Everyone Participates in a Medical Experiment

Everyone was in the hospital. The hospital looked like everyone’s office. The bed on which everyone lay appeared like everyone’s desk. The bed was bolted to the wall. Along another wall was a window that looked into the sky. Above everyone were shelves; below everyone, file cabinets.

The shelves held photos of John Quincy Adams in Hawaii. Everyone and his or her four children were in some of the photos, Star especially. One photo featured Journey eating a chocolate bar. Everyone hadn’t realized Journey had had chocolate when they’d gone to visit John Quincy Adams.

Everyone’s coworker and next-door officemate Sam carried a clipboard on which he or she wrote about everyone. Everyone had not been well.

“That is not it at all,” Sam said. “You are perfectly healthy.” Sam was wearing nurse’s scrubs.

Sam pulled out a vacuum cleaner nozzle. At one end was a stopper and at the other end a needle. “Dasney Amusement Park Malls is entering the medical field,” Sam explained. “All employees have a choice. They can receive a vaccine for a life-threatening disease to which Dasney is exposing its employees or they can be control subjects.”

“Not interested,” everyone said.

Sam dropped the needle on the floor. “Very well,” Sam said, stepping from the room. “Germ dissemination will begin in ten seconds.” Sam put a gas mask over his or her face and closed the door.

What everyone had meant by “not interested” was “not interested in participating.” Everyone had a family to feed. There was no good reason to make a perfectly healthy person sick. However, “nonparticipation” was not one of the choices. Everyone cried.

Sam watched everyone through the glass frame in the door.

Tiny microbes landed on everyone’s skin, crawled across it, entered the nostrils, the mouth, the ears, the buttocks, the eyes, the pores. Everyone cried some more.

The next thing everyone knew, the famous actor Clint Gabble was standing over him or her. Clint was wearing a cocktail dress, black and velvet. Across the rib cage was a set of lines that looked like bones. “Hello,” Clint Gabble said. “I’m Beth.”

Everyone knew Clint Gabble from the movies The Real Mr. Keen, Fifty-Two Ways to Blog about the Meaning of Life, and Everyman: The Movie. The last two featured everyone’s child Jody. Jody and Clint had gone waterskiing together. According to the Internet, Jody and Clint had become friends. Everyone had only met Clint Gabble twice before, once at a party everyone crashed and once at the production of Everyman. The last time had been the last time everyone had seen Jody; hence, it was natural for everyone to ask Clint about his or her child.

“Kindred’s dead,” Beth said. “We all have to stand on our own at the end.”

Everyone sighed. Everyone did not care for method acting but knew enough to play along. “I know, Beth,” everyone said, “but it’s been four weeks. Surely Jody has started another role.”

“I’m death,” Clint clarified. “Not Beth. Prepare to meet your maker.”

Everyone Discovers Peace through Imagination

The police arrived shortly afterward. Everyone’s child Journey had stolen $5092 of chocolate. Everyone refused to pay. Everyone had been through this before, and everyone was tired of covering for Journey’s addiction. It did not matter that Journey was only eight or nine years old. Everyone did not have $5092 to spend on chocolate.

Journey had been trapped by a giant glass bowl. The glass bowl was full of fifty-pound chocolate bars, of which Journey had eaten at least one. The bowl was in a candy store in the Dasney Amusement Park Mall, a shopping center modeled on Disneyland that featured all the standard Dasney characters attached to various Dasney stores: the Mudhutter’s Amazing Mobile Homes, Dallas in Wunderland’s Drinking Glasses, Yellow Snow’s Lemonade Concoctions, the Wacked Witch’s Flying Cleaning Appliances.

The bowl was narrower at the top than at the sides and difficult to escape, especially when the supply of chocolate bars was low, as it was now. Patrons pointed at Journey within it. One overhaul-clad boy put his nose to the glass and snorted like a pig. Another licked the glass as if the chocolate could be consumed by osmosis. A girl in a polka-dot dress jumped in place as if she might at any moment launch into the bowl herself. A man in a plaid jacket averted his eyes, embarrassed, remembering his own past childhood transgressions involving Fruit Polygon Cereal.

Neither Journey nor everyone noticed any of this. Everyone was in love with the Internet, so computers of any sort sent her or him into a swoon, and a computer made of popsicles sent everyone into a double-swoon, since everyone was on a diet.

For Journey, the chocolate bowl was a world not unlike the animatronic John Quincy Adams Hawaiian exhibit on the other side of the mall. There, patrons were asked to forget what had been and what was possible and instead live in the moment, as if it were the real. Jump out a window and fly, the Dasney Amusement Park Mall executives in charge of bad decisions might as well have proposed. Don’t worry about what’s below.

What’s below came for Journey as a person dressed as a red-mustachioed copper put clinks on her or him. Beside Journey, a person dressed as a woman with a matronly physique read the child her or his rights in an enthusiastic sing-song voice appropriate for a picture book reader. Around Journey, Pop Rawk grenades went off as people shifted their feet trying to get a look.

Everyone was one of them.

Five thousand ninety-two dollars was a lot of money everyone did not have and a lot of lesson Journey had failed to learn. Still, this was everyone’s darling, her or his offspring, and it was difficult to watch her or him disappear into the darkness of a vehicle decorated like a paddy wagon.

Everyone thought of the Internet that she or he loved so much. It was always telling everyone to let go, that attachments were keeping everyone from what she or he wanted, which was to find the end to the novel she or he was writing, the end that was also the beginning.

Everyone thought of John Quincy Adams on the other side of the mall, of the transcendence offered in robotics.

Everyone saw Journey melt before her or him as if everyone’s darling were merely an idea conveyed through an assemblage of metal and plastic. Everyone let go.

Everyone’s Child Dies a Star

“Sam?” everyone heard Star say. Star was everyone’s second child. Sam was everyone’s coworker.

Everyone looked up from the bed. Star was standing in the doorway. Sam was not everyone’s spouse.

“I thought you were devoted to John Quincy Adams,” Star said.

“I am,” Sam insisted.

“It’s not what it looks like,” everyone said, putting feet on the floor and buttoning her or his shirt. “I came in to look at what was in the window.”

Star had tears in her or his eyes. “John Quincy Adams was inside you,” Star said.

“No,” Sam clarified. “J. D. is inside me. John Quincy Adams reminds me of J. D. John Quincy Adams is profound the way J. D. was. John Quincy Adams speaks of Hawaii the way J. D. used to.”

“I am devoted to my spouse,” everyone explained. “I would never--”

Star tugged at her or his chest, pulling the clothes away from her or his body, as if a vacuum cleaner hose were sucking at them.

“Please,” everyone said. “I’m sorry. I’m only human.” Everyone looked at the picture of her or his spouse on the shelf beside the bed. The spouse was gorgeous. She or he had been working out for a year before the photo was taken. Each muscle was perfectly toned. The workouts had occurred out of doors, and the spouse was well tanned. In her or his hand was a Popsi Cola, everyone’s favorite drink. The spouse was on a boat on an ocean or a lake. The sunlight cast a shadow onto the figure standing beside the spouse, also perfectly sculpted. How could everyone compete? And now this.

“This, this here,” Sam continued, trying to explain, “it’s just.” Sam bowed her or his head. Sam had not risen from the bed. Her or his robe stood open, advertising Sam’s flesh. Everyone realized that Sam was not only a constant source of temptation but also a paragon of gaudiness. No wonder everyone had fallen into Sam’s embrace.

“Everyone was there that day,” Sam said. “Everyone stood beside me in my grief. Our grief. I’d hoped--”

“Adams was out on that ocean for you,” Star yelled. “Adams went to paradise. Adams knows what love is, what it’s supposed to be.” Star was convulsing. She or he had more than a shirt in hand.

“Don’t,” everyone said. “Your heart. You’ll damage--”

But it was too late. Star had it in hand. It gleamed in front of Star under the fluorescents--gold covered in blood. Star threw it on the floor and collapsed.

“Star,” everyone cried. She or he knelt. Everyone and her or his spouse had devoted so much in medical expenses toward the child. She or he had always seemed the child most likely to become famous, given what was inside.

Sam covered her or him with the robe. “That was rather inconvenient,” Sam said. She or he stood, stooped beside everyone, put an arm around everyone’s shoulder. Together, they looked at the heart.

“I bet you could get $5092 for that,” Sam said.

Everyone Has a Child Aching to Be Famous

Everyone’s child Star decided to become an actor. Star had a heart of gold, so she or he was destined for fame.

Star’s inspiration for taking up acting was the John Quincy Adams exhibit at the Dasney Amusement Park Mall. Sam, everyone’s coworker at the parent company’s main office, had taken Star to see the exhibit.

Ever since Sam had seen John Quincy Adams speak, she or he had been transfixed. It was as if John Quincy Adams lived inside Sam and controlled all that Sam said, did, and perceived. Sam wanted others to see in John Quincy Adams what she or he saw. John Quincy Adams had been prescient enough to perceive that Hawaii was a place for tourists and thus to argue for its statehood, all without having seen the islands and before the United States had taken control.

John Quincy Adams reminded Sam of J. D., an ex-coworker of everyone’s and Sam’s. Whenever Sam saw John Quincy Adams speak, Sam was certain J. D. had come to live inside John Quincy Adams. It was evident from the way that John Quincy Adams had such respect for law and Hawaii.

Sam had been disappointed when she or he took everyone to see John Quincy Adams. Everyone had failed to see how John Quincy Adams invoked their former coworker J. D.

So Sam decided to take others. Sam wanted to take everyone’s youngest child, Jan. Jan seemed likely to be the most susceptible to Adams’s power, because Jan was the most like everyone’s former spouse, and everyone’s former spouse liked J. D. But like everyone’s former spouse, Jan could not be found.

Sam would have taken everyone’s child, Journey, as in the right light, Sam could see J. D. in Journey’s eyes. But Sam had heard of the troubles everyone had had with Journey the last time they had visited the Dasney Mall, and Sam did not wish to repeat those.

So Sam settled on Star.

Star believed John Quincy Adams to be the greatest orator of her or his generation, or so Star told Sam. Star identified John Quincy Adams’s voice and mannerisms not with J. D. but with the famous actor Clint Gabble. As a child Clint Gabble had been featured as a child robot on a television show that included a spaceship, and then he had gone on to star with Gina Monrovia in the movie The Real Mr. Keen. The movie had been rated R for sex. Clint Gabble wasn’t a child robot actor anymore, and this was how he proved it. Gina wanted to be famous, and the movie was how she proved that. Now everyone knew what Gina looked like naked, so she could not go anywhere without being recognized unless she had on clothes.

Star had never seen the movie, but the Internet had shown her or him clips, late at night, after everyone went to bed. Most of the clips did not involve the movie, however, except in passing. Most of the clips involved how Clint and Gina were in love. Their love was more famous than they were. All of humanity wanted to know where Clint and Gina’s love ate each night, what that love was doing coming out of the Crystalball Club at three a.m. on a Sunday morning, and when the love would finally make Clint and Gina marry.

In the grocery store Star learned that Gina had been unfaithful to the love, and Clint was uncertain about whether to continue going out with it. Star learned that love had made Gina pregnant, though no baby had ever come forth, and that Clint used a phone line to talk love into going out with other women.

Then Clint and Gina reconciled with love and had their pictures taken with it on a red carpet. Gina wore a long pencil gown that wrapped around her like a vacuum cleaner hose. Clint, right arm around Gina’s waist, smiled haughtily, as if he had just finished vacuuming love’s thirteen-room mansion. And in Clint and Gina’s free hands--because they were rich and thin and fit and happy and successful--were cans of Popsi Cola.

Star wanted to be part of this love that Clint and Gina had. They knew the meaning of life, took boat cruises with it each weekend. Star wanted to always have a member of the opposite sex beside her or him and to have all of humanity know it.

Clint Gabble, on stage as a John Quincy Adams robot, seemed to be out to tantalize single women, the way he spoke of Hawaii as the last adventure to be tamed and potentially as the federal government’s biggest tax haul ever. Clint, as John Quincy Adams, was very logical. Star wanted to have such logic. Star wanted to be an actor.

Everyone Is Uncertain about Dating

Sam asked everyone on a date. They were to go see John Quincy Adams speak at the local Dasney Amusement Park Mall. Everyone was nervous. Everyone did not want to go on a date. Everyone had not been on a date since her or his spouse had run away.

Everyone wanted the spouse back. Every night, everyone asked the Internet about the spouse’s whereabouts. The Internet knew the spouse well and was very informed about what the spouse was doing, which was enjoying life, because the spouse had found the meaning of it.

In the photographs the Internet showed everyone, the spouse looked fit and tan. In her or his right hand was a can of Popsi Cola, everyone’s favorite soda. The spouse’s hair had never looked better quaffed. The spouse stood next to other people, all of them equally spectacular. One of these people, everyone had gathered, was the meaning of life. Everyone could see the appeal. The meaning of life was fit and tan too--and rich and happy. Plus, the meaning of life had a boat and lots of jewelry.

Sam was a coworker with a kind heart and a crush. Sam complimented everyone ceaselessly about the things that made everyone mundane. “I like your shoes.” “You have great taste in paperweights.” “I think even the Eight Ball could not say a bad thing about you.”

Sam had been pestering everyone to go out with her or him since the spouse had left. At first, everyone thought Sam was simply trying to offer consolation. The fact that Sam continued to enter everyone’s office space five or six or seven times a day for months afterward, however, left everyone feeling Sam wanted more.

Then came hints: “Amateur wrestling. I would love to see that sometime.” “I bet you’re great with those four kids of yours--I’d love to be at your house one day to watch and learn.”

Then finally came outright invitations: “Let’s discuss the proposed procedures over coffee.” “Please come eat lunch at the pita place with me today. I want to know what someone else thinks of it.”

Everyone had turned down every invitation until the day of J. D.’s fall from a window on the twelfth floor of the building where their office was. That day, everyone felt a need for a new body, and when the Internet cut off communication for a few days later that month, everyone headed out for coffee with others, but most especially, almost exclusively, with Sam.

Now it was just them. The excuse Sam gave this time was that she or he had something important--something requiring long-windedness--to discuss regarding the John Quincy Adams exhibit. The exhibit was run by the company for which everyone and Sam worked, but they would be visiting it after hours, when the visitors were fewer.

Everyone and Sam sat down to listen to John Quincy Adams speak. John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States. He had been dead for over a century. No one knew what he sounded like.

Everyone worried that Sam would put one of her or his arms around everyone, but Sam did not.

So everyone had nothing to worry about, except that now everyone felt awkward and wondered whether she or he should go first or whether she or he had misinterpreted the meaning of the outing.

Everyone and Sam already knew each other’s bodies. They had held them the day J. D. fell from the window. But the touching had been nonexistent since then.

Everyone examined Sam. Everyone felt certain that the outing could have been intended as a date. Sam was wearing black dress pants that accentuated her or his figure. She or he had left the upper portion of her or his torso exposed so that the gold necklace dangling from her or his chest accentuated its nakedness the way a closed window accentuates a room’s insideness. If the chest alone had could have drunk Popsi on a boat with meaning, it would have fit right in with everyone’s spouse. Sam’s chest was the epitome of her or his gender.

At the exhibit, John Quincy Adams spoke of Hawaii. He wanted it to be the fiftieth state and was perturbed that so many in Congress were lined up against it just because it was in the middle of nowhere and could not be gotten to by horse and carriage. Hawaii had beaches and volcanoes and beautiful vistas. And it had tourists--a lot of them--which meant tax revenue.

Sam was transfixed, as if a vacuum cleaner were sucking her or his face into Adams’s mouth.

Sam saw everyone watching.

“You see what I mean,” Sam said, “the way he talks, it reminds one of J. D., doesn’t it?”

Everyone Raises the Darlings

Everyone needed to make money so that she or he could buy a new car, so everyone had taken a second job as a janitor of random office buildings. Unfortunately, the boss of that second job, Harvey, had disappeared, so there was no second job, unless everyone returned to the random office buildings she or he had been to already with the hope that cleaning was needed and pay was forthcoming. But that pay came from Harvey, so it was unlikely.

Everyone thought about starting her or his own business, using everyone’s children, except everyone didn’t have children anymore because everyone had taken some bad advice and killed them. Everyone was learning: Never trust the Internet.

Everyone looked down at the dog beside her or him at the desk as everyone was typing. One’s darlings are one’s darlings for a reason, everyone thought.

Everyone decided on a rescue mission. Everyone was going to resuscitate the darlings, bring them back to life: Jody, the sanctimonious fart-joke expert; Star, the gold-hearted surgical miracle; Journey, the $5092 tax write-off; and Jan, the copy of everyone’s one-time spouse except in the sense that she or he was a six-year-old girl or boy and hadn’t yet found the meaning of life and disappeared. Everyone loaded her or his pen with the intention of letting the kids spill once again across the page.

“Today, my precious progeny,” everyone wrote, “we are going to Dasneyland.”

There was nothing like a Dasneyland Amusement Park Mall to bring kids back to life. Dasneyland had sick-smelling sweet shops in unnatural and unhealthy levels of proliferation, fart-joke bookstores, metal detectors for kids with hearts of rare earth minerals, chocolate carpets, and rooms where one could select new parents or pretend to be one’s own. It also had rides: on faux cars and faux planes and faux boats, all them through faux cities with faux people, and in those faux cities were faux restaurants that served faux food and faux eye doctors with faux eyeglasses. Everyone loved Dasneyland, and so did her or his kids.

Today, especially.

Today was the day that the John Quincy Adams animatron’s job was transferring to Hawaii, and anyone who paid the twenty-seven-dollar entrance fee could go with him. The way you went with him was to stand in a line, and then walk, and then stand in a line some more, and then walk some more, and then stop and listen to John Quincy Adams speak, and then walk some more.

As it turned out, John Quincy Adams knew a lot about Hawaii. Hawaii had hula dancers and Don Hoe and lots of pineapple. If you smelled closely, you could feel the pineapple in your nostrils, and if you listened closely, you could hear the swish of hula skirts on your legs.

“People were uncertain about electing me president,” John Quincy Adams said, after he explained Hawaii to the visitors, “just as they were uncertain about letting Hawaii become a state.”

Jody’s eyes were the first to come alive as everyone stood with her or his kids staring at the president. “Is it really John Adams?” Jody asked. “When is he going to fart?”

Star came next, pushing a hand against her or his metal heart. “I feel like George Washington and I have so much in common,” Star said.

Then came Journey, chocolate lover, who kneeled and licked the floor.

And finally, Jan, who noted that Hawaii would be a good place in which to look for meaning.

Everyone smiled. The kids had come to life just as she or he had wished.

Now came the hard part--making the kids do as everyone expected them to, or at least wanted them to. Everyone could, of course, force the children to accede to her or his wishes, but everyone could not make the kids wish as she or he wished for them to wish.

“Come on, guys,” everyone said to her or his darlings. “Let’s go clean an office building.”

The darlings stared at one another as they stood beside everyone in front of the president. They felt safe with John Quincy Adams and Dasneyland. They were unsure about an office building. They did not want to leave. It was dangerous outside. They knew. They’d already been killed once.

Everyone Falls in Love

And then it happened--someone jumped or fell. Fell was more likely. Everyone did not know. Everyone had not been there. Everyone had been at her or his desk in her or his office on the twelfth floor doing tax returns while pretending to archive architectural details for the Dasney Amusement Park Malls, for whom everyone worked--this week, changes to the animatronic John Quincy Adams at the mall in the town in which everyone lived.

John Quincy Adams was not very popular. He had been settled on because some people did not like Ronald Reagan while other people did not like Bill Clinton. Dasney Amusement Park Malls was trying to galvanize interest, make the robotic John Quincy Adams relevant to people’s lives enough that they would want to listen to him speak. His voice predated audio recordings. No one knew much about him. He was exotic. This, the Dasney executives in charge of covering bad decisions had argued, should have made John Quincy Adams popular.

Now Dasney was putting John Quincy Adams in Hawaii, because many surveys said people love Hawaii. Having Adams speak presciently about the fiftieth state, the Dasney executives in charge of rendering bad decisions believed, seemed a spectacular thing for a robot to do.

Everyone heard a scream and a clank and clunk against metal. Everyone was uncertain which had come first or whether they had happened at the same time. Everyone was more focused on the response of her or his body--the sinking of the stomach, the quickening of the heart.

It had finally happened, everyone thought--people opening and closing and opening and closing that screen door all day every day for four weeks, and finally someone had fallen. The window was too large for opening and closing, the office too high up. “What an idiot,” everyone thought.

Everyone rushed to the open window but didn’t get too close. Everyone came for the spectacle, though everyone didn’t want to see it. Everyone felt sick. The other employees were there too, milling around, staring. Some stood on the ledge looking down--idiots all, everyone thought.

“Who was it?” everyone asked.

Others asked too.

“J. D.,” Sam told people. “It was J. D.” Sam was crying. Everyone had been trying to avoid Sam because she or he had a crush on everyone. But everyone had never seen Sam cry. Everyone was moved beyond sickness.

Others claimed J. D. also. J. D. spread through the office, became ubiquitous, a part of all employees’ souls. Everyone had never cared for J. D.--J. D. was too taken with budget numbers and was a know-it-all--but J. D. became part of everyone as well.

Everyone looked around for J. D. to make sure. Everyone did not see her or him. The supposition seemed possible, even likely.

Then Alice, poised at the window frame looking down, said, “It doesn’t look like J. D.”

Others looked for J. D. too, but J. D. was inside them, where she or he couldn’t be seen.

Everyone wanted to step to the window and look, confirm or deny what Alice had denoted. Everyone didn’t dare. That window was death waiting to happen. Everyone had four children to care for and a spouse who had run off that she or he hoped to cajole back.

“J. D. never wore shirts like that,” Alice continued.

“That’s not a shirt like that,” Pat said. “That’s J. D.’s jacket.” Pat had a penchant for fashion but was chronically near sighted. Everyone wasn’t sure what to believe.

“That’s a shirt,” Alice insisted. “Since when did J. D. have a plaid jacket?”

“J. D.,” Sam moaned, as if her or his heart were broken.

Everyone put her or his arm around Sam. Everyone couldn’t believe it. But J. D. was inside everyone, and everyone found her- or himself changing, transforming, becoming something loving and lovable. Everyone was scared.