grinch

-1-

He crouched where I did not expect to find him: in the place where I was told he would be. The Whovians had pointed to the mountain, it's black heights dominating the horizon like a finger insulting that gentle valley, to a dim fleck of white on its uppermost summit, a fingernail charred by years of disease and abuse, to the barren, frigid hovel where he dwelled like bacteria ignored by the world now its purpose was served. The Whovians had told the truth concerning the whereabouts of their legendary green antagonist. Who would have guessed?

Why did he glare from those frigid eyes with an agelessness only the truly aged can manage toward the smoke curls and absurd brown dwellings of Who-ville, possessed of an intensity that seemed carved of the same granite as the mountain behind and below him? And when he spoke, why did his voice not possess the rolling, mellifluous tones I had been coached to expect, like the voice-over templates from another time and another culture returned to life, but rather grated and graveled in an elderly wheeze, a life-passing gasp against the inevitability of another winter and the uncertainty of another sunrise? He spoke eloquently, as the voice of the formerly proud and the formerly mighty might speak in its decay of years, still able to muster the volubility of its former stature, still able to stir within the listener's heart the pathos of its history and experience; but he was doubly tragic for this reason, like the patriotic statesman in the wake of his disillusionment or the celebrated lover after his first dire failure in the arms of beauty. The Grinch was of this rank in the miserable condition in which I found him, the mere allusion of what once was and the certain destiny of the end that was to be.

I had only sought his point of view on certain events that had transpired on a certain Christmas Eve some time ago, the famous story of which is a matter of public record and which was then celebrating an anniversary. The paper for which I write assigned me the difficult task of finding the Grinch and discussing the matter with him. But what the Grinch wanted to discuss took us far from those simple bygone events. What the Grinch wanted to tell me, I was soon to realize, had been festering inside him for a very long time.

I came upon him after an arduous march up the mountainside, a sequence of trials that demanded scrambling over loose rock faces, following meandering deer trails, and fording raging mountain streams. He sat placidly on a broad shelf of rock that fronted the deep shadows of his cave, staring in contemplation at the valley below, visions of Whovians perhaps dancing before his eyes, and an obvious air of resentment on his matted, green face. He was not surprised to see me as he must have watched my slow progress for some many hours.

"Go away!" he said at once. His first words to me, and perhaps to any thinking creature in many years.

"Please, sir," I replied. "I've traveled a long and difficult passage to meet you."

"You bastards journey here to gather parts of truth for your elegant lies. I will not have it!"

"But I am interested in your side of the story," I said, not realizing that those were to be fateful words.

"My side and his side and all of the sides, such pluralism. No! You seek to rob the last of the Grinch of his few remaining possessions, his dignity, his sanity, his soul!" He shouted all this without wavering his eyes from Who-ville even for a moment, the intensity of his gaze a corridor of penetration between the two sites. The granite, icy ledge that served as his porch was exactly as it had been rendered in the popular story, implying that, whatever the validity of the tale, its author had done at least a modicum of research.

"No sir," I replied. "I have come to ask you a few questions about..."

"About the Seussian Saboteur, correct?" Now the Grinch turned to glare at me, an evil glint of knowledge in his eyes painted over the look of long, tremulous years spent suffering. "You wish me to confirm his accusations, that I attempted to deprive the Whos of their Christmas feast and that in my subsequent dismay over my failure to do so I experienced an epiphany of joy and love and hogwash. Correct?"

I hesitated, sorting out the rushed and gravelly speech he had delivered, while the Grinch waited in a patience born of long years spent waiting. Finally I said, "You have a different version of what occurred?"

The Grinch returned my stare for a moment, whether in contempt or in speculation I cannot say, then rose from his perch of rock and, with the flick of a gnarled green hand, led me into his cave. This too was similar to its depiction in the story, the sweeping walls like buttresses on a mad cathedral, the hanging blankets and wall coverings for the preservation of warmth, even an old sewing machine quietly rusting away beneath a layer of grime in one corner. Cluttered about the visible portions of the cave were assorted household odds and ends: a scarred wooden crate piled with dusty and dented cooking utensils; a wardrobe spilling out the sleeves and collars of threadbare clothing; the sad remnants of book shelves sagging under the weight of thick volumes with illegible titles; and a thin, yellowed mattress against the far wall, the remains of its straw stuffing poking through in a mindless effort to free itself of the Grinch's perpetual weight and join the general carpet of straw that served as the cave's carpet.

He gestured to a rickety gray chair next to a central firepit where orange coals sent off drifting streamers of smoke to meander out past the entrance blanket. An ancient tea kettle sat on one stone near the coals and, as I lowered myself cautiously onto the fragile chair, keeping most of my weight on my feet, the Grinch brought over two chipped cups and a bag of what appeared to be tea.

"I am not," the Grinch muttered possibly to himself, "completely bereft of the social amenities." He dropped some tea into the kettle and, after barely allowing it to steep, filled the cups from it.

"Not yet," he said, handing one of the cups to me. It contained a murky, brown liquid, and, after taking a preliminary sniff, I decided that it was indeed tea. "Not yet bereft said the Grinch in his cleft," the Grinch mused. "The words of the Saboteur. How devious were his cajoling rhythms, how insidious his rhymes. For the children. Yes," the Grinch said, taking a seat on a worn pile of carpets next to the firepit and across from my chair, "yes, the children. The Seuss taught them to read, they all said. But what was it they were reading? What propaganda at the expense of one Grinch to train the children not only in language but in ways, in thought, idea, and attitude. A subversion. At the expense, however, not of one but of an entire culture, an entire race. The Grinch race."

I sipped my tea patiently, my other hand gripping the pen and pad I had pulled from my wintry garments in anticipation of the Grinch's words. It was immediately apparent that I would need to control this interview in order to keep the half-mad Grinch focused. But at the same time my curiosity had been aroused; I was suddenly made aware that the Grinch story had no mention of an entire race of Grinches. I had been led to believe that there was ever but the one. Had that been explicitly stated? There was a copy of the story in my bag, but I was too polite to investigate just then. Didn't it seem obvious, though, that for one Grinch to exist there had to be more?

"Where do the rest of the Grinches live?"

"Live?" The Grinch laughed humorlessly. "Live? They do not. I am the Grinch. I am the last of the Grinch, the great Grinch who built cities and towers, who constructed vast wonders; who built machines that traveled upon the earth, traveled through the sky and even up to the very stars--we were masters of this world."

"The last?"

"We, the Grinch, had domain over all the animals, every rock and every wind was ours to refine at will, and make more like unto ourselves. A proud race, oh a god-like race were we, with medicines to cure the sickness of our bodies, and arts to enrich our minds, we Grinch stood proud, indomitable to all. To all but ourselves."

"But how did the--"

"Yes, I am a Grinch," he continued, seeming completely oblivious to my attempts to interrupt him. He had slowly adopted a dramatic and resonant tone, warming to his subject with a touch of zealotry; he then rose and paced to and fro, speaking as if to a larger audience. "And those days, those final days of our world now grow dim, and rot like the cancer in the rock of this foul cave where I live, rot as I do in this frozen hell, forever damned by the victimizers and the misers and the victims, forever here to..." He gulped once and scowled, gazing off past the cave entrance in the direction of Who-ville.

"There is little of our world that remains. There is only me. And what despair that I have only memories to guide me, only the barest threads of recollection to aid in my testament, oh the last of its kind as well, a dead race and a dead art to record its passing."

The Grinch sipped his tea then as I watched in perplexity. This was not the creature I had anticipated. There was something almost vast about him, something that informed me I was speaking to the tail end of an epic. It was not a sane quality, rather something long ago corrupted by bitterness and suffering.

I decided then, bracing myself even as the he filled his lungs for another blast of rhetoric, that this Grinch was mad. And I wondered just what exactly had I gotten myself into? What had the paper gotten me into?

"For when I die," the Grinch said in his lofty voice, "--and by the rusted spirit and stinking avowals of history that time is soon--when I die there will be nothing left, and none able, nor desirous even, to hear it. Nothing left at all of the mighty Grinch.

"I am the Grinch!" he stated, pounding his hairy chest with one fist. "If you too were the last of your race, the last of the listeners, as indeed you wish to be and as perhaps you are, then you too would find great solace in becoming the definite article, as am I, the Grinch. But I have shuffled off my Grinchly ways, at least the ways that correspond with all that was Grinch, for I am all that is Grinch and my ways are therefore their ways, the ways of the Grinch. I have chosen to follow my own ways. For what Grinch was ever the last Grinch before this Grinch now? Whose ways would I follow as my example? There are no ways. Except my ways. That is the conclusion I have reached. These are the ways, then, the ways of the last Grinch. And so they are the ways of the Grinch, for they are Grinchly ways."

He suddenly swooped down on me like an eagle on a small rodent, leering with one eye wide, his face only inches from my own, his green claw of a hand grabbing at my snow-parka in fierce threat.

"Does it terrify you," he said slowly, as I recoiled from the foulness of his breath, the yellow decay of his teeth, and the fever in his eyes, "that the part may demonstrate for the whole? What about your neighbor? Does he demonstrate for you?" The Grinch shook my snow parka on the word demonstrate. "Or your coworker. Does he demonstrate for you as well? But ahh, is he the last of you? Think again!"

The Grinch shook my snow-parka once more then set it free, whirling about the snow cave like a bad Hamlet. "He is not Grinch anyway. No, none of you are Grinch, neither you, nor your neighbor, nor your coworker, nor you nor you nor you. I am the Grinch! And me alone!"

He pounded his chest again in demonstration that he was the last of the Grinch. Maybe, I thought, if I made a sudden break for it he wouldn't have time to catch up before I hit the lower trails. Maybe I could find a Who or two to help me fight him off....

Then, as abruptly as the Grinch seemed to do everything, he dropped back down to his place across from me and sipped his tea.

"My burial weighs heavily on my Grinch soul," he continued calmly. "For who will there be, what exigency, what mindless creature of the wilds will arise to carry my corpse to its resting place, who to perform the proper ceremony for my end? Who but myself could eulogize for an entire race now passed? It is only those who move and die in the crowded spaces of time and history who are celebrated and remembered. It is only those present in the flux of life who are permitted a fair and meaningful death. Death is only for the living at last.

"No, there will be no hymns sung to my passing, no voice cast out above the anchor of my final ground, and indeed what ground shall there be? The cold wastes, the insular integrity of the snow fields, the barren rock and the silent timber that is all I have come to know? This ground, my home, the final home for all that is or ever was Grinch, for all that ever spoke the Grinch tongue, and thought as only a Grinch may think, this ground shall remain a wasteland, barren and finally alone. For when I die so dies a language, so dies a belief, and a god, so dies all that has passed. Only the ground will remain. Back unto the earth with it all. None will graft upon the surface of it any mark of this or any Grinch, none will tell the story of the race. But then only the wilds would be there to listen. Only the winds roving upon the scorched lands of our once great civilization will dare even a calm and subdued utterance of farewell.

"You say you want my version of the story," he said, turning to me in what amounted to critical appraisal. "You want the words of the Grinch. Yes, then, and the words of the Grinch are the words of all Grinch! Let this then be that eulogy. Let this be the final words of Grinch and for Grinch, a final testimony to all that might once have cared to listen or cared to be Grinch. Yes, I will announce our passing to you and to the naked crags and barren trees, to the sun and earth that once knew service under Grinch, to the newly feral valleys and rivers of a land gone foul with the chaos of ruin and loss, I will shout out to the heavens that here once stood--get the hell out of my ears damned Who-villian tormentors!...

"I have grown sick again. I must pause."

The Grinch then cowered into himself, becoming little more than a green ball on the pile of straw carpet before the firepit. Then, drifting in through the blanket from outside, there came a small but steady noise and I quickly, though cautiously, crept out to the ledge to investigate.

Yes, there it was. Singing. The Whos were singing and one could indeed hear it from up here, a gentle and melodious song in many voices that blended into one voice, rising out of the valley.

I turned to gaze back at the Grinch who still huddled in a fetal ball, trembling slightly beneath his dirty green fur. Just what were they singing, I wondered, edging back to the edge of the ledge and listening. Just what did they say?

#

Wahoo Lorax, dahoo doray,

Come the Grinch will cry tonight,

Fahoo foray, Lorax, he may

Bring the Grinch back to the light!

#

Was this just nonsense? Have I even transcribed it correctly? The Whos did indeed appear to be singing to the Grinch and for the Grinch. Were they intentionally tormenting him? Intentionally or not they were succeeding.

#

Wahoo Lorax, dahoo doray,

Just one Grinch is left in sight,

Fahoo foray, Lorax, he may

Force that Grinch to fight or flight.

#

My fear of him turning swiftly to pity, I returned to the cave and stared for a moment at the whimpering Grinch. "Why do they sing this to you?" I asked.

He whimpered louder but did not otherwise respond.

"What is a Lorax?" I persisted. "Who is he?"

"The Lorax," he managed between whimpers. "Don't let him get me. Don't let him take me back...."

What was I to do? I knelt beside the Grinch and petted his coarse green fur while the singing persisted. From within the cave the words were unintelligible and I grew curious over what more they said. The Whos.... My dealings with them had been limited to just one night at their inn, but I had found them a peaceful race, friendly and helpful. Something like this I had never suspected lay within their character. Who was this Lorax? Was he their leader? Their god? And furthermore, what did he, or any Who, have against the Grinch?

These questions would have to wait for the next day, for the Grinch proved either unwilling or unable to say anything more until that time. I spent a cold and lonely night there beside the firepit, wrapped in as many blankets as I could find, while outside, inexplicably, the singing went on and on and on.

###

-2-

"All the Whos in Who-ville know of me," the Grinch said the next morning over tea. For breakfast we ate some sort of biscuits made from a dull yellow powder and cooked upon the very stones of the firepit. It was odorless and more or less tasteless, and I feared it was one of the Grinch's few staples.

"I am their legendary green bed-time story," he continued, "their Abominable Snow Grinch, shunned like the light of truth and furthermore cast out from my proper burial place in Grinch-ville. Oh don't be fooled," he said, noticing my look of confusion. "Who-ville was once Grinch-ville. Does that surprise you? Does that shatter all that was once yours to cherish? Does that burn painfully with eagerness like an acid at all that you once naively had to believe in? Your very morality is built upon a lie! Oh deceitful historians, oh Seussian Saboteur, spreading viral Seussisms to poor innocent children! Wicked, wicked, wicked. No Grinch may even stand in your fallout, oh once proud and living man."

He raised his clenched fist in the direction of Who-ville, the general direction for all his rhetorical ravings and gestures.

"Is it not true," he said, "that when one is not the last of one's race there is a certain responsibility one owes? Surely, the last one can do as he pleases, the last being noble and defining, the last being kin only to God and himself, but the many-from-last? That one should mind his manners. For he will be judged by the others, and if he is judged improper then he will be found out and his property rightfully seized and his family sentenced to exile out on the mountaintop. It must be so for all races."

He did not wait for my response and I was just as happy not to provide it. Once more he seemed to speak to something beyond me, perhaps to all of existence, or to abstract history; perhaps to his god or his lost people; but not directly to me, and, indeed, I suspected that he was quite accustomed to speaking--or ranting--in this manner, being as alone and tormented as he obviously was. But where the day before it had been disconcerting and even a bit alarming, today, after the evidence of the singing and the demonstration of the effect it had had on him, I was more willing to let him have his stage and his oration. I felt compelled to give him something, anything that might help to ease his suffering, and if my acting the symbolic audience for him could provide that then so be it.

"Here is an example of the lies that continue to defame my character even to this horribly blighted day," the Grinch said. "Listen closely. There is not, was not, nor ever shall be a dog in my possession! Ah, but so the legend describes it! That dog is a prop, a devious tool engineered to make me look bad. Like the rhythms and the rhymes, it exists solely for the insidious purpose of manipulating children. It charms them with its cute puppy antics and large brown eyes, waggly ears and tail, luring in their good-hearted interest. Then only to show me, me!, the last of the noble Grinch, the good and honorable, kind-to-animals Grinch, only to show me abuse the poor thing! What slander is this? Oh they knew what they were doing, those propagandists, those manipulators. They wanted to get me. And get me they did. The Seuss. He got me. Oh, there is so much more that will surprise you...." he said, nodding at my obviously startled expression. "So many other lies that you must know."

"Did the Seuss come here to speak with you?"

"He came. To Who-ville he came, which lay 'Beyond the Z' as he called our land. 'Beyond the Z' he came and spoke with the Whos and with me--I was then living among them, having fallen to their various torments. In those days, I was their prize Grinch, their captive, thoroughly subverted and made to exist mindlessly in the Who fashion. I was their ugly trophy. Up here on the mountaintop I can forget what it is to be ugly, but can you understand that it is they, the Whos, who have made me so? Down there in their happy little village with their happy little songs, with their Floofloofers and Rumtinglers, they know not what it is to be alone, outcast. Je me am solitaire," the Grinch whined. "They know not, with their sameness and their oneness, with their dignified tanness, what it is that I know, alone with my greenness surrounded by snow, what it is to be different, different and alone. Yes, ugly. None among them can know. And this fault is theirs, not mine, for I am--simply am!--and I am one. But they are many. They exist with the power to decide what is and is not, what should and should not, and what is ugly.

"So I become ugly to myself. They make me so." He paused once again, staring out past the cave entrance and the billowing rug that he had propped open on a niche in the rock, his face wan and detached, his eyes searching for something that would never be there. In that body, in that soul, I felt the currents of his departed race lingering distantly within him, and I tried to conceive of what it must be like for him. The last of his people. The last of the Grinch. And these Whos, who were somehow--I supposed--responsible for it and for further suffering beyond the fact for this Grinch in particular.

"But up here on my mountain," the Grinch continued, regaining himself, "I can escape from all of that and from all of them. I can be a society of one, with allegiance to one, and with standards based upon one. One alone I can stand.

"Up here, they dare not touch me. They will not venture this far into the mountains for fear the Abominable Snow Grinch will get them. Oh, and I would get them, too. I would get them and take back some of the dignity I am owed, take back some tiny portion of myself. I would get them and in so getting I would convince them that the Grinch is proud, and not to be mocked any longer, that the Grinch is still mighty, stronger than they. I would tell them that I am here by choice, my own choice, here to preserve all that is Grinch and keep all that is Grinch from their mindless Whovian perversity, from their bottomless greed and unflinching will to take, from their devouring, unfailing end, I the only Grinch, unspoiled, resolved! Yes, I would tell them. But they do not come."

Trying to steer the Grinch back to the original question, I asked, "So the Seuss never came up here to the cave, to see where you lived before Who-ville?"

"And after Who-ville," he added with a touch of venom on the last word. "Yes, he came. With the Lorax as his guide, the arrogant Lorax who descended from the long extinct Spotted Lorax. Foul smelling beasts that once roamed in herds across the face of the lost continent of Mu. I should have suspected him from the start, sharing such company as that. And of course the Whos welcomed them, they danced and capered about on their tan foot bottoms with their hooting and their snooting and their singing and bell ringing, they praised the Seuss as an intrepid traveler of his peculiar race, the first they had ever seen, for the Whos were always rather provincial. Your race, that is, if I am not mistaken."

"Yes, he was of my race."

"I don't suppose they gave you any celebrations?" He didn't wait for my reply, continuing, "They will only do it once, in praise not of a being but of the unique event of seeing something new. But perhaps praise is a misleading word. It is more a ritualized warding for their own protection. When confronted with something new they feel threatened and so attempt to protect themselves with a very loud, very bothersome ceremony of... of noise. Blasted, ear splitting, bleating, biting noise! They thrive on the noise because it distracts them from what they really are, it masks the unpalatable truth of their being, which is vain and petty and empty of culture. These are the conquerors of the Grinch. Such an irony. Such a scathing, nauseating irony.

"I am not amused by the Whovian scatology, either; it grates upon my nerves, disrupting my meditations. Do they not understand that I am engaged in important work up here? How am I to concentrate under these conditions? I am composing an historical document of my lost race, the only such testament that shall ever be written by Grinch about Grinch after the fall of Grinchdom...."

This statement momentarily confused me, for up until this moment I had believed his "testament" was simply his oration to me. "You are writing the history of your race?"

"Just the final days, the days that none have written about. There are other histories of the Grinch in various libraries in this land. I once made the cruel error of seeking one out in Oskazizwey, but that is another and long story. Those creatures ennoble the Whos with subtlety, and if not for the pursuit of Sam-I-am I would not have ventured there at all."

"Sam-I-am?" I asked with surprise. "You’ve met Sam-I-am?" Suddenly this was getting very interesting indeed! Sam-I-am, the legendary terrorist of North Nubb, Jounce and South Bounce, the Scourge of Mulberry Street, Ipswich and Nipswich. Perhaps, I thought, there was more here than a trivial article on the Who Christmas affair after all....

"Knew in a round-about, forced-upon way," the Grinch nodded, pouring tea. "Horrible, terrible creature. The cruelest slime that ever did rise from the grotto in Gekko. Another loathsome place filled with noise, noise, noise.... The Whos are not the only ones in this land who make the racket of ruckus that has brought me to this mountain. Cursed creatures who know nothing of the struggles of the intellect, all day long with their braying and humming, their tapping and rapping, oh the noise, the noise!

"Am I not honoring the Who's peace?" the Grinch asked caustically, leaning forward over the firepit. "Am I not endorsing the equality of our adjoining spaces? They do not. Instead of respecting my genuine right to privacy, they invade my hearing at every waking moment, relentlessly, cruelly filling the air with their ridiculous uproar. And this goes on all year long; if it is not one holiday then it is another, if not one hollow pretext then the next, on and on, always. How can a Grinch possibly remain sane under these conditions, let alone compose the final testament to his dear and departed, so soon to be forgotten, race?

"I do not ask for much," he said plaintively. He rose and gazed out through the cave entrance toward the valley and Who-ville. "Indeed, from them I have asked almost nothing. Is it truly so horrendous to desire the smallest piece of silence? I believe they do it just to torment me. I am a Grinch, so I know what those Whovians are plotting down there, with their multi-purpose songs and clamor. I know. They are trying to break my spirit."

He paused for a moment to regroup himself. It was obvious that if not for my presence this poor creature would be standing exactly as I had first found him, face twitching, eyes fixed upon the valley and Who-ville below, with a composite of emotions on his face too numerous and conflicting to mention.

#

Wahoo Lorax, dahoo doray,

Come the Grinch will cry tonight,

Fahoo foray, Lorax, he may

Bring the Grinch back to the light!

#

As if summoned, the sounds rose again and the Grinch's body shuddered with obvious pain and distress. Once more I was struck by the seeming cohabitation of the entirety of his race invested in this one last vessel, this solitary remaining example. Such a tragic end for an entire people. Such a pity for them all, but mostly for the Grinch himself. What must these people, these Grinch have been like?

I knew then that I could not leave that day as I had planned. I had to have the whole story. I felt that the world deserved to hear it, to hear of the last of this race, and deserved to know what had passed in this land, in another time. Mostly, I felt that this last Grinch deserved it, deserved to tell his tale to all and any who would listen. I resolved to stay until I heard it all. And then I would write my own document, my own testament. I would write my own eulogy to the Grinch.

###

-3-

The Grinch Race was once a mighty one with cities as vast as the plains and mountains surrounding and shadowing them and numbers uncountable even by the most controlled and scientifically proven methods of enumeration, numbers and numbers of Grinch and more Grinch, the so-called Golden Age of Grinch. But that phrase is inexact, as I shall show, for where gold does not tarnish, the Golden Age of the Grinch certainly did, and not corrupted from without but from within, like a social cancer. For one day the numbers of the Grinch began to rapidly diminish: Grinches began dying at an unheard-of rate, unspeakable rate, and for the longest of times nobody could explain why. The scientists and doctors worked all day, every day in their laboratories and morgues, examining the corpses, performing autopsies and pathological analyses, desperately searching for causes and for similarities between them. But, much to their embarrassment, each dead Grinch seemed to have departed for a different reason and for quite ordinary reasons at that. There were heart-attacks, strokes, vehicle accidents, cancers, shootings; there were fires, suicides, hypothermias, asphyxiations, animal attacks; there was every kind of mortality that occurs to any society anywhere elevated to that level. Grinches were dying normally, just in ridiculous numbers. Was it just a statistical fluke?

It was not long before the mathematicians and statisticians and chaoticians became attracted to the phenomenon, plotting with their graphs and equations and attractors death rates throughout recent history, adding in environmental factors and societal factors and even seemingly irrelevant factors, attempting to construct some mathematical explanation. Maybe if we can understand the problem, they reasoned, we can then combat it.

They failed. They all failed, every stinking last one of those ivory tower charlatans. For do you know what their explanation was, their learned opinion built from countless hours of study, analysis and computation, after spending millions of dollars of tax payer's money, do you know what they concluded? Can you even guess? They said it was just a statistical fluke. And their prescription was that everybody had better reproduce as rapidly and as frequently as possible in order to avoid utter Grinch extinction.

What hogwash! What inane prattle! Single-handedly those professors and scientists had endorsed a program that was to lead inevitably to the fall of Grinch. And do you know why? Because it was decadence, not statistics, that destroyed the Grinch. It was the wrath of God that had fallen.

In the last days of Grinch there arose throughout their terrified society a great fervor for procreation. All with the potential to inseminate or be inseminated were urged to perform and repeat the performance again and yet again. It was viewed as their only hope for survival. What desperate orgies of the flesh then blighted an otherwise refined placidity! An act theretofore distasteful and inhibited became a matter of the utmost duty, and was therefore not only endorsed but mandated by the sum of the thinning yet still courageous energies of the race; and it filled them with a passion for sin they had not known since the dawning and barbarous ages. What loss of restraint then tainted a once well vested interest in civility and temper, what animal lusts were allowed free and ignoble pursuit within the pure chambers of that society's spirit, thereby compromising itself and its traditions, thereby soiling the otherwise promising futures of its children.

That was the harbinger of the final demise. And what irony that their very efforts at preserving themselves had become the defining and enervating means to their end. What gross injustice that they should die from their own self-inflicted wounds, gnawing at the trapped leg as it were, in order to free themselves, only to bleed to death afterwards.

For to recoil against one's own sovereignty, to spit in the noble face of one's own guiding covenant is to introduce a form of decay from which no potential salvation may gather enough strength to repel. Even the preserved roots of the past, if indeed those roots are recognized as one's own, cannot represent a solid enough philosophy to counter the decadence of the present. In the end it was decadence that destroyed the Grinch.

I have learned that cultural ethos is affected more by the present than by any tradition that lies, however deeply ingrained, however cherished, in the past. I have learned that just as one can launch a ball of snow down a steep hill and then watch as that ball gains in volume, so too can one watch the initial sins of one's culture escalate to a point where the original failings seem mild in comparison. Any point of decadence in the past is overshadowed by the zeitgeist of the present.

Oh, how the elderly must have trembled to watch it change! Oh, how I tremble just to consider it. For there could be little understanding of any decline on the part of those who participated. They knew not the fruit of their insidious ventures. Indeed, they believed themselves the very saviors of a culture that had already brought them close to collapse. As I have written, what irony.

That irony should be the final stamp upon a race as proud as the Grinch is somehow fitting. Intolerable of course, but fitting. For somehow, in the deepest secret regions of my cynicism, that part of me that--with the aid of this testament--I struggle to dominate, I cannot help but laugh at their pathetic efforts to save themselves. They had grown weak, indulgent, eager for simple answers while ignoring the lessons of their own history, arrogantly convinced of their own immortality, and willing even to sacrifice what semblance of their culture remained for the almost criminal satisfaction of their basest desires. No, mass procreation did not save the dying race of Grinch, it destroyed them. For they had become a race of miscreants who were either unable or unwilling to provide properly for the solidarity of their collective future, and who were out rightly contemptuous of the invectives that had formerly made them strong. And I, the only Grinch to survive that holocaust, I, the final victim of my culture's suicide, I--I am a child of that madness.

A great Grinch once said that quantity affects quality. That statement was never truer than in the final days of Grinch. We had become nothing if not--If not... Wahoo Lorax... dahoo dorax... If not... Dorax dahoo wahoo thy... No. Please, I beg you. Do not oppress my final moments. This is important! Please....

Yet another irony to add to the rapidly growing collection, that our secular leaders had prescribed a cure that could only exacerbate the disease. Is this not evidence enough that a secular society is ill equipped to handle a spiritual crisis? Is this not justification enough for belief in the holy book of Grinch? Well, it is too late anyway. The evidence of God's existence that the decriers and the infidel liars so often demanded came only after such evidence was superfluous. Yes, another irony.

The sudden procreative madness of the Grinch did not equally balance the death rate. In fact, with the number of children that were thereby begotten, the death rate was observed to increase in parallel. The more decadent the Grinch became, the worse the situation grew. For procreation was only the germ of their dissipation, only the caustic root of their moral decline. After the brief thrill of sexual abandon had diminished, Grinches everywhere took to the consumption of stimulants, both in the form of drugs and of psychological disinhibitors: pornography, dionysian rituals, lewd and suggestive language; visitations to the outermost limits of sexual perversity became commonplace. The world of Grinch had sunk into thorough debasement.

And mass opinion, rather than deeming their efforts too extreme, held that they were not doing enough, that certain detractors to the public ethos were contaminating their holistic effort for survival. Thus came the Great Restructuring. And thus also came my father's excommunication. Understand that this great redirection in our culture, while secularly initiated, did not remain within the boundaries of the secular institutions. No, indeed, in order to accomplish such a massive brainwashing the often devious tools of religion had had to be employed. The stasis of Grinch consciousness had had to be altered, then our moral fiber re-engineered.

What had emerged was nothing less than a culture-wide Bacchanalian cult of indulgence. The old Grinch was no more, effectively eradicated by the new. Once again, dominant power had overwhelmed minority wisdom.

All this in the name of survival. In the vainglorious attempt at preserving the race. But when, I ask now, after all that hedonism, after the very texture of the culture had been altered to the very worst, what, I ask, was even worthy of preservation? I do not pretend to know the mind of God, but as far as a Grinch is concerned, a true Grinch, I must surmise that He too must have asked this very question. Certainly it was within His power to save them--to save us that is--surely He could have spared the Grinch race their fate, but to what end? They had passed a point beyond which there was no returning. Finally, in the dismal end, they were better off in death.

I hope I do not sound too bitter. I hope I have not neglected to supply enough qualifiers. But when one is the last of one's race due primarily to the irrational behavior of his race, then that one, perhaps, is justified in one's bitterness. I am not fully disinclined to declare that they did this to me, that they, the very Grinch from which I descend, have hurt me to the point of virtual hell. I am not far from placing the blame of my despair and the ruin of my life as well as the ruin of my family on their long departed shoulders. And yet... I cannot. For in the end I would only be blaming myself. If I were to despise my race, if I were to disavowal it, then I would no longer be the last of the Grinch. I would be the last of nothing at all. And that, indeed, would be a meaningless death.

#

I was raised in one of the more stable households at that time. My father was a minister so I was taught well the values of the past, the lessons of a God fearing people. I was trained in all the customs of Grinchdom, properly beginning with the classics: Sitcomocles, Sergentius Cartus, Gomer and a veritable pile of his ancient writings. I was made to read them in their original language too, one of the few little Grinches in my school to do so.

From there my father rehearsed me in the teachings of the old proverbs, most concerning the values of restraint and fairness to others. But I was not raised to be a victim, nor a casualty to injustice; I was indoctrinated into a philosophy of equality: to every Grinch his space and to every Grinch his due accordingly. While I was taught to remain steadfast in my beliefs, I was trained well to respect the rights of those around me, be they Grinch or... otherwise. I would not, dared not, infringe upon another's sovereignty unless that sovereignty infringed upon my own. In that case, one mean and angry Grinch would rise from the equanimity of his former bearing, one vengeful Grinch then had the right, indeed the obligation, to correct and repair the imbalance of his world.

These were the old teachings, the old ways of the Grinch. And my father, I remember well, stood proudly behind them, and fought at every moment for their preservation. How he struggled with the changing times, as Grinch after Grinch imposed his own beliefs, his newfangled ways, upon the stasis that was our home. Forces that tried to counter-mandate our traditional family surrounded us. It was everywhere, in the streets, in the newspapers, on the television--before my father threw it away--rising up insidiously like the cancer it was, affecting even the stoutest of Grinch hearts and tempting with false promises of salvation and stability, of rejuvenation and rebirth. These were promises that my father considered treasonous to the old ways, erroneous to the culture, and he was determined to make a stand against them. As I have indicated, these new ways spelled out only decadence and turmoil, leading finally to utter annihilation. Could it have been that only my father understood this?

Perhaps it was so, for throughout the course of his struggle there came opposition after opposition, threat after threat. In the end even his own congregation at the First Church of Grinch Learning had turned against him, affected irrevocably by the madness of their world, and unable to believe any longer in the traditions my father preached. He was ousted from his Minister's Chair and the church became the First Church of Grinch Reconstruction. How this enraged the old Grinch! By then his hair had gone a terrifying shade of green, much like my own at this moment, under the chastisement and spite of his once loyal followers. What could he do? He certainly was not going to capitulate and join them. That would be a betrayal of the very deepest fiber of his being.

From there matters grew far worse than any of my ancestors had ever known them. My father continued to deliver his fiery sermons from box tops in the streets and every night it took my mother hours to help him clean off the vegetable splatterings and manure projectiles that had been flung at him by the local masses. Still he did not admit defeat. To his family and to himself he was fighting for the very survival of his race. And now, an old Grinch myself, I know that to be true.

It was not until the Great Restructuring that things came to a critical head for my father. On the eve of that terrible day two well dressed, official looking Grinches with visited him at our home unabashed certainly in their eyes. I watched, as I recall vividly, from behind the foyer stairs in hiding as they confronted my father at the door.

"Mr. Grinch," said one of them in the deepest, most terrifying voice I have ever heard. "You are hereby ordered by the City Council for Reconstruction to vacate these premises and proceed elsewhere."

My father, looking older than I had ever seen him, took the Grinch's offered proclamation with one nearly trembling hand.

"If you do not comply," continued that evil sounding Grinch, "within forty hours, you and all of your property will be rightfully seized by the State."

Oh, how I grimace even now at the recollection of that word, "rightfully". What right was that? What right could they possibly have had to remove us from our home, to throw us out on the street like so much detritus fit for trampling by the gross and eager hoards of the insanely misguided future? In the malphemistic names of progress and preservation we were to be discarded, branded enemies of the State, and financially ruined for the sake of our ideals. What ire rises forth to consider it even now, but then, oh then, it was devastating. No previous betrayal of the past could have prepared us for it.

My father, obviously shaken by the pronouncement, read over the proclamation carefully, having removed his spectacles from his threadbare vest with what now had become a visibly unsteady hand. I think that among my most vivid impressions from childhood, the memory of that moment stands out most cruelly pronounced, the old Grinch delicately placing his spectacles on his nose, and then attempting to hold that proclamation still while it wavered tremulously under his faltering self-control. Such a thing to carry through life in remembrance of one's proud father....

And perhaps it was the shock of the moment, how it had come so unexpectedly, that caused my father to react as he had. I do not know. For it is also possible that he had expected it and somewhere, deep in the most secret corners of his soul, had resigned himself to it: finally the struggle would be over, and at last, maybe, he could rest. In either case, he surprised me on that night and the Grinch I had known, the blustering preacher who had once wielded the lightning of heaven and the justice of hell, at that moment disappeared. And in his place was a passive Grinch, a beaten Grinch, a Grinch who had lost everything and could hope only to wither further into the morass that was now his comfort. My father did not argue, he did not protest on that night, he did not shout as if true righteousness belonged to him rather than to the corrupt State that was ruining us. He only lowered his head and slowly closed the door to the house that at one time had been our home.

After that he was never as he once had been. He took our family away from the city, selling most of our possessions in order to pay for the journey and for the food and the supplies we would need. And we retreated here, to this frozen wasteland, to this very cave that now comprises the sum total of Grinch civilization. This, my family's final home, and the resting place of my parents.

Ironically (and yes, it is more irony that comes now to sting me), it was this very cave that must have protected us from the full and final collapse of Grinchdom. Up here we were isolated, here in our excommunicated exile, up here we were virtually unaffected by the fall of Grinch. We still had some contact, it is true, by way of infrequently passing strangers and occasional clandestine visits to the city far below for desperately needed supplies, but these reminders of our culture grew more and more seldom as the world of Grinch rolled inexorably closer and closer to oblivion. How to make an account of those terrible last days? I cannot, at the moment, do so. The singing seems to have grown louder. It always does toward dusk. It is then that I feel my private agonies most keenly.

###

-4-

I am an old Grinch. My days, whatever pale sheen they might once have bourn, or whatever regrettable cast now shrouds them, are swiftly passing, escaping on the wind with the clouds, aimed finally for the darkness which lies beyond the horizon.

Each morning that I awaken there is yet another day lost to that yawning perimeter, yet one more part of the gradual lessening that is a Grinch's life. And have I lived a good life? Have I made the name of living my worthy moniker? All that lives deserves such petty praise. Not I, a Grinch, the last of the proud Grinch, the last of the Grinch!

What have I to justify my end? Shall my death too rot overcast by irony? Alas, the eternal irony that is Grinch.

The morning sun has just crept into the cave....

#

Here I paused in my reading of the Grinch's "history" of the last days of his people and stared out of the cave perplexed. There on the ledge, as was his custom, the Grinch sat staring, twitchingly transfixed upon the valley and Who-ville below. I rose to join him, dropping the dusty and slightly soiled manuscript--were those tear stains?--on the chair behind me.

"I was under the impression," I said as I arrived beside him, "that your writings were a history of the end of Grinchdom. It seems to have become more of a journal or a diary at this point."

The Grinch turned from his vigil and appeared almost saddened by the question. "It is an old form of historical discourse for our people," he said in his gravelly hiss. "One should not pretend to have the mind of God, omniscient and absent. That would be unutterable hubris, would it not?" He smiled distractedly and nodded. "By speaking of oneself, one speaks for the culture. How could it be any other way?"

These words seemed to generate great pain for the Grinch, and once more he returned to his vigil over the valley. Tiny plumes of smoke could be seen rising from that direction, gray fingers against the infinite white with tiny specks of green and brown showing through. The Grinch seemed to belong to this landscape as much as the mountain did, or a tree. He fit here so well that it seemed the place must have been designed for him to occupy, the way a mausoleum might be designed to best fit the traits and characteristics of its entombed. I did not want to pursue that thought so I returned to the cave and resumed reading.

#

The morning sun has just crept into the cave, and it serves me well by fighting off this damnable cold to which I have not yet grown fully accustomed. After sixty years of exile, the vast majority of which have been spent in this frozen waste so far above what was once Grinch-ville, I still have not conquered the wrath of the low temperatures. Like cruel thieves, they steal into my cave, coming devilishly to rob me of my peace. The cold seeps, both the cleanest and the foulest of waters, around the edges of the door quilts, akin to the voices from below, that frigid air, riding with the voices through the valley and up to the craggy peaks, dragging songs along to this summit as if it were a bull's-eye, zeroing in on me and my home, rupturing with a mindless vengeance my sleep and my meditations. If I had any predilection for foul irony I would proclaim them a travesty of isolation.

Yet I was a simple Grinch, a religious Grinch, and I had finally come to understand my situation, had adapted to it, even embraced it at times, as I sat in the position of the humble Grinch and allowed my mind egress into certain fathomable regions of my private soul.

I have discovered that there are balances in all things, yet not, as my idealistic father would have maintained, equitable balances. There are powers at work in the cosmos, some greater than others and therefore overbearing those others, pinning those others down. The passive, the weak, the permitting, these will always fall victim to the many. Was it not so with my father? Yes, there are balances, unequal balances, for the strong require the weak and the weak require the strong. I tremble to say it, but finally I am convinced it was weakness destroyed my father, and so too it was weakness destroyed the Grinch.

Of course there were days when I felt differently, many years in fact, when I practiced the teachings of certain holy Grinches of the distant past, Grinches who believed in the abnegation of the will, and who taught that suffering was the proper path to wisdom.

How these ideas comforted me in my exile! After my parents had died and I was left alone to account for my days and somehow see that they were not wasted, I would take refuge in the teachings and practices of meditation and introspection, seeking to discover some part of me that I had never known before. I would spend weeks sitting out on the cave lip, just inches from that fatal edge in the position of the holy Grinch, legs tucked under, back rigid, hands impassive. There I would concentrate on draining from myself all vestiges of my Grinch will, controlling my breathing, maintaining a lack of need. And yes, my will grew smaller, diminished as the weeks passed by, down to half its original size, and then a third, and I became wholly encompassed by the cycles of day and night, and then season to season as I watched it all pass in the valley far below. I became one with nature yet simultaneously detached from it, for up here it is always winter, and never does the snow leave me. I was more the observer of change in the valley than its participant, and drew my connections more from those orbiting giants above than from the spring, summer and autumn below.

After years of this practice there came a time when I felt as if I existed on the very cusp of the world, as akin to the sky as to the earth, and I became bifurcated, divided in my foundations, severed in my bearings, became ethereal, loosed to join with cloud and rain, vapor and light, and also earthly, one with the mountain, merged with the soil. In essence, I had become everything, and in my self I had become nothing.

What could have resurrected me from this abysmal catatonia? What force could have possibly wrenched me back into the sentient, active world? For I was starving to death and dehydrating despite the random snowflakes that landed upon my lips and tongue; I was profoundly close to death and lacked any ability to save myself. And in truth, perhaps I did not care to save myself. All that I had once possessed was gone, my home, my people, my family. All that I had been was now vanished, and I had been reduced to a pitiful creature, a shriveled and vapid husk of a Grinch, with no past, no present and no future, with no memories or desires, hopes or comforts; transcendent as I was, I had reached the bottom stone floor of my being, and had discovered the abominable truth about that being. I had discovered that there was nothing there.

So what brought me back? What saved me? The dog. The dog saved me.

#

"Okay," I said aloud to myself in the Grinch's dingy cave, "Alright. Enough. First he tells me there was never any dog and now there is a dog. How can I believe a single thing he says now? Do you hear me?" I shouted at his immobile form on the cave's ledge. "How can I believe you if there was really a dog?"

I felt the lead sentence of my article flying away on mocking wings. Pulled from the Grinch's own words, it was to be: There is not nor ever was a dog! Now what would the lead sentence be? There may not have been a dog? The dog exists only in writing, not in conversation?

"You said there was no dog!"

He did not respond, and I sat staring at his still green body for a long while before shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head in disgust. Staring back down at the manuscript, I found I was reluctantly eager to read on. Perhaps he forgot about the dog?

"Ah, hogwash," I said, using one of the Grinch's favorite words. This place was starting to get to me. The cold, the isolation, the lack of activity. It was like spending time on the moon with Mr. Green Cheese himself, and what a diabolically disturbed green cheese it was.

I tried to remind myself that I was here for the Grinch and that if I felt this way after two days and with at least some semblance of company, then what must he have had to endure for sixty years? That was assuming he had told the truth about that....

"No dog," I mumbled angrily. "It was the nonexistent dog that saved him from nonexistence...."

But did it made some kind of twisted sense? Was it not the nonexistent truth of the Seuss' story that had defamed his character? Was it not the nonexistent race of the Grinch that tormented him so in this testament? Why shouldn't it be a nonexistent dog that saved him? For when something ceases to exist, what remains but the effect it leaves upon the world, the wake of its passing? The memory.... And did not the Seuss, whether lying or not about the dog, legitimately create a dog for the Grinch's companionship? Perhaps there was no dog until the Seuss created it. Was not this document written after the fact? And did not the Grinch suffer over what the Seuss created for his character, for his actions, for his being?

The Grinch was obviously a product of his environment, as was everyone, as was myself. And what could contribute more to one's own environment, one's own sense of self, than that which someone else has maintained to be the case? Up there, the Grinch was living in a very vulnerable world, a world subject to any impression from beyond, due to its alarmingly static nature. Could it be possible, then, that the Seuss created the dog for the Grinch? As a gift of some kind, an act of charity? Or perhaps as recompense for what the Grinch obviously felt was a wrong portrayal of him?

What if this was the case in the Grinch's own mind....

Struggling with this confusion, I returned to that strange manuscript.

#

I know not where the dog came from, and I shudder to consider the most probable place, but come he did, a mere puppy at the time, to draw me up from my spirit's basement and replace me back in the world.

It began with a gentle sensation, a moisture and a roughness on my limp hand, the dog licking at whatever meager quantity of salt remained upon my skin and hair. But it soon escalated to an uninhibited barrage of barking. Ah, the sound of life knocking at my eardrums, bludgeoning them into recognition, this animal vitality, this enthusiasm for existence, even for my existence; it was barking at me. Of all things. Of course, later I was to see the dog commence his noisemaking at rocks, at trees, at wind-dragged leaves, even at a chance snow pile or two, but at that moment, there as I sat wholly absorbed by the nothingness I had become, I felt, somewhere in the most minute wellsprings of whatever being remained to me or perhaps through the cloudy window of my languished spirit, that the dog--or that which I sensed to be the very life-force of the earth summoning me back to herself--was barking at what it considered to be its own kind. Yes, here was life greeting life. Here, on the shadowy border of nonexistence, was nature communicating with itself, indeed, as it turned out, repairing itself.

Gradually, I responded to the dog's voice. In a certain way--for me at least, as the dog was probably just surprised to see a Grinch--in a certain way this animal was performing a kind of resuscitation on the approximate corpse I had become. It was reviving me with its barking, energizing my spirit--forcing me to gather together the tattered remains of my degenerate will for just long enough to reach out and smack that damned mutt across the side of his head and shut it the hell up at last. God, how incessant barking can drive one to torment.

#

I peeled an exasperated eye back toward the Grinch once more, feeling duped and betrayed. But I didn't bother to worry about it this time. I now felt confident that all was to be revealed, if not by the Grinch himself--who was suddenly appearing a master of disguise--then by his private writings. In here, in this manuscript I would get my true story and to the blazes with whatever he had to say to me in person. I read on.

#

Unfortunately, that was not to be the last of the dog, nor of his persistent yammering. Somehow--I cannot comprehend it--as I gradually regained my strength, the mangy beast became my constant, oh unyielding, companion. At my side he would frolic and wag; whether I was off on the mountainside or down in the valley hunting for food, or else just reading calmly by the fire, the dog would be there, licking his paws, nibbling at his hindquarters, be there barking and running, or just sleeping in the way of wherever I chose to walk, my dear Grinch's best friend of a flea-bitten mongrel. I never chose to name him, never had a reason to, but that did not seem to bother the dog, oh no. He was quite content to simply remain "the dog", as if he too were the last of his race, the sole survivor of some horrible canine catastrophe, exiled to this mountaintop in order to await the approaching finality that summons us all, be we Grinch or otherwise.

I must say that he took to the situation much more eagerly than I, and with better spirits from day to day than I could ever muster. There was something insulting in that, as if this ridiculous animal possessed a capacity for adaptation far superior to my own, and was relentless in reminding me of the fact.... Well, anyway, at my side he remained and remains to this day. There he is now, daydreaming in the corner, old and ragged, it is true, yet still more alive than I will ever be. And do you know? I believe he actually enjoys the singing....

#

This was the end of that part of the manuscript, so I felt at ease to search about the cave for any sign of the dog, whether its actual presence or some trace of its having once been there. I peeked into every granite chamber, under every blanket and rag, behind the sewing machine and beneath the Grinch's ratty bedding. Not even a hair. Not a bowl, not a bone, not a chewed up piece of wood or scratched over section of rug. There was no sign of any dog anywhere in that cave, and I was left sorely disappointed, for now I did not know what to believe, and I began wondering if it--or if any of this--even mattered at all. The Grinch was becoming more trouble than he was worth. What did I care for the Grinch? Now that I had his version of the story, why should I even bother with any more?

But then, did I really have his version yet?

###

-5-

"It was the singing of course," he said when I had finally managed to make him talk (a procedure involving entirely too much grumbling and twitching and bribes of hot tea for my tastes, but effective), and we sat upon the rugged ground beside the firepit once more. "The Seuss did not lie about that. If there's one thing I despise, it's noise. But prior to resorting to any rash attacks upon the Who Hash, I attempted a strategy of diplomacy. The singing was raging like a torrent of foul wind from the Swampf of Swumpf and I decided to act upon my needs for at least some smallest bit of peace for mind and ear.

"I composed a letter of petition for their mayor--or for whatever governing body might listen. It read... well, let me see, I believe I still have it...."

His frail-seeming green body lurched to its padded feet and he began shuffling around in the shelves of old books and papers from which he had earlier produced the "historical" manuscript. Finally, he said, "Ah yes, here it is. It took me many drafts to get it just right, and I could not bear to throw it away into the fire."

He handed me a yellowed sheet of typing paper upon which was written, from a well-trained penman but in a visibly shaky hand, the following:

#

To the Who it may concern,

I, the Grinch of the mountaintop, being a creature of reason and therefore sworn to the maintenance of equality between races, do hereby make a single request of the Who valley dwellers, also creatures of a righteous disposition, to the extent that, given the geographical diversity of our two habitats, certain inter-national regulations are in order. The spaces we each inhabit are joined swiftly and unavoidably by air currents which, given the quirks of mountain-valley sonics, have a tendency to travel upward, from your happy little town to my sad little cave.

Now, it is understood that the Who-ville holiday season has yet again arrived on the wings of fair time, and all salutations in respect to it are hereby given accordingly; however, the sound of this celebration--in short, the noise pursuant to this event--has an unfortunate tendency to travel upon the aforementioned air currents and, subsequent to this, what can only be termed a transmission, arrives at my home and disrupts the willful and cherished vestments of my local peace and solitude, thereby disrupting this solitude at great expense to my work, my frame of mind, and, at the risk of sounding grandiose, my sanity. No blame is being placed upon any Who's shoulders for this unfortunate situation; however, the institution of a rectifying town ordinance would, with all good will, be appreciated.

Yours respectfully,

The Grinch

#

"And what became of this?" I asked after reading it.

"Well, as you know, every Who down in Who-ville liked Christmas quite a lot and I had been putting up with it for fifty-three years before this final decision to act. I think they were accustomed to my being accustomed to the noise, noise, noise, and were bewildered that I should suddenly respond negatively to it. In my effort to deliver my missive, I came upon the mayor's twisted little tan house with its baubles and bells, purposeless antennae and other accoutrements, after much shuffling about in the finer districts and many inappropriate directions.

"He sat alone in a clean, well lighted place, warmed by a fireplace complete with chimney and nailed-in stockings on the mantle, Christmas tree and holly-Who wreathes, his whiskers perfectly trimmed, his demeanor quite within the same spectrum as any dignified Whovian beast. A pipe of colossal girth stuck out from his mouth and I could smell the diabolical fumes of Who-Hash issuing forth. After just several moments in the room with it, I became woozy and disoriented.

"You must understand that this was a very unusual and stressful situation for me. I was not accustomed to dealing with others in any sort of situation at all, let alone with that race of exploiters who had settled upon the empty ruins of Grinch-ville like so many cockroaches after nuclear winter. My desire for diplomacy was fair enough, but the actual fulfillment of that noble goal would have been best left up to another, more skilled and better prepared. I could do nothing but hand the envelope to him and wait as he read it.

"Well, perhaps that mayor's head wasn't screwed on just right, or maybe his shoes were too tight, but upon finishing my proclamation he simply stared at me and said nothing. Now granted, by that time I was fidgeting uncontrollably, the anxiety of the moment being quite overwhelming, but certainly not enough to warrant what he did."

I waited for more but the Grinch appeared unable to continue with his speech, and stared out of the cave mouth once more, perhaps dazed or lost in thought. "What did he do?"

"He summoned..." the Grinch began after a moment, still looking off into the distance. "He summoned Sam."

"Sam-I-am?" I asked, startled. "But how..."

"It is an undisclosed fact that Sam-I-am is Whovian. Yes!" the Grinch cried, turning to me so that I could see the tortured intensity on his face. "A Who! And if that does not tell you enough about that foul and loathsome race, then nothing ever will! The Whovians and their mayor, the Mayor of Who-ville, spawned and employed the foulest, cruelest creature ever to emerge from this land. It was Sam who caused the Great Christmas Debacle and so many other tortures for me and for all who live simple lives. Sam, who rampaged on the Prairie of Prax during the North-South War, who secretly financed Sylvester McMonkey McBean in his subversion of cultures too numerous to count, not least of which the once proper Sneetches now unfixed with doubt. It was Sam-I-am who, in the Jungle of Nool, orchestrated the farce that gave the Whos their rise to power, manipulating that fool of an elephant Horton into fighting for a cause contrary to his own independence. Nool was ravaged after the tale the Seuss tells of the event, the social structure of the jungle wrecked beyond salvage until nobody dares travel there. Sam-I-am, the mad genius of torment, the sadistic wrecker of reason, the subversive, the insidious, the evil, evil Sam!"

The Grinch fell into his fetal position and began weeping, just as I had observed him do two days before when the singing grew exceptionally loud. I recalled that on that occasion he had been unable to continue until the following day, and this annoyed me. Such revelations about the infamous terrorist Sam-I-am were the stuff Pulitzers were made from. I had to have more on this subject, and Grinch be damned if he stopped now. After some time of shaking and nudging and shouting and kicking at his prostrate green body, I decided to try something a bit unorthodox.

"Woof," I said in my best canine imitation. "Woof woof woof!"

The Grinch grew still and the crying abated, but he still did not extricate himself from the ball he had created.

"Woof woof woof!" I repeated. "Woof!"

Crack! I had been slapped by one green tufted Grinch hand. He glared at me with ageless suffering.

"What did Sam do?" I asked, rubbing my stinging cheek.

"If you must know, damned investigator, I will tell you what the devilish thing did and I will tell you what he continued to do, how the beast hounded me and drove me to extremes otherwise unheard of in the annals of the Grinch kingdom! I will tell you what he did on that fateful day, by the Mayor of Who-ville's demanded decree. I will! I will tell! I will tell it all!"

"Tell me."

"He brought forth his infamous plate and held it beneath my nose, one hand gripping the fork upon the end of which... upon the end of which..."

"What? Green..."

"Green ham, yes, green ham. But more..."

"Green eggs..."

"No! Not green eggs--the Seuss has lied! Not eggs!" The Grinch doubled over and wept anew, fiercer now and more tragic until I actually began to regret pressing him on the subject, Pulitzer or not.

"What was it?" I asked as gently as I could.

"Grinch," he whispered hoarsely through his tears. "It was green Grinch and ham...."

I recoiled, incredulous. "Not..."

"Yes. The Grinch do not decompose as other races. It is why we once deemed ourselves saintly and exalted. Beneath Who-ville, in the tombs and monasteries, in the fields and gravesites, all the Grinch, the vast population that once was, still exists in their material form. Their spirits have left to join with the holy Grinch on the star to which the black mountain points, but their bodies... Their bodies...."

"There there," I said, patting his back. "It's okay." What was I supposed to say? That I saw yet another irony for the eulogy of his race and for himself? That Sam-I-am was an evil son of a Who for doing that to him of all the things to do? I was still too amazed to say anything worthy of a Pulitzer Prize reporter.

"Okay?" he roared. "Okay? It is not okay! It is sick! Sick, I tell you, to do such a thing. It was bad enough that the Whos devoured our city, but to make such a gross and ostentatious display of devouring our bodies as well? It was unforgivably vulgar! It was inexcusable."

"Surely he was just kidding?"

"Does that make it permissible? You with your infidel ways, how could I expect you to understand? You are not Grinch. You do not know. Those of us who are Grinch or have been Grinch, those of us in the know as the know pertains to Grinch knowledge, we all know, we Grinch, yes, we know. Or rather, I know," the Grinch continued to rant, growing more and more confused. "For I am the last of the Grinch and the last of those to know, to truly know what it was that Sam-I-am and the Mayor of Who-ville did on that day. But you, you do not know. You are not, shall not become, and have never been anything remotely akin to the Grinch. You do not know. When you die, there will be someone to bury you, perhaps someone to pray for your departed soul, and to praise you, all of your accomplishments, your clever characteristics, your playful ways. When you die you will not be the last."

He rose now and began pacing around the firepit area, myself included.

"And even if you were the last!" he continued in his enraged voice. "Even if you, distant ancestor of your late, great species, even were to die with all that is you and your race packaged together into one bundle, even if you were the last, you would still not know. For you would rot away and disappear, into the earth to become one with the soil, into the ground to become nothing and everything at last. But as for me? What do I hope to expect when I die without burial? What do I hope to receive as a final ceremony? A feast, that's what! I shall be eaten! Eaten by Whos! Eaten by Whos!"

It took some great amount of time to calm him down, and by the time he did, he was in no mood for further discussion. Yet another day had passed and I was only fractionally closer to the resolution of what was now a long and arduous story.

###

-6-

I am a Grinch. Tremble, puny ones, before the symbol of purest evil risen out of your childhood. Tremble at the mention of its name. Grinch. Or more properly, GRINCH. I am the foul one up in the snow cave, torturing his defenseless dog. I am the heinous one who sneaks into your town at night as you sleep in ignorance of the deviltry that lurks outside. Yours is the sleep of the future victim, my victim, for I am Grinch. I am the stinking one who creeps into your house while you dream of sugarplums and rumdiggalers, and then robs you of your Christmas joys. For I am Grinch, the nasty one. Hate me as you should, hate me as you must, for you have been trained to do so. I am the source of your solidarity.

All the Whos in Who-ville have a story about me, the Seussian Grinch Legend, as it is sometimes called. This is how it goes:

Peaceful, fun loving Whos get ready to celebrate Christmas, making lots of noise. Evil Grinch is angered by the noise in suitably comic fashion. After torturing his poor pet for awhile, the Grinch dresses up like Santa Claus, pulls a giant sled out of thin air, sneaks into Who-ville, robs every house of their Christmas paraphernalia, including the candy canes from under children's fingers, then retreats back to his snow cave, prepared for the end of Christmas. But the Grinch is dismayed when Christmas comes anyway. The Whos sing their song and act content and happy. The Grinch, suddenly understanding that if he can't beat them then he should join them, pulls an Ebenezer Scrooge and rushes down to Who-ville to partake in the glorious holiday, where he is then accepted as one of the Whos.

Yes. This is their story. And what a lot of rot it is!

But perhaps it can be used to my advantage. If one were to, say, play out this feeble legend, if, say, a certain Grinch were to commence with the prescribed maneuvers, to steal Christmas as it were, lull them into the complacent belief that all such fools harbor: that history repeats itself, and then, say, break with the story, this time not be outdone by the unexpected singing, and stay fast with the original plan, that is, say, call their bluff rather than succumb to it, then possibly....

History can be repaired. Perhaps....

The Grinch can alter the story and get his proud name returned to him, not fall into the mindless mass and become devoured by it, not fail in his noble aim to teach those rotten bastards what it is to mess with the Snow Grinch, corrupt them this time, yes--another thought: What if a certain Grinch were to torment them, make them mad, mad in the agony of oppression and injustice, exile them to this frigid peak in the darkest hell of...!

The Grinch must plan this carefully. Exactly. He must play their role for them, sure, the better to lull them, at first.... But soon the best-laid plans of Whos and Whatnots shall turn on them awry and off the record. The legend shall change!

And the story of the last Grinch, of the all-Grinch shall not fade into some children's niche of innocuous conformity, shall not be puppeted about as the ignoble travesty it pretends to be, no.... The legend of the true Grinch shall be born. The legend of what the Grinch should have been, the Great Grinch, the Grinch of fire and granite, might of sky and storm returned to this persecuted land, a new legend, a better legend, one that Whovian children shall weep to hear, and before which they shall cower, a legend that their elders shall tremble to recount, more glorious than anything before it, finally removing the ghastly irony from the face of the Grinch sepulcher....

From this hole of the damned he shall rage forth against you with angry vengeance, rage forth from larch and shrubbery where his eyes burn for you, his padded tufts like sewage to your eyes, poison and perversion, like craters to their daylight, his many teeth like carnivores to their young--I WILL DEVOUR YOUR CHILDREN! I WILL DRINK THE WINE OF YOUR BLOOD!

That being said, the Grinch needed a plan, an unorthodox plan if his goals were to be fruitful. He industriously set about devising the means to turn about the Grinch legend that had so defamed him, but it was not long before more complications arose. Those complications went by the shunned name of Sam-I-Am.

"Max!" he called from the sewing machine. "Max, come here and obey your master."

The dog, of course, continued to ignore him so it became necessary to employ the use of force. "Yelp," said the dog from its constricted glottis.

"Wear this," said the Grinch, applying antlers too large. Snipped them down to size. Was remotely satisfied. "Yes," he muttered conspiratorially, "if Santa Clause were evil. Yes...." He rubbed his hands together in suitable bad-guy fashion.

"Would you eat them in a cave?" came a voice from behind him. "Would you eat them to be saved?"

He whirled in terror. There it was, the foul smelling Who, Sam-I-am!

"Stay back!" the Grinch cried.

"Would you eat them with the dog, would you eat them fur and all?" The Who approached with a sickening grin on his contorted face, his hands offering the plate of green meat. "Would you eat them with your friends, would you eat them to avenge?"

"No, I do not like them, Sam-I-am!" the Grinch cried. "I do not like Green Grinch and Ham!"

Max lunged toward the intruder, wagging his tail in greeting. Sam-I-am, revoltingly, gave the plate of Green Grinch and Ham to the dog, and smiled as Max gobbled up the corpse.

"Nooo!" cried the Grinch in anguish, unable to stop it or make it go away, unable to remove his eyes from the terrible sight.

"Would you eat them brains and all," Sam-I-am cried ferociously, "would you eat them short and tall? Would you eat them young and old, would you eat them timid and bold!"

The Grinch could take no more. He ran from the sight of the dog devouring the dead Grinch and from Sam-I-am's torment, from the cave that had been his home for so many years and from the mountainside entirely. He could not stop running. He found a sled out of thin air and leaped upon it desperately, slid fast through that region Beyond the Z, slid fast toward the Christmas trees, the Who-ville noise, the Christmas toys, ran back to them and from his cave, ran away, away, the Grinch ran away!

#

"So the dog did have a name. Max. Just like the Seuss said."

"How should I know?" the Grinch replied sourly. "He was a filthy creature. I could not forgive him for what he did."

"So you disavowed that he ever existed at all."

The Grinch frowned. "Yes," he mumbled. "I removed him into nonexistence."

I nodded, finally satisfied with something the Grinch had told me. "You went back to Who-ville?"

"What a mistake that was, let me tell you."

"Is that story written in here?" I held the manuscript up.

"Yes, yes it's all in there. Every last horrible moment of it. And a good thing for you, for I could not bear to recount it again."

"This isn't a history of the last days of Grinch, is it?"

Once more the Grinch frowned and gulped his tea like it was something strong and bitter, something to soothe his agonies. "It began that way. But... the memories. The memories kept rushing in and insisting they be voiced. Strange how that happens."

"Yes," I agreed. "Strange indeed."

#

Wahoo Lorax, dahoo doray,

Come the Grinch will cry tonight,

Fahoo foray, Lorax, he may

Bring the Grinch back to the light!

#

Break out the Grinch's window glass

Wreck his face with mustard gas,

Clean up the Grinch's sorry ass

And have some fun!

#

"Why do they hate you so? What did you do to them?"

The Grinch, in the flickering light of the dying fire in the middle of the dying night leered evilly toward me and said, "I showed them what they are."

"What does that mean? And stop acting so weird."

"It means," he loomed over the coals, "that I became the cancer. I gave them their myth, their legend of the abomination. But it did not end as the Seuss would have it, Green Grinch and Who meat soaking in the basting pan with dead Who beast and olive spam. It ended with the permanent collapse and utter annihilation of Who-ville."

"That's not true," I said testily. "There it is. Right down there."

"That is not Who-ville." The Grinch's voice was really starting to annoy me now. He issued forth his words in a sweep of breath like a ghost record on Halloween night, with a Booo and a Wooo and an I'm-more-evil-than-you. He pretended to be a creature of the darkness, while I knew he was just acting, just pretending to be something other than a sick little green man. "That is Seuss-ville," he said.

"Soooos-ville? What does that mean?"

"You should know. You have the book with you, don't you?"

I admitted that I did, and what journalist wouldn't?

"Was not the town exactly as it is portrayed therein? Was not this valley, mountain and cave exactly that way?"

"Well, yes, but I don't see..."

"You are in Seuss-land. Not my land. My land is very different. My land has no Who-ville in it."

I was reminded of my original theory about the dog, why he existed yet did not, that the Seuss had created the actual dog. But that question had been resolved when the Grinch had admitted that he had lied, that psychologically he could no longer endure the existence of Max and so had erased him from his memory. Now he was trying to turn those tables back again. I would not have it. My dog theory was outlandish and ridiculous, and this theory even more so.

"Look," I said roughly, "the Seuss wrote what he saw and what he was told. He did not create, he recorded. There is a very great difference."

"There is no difference. You with your fleet of reporters, your big city paper. You with your objectivity." He spat the word like a wriggling bug he had eaten by mistake. "You do not record the world, you make it. You are simply not honest about it. The Grinch, however... The Grinch knew. That is why my historical document is a subjective account of what happened to me. I am morally and ethically permitted to create my own world. The world of the Grinch, that is for all of the Grinch to make. And the world of your race, that should be the same. But it is not. You rely upon others to do that job, others who are not even elected, not nearly qualified for such a god-like task. Others like you, investigator. Are you not making up this story even as we speak? Are you not determining how it truly is, and how, therefore, it shall be for your readers?"

"This is absurd...."

"Listen to me, creature of another land. Listen. What, for instance, what..." he leaned even closer over the firepit. "What if the Seuss had been a madman?" That having been said, the Grinch eased back to his place over there.

I pondered that question for a moment, honestly perplexed. Certainly, if the Seuss had been a madman, then all of this... All of this might not exist at all.... Or that which did exist might be rather different. I frowned and said nothing.

"What," continued the Grinch haughtily, "if an entire race were mad? What would be reality then?"

"This is worthless speculation," I said, but by that time I had seen the Grinch's point. "Okay," I said, nodding, "I see with the eyes of my race, so I see what my race would see. What the Grinch would see, for instance, would be different."

"Precisely. One or the other race is mad by the other's standards. Did the Seuss not see the Grinch as mad? And yes," he nodded firmly, "the Grinch did see the Seuss as mad. Add the Whos into that equation and you have quite a mess. Three different perspectives produce six different permutations of reality. What, then, is real? Adding you now, that makes twenty-four different realities. Is it getting any easier? None of which can ever be objective. None of which can ever be God. Speculate that one, just one of those perspectives, is mad...."

"Like you for instance?"

"Certainly. If I am the twisted mind, and one of us, either myself or the Seuss at least, must be, then what does that do to the equation?"

I rose and paced about the firepit area, the Grinch included.

"You're just trying to confuse me," I said. "This is sterile jabberwocky. The simple fact is that what you say differs from what the Seuss wrote--which I can accept--but it also differs from what I see and hear, which I cannot accept. You say that Who-ville no longer exists. Then what about the singing?"

"I did not say that Who-ville does not exist. I said that it was collapsed and annihilated. It certainly still exists; otherwise what are we speaking of?"

"Whatever!" I cried. "What about the singing? Does the singing come from ghosts in the middle of annihilated Who-ville?"

"What singing?"

"Don't pretend you don't hear it!"

"Perhaps," said the Grinch, "it is you who is mad."

"Me? Who? Me? Ha!"

"Take your notion of a dog. Do you see a dog here?"

I groaned. Not the dog again. Anything but the damned dog! But I was forced to admit that I saw no dog, or any trace of him.

"The dog existed only in a story. It is in the Seuss' story, and in my own story. It will probably be in your story as well. But obviously, there is no dog. It truly frightens me that this is the kind of thing you teach your children."

"You already admitted that there was a dog," I said, trying to remain calm. I noticed that I had stopped pacing and now confronted the Grinch head on, my fists clenched in anger and frustration. "You said that you removed him from existence."

"Well, if that is the case then there cannot be a dog, though how I, a simple Grinch far less than God, could remove an entire dog from existence is quite bewildering."

"Forget the dog. Ignore it. Unlike the dog, there is a trace of Who-ville. It is right here in the air. The singing. The singing proves that Who-ville exists." I was rather proud of this deduction.

"You just don't understand yet," the Grinch said calmly. "Perhaps you should wait to hear the story before insisting upon this or that."

I grunted, frustrated. "Fine," I said. "Tell me the damned story. But I know what I know and no story is going to change that."

The Grinch laughed, a foul and odious chuckle. "I am indeed swamped by irony," he said to himself. "I am indeed."

###

-7-

The dog yapped wildly as the sleigh crashed through drifts and over mounds, snaked between trees and looped loops down toward Who-ville. It had been a particularly fierce winter and particularly heavy snows had covered the particularly high regions where they had not had the chance to turn into rain as they often did over Who-ville, where the Grinches had once lived. They had called it the purification of the Black Mountain and the baptismal of the world. That holy rain would now be slush, the Grinch knew, as the Whos were well known to pervert all things.

"Heeya!" the Grinch cried, crashing his whip and lashing his rein two sizes too long. "On, little doggie, on!"

"Yelp...."

The slope streamed by as rocks and trees, and the icy wind clutched at his green tuft of hair, catching Christmas bags in the back draft and ripping them from the sleigh. "On Masher, on Slattern, on Backpain and Nixon!" The Grinch sent his laugh out over the tundra, evil, foul and glorious. Nothing could stop him. He was Anti Santa Claus, and the Whos would know his wrath. "On Vomit, on Stupid, on Donner Party Victim!"

After much crush and tumble and broken branches swiping, the Grinch and his carriage arrived at the floor of the valley, over the last hill and around the bend to where the Who's garish little pink arch of welcome stood, like a plastic sign over a mall store. The Grinch was sure to go shopping tonight!

"You're a mean son of a Mr. Grinch," a strange voice sang in his ears. "You're a slimy, soggy crock! You're a bite of relativity, a smack of Bolshevik glop, Mr. Grinnnnch!"

"What is this voice that intrudes here so?" the Grinch wondered aloud in his customary way. "Could it be the spirit of the long departed Grinch come to welcome the bandit of their lost honor and pride?"

"If offered a choice between you and some other thing unpleasant I would choose... you!"

"Yes, I thought so."

The Grinch entered Who-ville and smiled. All was sleepy, all was quiet. All was empty of Whos. Now for the stinking Mayor's house...."

"And I would offer you..." the strange voice continued. "In the hells? Would you, could you, by their smells? Say! Say, Grinch!"

There: an unorthodox mound in the snow: fuzzy yellow jerkin and red bowler. It's, it's.... No, it's just a SnowWho. I must keep my wits together, the Grinch thought. Sam-I-am was far behind, in the snow cave. He could not, would not be able to get here so quickly. The Grinch growled, though, as if the creature really were that mound instead of the SnowWho. "I do not like that Sam-I-am!" he grumbled. "I do not, could not, would not like!"

He crept through the silent town toward the Mayor's house, a bit unnerved by the prospect of returning there. The twisted tan houses glided up like their own sort of mound, far too joined with the earth, as if they protruded directly from the soil beneath the snow. What a dirty place this must be in the summer, the Grinch thought. A Third Worldplace if ever there was one. How insulting that this should be the replacement for Grinch-ville.

"You're a commie, Mr. Grinch," the mysterious voice sang on. "You're a sodden Robin Hood! You seek from them the fruits of their Behoovian economy, Mr. Grinnnnch. Did you not learn your lesson from the Grinches of the past; capitalism is the only economy that works! Dumb... dumb... Grinch!"

He jumped like a kung-fu Grinch and landed on the Mayor's house, tiptoed to the chimney, to the chimney, and dropped down in. He was stuck. The cursed thing was too small! Was this the end already? Was this the end of the Grinch's revenge? Please, no! Nothing would change! The Whos would rise in the morning and their singing would fill the air, while Mr. Grinnnnch, would wait whimperingly for the fire to fill the chimney and for his bottom to burn. Fizz... crackle... yuump!

He adjusted and maneuvered himself in, like a wily snake, into the Mayor's house, bearing the poison apple of their ruin and fall.

Quiet and dim. Heh heh heh....

The stockings nailed upon the mantle with greed, the Christmas tree waiting for its bounty of spoils. How very pagan, thought the Grinch. Bring the tree inside and dance around it like a bunch of druids. These Whos, he reaffirmed, just didn't have a solid culture.

He stuffed his bags with everything he saw, holly who wreathes, X-mas candles, lamps, end-tables, brass X-mas balls. He filled his bag with goodies and possessions, with all the movable parts of the Mayor's property, all of which, the Grinch reasoned, had been stolen from or produced by the means of the dead Grinch race resting below them. He took the bag of hash from the Mayor's study, as well as his pipe and brandy bottle, as well as his symbolic rod of mayoralty, as well as his key to the town. He took the files from his cabinet, the blotter from his desk, and then, after pausing, also the desk.

"You're an idealist, Mr. Grinch. You're a stopper in the bottle of growth. You attack the means of production to usurp the status quo, Mr. Grinnnnch. If there's one problem with all of this then it is as follows, and I quote, you're moving... much too... slow!"

"That is true," the Grinch muttered. "I have this entire town to rampage."

He snuck into the children's room and stole the candy canes from beneath their tan little fingers, this one, that one, the next, and... uh-oh.... Okay, that one. Wait, what's with this little girl? he wondered, examining little Cindy Lou Who. Why, she's not a Who at all.... She's not tan like the others, but more of a cream color, with most unWhovian yellow hair.

The Grinch paused and reflected upon this just long enough to steal Cindy Lou's candy cane. Then off to stuff the Christmas tree into the fireplace.

"Shoo," the Grinch said to Max, who was staring in through the window with a most disapproving expression on his ugly canine face. "Pack the sleigh like a good little comrade."

A noise from behind him. He whirled, thinking, "Oh no, not Sam-I-am, not that!" But it was just the non-Who little girl, Cindy Lou Who.

She rubbed her eyes delicately and peered across the room at him. Such a cute little girl, standing two feet in one sock, with yellow curls and doll eyebrows. "Santi Claus, why?" she asked in the most sweetly innocent voice on the face of x-ville. "Why are you taking our hash, why?"

The Grinch, unable to keep from swelling with love for the little girl, who, he reminded himself was obviously not of the Who race, strolled quietly over to her and said, "My my, little girl, it's because..." he thought for a moment, seeking the proper response, which, honestly, was still not quite clear to himself. "It's because of you, child. You and all the children who must suffer because of the sins of your parents. They have warped and perverted you into believing that there is only one way to live and that this is it. They have corrupted your innocent little minds with greed and myopic value systems in order to reproduce themselves."

Cindy Lou thought about this explanation for a moment, frowning. "And you will fix it?" she asked sweetly.

"I can only perform a symbolic act, child. I can only demonstrate, at least to the young ones, and possibly to the students, that what they truly value requires constant vigilance and consideration, and that also it might not be exactly what they believe it to be. I know from cold, hard experience, that one never truly appreciates anything until it is taken from them and they are left alone and starving on the mountaintop, stricken by ice and grating noise to suffer for the rest of their lives."

"Why does your head look like a big green eggplant, Santi Claus?"

The Grinch, very close to weeping from his noble speech, was suddenly struck dumfounded. "My..." he said, feeling his head. "Why, I do not know, my child. I suppose it is because I am different from the Whos. Just as you are different from them."

"I'm from New Jersey," Cindy Lou stated cheerily. "Do you know where New Jersey is?"

"No, I do not, child. But I am sure it is a lovely place."

"Not really," Cindy Lou said. "Expect for where all the exit ramps end."

"Eh, exit ramps?"

"The way to get off the road," Cindy Lou said, obviously having explained this before. "The road travels into the dark and dirty city, but you don't have to go all the way. You can get off before you get there." She nodded, satisfied with having delivered this speech properly.

"You can get off? Get off of the road?"

"Yes, silly. You can get off and stop where people live!"

The Grinch frowned, quite confused by this new philosophical dilemma. Before this he had always believed that the road was inevitable, that there was nothing one could do to correct its inexorable course toward the dark and dirty city, by which, he assumed, the child meant death. But obviously she knew another way. Obviously this small little girl, unlearned in the ways of the world, understood something that the Grinch did not, that none of the Grinch had known. If only this strange little creature had been there at the last days of Grinch-ville!

"How?" the Grinch demanded. "How do you get off? Tell me now! Please!" He realized he was shaking the little girl and alarming her, and quickly ceased. "Please tell me."

She was confused. "Why, you just do, that's all." She scratched her little yellow head. "You slow down and turn and... and get off the exit ramp."

"Where is the exit ramp, where? I must know. Please? I must know how to stop!"

Cindy Lou frowned up at the green Santa Claus who looked as if he might burst from his need for the answer. "Paterson? " she tried. "Number fifty-eight?"

"Paterson...." the Grinch thought for a moment. "Father's son. The father's son is the exit ramp. Hmmm."

"Merry Christmas, Santi Claus," said little Cindy Lou Who, and ran back into her bedroom.

The Grinch stood for a moment, lost in thought. Perhaps the children should teach the adults, he thought, recalling the words of the Holy Grinch. Perhaps wisdom comes from small places. The father's son is the exit ramp, the salvation from the dark and dirty city of death.... "Oh, father," the Grinch moaned. "Oh father, why have I forsaken your memory? It was not you who was weak. It was all of them, it was all of us. It was all who crumbled beneath the pressure for the need to survive. And it was not their fault to do so. It was not their fault to need it so. We all need it so. We all need so much to survive...."

The Grinch fell into a fetal ball and wept for a time there in the Mayor's emptied house, long suppressed emotions welling over the sides of his wall of bitterness. He could not say afterwards how long he remained thus, crushed by the magnitude of it all, by the tragic weakness that he now knew was joined to living, forever joined to being alive.

###

-8-

"She was quite unlike any woman I had ever seen before," the Grinch mused with a distant gaze beyond the cave mouth. "She was beautiful and innocent and filled with the most profound wisdom."

Confused by this departure, I said, "Cindy Lou Who? She was a little girl."

"Once she was, I am sure. But when I met her she was a goddess of womanhood."

"You sick, disgusting..."

"But alas, she would have nothing to do with me. Such is the way for ugly green eggplant-heads. Do you know what it is like to be deprived of the possibility, even the possibility, of a mate? Have you any idea what it was like for me? There were no Grinch women! Not a one. And it is well known that the Grinch are incompatible with other species, biologically, emotionally, chemically. But that did not deprive me of my love for Cindy Lou. And that love, more than anything else, was what prompted me to do what I did. That love drove me to seek her salvation, to free her from the foul clutches of her adopted people. That love, love, Mr. Investigator, was what caused the Great Christmas Massacre."

"You said it was Sam-I-am who caused it!"

"Sam-I-am was not yet in the picture at that time, though his story, unhappily, intertwines with my own, and with the star-crossed love affair between myself and my darling."

I didn't know whether to laugh or weep or vomit from this speech. In truth, what I wanted was to punch that Grinch in his sick green mouth. A little girl! He was speaking this way about a little girl! I had seen pictures of Cindy Lou Who in the Seuss account, and she was much like the Grinch had described her. I had always wondered about the fact that she seemed so different from the rest of the Whos, but had always attributed it to the Seuss' wanting to make more of a connection with the children who would be reading his story. All this stuff about New Jersey and exit ramps was beyond my comprehension at the moment. But calling her a goddess of womanhood, and referring to a "star-crossed love affair"? That was just sick. He was a dirty, perverted old Grinch and I was beginning to want nothing more to do with him. Unfortunately, I also wanted to hear the rest of the story.

I asked how Sam-I-am could possibly not be in the picture since he was the supposed impetus behind the Grinch's ransacking of Who-ville in the first place.

"No, it was not Sam-I-am, it was moral indignation which propelled me toward that deed, and I stand by it to this day. Those Whos had corrupted Christmas with their commercialism and materialism, perverted it as they did everything else, as they were doing to their children. It was my responsibility as the last of the Grinch, and therefore the custodian of all things Grinch, to ensure that Christmas would be celebrated in proper Grinch fashion on what was still Grinch soil, however abused and appropriated by the Whos. I did my duty as The Grinch."

"So it was because of this moral imperative that you stole the Who's Christmas, and not because Sam-I-am offered you a plate of Green Grinch and Ham," I summarized.

"I stole more than their Christmas," the Grinch agreed. "I also stole the means of production and gave it to the workers. All their McBean machinery, all their Slave Contraptions and harnesses. I took it all, and left them with nothing."

"Who were the workers? How did you give it to them?"

"What workers? I took it and I sold it on the open market, then used the money to buy the sleigh I used to rob Who-ville."

I restrained myself once more, biting my tongue, clenching my fists. "Just tell the rest of the story," I said. "I've had enough of this conversation."

The Grinch perched on his cave ledge and stared through binoculars down at Who-ville, awaiting the results of his midnight pillage. Tiny fingers of smoke rose from the chimneys as on any other day, and several Who-shaped forms could be seen exiting their houses. Behind the Grinch rose the tower of stolen presents, four times larger than himself and stuffed full of the Who's decadence. Max panted beside the sleigh, quite amazed that he had been able to pull it up the mountainside.

"Where is the misery?" the Grinch asked anxiously. "Where is the sorrow?"

Max didn't know either.

"Where is the crying, wailing and horror?"

The Whos exited their dwellings and converged upon the center of town where there was a large open square. They held hands. They formed a ring. They sang.

#

Wahoo, wahoo, who who, wahoo,

Wahoo, wahoo, boo hoo, wahoo

#

"Yes," said the Grinch. "Become very upset now. Come to understand. Yes, yes...."

The ring of Whos sang out and the Grinch scratched his ears. In the center of the ring there formed a glowing ball of light, as bright as any sun, orange like candle flame, pulsing and writhing, shimmering and growing.

#

Wahoo, wahoo, who who, wahoo,

Mock the Grinch for we don't care,

Wahoo, wahoo, boo hoo, wahoo,

Ha ha Grinch, you've got green hair.

#

It was a spectacle of pagan splendor the likes of which the Grinch had never beheld, though he had read of it in the works of Destincloop the Elder. The Whos, stripped of their commercialism, had returned to paganism. And furthermore, they knew that the Grinch was responsible. They would be angry. Vengeful. They were going to get him for this! With supernatural powers like that, nothing could stop them...! He was a goner! A gone Grinch!

"Quickly, Max," the Grinch cried. "To the Grinch-Cave!"

The Grinch and the dog ran inside. Unknown to them, just beneath the edge of the ledge there laughed a sick little Who named Sam. "Yes," he whispered in his odious tongue. "Yes, it is all falling perfectly into place."

"No jingtinglers tied to their heels," the Grinch raged. "No floofloobers or tartinkers. They sing without dollar signs, they sing without noise. They sing without Sega, CDs or fun toys! Such an adaptable race of miscreants I have never before encountered...."

"Perhaps," suggested Max, "it is because the buying is over, and their economy has already benefited from Christmas. You made a key mistake, oh Grinchly one. You should have robbed them around Thanksgiving."

"Thanksgiving! Of course.... Why did you not warn me of this blunder?"

Max shrugged. "You didn't ask."

The Grinch paced about the firepit area, the dog included, and thought about the dilemma. He had not created a bankrupt Who-ville but rather a pagan Who-ville. They had not needed Christmas for their celebrations. Any holiday would do. And now he was stuck with all that crap outside....

Suddenly the Grinch whirled as a noise caught his attention. "The sleigh!" he cried, rushing out. It was too late; the sleigh had already slid from its perch on the ledge and was rushing madly toward Who-ville. And what was that clinging upon its highest mound? Fuzzy yellow jerkin, red bowler.... Not Sam-I-am, not that!

A voice drifted back from the speeding brown sleigh. "Would you, could you on a sleigh? Would you, could you again some day?" This diabolical speech was followed by a sick cackle as Sam-I-am stole the fruits of the Grinch's plunder.

"We must stop him from reaching Who-ville! Run!"

The Grinch and his faithful hound raced after the sleigh, but there was no hope of catching it. Their one chance was that Sam-I-am, deprived of an animal to pull, might get caught upon some heavy drift or craggy aperture, the likes of which covered the mountainside. "Must... run," panted the Grinch. "Must... catch... sleigh of goodies."

Sam-I-am, much to the Grinch's dismay, proved an excellent master of sleigh, and drove the thing expertly all the way to Who-ville. The Grinch and his dog caught up just in time to enter Who-ville Square, burning star and all, by Sam-I-am's side.

"Welcome, Sam-I-am," said the Mayor. "Welcome, Santa Grinch."

The Grinch frowned sourly. "Merry Christmas," he said.

#

Into the chamber of the Lorax went the Grinch, went the Grinch, into the chamber of the Lorax for reconstruction, for reconstruction.

"Who are you?" cried the evil Lorax, the Grinch in flinching, cowering on the floor. "Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?"

The chant went on, for a year it went on, and sometimes the Grinch tried to say, "I am the Grinch! I was always and ever shall be the Grinch!"

But the chant went on, "Who are you, Who are you, Who are you!", for a year it went on, until the Grinch didn't know, and the Grinch didn't know, and he was one of them then, he was Who and he was Who and he was Who and he didn't know. "Who are you!"

"Yes, Who am I, Who-I-am, Who am I, Who-I-am, yes, yes!"

And the Grinch was Who-I-am and he lived with the Whos and he carved the roast beast and he was Who-I-am and he was Who-I-am and he was Who-I-am....

Who would have guessed?

#

"It was the way of the Whos," the Grinch said sadly on that last day, when it all came out, how he had been subverted and how he had lost himself. "They celebrate the Whoness and they conspire to add you to it."

I was amazed. How terrible! How tragic! "How did you escape?"

The Grinch smiled. "Funny that you should phrase it that way, foreign reporter. For a long while I lived in Who-ville and I was Who-I-am, but, unlike the Whos, the question Who? was not enough for me. I had been so well subverted that I wanted to know more and so I questioned more. I began to ask a forbidden question, at first quietly to myself and then loudly in the streets so that all the Whos could hear, propped up on soap boxes in the street, asking that question."

"What was the question?"

"How am I? That was my question. How am I, How am I, How-I-am. I went straight from Who to How and they cursed me for offending their ears, they attacked me as a heathen, as a blasphemer, but I was zealous in my quest for the answer. Who am I? had gotten me nowhere! I had been there for years asking Who? and I was never any closer to knowing. So I became How? and then finally I began to make some progress. I was shunned by my neighbors and by Whos in the street but that didn't matter to me, so enraptured was I with the need for an answer. Then How? escalated into Where? for awhile, but that one was easy. When? didn't create any spiritual commotion, so that one too passed away quickly.

"It was the next level that stunned both me and every damned Who within listening range. The question What? struck Who-ville like a plague and very soon all the Whos in Who-ville were the Whats in What-ville, so profound, so poignant was the question. I soon went from offensive heathen to caustic demagogue. I had corrupted the Whos as they had corrupted me, and by using their own tactics. I felt satisfied with myself and with my new mission. I was obsessed with What?"

"Did you ever find an answer?"

"Indeed. How could I not, for it was right there before me, within me, and all around me the entire time. I discovered that I was Grinch. I was Grinch, damn it, and no Who or Who? could ever change that! Grinch was WHAT I was more than any WHO. And the others, my followers, they all discovered what they were too. They all found that they were Whos. And so we had come through the full circle and were back to that place in time before the Lorax corrupted me. It was rather abysmal, actually, because the same thing occurred. They sent me back to the chamber of the Lorax for reconditioning. But this time I was better equipped to handle that noxious beast. For by this time I had acquired a new weapon, a weapon that even the dreaded Lorax couldn't face."

"What was that," I asked, though certain I already knew.

"Why? That was the final level, and I had graduated to it just in time. I was dragged into the chamber of the Lorax, and even before he could begin his mad ranting and conditioning I asked the question."

"Why?"

"Who are..." the Lorax began and then paused, tripping over his own tongue. "What did you say?"

"Why are you? Why are you? Why are you?" the Grinch chanted cruelly, even as the Lorax groped to cover his ears, "Why are you, Why are you, Why are you?"

"Why-I-am!" cried the Lorax and the Grinch joined him, "Why-I-am! Why am I, Why-I-am, Why am I, Why-I-am!"

This went on for some time until finally the Lorax fell down sobbing on the dirty chamber floor and the Grinch comforted him, for only the Grinch understood. "I know, ugly Lorax, I know."

That was the end of the Grinch's stay with the Whos, for now he had remembered Who What Where When and How, and he was still very interested in Why, and so all the Whos let him leave finally, back to the mountain, back to the snow cave, to pursue his question in privacy.

"And I pursue it to this day," the Grinch said sadly. "Every day I ask myself and I ask the sky and I ask Who-ville, Why? But I have not yet found an answer to that most intriguing of all questions. I watch the Whos and I listen to them, all still stuck in their old ways, asking Who of one another and still trying to call me down from the mountain or threaten me with the Lorax, but all I can do is ask myself Why? Why, Why, Why am I? Why, Why, Why-I-am. That is the way of the Grinch now for that is a Grinchly way. Why."

The Grinch now rose and paced around the fire-pit area, myself included. "And do you know, young human male, I have discovered that the question, most surprisingly, leads back to all the others. Why Who and Why What and Why Where and Why When and Why How and Why Why? They are all there in that one simple question and I cannot answer any of them. Do you understand? I simply don't know. And that, perhaps at last, is the final great irony, and this time it is an irony with which I am comfortable. I don't know. But I am Grinch, and that has proven to be the only thing that has ever mattered to me. I am Grinch and I shall go on being Grinch until the near day that I die. I am, was, and ever shall be Grinch."

I rose from the fire-pit area and stretched my aching limbs, satisfied at last with what the Grinch had told me. It took me two days to get back to Who-ville (where I didn't stop) and then another week to get back to the Z. And during that trip back to the humans, during that trip home, I realized something about the Grinch. He already had his answer to Why? He was Grinch and he was Grinch and he was Grinch, however insane, however confused, however odious or lovable or vain or disturbed. He was Grinch. And that was Why.

--end--