Ransom by Jay McInerney

fainted, suddenly stricken with an attack of the cyclical fever he’d been fighting since India. He passed out just inside the door and when he came to he was looking up at a cowboy. Miles had taken Ransom home and Akiko had nursed him. Eventually they helped him find a teaching job and a place of his own. A Japanese doctor shot Ransom full of antibiotics and the fever stopped coming back. He enrolled in a language class, explored the streets of the city, and considered joining a Zen temple, until the day he wandered into a karate dojo.
    Ransom began to wonder if something had happened to Marilyn. More likely, she had stood him up. He had given her more than an hour. The thing to do was make sure Miles was all right. He briefly imagined himself dispatching tattooed, heavily armed yakuza with his bare hands, and almost immediately realized that he was casting this scenario out of the kind of television fantasy that had made his father rich.
    In the lobby a flash bulb went off in his face. A girl no older than twelve was pointing a camera at him and screeching. He pushed through the door and found himself looking at a hundred quizzical faces, all belonging to teenage girls. For a moment, nothing happened; he looked at them and they looked at him. Then someone screamed. Other voices joined in. The crowd pressed forward, hands outstretched.
    Reflexively, he swept his arm in a mid-level block, clearing away several hands. The blazer slung over his shoulder was tugged down into the crowd. Then his shirt was torn at from all directions. He was pressed back against the glass door, which had swung closed behind him. The screaming pitched even higher when the shirt ripped and came clear of his chest. Hands were all over him, and he felt lips pressed to his arm. He watched his shirt dissipating in the mob, being torn into smaller and smaller pieces as it moved back. He was beginning to panic.
    Fingers groped at his belt buckle, as Ransom spotted two policemen wading through the crowd, whistles in their mouths and clubs raised above their heads. Then he felt the door move behind him. A girl with pimples and pigtails seemed determined to write something on his chest with a ball-point pen, and another flourished a pair of scissors. He felt his shoes go; then, lips on his feet.
    He was being pulled back into the hotel. Two girls made it through the door with him, but they were prised loose and whisked away. A hotel employee stood in front of the door; and while the crowd still leaped and screamed, no one attempted to rush indoors.
    A man in a blue suit was bowing repeatedly to Ransom. “I am so sorry for this misfortune. We did not know you would be using main entrance. Please accept my deep apology on behalf of hotel. Our security was at fault.”
    A knot of hotel guests gawked from the inner lobby at the half-naked gaijin. A woman in a hotel uniform appeared with a kimono which Ransom quickly put on. Theman in the blue suit kept apologizing. Outside, the school girls began singing choruses of a song Ransom eventually recognized as “Satisfaction.”
    A limousine was placed at his disposal. Since his shoes were gone, he decided to pick up the bike later, and was escorted out the back entrance to a waiting car.
    The driver had a broad face and drinker’s complexion. He kept looking at Ransom in the rear view. “You Charrie Watts,
desu ne
?”
    Ransom said that he was not a Rolling Stone.
    â€œYou know Mr. Kirk Douglas?”
    â€œNot personally.”
    The driver reached inside his jacket and handed back a pocket photo album. The first picture showed him standing at the gate of Yasaka shrine with his arm around a man who appeared to be Kirk Douglas. The next one was similar, except that it was signed
Best wishes Lloyd Bridges
. Standing beside the car, Lloyd looked dried-out, not a spear gun in sight.
    â€œI drive Jack Kneecross last year,” he said.
    â€œSay who?”
    A crowd of schoolboys in