Brandon! Oh, dear sweet suffering Jesus!”

Mrs. Clark holds the bag for him to see, and she says, “You just ate the equivalent of ten turkey dinners . . .” She says, “Why?”

And Mr. Whittier moans. “Because,” he says, “I'm still a growing boy . . .”

In the future version, the beauty queen cries: “You're splitting apart inside! You're going to explode like a burst appendix!”

In the movie version, Mr. Whittier is screaming, his shirt stretched tight over his swelling belly, his fingernails claw the buttons open. Just then the tight skin starts to tear, the way a nylon stocking gaps open. Red blood spouts straight out, the way a whale clears its blowhole. A blood fountain that makes the audience scream.

In reality, his shirt looks a little tight. His hands unbuckle his belt. They pop open the top button of his pants. Mr. Whittier cuts a fart.

Mrs. Clark holds out a glass of water, saying, “Here, Brandon. Drink something.”

And Saint Gut-Free says, “No water. He'll only bloat more.”

Mr. Whittier, his body twists until he's stretched out on his stomach against the red-and-blue carpet. Each breath comes fast and short as a dog panting.

“It's his diaphragm,” Saint Gut-Free says. The food expanding in his stomach, it's already absorbing moisture and blocking the duodenum at the bottom. The ten turkey Tetrazzini dinners are expanding upward, compressing his diaphragm, making it so his lungs can't inhale.

Saying this, Saint Gut-Free is still eating handfuls of dried something from his own silver bag. Chewing and talking at the same time.

Another happening inside could be the stomach splitting, fouling the abdominal cavity with blood and bile and growing bits of turkey meat. Bacteria spilling from the small intestine. Leading to peritonitis, Saint Gut-Free says, an infection of the cavity wall.

In our movie version, Saint Gut-Free is tall with a straight nose and thick-framed glasses. He has a shock of thick, wild hair. A stethoscope hangs on his chest as he says duodenum and peritoneum. Not with his mouth full. In the movie, he holds out one hand, palm-up, and demands: “Scalpel!”

In the version based-on-a-true-story, we boil water. We give Mr. Whittier shots of brandy and a bullet to bite. We mop Saint Gut-Free's forehead with a little sponge while a clock tick-tocks, tick-tocks, tick-tocks, loud.

The noble victims saving their villain. The way we helped comfort poor Lady Baglady.

In reality, we just stand here. Our hands, waving away his fart smell. We're maybe wondering how Whittier will play this scene, if he'll live or die. We really need a director. Someone to tell each one of us what our character would do.

Mr. Whittier just moans, stroking his sides with his hands.

Mrs. Clark just leans over him. Her breasts looming, she says, “Here, someone help me get him to his room . . .”

Still nobody moves to help. We need for him to die. We can still make Mrs. Clark the evil villain.

Then Miss America says it. She steps up beside his bloated stomach, face-down, his shirttails pulled out of his pants, the elastic of his underwear showing as his waistband rides down. Miss America steps up and—oomph!—her shoe kicks into the stretched-tight side of his belly. It's then she says, “Now, where's the goddamn key?”

And Mrs. Clark bends an arm and elbows her back, away from the body. Mrs. Clark says, “Yes, Brandon. We need to get you to a hospital.”

In his own way, Mr. Whittier did. He gave us the key. His stomach pulling apart on the inside, the cavities of him filling with blood, the dried chips of turkey still expanding, soaking up blood and water and bile, getting bigger until the skin of his belly looks pregnant. Until his bellybutton pops out, poked out stiff as a little finger.

All of this, it takes place in the spotlight of Agent Tattletale's camera, him taping over the death of Lady Baglady. Replacing yesterday's tragic scene with today's.

The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder close, using the same cassette, betting this horror will be worse than the last.

This moment, it's a plot point we've never dared dream. The first-act climax that would make our lives worth cash money. Mr. Whittier's busting open, the event we could witness to become someone famous, a famous authority. Like Lady Baglady's ear, Mr. Whittier's belly splitting open was our ticket. A blank check. A free pass.

We were all soaking it up. Absorbing the event. Digesting the experience into a story. A screenplay. Something we could sell.

The way his pumpkin belly subsided a little, going a bit flat when the pressure collapsed his diaphragm. We studied how his face, his mouth stretched open, his teeth biting for more air. More air.

“An inguinal hernia,” Saint Gut-Free said. And we all said those words under our breath to better remember.

“To the stage . . . ,” Mr. Whittier says, his face buried in the dusty carpet. He says, “I'm ready to recite . . .”

An inguinal hernia . . . , we all echo in our heads. What's happened so far wouldn't make a good joke. All these idiots fooled into a building and trapped. The ringleader gets gas, and we escape. That's just NOT going to play.

Already, Mother Nature is planning to take off her choker of brass bells and sneak him some water.

Director Denial is planning to walk Cora Reynolds past his room and smuggle in a big pitcher of water.

The Missing Link sees himself tiptoeing to Mr. Whittier's dressing room all night long, ladling water down his throat until the man goes: ka-boom.

“Please, Tess?” Mr. Whittier says. He says, “Would you help me to bed?”

And we all jot a note in our heads: Tess and Brandon, our jailers.

“Hurry, to the stage . . . I'm cold,” Mr. Whittier says while Mother Nature helps him to his feet.

“Probably shock,” Saint Gut-Free says.

In the version we'll sell, he's already a goner. One villain will die, and his she-villain will torment the rest of us in her rage. Mistress Tess, holding us captive. Depriving us of food. Forcing us to wear dirty rags. We, being her innocent victims.

Saint Gut-Free stands to put an arm around Mr. Whittier. Mother Nature helps. Mrs. Clark follows with her glass of water. The Earl of Slander with his tape recorder. Agent Tattletale, his video camera.

“Trust me,” Saint Gut-Free says. “I happen to know a lot about human insides.”

As if we still needed her to die, Miss Sneezy sneezes into her fist. Miss Sneezy, the future ghost of here.

Wiping the spray from her arm, Comrade Snarky says, “Gross!” She says, “Were you raised in a plastic bubble or what?”

And Miss Sneezy says, “Yeah, pretty much.”

The Matchmaker excuses himself, saying he's tired and needs some sleep. And he sneaks down to the subbasement to sabotage the furnace.

He couldn't guess, but the Duke of Vandals has already beat him to that punch.

This leaves the rest of us sitting on the silk cushions and pillows spotted with mildew under the Arabian Nights dome. The silver bag of turkey Tetrazzini empty on the carpet. The carved elephant pillars.

In our heads, we're all jotting down the line: I happen to know a lot about human insides . . .

And nothing more happens. More nothing happens.

Until the rest of us unfold our legs and slap the dust from our clothes. We head for the auditorium, our fingers crossed we'll hear Mr. Whittier's last words.

Erosion

A Poem About Mr. Whittier

“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.”

So maybe we're supposed to fight and hate and torture each other . . .

Mr. Whittier rolls his wheelchair to the edge of the stage,

with his spotted hands, his bald head.

The folds of his slack face seem to hang

from his too-big eyes, his cloudy, watery-gray eyes.

The ring looped through one of his nostrils, the earphones of his CD player looped around the wrinkles and folds of his beef-jerky neck.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a black-and-white movie fragment:

Mr. Whittier's head is wallpapered with newsreel armies marching.

His mouth and eyes lost in the shadow boots and bayonets that worm across his cheeks.

He says, “Maybe suffering and misery is the point of life.”

Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory.

Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks:

A rolling drum filled with water and sand.

Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock,

some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore.

And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,

polishes our souls, refines us,

teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.

Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and again,

knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth.

Mr. Whittier, his teeth crowded too many in his narrow jawbone,

his dead-tumbleweed eyebrows, Mr. Whittier's bat-wing ears spread wide

with the shadow armies marching across,

he says,

“The only alternative is, we're all just eternally stupid.”

We fight wars. We fight for peace. We fight hunger. We love to fight.

We fight and fight and fight, with our guns or mouths or money.

And the planet is never one lick better than it was before us.

Leaning forward, both his hands clawed on the arms of his wheelchair,

as the newsreel armies march over his face, those moving tattoos

of their machine guns and tanks and artillery,

Mr. Whittier says: “Maybe we're living the exact way we're meant to live.”

Maybe our factory planet is processing our souls . . . just fine.

Dog Years

A Story by Brandon Whittier

These angels, they see themselves being. These agents of mercy.

Put together so much more nice than God had planned, with their rich husbands and good genetics and orthodontia and dermatology. These stay-at-home mothers with teenaged kids in school. At-home, but not homemakers. Not housewives.

Educated, sure, but not too smart.

They have help for all the rough work. Hired experts. They use the wrong scouring powder, and their granite countertops or limestone tile is worthless. The wrong fertilizer, and their landscaping gets burned. The wrong color paint, and all their careful effort, their investment, suffers. With the kids in school, and God at his office, the angels have all day to kill.

So here they are. Volunteers.

Where they can't screw up anything too important. Pushing the library cart around a retirement center. Between yoga and their book group. Hanging the Halloween decorations at an old-folks' home. Any old-age hospice, you'll find them, these angels of boredom.

These angels with their flat-soled shoes handmade in Italy. Their good intentions and art-history degrees and long afternoons to kill until the kids get home from soccer or ballet after school. These angels, pretty in their flower-print sundresses, their clean hair tied back. And smiling. Smiling. Every time you sneak a look.

With a nice word to say for every patient. A comment about what a nice collection of get-well cards you've arranged on the dresser. What nice African violets you grow in pots on your windowsill.

Mr. Whittier loves these angel women.

Always, for Mr. Whittier, the spotted, bald old man at the end of the hall, they say: What nice black-light, butt-rock concert posters he has taped above his bed. What a colorful skateboard he has propped beside the door.

Old Mr. Whittier, bug-eyed dwarf Mr. Whittier, he asks, “What's shaking, ladies?”

And the angels, they laugh.

At this old man who still plays at being so young. It's so sweet, his being so young at heart.

Sweet, goofy Mr. Whittier with his Internet surfing and snowboarder magazines. His CDs of hip-hop music. A brimmed cap, turned around backward on his head. Just like a high-school kid.

An ancient version of their own teenagers in school. They can't not flirt back. They can't not like him a little, with his spotted, backward-capped head between earphones, listening to head-banger rock so loud it leaks out.

Mr. Whittier in the hallway, parked in his wheelchair with one hand open, palm-up, he says, “Gimme five . . .”

And all the volunteer ladies slap his hand as they walk past.

Yes, please. That's how the angels want to turn ninety years old: Still with-it. Still hip to new trends. Not fossilized, the way they feel now . . .

In so many ways, this old man seems younger than any of the volunteers in their thirties or forties. These middle-aged angels a half or a third his age.

Mr. Whittier with his fingernails painted black. A silver ring looped through one honking-big, old-man nostril. Around his ankle, a tattoo of barbed wire shows above his cardboard bedroom slipper.

A clunky skull-face ring rattles loose around one stiff, little-stick finger.

Mr. Whittier blinking his milky-cataract eyes, saying, “How about you be my date for the high-school prom . . . ?”

All the angels, they blush. Giggling at this safe, funny old man. They sit on his wheelchair lap, their muscle-toned, personal-trained thighs perched on his sharp, bony knees.

It's only normal that, someday, an angel will gush. To the head nurse or an orderly, a volunteer will gush about what a wonderful youthful spirit Mr. Whittier has. How he's still so full of life.

At that, the nurse will look back, eyes not blinking, mouth open a moment, quiet a moment, before the nurse says, “Of course he acts young . . .”

The angel says, “We should all stay so full of life.”

So filled with high spirits. Such pep. So perky.

Mr. Whittier is just so inspirational. They say that a lot.