The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (15 page)

Look at those self-important, talented kids I hired, which was a great honor. They’re running wild because my docent’s asleep at the switch and the only other people in the building are The Committee, whom I
do not trust
, up there in the observation booth, thinking they’re perfectly safe. It’s egregious. They’re disgusting. Every one of them!

Even God would push the plunger. But wait! What’s this?

Camera A just picked up activity down in the Realist Writers’ Courtyard. Looks like some kind of—wait, it is!

A statue. I didn’t order that! Five men are rolling it off a truck onto a forklift as we speak.

Now the man in the bucket truck is attaching padded ropes so the crane operator can hoist the figure to its feet.

As the ground crew tugs the ropes, the felt blankets drop, revealing a rather handsome …

It looks like a … Why, it’s a …

I didn’t order that!

Handsome bronze. A handsome bronze is going up in the main courtyard without my … Not a bad looking fellow, now that I think about it, but this is nothing I approved. I wasn’t even consulted. Plunger time! But wait. Who is he, and why did I not see sketches or site plans? It’s some great writer, I suppose, although it looks a little bit like … but what great writer wears a topcoat like mine and wears a homburg that looks just like mine, and who else carries the Gucci briefcase with a special holster for my click-n-switch sword cane, just in case? This is so …

Oh!

Very well, then. Kudos to you, Committee. And thank you very much.

Now, moving on. Camera One: the willowy girl has pulled herself together. Looking around for some paper and something to write with.
Lady, not that manuscript. Lady, not Emily Dickinson’s pen!
The young studs are still grappling in the Great American Northwest, the lean one has the one I like in a hammer lock, must send Docent in to pull them apart before they …

Rethink. Forget this bunch. There are plenty more where they came from, if these two fight to the death, let them. Which, come to think of it, would make an interesting spectacle for the Grand Opening. Maybe with the next pair …

Excellent!

Note to self: order bronze light bulb above that great bronze head in the courtyard, signifying Idea.

I know how to save my museum and guarantee that it will do me credit, and looking at the statue in the courtyard—handsome bronze!—I know it’s credit that I deserve.

See, businessmen like me know all there is to know about the Great American Way, and now that I’ve watched these kids in action, I know exactly what to do. In our great country it’s not really about who wins and who loses. It’s all about the race.

Tomorrow I dispatch The Committee to cover every writing program, workshop, and small press reading and poetry slam in our great nation, with orders to recruit the attraction I should have put in place on Day One.

The exhibit that makes sense of all the literary things collected here.

At the end of the day, instead of being my dream diluted and deferred,
The Museum of Great American Writers
will be a commercial sensation, and a credit to my name. For the Grand Opening, which I predict will take another year to prepare, we’ll have the greatest show on earth. In addition to moldy relics of the great and not-so-great American dead,
The Museum of Great American Writers
will feature a living writer in every room.

We can keep wannabes in every room in all those galleries 24/7, pacing, typing, deleting, whatever writers do. Plenty of cannon fodder in those writing schools. We can throw in some other contests to amuse our paying guests: pair them off in bouts of drinking, dancing and bar-fighting, love triangles and bad breakups, even gladiatorial tilts, because the great American public needs to know everything about the ugly underside of the American writing game.

Millions will stroll past my live exhibits just to handicap the winners, and millions will keep coming back, watching their favorites make it into rooms labeled Submission, Rejection, that kind of thing, and we’ll let our public place bets at every step along the way. And if your pick gets axed at Rejection?

Come on down again! You can always get yourself a winner next time, and if we throw in a small cash prize … Then there’ll be the elimination rounds, with the Publication room for the few and for the
very
few, a spot in the Museum’s Awards Corridor, next stop, the Late American Wing. From there, as I understand it, it’s only a hop and a skip, some schmoozing and a couple of murders, to the Rotunda and—for the best of the
very
few, a photograph of the winners with yours truly by that handsome statue in the courtyard, and—wait for it—a spot on the Wall of Fame.

—
Postscripts
, 2011

High Rise High

The situation at the school is about like you’d expect: total anarchy, bikers roaring through the halls pillaging and laying waste; big guys hanging screaming frosh out of windows by their feet, shut up or I let go; bathroom floods and flaming mattresses, minor explosions and who knows how many teacher hostages; this is worse than Attica, and the monster prom that puts the arm on Armageddon is Saturday night. The theme is Tinsel Dreams; expect wild carnage fueled by kid gangs sallying forth to trash your neighborhood and bring back anything they want. Who knows how they got out of the citadel? Who can say exactly how they get back in?

An interesting thing has happened. Nobody’s cell phone works inside the walls. Worse. The land lines have been cut so you can’t phone in.

Then there is the problem with the baby. See, this Bruce Brill, he tries to get down with the kids, you know, call me Bruce, but the kids call him the Motivator? He’s always, like, “Come on, if you want to, you can get a C,” big mistake trying that on Johnny Slater: “Why are you holding back like this? You could go to
MIT
!” Well, that and his stupid play.
OK
, this is what you get for pissing Johnny off. He and his gang have snatched your pregnant wife, they broke into your house while you were scrubbing your hands in front of English class, we’ll Macbeth
you
. Johnny is holding pregnant Jane in the woodworking shop while his seven best buds rig the table saw to rip her fuckin in half. Boy, you should hear her scream. Listen, when Mr. McShy the band teacher begged them to let her go the seven of them did, yes they
did
smash sensitive Eddie McShy’s Stradivarius over his sensitive head; while he weeps and the pregnant lady screams for help, Johnny uses the splinters to pick his front teeth.

It’s Teach, this eager jerk Bruce Brill, that alerted us in the city. “I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t listen.” Look up from supper and Teach is on your screen sobbing for Global
TV
. “Now it’s too late.”

Hunkered down in his office with a handful of survivors, deposed principal Irving Wardlaw shakes his fist at the
TV
. Frankly, the riot broke out because Bruce tried to make Johnny play a fairy in his “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Fucking Shakespeare, what do you expect?

“It’s a jungle in there!” Bruce’s eyes are wet with disappointment. “I had such hopes.”

Yeah right
, Wardlaw growls, observing on the Watchman in his still-smoking office.
You shoulda had a gun.

Then Bruce completely loses it. “My wife is trapped! My baby’s coming even as we speak!” And because Teach made it to the Global studios before the kids or the Mayor’s men could bring him down the whole world is watching, so instead of saying “We’ll look into it” and back-burnering like he does everything else, the Mayor will have to act.

In any other city conquest and recovery would be a snap.
SWAT
teams on the roof of the school, they could rappel from there no problem, and end the siege; paratroopers could knife in through the skylight, shattering the stained glass with spiked jackboots to break up the Tinsel Prom; the Feds could plant explosives or the governor could call out the National Guard to crack skulls and restore order, but not here. We are ahead of the wave, second to none in doing what we have to do to keep our sanity.

High Rise High is a fortress unto itself.

Listen, these walls are slicker than glass. No pikes and crampons here! We’re talking a hundred stories built on bedrock, nobody tunnels out and no mole gets in. The vertical face is tougher to storm than Masada or the Haunted Mesa, when your enemies can’t get a toehold you are proof against siege. The first ten floors are windowless, girdled by coiled razor wire bolted tight to the glossy molybdenum face.

What were they thinking when they built
HRH
? Keeping you out? No. Keeping your kids
in.

Listen, you wanted it this way. The teen population is out of control, you said, and believe me, you came begging. You showed us your lip that he split when you wouldn’t give him the car and the bruises she left in the fight and you whined, “Our kids won’t
do
like they should,” when you meant, they won’t do like we say. Fine, we said. Let’s put them all in a good, safe place, with their dope and their dirty underwear and loud rock music, and let’s make the walls thick enough so their speakers won’t bother us and while we’re at it let’s make sure they can’t get out. We aren’t doing anything, we just want our children in some nice, secure environment where they can be happy, i.e., so if they smoke, drink, pop or snort, and exchange STDs and flaunt their tongue studs and anarchic tattoos, we won’t have to see.

Ergo: High Rise High.

The ten stories with the no windows? Security! Perfect, until you need to get
in. The power source is self-contained on One. Nine floors are thickly packed with hydroponics and walk-in freezers and stacks of freeze-dried
TV
dinners and canned foods, so you can forget about starving them out. Living quarters from Eleven on up to the fortieth floor, where you get the
RV
and rock climbing areas, the Rollerblade floor, swimming pool and football field floors, dirt bike mountains, graffiti heaven and the skateboard park floor, a bunch of you-name-it floors and above that on the top five stories,
HRH1Z
to
HRH
5, the school. External faculty elevators that shoot up at tremendous speeds and bypass the kids’ dorms without opening so no craven grownup can infiltrate, as in, sneak into your private place, and, like, read your diary, try to break all your bad habits or smell your underwear, in other situations unscrupulous ’rents have been known to creep into your room in spite of the sign that says
Keep Out
and pounce on you like
that.

Privacy. That’s how we baited the trap.

Assurances. How else do you think we got the kids to bite? They filed into the entrance that we sealed behind them like so many dumb animals, crazy to get inside where we couldn’t watch what they were doing, probably so they could get high or abuse themselves and each other, or worse.

So. Basically, every teen troublemaker in the greater metropolitan area is socked inside our citadel, free to riot at their round-the-clock raves, plus—surprise!—spill out and sack your neighborhoods and then go home to the high rise and pop, snort or drink themselves senseless while you quake in your quiet, childless, orderly houses and your adults-only condos, and there isn’t a law enforcement agency in the greater U.S. that can touch them because nobody can figure out how to get inside, even though from the beginning it was clear that the very worst kids had found a way out. Nobody cared much until the riot started and this Bruce went on
TV
. “My unborn baby! My wife!”

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Remember, you mandated this when you voted for High Rise High.

Cheer up. All the best heads in law enforcement are huddling on this problem, they brainstorm around the clock but so far nobody’s figured out how to breach the walls so that whichever local or national forces can carry out whatever threats and let us decent, God-fearing grownups restore order so we can get some sleep.

Bruce the idealist has been dragged into The Big Meeting by the Democratic candidate. The Republican mayor wants to stonewall the jerk, but remember Global; they are being watched. Municipal switchboards are flooded; the city server is clogged with gigabytes of protest mails. Crowds are gathering in front
of the Mayor’s residence and City Hall. The president reaches the unlisted red phone. Mayor Patton has caller id so he has to pick up. “Yes sir.” Our nation’s leader cracks the whip. “Global laughing stock.” The mayor’s teeth clench. “I’ll end it, yes. No matter what it takes.”