will.”
“With questions.”
“Probably.”
“It’s a set of procedures we developed. It isn’t a miracle; it isn’t fate. And it just happened to be him we chose. It could have been anyone with pleasing features. Even you,” the colonel said.
“I know that, for some reason. I realize that.”
“We wanted a role in everything. Journalism, business, academia. The entertainment world we couldn’t touch, though. Politically hostile, socially impenetrable. Then we put our heads together. It’s amazing what half a billion dollars and ten or fifteen PhDs could do back then.”
“Tom Cruise was invented by our government?”
“‘Improved’ would be more accurate. Now, apparently, we’re through with him. You think I’ve lost my ever-loving marbles.”
“No. But I feel like I need to lie down, too, now.”
“We’re all going to need our rest soon, with what’s coming. You go lie down, boy.”
And now that I’ve written this, I think I will .
21.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Memo: The booth at the W faced a window that took in the busy valet-parking lot. The rich and famous were in town that night, laden with designer garment bags and zipper-cased sporting-goods equipment. The women had that aging-ageless look , like heavily doctored photos of themselves, and their bodies repeated the curves and cuts of the late-model sports coupes they stepped out of. The men were not as smoothly molded, but I could feel the excitement of the staff as it vied for the tips concealed inside their handshakes. I worked for gratuities during my college years, and it’s a desperate way to live. After a while, your smiles are not your own.
Jesse, my brat, arrived for dinner first, already tipsy and argumentative but dressed in a manner that made her black mood bearable. Since our first breakup the week before, we’d undergone two more entire cycles of rupture and repair, both of them entailing costly visits to the Neiman Marcus lingerie floor. I feared that unless I made things last with her, my investments in her undergarments had grown too extensive ever to recoup. There were corsets that I might never see her wear and certain bra-and-panty combinations that her next man would gain more pleasure from than I would.
“I thought this was a double date,” she said. Her first vodka gimlet was nothing but ice by then, and her second was on its way. In the meantime, she’d made a move on my martini. “Where’s Cass and his little lady?”
“He goes by Kent now.”
“And next year he’ll go by something else,” she said. “He’s still in play. Still forming. That’s his charm. When we met, he called himself a Christian. Then he became a ‘deep ecologist.’ A couple weeks later, on his bedside table, I found a Koran. On a stack of
Penthouse Forums
. Next to a sign-up form for a tai chi class.”
“Selkirk studied the Koran?”
“Is the Koran the one that Buddha wrote?”
“Not according to tradition, no.”
“Then it might not have been the Koran. I don’t remember. Maybe it was The Tibetan Book of the Dead . How much do you love the pattern in these stockings?”
“As much as I thought I would when I bought them for you. Let’s go back to the mystery scripture on Selkirk’s nightstand.”
Jesse’s gaze had slanted toward the window, where a woman with rocky little childish features set in a concave, banana-shaped face was stepping out of a silver BMW. She smiled in the manner of the oft-photographed.
“It’s her. Holy shit!” said Jesse. “It’s what’s-her-name. That lesbian slut who broke up Grace and Chad. The couple from
The Enchantress
, season three. Who’s in that commercial for Dovebars now. Malicia?”
There is no such thing as empty-headedness. All of our brains are full of what they’re full of, and all of us are authorities on something. Sadly, my Jesse possessed expertise in a field that mattered only to her. This was true of Selkirk, too, who arrived a few minutes later
“With questions.”
“Probably.”
“It’s a set of procedures we developed. It isn’t a miracle; it isn’t fate. And it just happened to be him we chose. It could have been anyone with pleasing features. Even you,” the colonel said.
“I know that, for some reason. I realize that.”
“We wanted a role in everything. Journalism, business, academia. The entertainment world we couldn’t touch, though. Politically hostile, socially impenetrable. Then we put our heads together. It’s amazing what half a billion dollars and ten or fifteen PhDs could do back then.”
“Tom Cruise was invented by our government?”
“‘Improved’ would be more accurate. Now, apparently, we’re through with him. You think I’ve lost my ever-loving marbles.”
“No. But I feel like I need to lie down, too, now.”
“We’re all going to need our rest soon, with what’s coming. You go lie down, boy.”
And now that I’ve written this, I think I will .
21.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Memo: The booth at the W faced a window that took in the busy valet-parking lot. The rich and famous were in town that night, laden with designer garment bags and zipper-cased sporting-goods equipment. The women had that aging-ageless look , like heavily doctored photos of themselves, and their bodies repeated the curves and cuts of the late-model sports coupes they stepped out of. The men were not as smoothly molded, but I could feel the excitement of the staff as it vied for the tips concealed inside their handshakes. I worked for gratuities during my college years, and it’s a desperate way to live. After a while, your smiles are not your own.
Jesse, my brat, arrived for dinner first, already tipsy and argumentative but dressed in a manner that made her black mood bearable. Since our first breakup the week before, we’d undergone two more entire cycles of rupture and repair, both of them entailing costly visits to the Neiman Marcus lingerie floor. I feared that unless I made things last with her, my investments in her undergarments had grown too extensive ever to recoup. There were corsets that I might never see her wear and certain bra-and-panty combinations that her next man would gain more pleasure from than I would.
“I thought this was a double date,” she said. Her first vodka gimlet was nothing but ice by then, and her second was on its way. In the meantime, she’d made a move on my martini. “Where’s Cass and his little lady?”
“He goes by Kent now.”
“And next year he’ll go by something else,” she said. “He’s still in play. Still forming. That’s his charm. When we met, he called himself a Christian. Then he became a ‘deep ecologist.’ A couple weeks later, on his bedside table, I found a Koran. On a stack of
Penthouse Forums
. Next to a sign-up form for a tai chi class.”
“Selkirk studied the Koran?”
“Is the Koran the one that Buddha wrote?”
“Not according to tradition, no.”
“Then it might not have been the Koran. I don’t remember. Maybe it was The Tibetan Book of the Dead . How much do you love the pattern in these stockings?”
“As much as I thought I would when I bought them for you. Let’s go back to the mystery scripture on Selkirk’s nightstand.”
Jesse’s gaze had slanted toward the window, where a woman with rocky little childish features set in a concave, banana-shaped face was stepping out of a silver BMW. She smiled in the manner of the oft-photographed.
“It’s her. Holy shit!” said Jesse. “It’s what’s-her-name. That lesbian slut who broke up Grace and Chad. The couple from
The Enchantress
, season three. Who’s in that commercial for Dovebars now. Malicia?”
There is no such thing as empty-headedness. All of our brains are full of what they’re full of, and all of us are authorities on something. Sadly, my Jesse possessed expertise in a field that mattered only to her. This was true of Selkirk, too, who arrived a few minutes later
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