The Greatest Love of All
The phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Singer, actress, film producer, model, mother."
"Um. Whitney?"
"My accomplishments extend over multiple artistic disciplines and plumb the depths of human experience. The range of emotions felt by me and the past two decades is akin to being at the rail on the cruise liner and spotting the iceberg, drawing closer."
"I -- "
"It is also the iceberg itself, the massive weight and bulk, the cold. The centuries of existence, stoically accreting experience, love, loss, like layers of ice until I can pierce a steel hull, send thousands to their deaths."
"Well -- "
"As the unemployment rate rises to edge nearer and nearer to 8% in the month of January alone, I consider the new line on my roster of accomplishments, the reformed addict."
"That's good."
"You have no idea -- the bombed-out hollowness, the hypocrisy (say no to drugs, indeed -- after the first round of refusal, capitulation increased and it was wonderful, wonderful), the gist, Brad, is this: the lows and depths have only served to reinforce my death-grip on popular consciousness, the history of this country and the world."
"Whit -- "
"My name recognition increases. More people know me and my accomplishments, my trials and tribulations than ever before. I am larger than Patton. I am larger than Churchill. Joan of Ark is losing ground steadily."
"Uh -- "
"None of this is even my doing. I am iceberg-big, my depths are frozen. I don't even need to try anymore, such is the scope of my life and name. Nothing you do matters. You will outlive me in only the strictest sense. You are puny, hopeless. When I die, there will be a crater in your hive mind and heart, my death will be Chicxulub, my death will be millennial Black Death."
Then she hung up.
