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III

I
watched one for a long time, till half its body was buried; I then
walked up and pulled it by the tail; at this it was greatly astonished,
and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in
the face, as much as to say, "What made you pull my tail?"
. . . I
threw {it}
. . .
as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide.

—CHARLES DARWIN

THIS ISN'T A paradise. More like a barbecue on the verge of igniting. The airport's tarmac smells of spilled diesel, and the
distant lava, long hardened, menaces with spent fury a la late Joan Crawford. The First Lady's a bit late. Nothing new. It's
around five in the afternoon. Still hot. Not much of a breeze. The sun is giving no hints of ever leaving the sky, and the
earth, or this fat part bulging at the seam, sucks it up with forced devotion. It could be autumn, winter, spring, or summer.
The weather never changes.

A crowd has gathered, about sixty people corralled behind a wooden barricade. The front line belongs to the press, print and
TV, mostly South American, ready to capture the taxiing of the airplane and the eventual disembarking of the First Lady. Behind
them are second-tier dignitaries too lowly to greet anyone. Plus a few naturalists and soldiers thrown into the mix. Finally,
toward the back, children and young women act as filler, their small American flags lazy at their sides. A floral melange
of tourists has also joined them, but these individuals look out of place as if they were hostages waylaid en route to a Club
Med.

Everyone is staring into flat blue space.

The camera their locus, Lewis, McGraw and Zev stand unsteadily together, press credentials fastened to their pants. Against
protocol, their shirts are off because it's hot and they're not used to being hot and having their shirts off. It makes them
happy even though a lot of the tourists bitch about the constant heat. But what do you expect? It's the fucking equator. The
guys laugh at this. They've been laughing for the last hour—setting up the tripod, talking to the advance crew, meeting the
reporter from
Brasilia
Today
—laughing because everything seems so funny. Except the flying cockroaches.

"Jesus, I hate these things!" Lewis shrieks. One of the bugs has landed on his head, the creature's podites getting caught
in his curly hair. With spastic motions he quickly sweeps it off.

"Where'd it go?"

"Fucking what?" Zev asks.

"The cockroach."

"I hate those things," says McGraw.

"Dammit, that's not fair." Lewis tenses his jaw and turbans his shirt around his head. "Bastard's uncatchable." But that's
what happens when you have no natural predators—you develop hobbies, like flying. Lewis hates such insectile advancement.
Plain cockroaches are bad enough, but when they're airborne it seems positively postapocalyptic. And who started doomsday
and didn't tell him? What's next? Dog-walking fleas . . . dieting tapeworms . . . hair-styling lice. As a kid he sometimes
had problems getting to sleep, imagining the millions of microbes nibbling on his body, the amoebas dining in his intestines,
his flesh nothing more than a take-out meal. "Why the hell do they have to fly?" Lewis asks.

McGraw answers with a "Why not?"

"Rats don't fly."

"Fucking pigeons," Zev says.

"More like bats. I think bats are closer to rats and so they'd be considered the flying rat."

"It rhymes at least."

"No," Zev interrupts. "Bats are fucking mammals. Closer to us. Pigeons are flying rats. No bullshit, trust me. I killed enough
to know. They're stupid and dirty, circling those fountains until they're all fucking dead and on the ground. And the women
still happy for food." This ends the conversation. Zev's gravy-thick voice has a way of doing this. Everything he says sounds
so tragic and final.

An airplane breaks through the blue and someone shouts and points to the sky like a sailor on the prow of the
Pinta.
Soon everyone is shouting and pointing to the sky. The airplane begins to descend, its wheels locked down and ready to grasp
the ground. The people are so excited, you'd think it's the first time they've seen such a thing.

Lewis wonders how Laraby would've described it—the glittering metal, the anticipation. Back home, his death was received with
little fanfare. The autopsy betrayed a congenital condition, a hidden glitch he was born with, and it was just a matter of
time before the bug in the brain burst to life. Sure, there was coverage, his photograph and his dates, a brief homage to
his brief career, the anchor concluding the report with
our-prayers-are-with-his-family.
But that was it. They didn't even show the video of his brief spasms, his rolled-back eyes, his grimaced mouth. Too morbid,
they told Lewis. No need to turn it into a tabloid event. But if it had been a bullet that ripped through his brain instead
of an arterial dilatation, if the blood had been all external instead of internal, shooting into the air like the blood of
that poor bastard in Vietnam, the gun-to-the-head guy, then maybe it would've been the lead story, a special report, a bulletin.
No parachute journalism—jump in, tape the segment, and take the next flight home—but a literal deadline, a perfect mix of
subjective and objective news, a reporter as victim, as casualty, as sacrifice to the event itself. In the end, Lewis felt
gypped, like a boy robbed of the game-winning hit because the pitcher threw a tricky strike.

The plane lands with the finesse of an albatross—
bump, bump,
thud
—then turns and taxis toward the specified greeting zone.

"What are you going to do?" Lewis asks McGraw.

"It's pretty difficult."

"Get her deplaning. That's our establishing shot."

"Of course."

Lewis consults a clipboard even though it tells him nothing.

The logistics are not complex. Just follow her around. Watch her linger next to the sea lions, her face all smiles at their
aquatic adorableness. Watch her mourn the short cruel life of baby turtles, only one ever makes it. Watch her laugh at the
marine iguanas, so prehistoric, so bizarre, as they swim with their tails sweeping the water, their heads poking from the
surface the same way Mother laps the community pool. Watch her take note of the saddle-back tortoise, steadfast and consistent,
like a politician she knows.

"Molim, a little rest," says Zev before slumping to the ground, his huge body falling the way Robert Mitchum used to fall,
with reluctant inevitability. "Fucking sleep," he mutters. Arms curl around the hot metal of the tripod, hands lock, and he
looks up and imagines, for a frozen second, that he's being trampled by a lethargic crowd. At least there are no pigeons here.

The plane, a customized 727, eases to a stop. Engines rev down in a fading tone, almost mournful. After the gangway is affixed
to the fuselage's front door, the red carpet is rolled out. That's when the taped music begins to play, something by Sousa,
and the little flags—plastic Stars and Stripes stapled to dowels—are lifted and flapped, each one designed to sustain maximum
enthusiasm at cheapest cost.

Lewis thinks about moving the camera back a bit and placing some children in the lower foreground, blurry yet eager, the tops
of their heads bouncing with glee. But what's the point? Right now he doesn't feel like moving. Not ever. Not in a million
years. Not until something has changed in him. A new adaptation. An elegant head. A solid chin. Trustworthy eyes.

The door opens.

Starting to film, McGraw centers on the door. If in some backward countries a photograph steals your soul, what the hell would
this do? He could wreak havoc with the tribes of the rain forest, all without destroying a single thing. Videoman.

After a while, two secret service agents emerge, their habits ingrained in everyone's head: dark glasses, plain suits, fingers
in ear, mouths to sleeve; they take the stairs with suspicion. Then the First Lady emerges, waving hand first, followed by
a genuine smile of It's-great-to-be-here-in-the-Galapagos. She pauses at the top, her khaki outfit perfect for these parts.

"Holy shit." A jolt moves through Lewis. "Are you getting this?"

"Yeah."

"It's a miracle." Moving closer to the camera, wanting to be sure it's working, trying not to step on Zev. "I can't believe
this. It's better than the
Challenger"

The First Lady descends.

"Get the legs."

"Sure."

"But don't make it obvious."

She's wearing shorts, maybe for the first time since becoming First Lady. Not maybe, definitely. Because look at those legs!
Blotchy white skin, some of it curdled, pouring out of khaki. Thighs as big as pillows. Bowed knees that probably haven't
touched since she was a teenager. Shins? There are no shins, only calves.

"I had no idea," Lewis says. He feels something on his shoes. It's Zev resting his head. "I knew about the ankles. But not
this."

The First Lady greets the people waiting below, shaking hands with dignitaries and accepting flowers from a nervous girl,
a tiny thing, who starts to cry uncontrollably, her face creased with five-year-old misery.

"The networks are going to shoot themselves for missing this. So are the tabloids. I bet they open with this, or maybe not
this, but they'll get to this sooner rather than later.
Inside Edition, Hard
Copy,
they'd start right here. Get some fitness experts, maybe the Buns of Steel woman. Or Richard Simmons could do his shtick,
driving up to the White House in the Deal-a-Meal van."

The First Lady picks up the girl, the girl's arms wrapping around her neck, the girl's face burying under her chin. They rock
together.

"Really go tight on the gams."

"How tight?"

"To the flesh. I want to see everything."

McGraw zooms in with terrifying speed, pushing aside any distance with a mere touch of his finger.

"I want to see the pulse in the varicose veins," whispers Lewis, his body beginning to sway. "The horror of cellulite. Tighter.
Tighter. Tighter."

The crowd cheers.

anaconda wrap

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of
God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards,
nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

—1 CORINTHIANS 6:9

THE CAR PHONE RINGS, doesn't really ring because nothing rings anymore. Instead, it chirps like an electronic grasshopper.
Saul Messer knows this sound well. In his sock drawer at home he has five cellular phones, each of a different size and capability,
all outdated. I mean, what are you meant to do with these hi-tech gizmos? You can't just throw them away, too expensive for
that, and it's tough to hand them off to friends as gifts. (Friends get pissed at the assumption that your has-beens are their
will-bes.) Maybe give one to your daughter, but she's only nine and you don't want to spoil her. Nothing worse than jappy
kids yapping away like little adults.
Oh, darling! Really? That's
staggering!
No joke, kids today talk like that. It's gotten to the point where you don't fear X-rated language anymore—fuck and shit would
be a relief—but cringe with shame at
ciao,
at
fabulous,
at
no-can-do.
I swear, your daughter has a mouth like a Gabor sister. So what do you do with your old cell phones? Do you
give
them to your housekeeper, to your gardener? "Here you go, a little something, you know, for a job well done." Nope, that's
out of the question, too imperialistic for a good democrat like you. Maybe resell them—always an option—but how do you go
about doing that? A pawn shop? A secondhand store? Can you imagine driving up in your Porsche and unloading a box of old electronic
gear? There's a man who knows the meaning of a buck, that's what they'll say the second you leave the place. Trust me. They'd
probably speculate that you're some down-and-out movie Jew, which you are, but hell, you're much more than just another down-and-out
movie Jew. That's the short division of your life, and right now you're as complicated as differential calculus. So what do
you do with that Motorola Micro T.A.C. Lite? Nothing you can do but slip it next to the Corola SX-50, the Corola 7 series,
the Centaur, and the Motorola Por-Cell. Dead technology laid to rest next to a pair of cashmere socks.

Saul lets the car phone chirp away. He strokes its black plastic shell and tries to do some sort of Carnac routine.
You'll never work in
this town again! And may fleas infest the underwear of your father's lover.
(Didn't Johnny Carson have a great way of opening up those envelopes; he'd slice through the top, then blow to puff out the
innards, all that self-important posturing for a corny joke. And don't you sometimes find yourself opening up your mail with
the same technique? It's inevitable. Stuff like that imprints on your brain, like theme music and holiday good cheer and remarks
on the mostly unchanging weather; like kissing your wife hello and good-bye, good night and good morning; like the endless
best wishes and compliments and regards and respects to people you know and barely know, your life a history of innocuous
greetings, your day-to-day determined with less and less intention.) But Saul doesn't bother with actually answering these
calls. No point. It's all the same. Blah blah blah. And it's been ringing nonstop for the last seven hours. But early on,
in the beginning, during those first few hours of driving (heading east to go west, if you know what I mean), he picked up
the phone. It's a habit, a trained response in Pavlov Angeles. "Saul, where are you?" his annoyed secretary asked him. "You
can't do this."

"Stop calling," he said.

"Saul, you're a big boy, act like one."

"Waaaaaaaa!"

And his wife had dialed him up a couple of times. Anna with that lazy French accent and sloped continental body; she defies
gravity. There's also a certain Asian quality to her skin and cheekbones, her long black hair, her almond eyes. Exotic is
the word and exotic ages well—at forty-three she still looks good, model good, yummy good, and there's a joke around town
that she must bathe in the blood of virgins. In other words, her preserved beauty is almost B-movie creepy. But what can you
do about genes? Nothing. Sure, you can take care of yourself—stay out of the sun, eat the right foods, don't drink too much
booze—but so much depends on your particular batch of deoxyribonucleic acid. In terms of the complexities of Anna's personality,
ice queen will do. Anyway, on the phone she said, "You can't run away, darling," with her usual existential nonchalance. To
Saul, the whole thing should've sounded more histrionic a la a loved one trying to coax a gun-toting maniac into releasing
his hostages. But no, she spoke calmly, almost bored, as if such desperate behavior was nothing new to the Gallically challenged.
When you get down to it—and this is a thought Saul has maybe once a day—he should've married another Jew, someone with an
equally heavy Levantine face that aged with each passing second. Instead, he fell for a
chicsa.
—his mother's word—a boy toy goy. "It's not worth it," his wife told him.

"What?"

"Just come home."

"I will."

"Now."

He said, "At some point," and then he hung up, didn't really hang up—those days of cradle-slamming good-byes are over—no,
he just pushed the "end" button. Not very satisfying. Some irate people, like the studio chief, toss their cellulars across
the room, smashing them against the wall for effect. Shrapnel explodes; the oak paneling is given a half-moon nick. Saul had
recently watched this display and immediately tallied the expense, but he couldn't deny the power of that particular production
value. It certainly sent a fright through his spine. A real grabber. Maybe that's what you do with old cell phones and computers:
you wait for that right moment—say it's a meeting of scriptwriters and you think their script is complete crap—and you pick
up the moldy PC you've dragged out of the closet and you make a show of throwing it out the window. Bombs away! That'll get
the idea across. A nice little drama for those geeky wordsmiths.

"Daddy, I'm scared. Please come home," that's what his daughter was saying an hour ago. Saul is sure some rehearsal was involved.
He could imagine his wife coaching her, running lines back and forth until Missy had it down cold. She's a hammy kid, an atavist
of some forgotten vaudevillian Messer. Dance lessons: tap, jazz, ballet; voice lessons; something called poise, pronunciation,
and polish. If she sees a piano she'll insist on singing her signature song, "Memory." Even at a packed restaurant, she'll
beg and plead until you've got to give in. "This is a number that's dear to my heart," she'll tell her makeshift audience.
And the scary thing is that a lot of people think it's the most adorable thing. "We miss you terribly," she said amid the
bacon crackle of spotty coverage. "Really. We'll always love you the way you are. No matter." And it was almost enough to
make Saul slam on the brakes and turn the Porsche around. But he didn't. Like most stunts he admired the mastery, the pyrotechnics,
the precision, but within the explosions he always saw a thick bottom line of expenditure. Anna had probably promised Missy
something, maybe a suede jacket with frills, or possibly a dog. There's always incessant talk about a dog. I swear, you can
make a nine-year-old eat shit if you promise her a dog.

Saul downshifts the Porsche and kicks the RPM needle into the 5 x 1000 section of the tachometer. The car is speeding thirty
miles over the posted speed limit, but it's dark out, well into the middle of the night, and speed slips into the relative
ease of evening without the blur of things, of fields of suburbs turning into expanse of desert turning into mountains; instead,
there's only that crescent of lit blacktop. And when Saul finds himself on a long stretch of empty road, he steers into the
middle of the highway and pretends that this car is some great beast with glowing eyes and that the broken yellow lines are
helpless creatures trapped in the mailroom of the evolutionary chain.

I know this is terrible but this is the way Saul thinks about movie disasters: they're like Nazi death camps of World War
II and their names are enough to make your blood cold:
Cleopatra
. . . Dachau;
Heaven's Gate
. . . Auschwitz;
Ishtar . . .
Treblinka;
Howard the
Duck . .
. Lublin;
Hudson Hawk .
. . Buchenwald. Whole studios nearly destroyed, careers forever lost, all because of one lousy picture, and a picture that
once looked so good, a picture people were banking on, a picture earmarked for a big summer release, a picture with can't-miss
stars, a real boffo. How can you live in a universe like that, where talent doesn't mean shit, where a five-million-dollar
movie can gross a hundred million and a hundred-million movie can gross five million, where six million Jews can be sent to
a systematic slaughter, grandparents and aunts and uncles, a whole swath of cousins, a family tree treated like a pile of
leaves? And no one learns diddly. Check out the news, the same stuff is happening over and over again
(Waterworld . . .
Rwanda), and while you know enough not to believe in progress, you still want to believe in growth, in maturity; you want
to stop jacking off to that
Playboy;
you want to stay faithful to your wife, your parents, your religion; you want your daughter to love you always and you want
to die wise and beloved even though when you get down to it you don't want to die at all. Never.

Saul turns up the music. At night the CD player casts an eerie red light, like Vegas from thirty miles out. And when Saul
passed Vegas a few hours ago, the hotels pulsating from the highway, the shows in their second set, he thought about stopping
and staying at the MGM Grand and maybe blowing a few thousand at the tables and getting blown for a few hundred. People would
understand; they'd laugh and shake their heads and roll their eyes. So Hollywood. But Saul didn't turn off at any of the half
dozen exits. Nope. He kept going north on Interstate 15, just a single highway creeping up like America's varicose vein. Is
this a midlife crisis? Is it something that cheap, all these shitty feelings? Saul hopes it's not that cliched. But there
are moments, on the road, where all the cars seem to be filled with men who look like him, men on their way to a caucus of
desperate behavior. So plow forward, you lemmings, to the edge of your actions! The soundtrack music swells with violins—you
can't believe the cost that goes into incidental music—and within the DEFCON Denon glow, Saul grips the leather handle of
the emergency brake and mutters, "Drive, drive drive."

At St. George, Utah time leaps forward an hour into Mountain Time (a phrase that makes you think of mewly John Denver sitting
atop a precipice and singing about the virtues of clean Rocky living). In an instant it's no longer late on Thursday night
but early on Friday morning. Saul immediately fiddles his watch's hour hand. How easy it is to be a time traveler, to hurtle
through time, to collect time and then to give it away. That's why the Concorde from London is such a kick. Pick up and leave
and arrive before you left. How often can you get that? A real-life flashback.

10:48 A.M. Thursday.

In his office, a corner office, Saul says, "Fuck me," and then pauses for a second or two and says, "Fuck fuck." When upset,
he relies on that word like a baby relies on a pacifier.

"What?"

"You heard me. Fuck me. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Have you seen this?" He waves the
Variety
in front of his secretary's face. "Have you seen this fucking hatchet job? It's insane." Saul squeezes the bottle of Evian
hard enough so that its ribbed plastic pops. Water shoots out and wets the splint on his broken middle finger, wets his shirt,
wets the blotter on his desk.

"I'll get you a towel," the secretary says.

"Fuck that; have you seen this?" He tosses the paper—it flutters in sections, a failed flying machine.

"Yes, I have."

Saul rolls up his sleeves. He wants to look intimidating, powerful, young—Christ, does he want to look young, mid-thirties
instead of mid-forties, just a lousy ten years!—so his trainer has been working on his arms, giving them corporate buff. "I
thought this reporter was a friend," Saul says. "You know, in pocket."

"He has been."

"I tell you, the fucking new morality of this world. Everyone's Serpico. Or at least everyone thinks they're Serpico. Serpico's
cool. Blow the lid off. Yeah, that's it. The last good guy. The last honest man in America. The fucking whistle-blower to
the corrupted soul. So turn colors. Rip off that mask. Reveal the real you. Here I am to save the day! While all this time
the old you was just a spy to this vileness you once loved. Taking notes while you dutifully take the perks. Give me a break!
I mean, it's just a movie. Am I right, Cloris? It's just a fucking movie. And a historical movie at that. It's not the downfall.
This isn't the lead in the pipes. A movie. It's just a movie. Entertainment. Not worthy of this Woodward-andBernstein approach."

The secretary, uncertain at what to do, picks up a tray of bagels and Danishes and offers him something called a Morning Delight.
"They're wonderful," she says.

11:47 A.M. Thursday.

After numerous phone calls—the studio chief, reporters, wife—a knock on the door and his assistant walks in holding a wrapped
package under her beautiful bare arm. "We have it," she says.

"Has anyone seen it?" His hand instinctively hides his broken finger, the surgical tape a while flag of surrender.

"No, no one has. This isn't airing for a week. I have a friend."

"Good work."

She unwraps the brown paper and walks to the TV—well, actually she struts, she's a strutter, ass wiggling like it's cleaning
a windshield at one of those nudie car washes. She inserts the tape, pushes it ever so gently until the black tongue is pulled
within the machine. Yes, this is quite a performance. And yes, Saul has slept with her. I mean, it's on your mind, don't deny
it. Men want to fuck her and women want to hate her, that's the Eszterhasian coverage on her first impression. So yes, they
had a one-night stand, about a week ago. You see, he was feeling down from everything, failure looming overhead in Cuban-missile-crisis
fashion: any day, the bomb would drop. There was no escaping it, his lot held in celluloid. And here was this attractive woman,
and smart, and willing, and young. When did twenty-four seem so young? When does that happen? Sure, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,
positively illegal; eighteen, nineteen, robbing the cradle; but how did the early twenties slip into something considered
innocent and naive and pure? And that night, last Tuesday.