THE pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood.

Some had chosen to sleep inside their recreational vehicles, others lay out on mattresses in the beds of pickup trucks, a few had packed on further into the woods, and many had pitched tents in the meadows. Presently, as the light came up and birds started in, clock-radio alarms began to kick on in a thickening radio fugue of rock and roll till dawn, Bible interpretation, telephone voices still complaining about yesterday's news. Behind the mountains that climbed from here inland, morning-glory-blue light grew in the sky. Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves, gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links, eggs, flapjacks, waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puppies, were sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just-made coffee. People who'd slept overnight in the woods began to wander in. Blue jays appeared on foraging patrols, shrieking, bullying, scavenging, seagulls of the redwoods. Radio weather reports called for a real scorcher, even down in Vineland after the fog burned off. Younger cousins looked at the sky and into one another's backpacks. Fishermen set off along the creek bed to see what might be up and feeding, and golfers tried to scheme ways to slip off for a quick eighteen holes down at Las Sombras, a genuine links beside the fog-hung coast of Vineland. The marathon crazy eights game in a battered but shined-up Becker Airstream proceeded ageless as generation begetting generation, like a pot-au-feu of nickels, dimes, chips, greenbacks, and nuggets that might have been simmering continuously here since the times of the Little Gold Rush. Elsewhere in camp there were other games, poker, pinochle, dominoes, dice — but it was the Octomaniacs, as they thought of themselves, who as a crowd carried a more coherent look, as if they ought to be wearing matching T-shirts, while among the assortment of semi-strangers in and out of the other games, talent and judgment might vary by orders of magnitude, causing delays, astonishment, and episodes of consanguineous discombobulation.

Some were waking up hungry, bottomless-pit, how-come-it's-not-on-the-table-yet style, while others had only to think of a frying egg to feel nauseated till noon. Some needed to take in columns of print from morning papers that weren't there, others coffee from any container that didn't leak, at least not too fast. Many who woke with eye more than stomach hunger stayed as long as they could in sleeping bags or back in camper shells with portable TV sets bootlegged onto the cable out on the highway by ingenious pole-climbing teenagers. Somewhere beyond earshot was the wash of morning traffic down along the freeway they'd come in on, as the workweek began to roll to another finale, though everybody here had taken off early, sometimes weeks early. While some of the bigger kids were dollying in different-sized refrigerators and tunning electric lines back to the nearest outlets, luckier ones got drafted to ride on up into Thanatoid Village to help pack in last-minute supplies as well as have a look at what there might be in the way of mall thrills among this community of the insomniac unavenged.

In fact, out of a long memory of strange dawns, this morning in the Shade Creek—Thanatoid Village area would stand forth as an exception. Not only had the entire population actually slept the night before, but they were also now wakening, in reply to a piping, chiming music, synchronized, coming out of wristwatches, timers, and personal computers, engraved long ago, as if for this moment, on sound chips dumped once in an obscure skirmish of the silicon market wars, expedited in fact by Takeshi Fumimota, as part of a settlement with the ever-questionable trading company of Tokkata & Fuji, all playing together now, and in four-part harmony, the opening of J. S. Bach's "Wachet Auf." And not the usual electronic stuff — this had soul, a quantity these troubled folks could recognize. They blinked, they began to turn, their eyes, often for the first time, sought contact with the eyes of other Thanatoids. This was unprecedented. This was like a class-action lawsuit suddenly resolved after generations in the courts. Who remembered? Say, who didn't? What was a Thanatoid, at the end of the long dread day, but memory? So, to one of the best tunes ever to come out of Europe, even with its timing adapted to the rigors of a disco percussion track able to make the bluest Thanatoid believe, however briefly, in resurrection, they woke, the Thanatoids woke.

This time what went rolling out, whistling in the dark valleys, chasing the squall lines, impinging upon the sensors of more than one kind of life in the countryside below, wasn't just the usual "Call of the Thanatoids" — this was long, desolate howling, repeated over and over, impossible for Takeshi and DL, even in their high-tech aerie down south, to ignore. They found Radio Thanatoid on the peculiar band between 6200 and 7000 kilohertz and tuned it in for Prairie, who after a while shook her head sadly. "What are you gonna do about this?"

"We have to respond," DL said. "Question is, do you want to come with us."

Well, Prairie wasn't having much luck here in L.A., though she had managed to hook up again with her old friend Ché, whose grandfolks Dotty and Wade went back into ancient Hollywood history with her own grandparents. But Sasha was out of town, had been since Prairie'd started calling, and according to her message on the answering machine, there was most likely a wiretap on the line too.

Among the first mall rats into Fox Hills, aboriginal as well to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Prairie and Ché had been known to hitchhike for days to get to malls that often turned out to be only folkloric, false cities of gold. But that was cool, because they got to be together. This time they'd arranged to meet in lower Hollywood at the new Noir Center, loosely based on crime movies from around World War II and after, designed to suggest the famous ironwork of the Bradbury Building downtown, where a few of them had been shot. This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories from Hub and Sasha, and Dotty and Wade, to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome pictures had left out. Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n' the Lox. Security police wore brown shiny uniform suits with pointed lapels and snap-brim fedoras and did everything by video camera and computer, a far cry from the malls Prairie'd grown up with, when security was not so mean and lean and went in more for normal polyester Safariland uniforms, where the fountains were real and the plants nonplastic and you could always find somebody your age working in the food courts and willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings, and there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was affordable, she could remember days with Ché, in those older malls, where all they did for hours was watch kids skate. Weird music on the speakers, an echo off the ice. Most of these skaters were girls, some of them wearing incredibly expensive outfits and skates. They swooped, turned, leapt to the beat of canned TV-theme arrangements, booming in the chill, the ice glimmering, the light above the ice green and gray, with white standing columns of condensation. Ché nodding toward one of them once, "Check this out." She was about their age, pale, slender and serious, her hair tied back with a ribbon, wearing a short white satin number and white kid skates. "Is that white kid," Ché wondered, "or white kid?" All eyes and legs, like a fawn, she had for a while been flirting, skating up to Prairie and Ché, then turning, flipping her tiny skirt up over her ass and gliding away, elegant little nose in the air.

"Yep," Prairie muttered, "perfect, ain't she?"

"Makes you kinda want to mess her up a little, don't it?"

"Ché, you're rilly evil?" It didn't help that inside, Prairie liked to imagine herself as just such a figure of luck and grace, no matter what hair, zit, or weight problems might be accumulating in the nonfantasy world. On the Tube she saw them all the time, these junior-high gymnasts in leotards, teenagers in sitcoms, girls in commercials learning from their moms about how to cook and dress and deal with their dads, all these remote and well-off little cookies going "Mm! this rilly is good!" or the ever-reliable "Thanks, Mom," Prairie feeling each time this mixture of annoyance and familiarity, knowing like exiled royalty that that's who she was supposed to be, could even turn herself into through some piece of negligible magic she must've known once but in the difficult years marooned down on this out-of-the-way planet had come to have trouble remembering anymore. When she told Ché about it, as she told her everything, her friend's eyebrows went up in concern.

"Best forget it, Prair. All looks better 'n it is. Ain't one of these li'l spoiled brats'd even make it through one night at Juvenile Hall."

"Just it," Prairie had pointed out, "nobody'll ever send her to no Juvenile Hall, she's gonna live her whole life on the outside."

"A girl can have fantasies, can't she?"

"Ooo-wee! No-o-o mercy!" This was their star-and-sidekick routine, going back to when they were little, playing Bionic, Police, or Wonder Woman. A teacher had told Prairie's class once to write a paragraph on what sports figure they wished they could be. Most girls said something like Chris Evert. Prairie said Brent Musberger. Each time they got together, it suited her to be the one to frame and comment on Ché's roughhouse engagements with the world, though more than once she'd been called on for muscle, notably during the Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid, still being talked about in tones of wounded bewilderment at security seminars nationwide, in which two dozen girls, in black T-shirts and jeans, carrying empty backpacks and riding on roller skates, perfectly acquainted with every inch of the terrain, had come precision whirring and ticking into the giant Plaza just before closing time and departed only moments later with the packs stuffed full of eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks, earrings, barrettes, bracelets, pantyhose, and fashion shades, all of which they had turned immediately for cash from an older person named Otis, with a panel truck headed for a swap meet far away. In the lucid high density of action, Prairie saw her friend about to be cornered, between a mall cop and a kid in a plastic smock, hardly older than they were, bought into it young, hollering as if it were his own stuff — with the cop, clear as a movie close-up, unsnapping his holster, oo-oo, look out — "Ché!" Kicking up as much speed as she could, she went zooming in, screaming herself semidemented, paralyzing the pursuit long enough to sail alongside Ché, take her by the wrist, twirl her till they were aimed the right direction, and get rolling with her the hell on out of there. It felt like being bionically speeded up, like Jaime Sommers, barreling through a field of slo-mo opposition, while all through this the background shopping music continued, perky and up-tempo, originally rock and roll but here reformatted into unthreatening wimped-out effluent, tranquilizing onlookers into thinking the juvenile snatch-and-grab mission couldn't have been what it looked like, so it must be all right to return to closing time, what a relief. The tune coming out of the speakers as the girls all dispersed into the evening happened to be a sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry's "Maybel-lene."

Whenever Ché and Prairie met, it was by way of zigzag and trick routes, almost like they were having an affair, slipping away from PO's or caseworkers, or only steps ahead of the bright attentions of Child Protective Services, not to mention, these days, the FBI. Ché arrived at Noir Center all out of breath, dressed in leather, denim, metal, and calico, with a bazooka rocket bag slung over one wide precise shoulder and her hair today Tenaxed up into this amazing feathery crest, in a blond shade soured to citric.

"You're all gussied up, girl."

"All for you, my little Prairie Flower."

Prairie went shivering in with her hands under her friend's arm, while around them, in the uniform commercial twilight, plastic flowed, ones and zeros seethed, legends of agoramania continued. They stopped at a House of Cones, where they eyeballed each other, politely but without mercy, for changes in fat distribution while sucking, with more and less metaphoric attention, on the ice cream in their cones. Back when they were girls, all it ever took was eye contact to topple them into laughter that might go on all day. But Ché's much-valued smiles today were only tight quick Polaroids of themselves.

It was her mom's boyfriend again. "At least you have the whole set, you're not a semiperson," Prairie used to mumble.

"A mom who watches MTV all day and her boyfriend who transforms into Asshole of the Universe anytime he gets to see a inch of teen skin, family of the year for sure, you want it, I can fix you up with Lucky, no prob, just remember to wear somethin' short." And that was back when he was only harassing her, before they'd started fucking. Which when her mom found out about it she never brought up to Lucky's face, turning on Ché instead and blaming her for everything. "Callin' me all this shit, sayin' she wished she never had me . . . ," keenly watching to see how it went over, but Prairie was all sympathy and calming touch. For years they'd had this ongoing seminar on the topic of Moms, a category to which Ché's mother, Dwayna, was not much credit. The tension in the house would rise to an explosive level, with Ché coming on to Lucky, whom she couldn't stand, right in front of her mom just to piss her off, then the uproar would go on all night, with Ché stomping out each time swearing that was it, staying on the loose for weeks, turning for money to more and more desperate shit and the company of some odd young gentlemen, some with runny noses, some with money in their hand, some fresh from the schoolyard and some that played in a band, often in situations hazardous to her health, till the only choice left her was to get popped so Dwayna would come down again and get her out, which she didn't have to but always did. Hugs and tears at the sergeant's desk, cries of "My baby" and "I love you, Mom," Ché would go home, Lucky would leer hello, and the whole cycle would start over, her rap sheet each time picking up new pages.

"Sure is a good thing you're beautiful," Prairie, the adoring sidekick, mooned.

"Remember that time over at my grandma Dotty's, we must've been six or something . . . one of those rainy Sundays with a major Monday comin' up ... I remember I looked over at you during a commercial, thinking — I've known her forever."

"Six? Took you that long to figure it out."

They sauntered along companionably as New Age mindbarf came dribbling out of the PA system. "Moms are a mixed blessing," Ché announced.

"Rilly. But try having that part of your life missing."

"You'd love it in the joint, Prair, 'cz that's exactly what the girls are into, 's that hookin' up together in threes, one's the Mommy, one's the Daddy, and one's the little child — hard, soft, and helpless. I figure, what's the difference, bein' in a family out here, or being in the joint? Is why I've got this need to escape all the time, especially now. . . . You remember Lucky's collection of Elvis decanters, 'member his favorite, with the sour mash in it, that he only brought out for Super Bowl and his birthday? sort of full-color metalflake glaze on it?"

"Don't tell me —"

"Put it this way — that old Patsy Cline song 'I Fall to Pieces'? Well, the King just covered it."

"You told me he used to take it to bed with him, like a stuffed toy."

"It was a close call, you could see he was torn between coming after me and tryin' to save that bourbon — last I saw as I was running out he was down tryin' to suck what he could up off of the floor, had to keep spittin' out little slivers of Elvis's head — but he looked up at me, and his face was just full of murder, you know that look?"

Prairie realized she didn't. . . and then, with a stab of sadness, that Ché did. "So what the fuck," Ché asked softly, "am I supposed to do ? I keep getting these business offers from gentlemen in mega-stretch limos, and some of 'm I think seriously about."

The girls had moved along to Macy's, where Ché, smooth and sweatless, was working through the lingerie department with fingers spider-light while Prairie fronted, blocking her from what store cameras they'd managed to locate, keeping up a dizzy teen monologue, boys, recording stars, girlfriends, girl enemies, grabbing items at random, holding them up going "What do you think?" getting salespeople involved in long exchanges about discontinued styles as Ché blithely went on filching and stashing everything in her size that was black or red or both, so invisibly that not even Prairie after all these years could ever see the exact instant of the crime. Meantime, with a special tool swiped from another store, Ché was deftly unclipping the little plastic alarm devices on the garments and hiding them deep in the other merchandise — all at a fairly easy what Brent Musberger might've called level of play, a routine long perfected and usually just for getting warmed up with. But today, instead, they felt already nostalgic, shivery with autumnal chances for separate ways, so that each came to be performing for the other, as a kind of farewell gift, two grizzled pros, one last caper for old times' sake before moving on. .. .

Soon as she was old enough to see out the windshield, Ché had learned to drive, didn't give a shit really about ever being street-legal, not even if she lived to be that old, which it was part of her bad young image to doubt. Times she liked to flirt, times she was out to hurt, it depended. On the freeway she liked to cruise at around 80, weaving and tailgating to maintain her speed. "We are children of the freeway," she sang, fingertips on the wheel, boot on the gas,

We are daughters of the road,

And we've got some miles to cover,

'Fore we've finally shot our load —

If you see us in your mirror,

Better clear a couple lanes,

'Cause we're daughters of the freeway,

And speedin's in our veins. .. .

None of the cars she drove were hers, but usually hustled off boys she knew, or sometimes borrowed via slim jim and hot-wire from strangers. When she couldn't get her hands on a car, she'd hitch a ride and try to talk the driver into letting her take the wheel. She could get anywhere in Southern California as fast as wheels could move. Sasha called her the Red Car, after the old interurban trolley system.

When they got someplace secure — which turned out to be the apartment of Ché's friend Fleur, east of La Brea and down in the flats — Ché shook from the rocket bag and from under her shirt this amazing fluffed volume of underwear.

"What, no aqua?" Prairie said.

"Aqua's what the> give their wives, honey," Ché told her. "Black and red," twirling from a short-nailed finger a pair of lace bikinis in that combination, "is what they like to see on a bad girl."

"Night and blood," amplified Fleur, who'd recently begun working as a professional out of her apartment and was trying to talk Ché into joining the string she was on, "it's like they 's programmed for it or somethin' — oh, hey, nice, Ché, do you mind?"

" 'Course not," Ché in the middle of sliding into a short see-through number herself.

Prairie watched them playing centerfold and thought, strangely, of Zoyd, her dad, and how much he would have enjoyed the display. "Not exactly a innocent teen fashion message here," she commented.

"It never has worked on Ché," said Fleur. "Put her in anything pink or white," fingerslash across her throat, "her street plausibility's all shot to hell."

"While on the other hand you, my dear," Ché flinging at Prairie something almost weightless in those colors, "belong inside this item, stolen expressly for you." Which turned out to be an intricate silk teddy full of lace, ribbons, ruffles, bows, which it took awhile for Prairie, blushing and protesting, to be persuaded to try on. Whenever Ché got this way with her, courtly, using her eyelashes, it put her into this weird warm daze for minutes at a time. This one lasted till she'd resumed her street uniform, sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes, and was standing outside on the steps, gazing up at Ché framed in the doorway, twilight coming down in a great blurred stain, and hard lemon light in the room behind her . .. Prairie felt like it was steps of a boat landing and that one of them was setting off on a dangerous cruise across darkened seas, and that it could be a long time, this time, till they saw each other again.

"Hope you find your mom," pretending it was coke that was making her sniffle. "Do somethin' about your hair."

Prairie got back to Takeshi's office and found the place in upheaval. They'd just got back from what was left of Ditzah Pisk's house. Ditzah's anxiety about the safety of the 24fps archives had turned out to be prophetic after all. Both DL and Takeshi had sensed exits away that something was up, when they came upon a loose formation of midsize, neutral-colored, dingless and clean Chevs, each with exactly four Anglo males of like description inside, and little octagoned E's, for "Exempt," on their license plates. Ascending into Ditzah's neighborhood, they began to hear hill-warped traffic on the scanner, up around Justice Department frequencies. Before long there was a police roadblock, so Takeshi parked farther downhill while DL switched herself on Inpo mode and disappeared into the landscape. Inside the perimeter she met, coming the other way, a Youth Authority bus with bars on the windows, the kind that usually carried brushcutting crews or fire-camp swampers, jammed with restless, sweating Juvenile Hall badasses all whooping and hollering like a school team bus after a victory. She smelled something like burning plastic but not quite, stronger, more bitter as she drew close, and smoke from burning gasoline.

It could have been handled with far fewer personnel, but somebody — DL could guess who — had determined to give the neighbors a show. In front of Ditzah's garage, on the cement, conical black heaps smoked, glowed, flared here and there into visible fire. Metal reels and plastic cores were scattered all over, and besides all the unspooled film burning there was a lot of paper, typed pages mostly, any scraps that temporarily escaped, spinning in eddies from the updraft, sent back into the flames by a sweeping crew. None of those observing the fire seemed to be civilians — the neighbors must have all been scared indoors. She noticed that the windows of the house had all been broken, the car trashed, trees in the yard taken down with chain saws and youthful muscle — she assumed it was the juvies in the buses who'd done all the physical work.

"How about Ditzah?"

"Still with her friends, hiding out. She's OK, but she's scared."

Well so was Prairie. She had no choice but to stick with these two, and was only marginally reassured by the $135,000 manufacturer's suggested retail price of the ride they took to Vineland, the ultimate four-wheeling rig, a Lamborghini LM002, with a V-12 engine that put out 450 horsepower, custom armed, wired and dialed to the hubcaps. It was like being taken off in a UFO. "Sometimes," she'd told Ché, "when I get very weird, I go into this alternate-universe idea, and wonder if there isn't a parallel world where she decided to have the abortion, get rid of me, and what's really happening is is that I'm looking for her so I can haunt her like a ghost." The closer they got to Shade Creek, the more intense this feeling grew. The speakers were all one cross-spectrum massive chord of discontent and longing by the time they reached the WPA bridge and began to thread the complex obstacle course into town.

Takeshi and DL had long been set up in a restored Vicky dating from Little Gold Rush days, when it had been an inn and brothel. They found a crowd of Thanatoids on the porch when they got there, and an atmosphere of civic crisis. CAMP search-and-destroy missions by now were coming over on a daily schedule. Brock Vond and his army, bivouacked down by the Vineland airport, had begun sending long-range patrols up Seventh River and out into some of the creek valleys, including Shade Creek. And now there was a full-size movie crew up here, based out of Vineland but apt to show up just about anyplace, prominent among whom, and already generating notable Thanatoid distress, was this clearly insane Mexican DEA guy, not only dropping but also picking up, dribbling, and scoring three-pointers with the name of Frenesi Gates.

"See?" DL nudged Prairie, whose mouth was ajar and abdomen tingling with fear, "what'd we tell you?"

They'd only missed Hector by about twenty minutes — he was headed for the Vineland nightlife, looking to see who else he could inveigle into his project, driving a muscular '62 Bonneville he'd borrowed, or, OK, commandeered, from his brother-in-law Felipe in South Pasadena. In the back seat, on loud and bright, was a portable Tube, which Hector had angled the rearview mirror at so he could see, for the highway was a lonely place, and a man needed company. He'd stolen the set the last time he'd broken out of the Tubaldetox, this time, he swore, for good. Scientists. What did any of them know? The theory, when Hector was first admitted, had been homeopathic — put him on a retinal diet of scientifically calculated short video clips of what in full dosage would, according to theory, have destroyed his sanity, thus summoning and rallying his mind's own natural defenses. But because of his dangerous demeanor, which the doctors only found out later was his everyday personality, they rushed him into therapy without the full set of workups, and misjudged his dosage. Who could have foreseen that Hector would have such an abnormally sensitive mentality that scarcely an hour of low-toxicity programming a day would be more than enough to jolt it into a desperate craving for more? He crept out of his ward at night to lurk anywhere Tubes might be glowing, to bathe in rays, lap and suck at the flow of image, more out of control than ever before in his life, arranging clandestine meets in the shadows of secluded gazebos and window reveals with dishonest Tubaldetox attendants who would produce from beneath their browns tiny illicit LCD units smuggled from the outside, which they charged exorbitant rent for and came at dawn to take back. After lights out, all the detoxees who could afford to would settle down beneath their blankets with prime-time through-the-air programming, all networks plus the four L.A. independents. By the time Hector ran out of money, the homeopaths were in disgrace and young Doc Deeply, at the head of his phalanx of New Agers all armored in the invincible smugness of their own persuasion, had beamed into power, proclaiming a new policy of letting everybody watch as much as they wanted of whatever they felt like seeing, the aim being Transcendence Through Saturation. For a few weeks, it was like a mob storming a palace. Schedules were abolished, the cafeteria stayed open around the clock, inmates who had OD'd wandered everywhere like zombies in the movies, humming theme songs from favorite shows, doing imitations of TV greats, some of them quite obscure indeed, getting into violent disputes over television trivia. "Amazing," Dennis Deeply was surprised to find himself thinking out loud, "the place is like a nuthouse."

After a lifetime of kicking other people around, Hector was suddenly here put down among the administered, judged as impaired, sick, and so, somehow, expendable. Time was he'd have blown people away for frustrating him less than this. What was happening to him? He had to believe that he was different, even as months began to creep by — that his release really was in the pipeline, that he really wouldn't be inside for the rest of his life, here along these ever-lengthening, newly branching corridors, with progressively obsolete wall maps of the traffic system posted beneath lights he knew, though staff never admitted it, were being replaced each time with lower-wattage bulbs. As his program went on and his need for video images only deepened, he gathered a charge of anxiety that one day, as he looked in the mirror, discharged in a timeless crystalline episode in which both man and image understood that the only thing in the pipeline anymore was Hector — heading straight down it with only the one, call it less than one, degree of freedom, and no way to get out. But headed where? What kind of "outside world" could they be rehabilitating him for? "You'll like it, Hector," they kept assuring him, even when he didn't ask. Every evening before they got to sit down and eat supper, everybody, holding their mess trays, had to sing the house hymn.

THE TUBE

Oh ... the ... Tube!

It's poi-soning your brain!

Oh, yes. . . .

It's dri-ving you, insane!

It's shoot-ing rays, at you,

Over ev'ry-thing ya do,

It sees you in your bedroom,

And — on th' toi-let too!

Yoo Hoo! The

Tube. .. .

It knows, your ev'ry thought,

Hey, Boob, you thought you would-

T'n get caught —

While you were sittin' there, starin' at "The

Brady Bunch,"

Big fat computer jus'

Had you for lunch, now Th'

Tube —

It's plugged right in, to you!

All he had for hope — how he fingered it, obsessively, like a Miraculous Medal — was a typed copy, signed by Hector, Ernie Triggerman, and his partner, Sid Liftoff, of an agreement on this movie deal, or, as Ernie liked to say, film project, now stained with coffee and burger grease and withered from handling. Despite his personal savagery, which no one at the 'Tox chose to acknowledge, let alone touch, Hector in these show-biz matters registered as fatally innocent, just a guy from the wrong side of the box office, offering Ernie and Sid and their friends a million cues he wasn't even aware of, terms used wrong, references uncaught, details of haircut or necktie that condemned him irrevocably to viewer, that is, brain-defective, status. Could he, with all the Tube he did, even help himself? Sitting in those breezy, easygoing offices up in Laurel Canyon with the hanging plants and palm-filtered light, everybody smiling, long-legged little bizcochos in leather miniskirts coming in and out with coffee and beers and joints that they lit for you, and coke that they held the spoon for you and shit? was he supposed to sit there like some Florsheim-shoed street narc, taking names down in a daybook? Why not join in the fun?

The deal was that Sid Liftoff in his vintage T-Bird had been stopped one recent night on Sunset out west of Doheny, where the cops lurk up the canyon roads waiting to swoop down on targets selected from all the promising machinery exceeding the posted limits below, only to be found, aha! with a lizard-skin etui stuffed with nasal goods under the seat on the passenger side, which to this day he swore had been planted there, probably by an agent of one of his ex-wives. Lawyers arranged for Sid to work off the beef with community service, namely by using his great talents and influence to make an antidrug movie, preferably full-length and for theatrical release. Hector, then attached to the Regional Intelligence Unit of the DEA office in Los Angeles, was assigned as liaison, though RIU work was understood to be punishment for 1811's with dappled histories, and this Hollywood posting, Hector was required to appreciate, was a favor, to be returned one of these nights and in a manner unspecified.

But soon enough, Hector's thoughts grew vertiginous, and he began to believe he'd been duked in to some deal, less and less willing to say when, or whether, he acted at the behest of DEA and when not, and neither Ernie nor Sid could quite decide how to ask. "The fucker," Sid told Ernie, at poolside, in confidence, "wants to be the Popeye Doyle of the eighties. Not just the movie, but Hector II, then the network series."

"Who, Hector? Nah, just a kid at the video arcade." They discussed the degree of Hector's purity, as then defined in the business, and ended up making a small wager, dinner at Ma Mai-son. Ernie lost. Sid started with the duck-liver paté.

What Hector thought was his edge came about courtesy of an old colleague in the arts of foot-assisted entry, Roy Ibble, now a GS-16 with a yen for regional directorship, who called in from Las Vegas with word that Frenesi and Flash had shown up in town. Without even thinking about it Hector obtained a confiscated Toronado and went ripping all night across the Mojave toward the heavenly city, denial of desert, realm of excess. In the movie it would be a Ferrari, and Hector would be wearing a carefully distressed Nino Cerruti suit and some hyper-cherry A.T.M. Stacey Adams zapos. Liftoff and Triggerman would see to that. Yeah, those guys would get him just about anything these days. He cackled out loud. These days it was Hector who wasn't answering no phone calls, ése.

For according to a rumor sweeping the film community, a federal grand jury was convening to inquire into drug abuse in the picture business. A sudden monster surge of toilet flushing threatened water pressure in the city mains, and a great bloom of cold air spread over Hollywood as others ran to open their refrigerator doors more or less all at once, producing this gigantic fog bank in which traffic feared even to creep and pedestrians went walking into the sides of various buildings. Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in '51, when HUAC came to town, and the years of blacklist and the long games of spiritual Monopoly that had followed. Did he give a shit? Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef, wasn't it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow — easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101. But why right now? What did it have to do with Brock Vond running around Vineland like he was? and all these other weird vibrations in the air lately, like even some non-born-agains showing up at work with these little crosses, these red Christer pins, in their lapels, and long lines of civilians at the gun shops too, and the pawnshops, and all the military traffic on the freeways, more than Hector could ever remember, headlights on in the daytime, troops in full battle gear, and that queer moment the other night around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., right in the middle of watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story, when he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices hard, flat, echoing.

"But we don't actually have the orders yet," somebody said.

"It's only a detail," the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a service voice, "just like getting a search warrant." Onto the screen came some Anglo in fatigues, about Hector's age, sitting at a desk against a pale green wall under fluorescent light. He kept looking over to the side, off-camera.

"My name is — what should I say, just name and rank?"

"No names," the other advised.

The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and he read it to the camera. "As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD #52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, I am authorized — what?" He started up, sat back down, went in some agitation for the desk drawer, which stuck, or had been locked. Which is when the movie came back on, and continued with no further military interruptions.

There was a weirdness here that Hector recognized, like right before a big drug bust, yes, but even more like the weeks running up to the Bay of Pigs in '61. Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention, arm local "Defense Forces," fire everybody in the Army and then deputize them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act? Copies of these contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn't much of a secret. Hector knew the classic chill, the extra receptors up and humming, gathering in the signs, channels suddenly shutting down, traffic scrambled and jammed, phone trouble, faces in lobbies warning you that you don't know them. Could it be that some silly-ass national-emergency exercise was finally coming true? As if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and instead announce, "From now on, I'm watching you."

He deliberately dragged his feet on it but at last did Ernie and Sid the favor of taking a meeting. He found the mood in Holmby Hills a little more depressed than the last time he'd been up, the play areas empty of starlets now, the pool gathering leaves and algae, an autumnal string quartet on the audio instead of the usual K-tel party albums, and the only recreational drug inside the property line a case of Bud Light, which was disappearing fast, often without Ernie or Sid even waiting for it to get cold in the tiny patio fridge. Both men were nervous wrecks, covered with a sweat-like film of desperation to ingratiate themselves with the antidrug-hysteria leadership, suddenly perceived as the cutting edge of hip. Sid Liftoff, having owed much of his matey and vivacious public image to chemical intervention, often on an hourly basis, now, absent a host of illicit molecules in his blood, was changing, like Larry Talbot, into the wild animal at the base of his character, solitary, misanthropic, more than ready to lift his throat in desolate, transpersonal cry. Ernie, meanwhile, sat in a glazed silence that would have suggested his return, in this time of crisis, to his childhood religion, Soto Zen, except for the way he was unable to keep from handling his nose, with agitated fussing movements, as if trying to primp it into shape like a hairdo.

The pair, trembling and tense, had been exchanging remarks as Hector approached, calling, "Hi, guys," his shoes flashing in the sun. Sid took a very professional beat and a half before leaping up violently, knocking over his custom deck chair, running to Hector, falling on his knees, and crying, "Fifty percent of producer's net! That's out of our own profits, isn't that right, Ernie?"

"Uh-huh," Ernie on some dreamy internal delay, through which Sid continued, " 'Course you appreciate that won't happen till we get to the break-even point —"

"Do me a favor," Hector struggling to get loose of the importunate Sid, dragging him a step at a time toward the pool, "and please, mis cortinas, man — take that producer's net, use it to chase butterflies, around the grounds, of whatever institution deals with people who think I'm about to settle, for anythín short of gross participation here, me entiendes como te digo?"

Sid went flat on his face and burst into tears, kicking his feet up and down. "Hector! Amigo!" — further blowing it by most injudiciously reaching for Hector's shoes, whose finish the world knew, or ought to know, that Hector had long entertained homicide among his options in defending. But now he skipped backward, reminding himself the man was distraught, mumbling courteously, "Sid, you might want to, ahm, you know, check yourself out. . .."

Sid fell silent and presently got to his feet, wiping his nose on his forearm, rearranging his hair and neck vertebrae. "You're right of course, frightfully immature of me Hector, I do apologize — for my outburst and also for my shortcomings as a host. . . please, here, a Bud Light? Not exactly bien fría, but the warmer temperature brings out more of the flavor, don't you think."

Graciously nodding, taking a beer, "Is that I would rather not hear no more about some 'break-even,' please, save that for Saturday morning, with the Smurfs and the Care Bears and them, OK?"

The two movie guys cried in unison, "Maybe a rolling gross?"

"La, la, la-lalla la," Hector pointedly singing the Smurf theme at them, "La, la-lalla laahh___"

"Just tell us then," Sid pleaded. "Anything!"

How he had dreamed of this moment. He knew his mustache was perfect, he could feel where every hair was. "OK, a million in front, plus half of the gross receipts after gross equals 2.71828 times the negative cost."

Sid's tan faded to a kind of fragile bisque. "Strange multiple," he choked.

"Sounds real natural to me," Ernie twisting his nose back and forth. They screamed and yelled for the rest of the day till they had a document they could all live with, though Hector much more comfortably than the others, even imposing upon the project his own idea of a zippy working title, "Drugs — Sacrament of the Sixties, Evil of the Eighties." The story hit the trades just about the time the grand-jury scare was cresting, so it got banner treatment and even a ten-second mention on "Entertainment Tonight" — no doubt about it, Ernie and Sid, first out of the chute into the antidrug arena, were making the town look good. Day after day skywriters billowed BLESS YOU ERNIE AND SID and DRUG FREE AMERICA in red, white, and blue over Sherman Oaks, though soon guerrilla elements were launching skyrockets charged to explode in the shape of a letter s and aimed at the space right after the word DRUG, changing the message some. Ernie and Sid found themselves allowed back into places like the Polo Lounge, where right after Sid's bust he'd been if not 86'd, then at least, say, 43 'd. And then Reagan's people got wind of it and the two started hearing their names in campaign speeches. "Well... all I can say iss ... ," with the practiced shy head-toss of an eternal colt, "if theere'd been moore Sid Liftoffs and Ernie Triggermans in Hollywood, when I worked theere ... we might not've had . .. soo minny cahmmunists in the unionss . . . and my jahb might've been a lot eassier.. . ," twinkle. Die-hard industry lefties wrote in to publications to denounce Sid and Ernie as finks, Nazi collaborators, and neo-McCarthyite stooges, all of which was true but wouldn't deflect them an inch from making the picture, which they must have thought, dope-clouded fools, would purchase them immunity from the long era of darkness they saw lying just ahead. The town attended, now wistful, now cruelly amused, depending how hysterical the news was that day, to the boys out running point for the rest of them. Go, fellas, go.

Above-the-line checks started clearing the bank, motel rooms were booked, weather maps consulted, and crews assembled, and nobody had the least idea of what the movie, in fact, was supposed to be. Sid and Ernie, by now both deeply afraid of Hector, dared not ask, stuck with only vague assurances that the star element would be Frenesi Gates. Frenesi, working in Las Vegas one on and one off at a minor establishment on the wrong side of the Interstate, Chuck's Superslab of Love Motor Inn and Casino, cocktail-waitressing, had no inkling of the madness developing in her name till Hector showed up in town. Just before he called, she saw from the corner of her eye the snarled telephone lead, all by itself, like a snake in its sleep, give a slow loose shiver.

By the time they got there neither could remember why they'd picked the Club La Habanera, deep within a thousand-room resort-casino much too close to the airport, designed after the legendary gambler's paradise of pre-Castro Havana, where the smoke of genuine Vuelta Abajo filler and the fumes of Santiago rum, smuggled past the long embargo, mingled with a couple dozen brands of perfume, the band wore arm ruffles, and the sequined vocalist sang,

Mention . . . [rattle of bongos] to me, [picking up slow tropical beat]

"Es posible,"

And I won't need a replay,

My evening, is yours. . . .

Yes that's all, it takes,

Incre-íble,

Would it be so ... ter-reeb-lay,

To dare hope for more?

?Es posible?

Could you at last be, the one?

Increíble,

Out of so many mil-lyun,

What fun,

If you [bongo rattle, as above] would say, "Es po-ho-seeb-lay,"

While that old Mar Carib' lay

'Neath the moonlight above,

Es posible,

lncreíble,

It's love . . . [fill phrase such as B-C-E-C-B flat]

It's love . . . [etc., board-fading]

Deeply tanned customers in dimly white tropical suits, with straw hats on the back of their heads, danced lewdly with hot-eyed packages in spike heels and tight bright flowered dresses, while beyond the seething blur of flame and parrot colors, sinister creatures, wrapped objects of unusual shape passing among them, bargained in the shadows. They were all yuppies on a theme tour, from places like Torrance and Reseda.

She recognized Hector right away, even after all the years, but the sight didn't raise her spirits. He looked like shit — run-down, congested in every system of circulation, appearing to her as at the edge of a circle of light, out of the frozen dark of years in service, of making deals and breaking them, betrayed himself, tortured, torturing back . . . long-term ravages . . . He ought to've broken by now — what kept him going? Somebody he loved, some drug habit, simple stubborn denial? She breathed his tobacco aura, withstood his crooked jovial born-to-lose laugh. So this was who he'd become — who, at least through her lack of surprise or any but reflex sorrow, she, down at her own modest level, must have become as well.

Just to get it done, she asked, "Is this official? Do you have any backup from DEA or Justice on any of this, or are you working some private angle?"

Hector began to pop and roll his eyes, as if working up to a full-scale freakout. Back at the Tubaldetox he'd had women talking to him like this all the time, another reason to escape, obliged never to scream back at them, as this earned him demerits that would even further postpone his release date. How he would have preferred violent body contact, shock, the recoil of a weapon, some scream of aggro, some chance just to drum his heels on something, but his options these days didn't even include teethgrinding. Once suave and master of himself, the fed was now having some trouble "trying," as Marty Robbins once put it in a different context, "to stay in the saddle."

Frenesi felt a little anxious for him. "Hector, you ever just think about beaming up, getting yourself out of this?"

"Not till I've got you and Brock Vond in a two-shot, smiling."

"Oh dear. No — Hector, it isn't 'This Is Your Life' here, in fact it could turn out the opposite.. . . Don't you know anymore what Brock is? Those quacks at the Tubaldetox have got you so Tubed out you can't even think straight."

"Listen to me!" screaming through his lower teeth like a lounge comic doing Kirk Douglas. She foresaw his attempt to grab her by the lapels and slipped in ahead of his, yes definitely looser reflexes, on her feet, turned and planted, telling herself I'm ready. Here she was with a homicidal narc having a midlife breakdown, without, fool, having remembered to bring anything tonight more threatening than a purse-size can of hair spray. But Hector, exhausted, folded back into the rattan chair, squeaking and creaking.

"You're an honest soldier, Frenesi, and we been out on so many of the same type calls over the years. . . ." Here came some sentimental pitch, delivered deadpan — cop solidarity, his problems with racism in the Agency, her 59￠ on the male dollar, maybe a little "Hill Street Blues" thrown in, plus who knew what other licks from all that Tube, though she thought she recognized Raymond Burr's "Robert Ironside" character and a little of "The Captain" from "Mod Squad." It was disheartening to see how much he depended on these Tubal fantasies about his profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of cops-are-only-human-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of government repression into sympathetic heroes. Nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the routine violations of constitutional rights these characters performed week after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American expectations. Cop shows were in a genre right-wing weekly TV Guide called Crime Drama, and numbered among their zealous fans working cops like Hector who should have known better. And now he was asking her to direct, maybe write, basically yet another one? Her life "underground," with a heavy antidrug spiel. Wonderful.

"Your story could be an example to others," Hector was purring, trying for a Latin Heartthrob effect, "an inspiration."

"Get them off drugs, right? Hector, Hector. I grew up hearing too much of this all the time, one movie pitch after another, my mother was a reader, then a story editor, even a writer, at first I thought they were all real, all I had to do was wait a little and I'd get to see every one of them on a screen someday." Sasha had finally wised her up, likening it to one sperm cell out of millions reaching and fertilizing an egg, a comparison by then that Frenesi could relate to, though she felt the same shock and depression as when she'd found out that babies come not from Heaven but from Earth. Things now, for a moment, went likewise a little hollow. She'd brought to this rendezvous some wispy 2 or 3 percent hope that Hector might not be crazy. Though he and Brock both nominally worked for the Meese Police, just handicapping personalities, playing percentages, she'd have been willing to bet on some support from the DEA man — but now, outside again after all these years, back with the rest of the American Vulnerability, she could see, desolate, how anytime soon, in the cold presence of trouble already on the tracks, better she keep her change in her mitten than molest herself calling Hector for any help. He reminded her of herself when she was in 24fps, inside some wraparound fantasy that she was offering her sacrifice at the altar of Art, and worse, believing that Art gave a shit — here was Hector with so many of the same delusions, just as hopelessly insulated, giving up what seemed already too much for something just as cheesy and worthless.

He was nodding his head now, with a faraway look, as the Local 369 folks played "A Salute to Ricky Ricardo," a medley of tunes actually sung by Desi Arnaz on the "I Love Lucy" show, including "Babalu," "Acapulco," "Cuba," and "We're Having a Baby (My Baby and Me)," from the episode in which first mention is made of what turns out to be Little Ricky, a character in whom Hector took unusual interest. "Yes and a hell of a li'l percussionist, on top of everythín else. Just like his dad."

Frenesi peered. Something was up. His eyes had this moist gleam, growing brighter by the moment. Then she tumbled. "Oh no. We all settled that years ago, don't be doin' this to me now."

"Come on, open up them world-class ears, don't be tell' me you're not itchín to hear certain pieces of news."

"Warnin' you Hector, don't get me pissed."

But he had advanced across the tabletop, like a tile in a game, a Polaroid, mostly green and blue, North Coast colors, of a girl wearing jeans and a Pendleton shirt in a Black Watch plaid, sitting on a weathered wood porch beside a large dog with its tongue out. There was no sun, but both were squinting. "You fucker," said Frenesi.

"Zoyd took this one. You can tell from the weird angle. See the dog? name's Desmond — Brock chased him away. The house there? took Zoyd years to build, Brock came took that away under civil RICO, and they're probably never gonna live there again. The deal we all thought we had, the deal we honored all these years, is now all blown to shit because of Mad Dog Vond, you listenín to me?"

"No, asshole, I'm tryin' to look at my daughter's face. That all right?" She glared at him. "If you're so worried about the breakdown of your private little boys-only arrangement, bring it up with Reagan next time you see him, he's the one took the money away."

"Correct. But did you know he took it away from Brock too? Imagine how pissed off he must feel! Yeah, PREP, the camp, ev-erythín, they did a study, found out since about '81 kids were comín in all on their own askín about careers, no need for no separate facility anymore, so Brock's budget lines all went to the big Intimus shredder in the sky, those ol' barracks are fillín up now with Vietnamese, Salvadorans, all kinds of refugees, hard to say how they even found the place. . . ."

"Hector —" shaking her head, unable to stop looking at the Polaroid.

He beamed her a tight teary smile. "She wants to see you."

She took a breath and enunciated carefully. "Look, I've seen some no-class behavior go on trying to get a picture made, and considering your life history, usin' somebody's kid on them ain't even a misdemeanor, but remember to put in your report that subject took deep exception to Agent Zu?iga's spiritual molestation of her child."

Hector frowned, trying to figure that out. "This ain't on the books — that what you think? Naw — families belong together, is all. Just 'cause I couldn't save my own marriage don't mean I can't try to help, does it?" Under the influence of, by then, quarts of a house specialty known as Battista's Revenge, Hector went off mooning about his ex-wife Debbi, who during the divorce proceedings, on the advice of some drug-taking longhair crank attorney, had named the television set, a 19-inch French Provincial floor model, as corespondent, arguing that the Tube was a member of the household, enjoying its own space, fed out of the house budget with all the electricity it needed, addressed and indeed chatted with at length by other family members, certainly as able to steal affection as any cheap floozy Hector might have met on the job. As long as she'd happened, moreover, to've destroyed this particular set with a frozen pot roast right in the middle of a "Green Acres" rerun that Hector had especially looked forward to viewing, possibly thereby rendering moot her suit, he decided in the heat of his own emotions to make a citizen's arrest, charging Debbi with Tubal homicide, since she'd already admitted it was human. In the movie of his life story, with Marie Osmond as Debbi and no one but Ricardo Montalban as Hector, it would be one of those epic courtroom battles over deep philosophical issues. Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love? There'd be this parade of expert witnesses, professors, rabbis, scientists, with Eddie Albert in an Emmy-nominated cameo as the Pope. ... All just dreams of what might have been — in non-Tubal "reality," both actions were thrown out as frivolous, and they got a simple no-fault divorce, on the condition that Hector immediately enter a Tubal Detoxification program.

"As kindly as I can," since no one else was telling him, "between the television set and those New Age psychobabblers back at your Detox, I fear that very little, beyond the minimum needed for basic tasks, remains of your brain."

"OK. Swell. You don't care about your kid, or the War on Drugs, I can even buy that, but I can't believe you'd just walk away from a chance to get back into film again."

"Oh, 'film,' well, 'film,' I thought you said Triggerman and Liftoff, I hope you aren't mistaking what they do for 'film,' or even a class act."

"Look, with or without you, this will, git made. The money is committed, the papers are signed, all except for the director's agreement, and that's you ... if you want. Shootín starts next week, soon as I leave here that's where I'm headed."

He wanted her to ask where. "Where?"

"Vineland."

"Hector, it's probably old news to you, but since I went under I've been all across the USA, Waco, Fort Smith, Muskogee too, rode up and down every Interstate in the land, some don't even have numbers, sweated my ass off in Corpus Christi, froze it in Rock Springs and fucking Butte, honored my side of it, always went where I got sent, and not once, that was the deal, never did I have to go anywhere near Vineland. It suited Brock's control-freak desires to keep me away from my child, and bein' a hard case and cold bitch, why, it suited me too."

They were both just about crying, Hector more with frustration than anything. "Is what I been tryín to tell you," in his forced, whispered grunt, "is that there is no deal anymore. OK? Brock has taken over the airport in Vineland with a whole fuckín army unit, and he seems to be waitín for somethín. Now what do you suppose that could be? Some think it's the dope crops, 'cause he is coordinating with CAMP and their vigilantes. Some think it's more romantic than that."

"This the way it is in your movie script, Hector?"

"Frenesi, there's no more reason for you to stay away anymore — see your kid again if you want, the game was called off. Come on back to Vineland, think how long it's been, all your mom's side of the family, gonna be up at those campgrounds on Seventh River —"

She drilled him with the double blues. "Who the fuck are you, trackin' the comings and goings of my family?"

He shrugged, with a look that if they'd been talking about virginity she would have called a leer. "Is it Brock? Are you afraid of him?"

"You're not?"

"You know Clara Peller, the lady in the burger commercial goín 'Where's the-beef? Where's the-beef?' well that's exactly my problem with you and Brock. How bad could it be? How personal? His dick was too short?"

She guffawed quietly. "Inquisitive tonight. Are you saying — you really think Brock and I should find a qualified third party, sit down, talk things out, share our feelings?"

"There you go!"

" 'Mad Dog Vond'?"

Hector allowed his face to flush and widen in a smile, angled his hand at the band. "?Caramba! don't this stuff just get my blood throbbín to that beat! How about yourself, Mrs. Fletcher?"

""What?"

"Do me the honor?" It was a subset of northernized Perez Prado charts, mambos, cha-chas, steps she hadn't done since she was a girl. Despite his attempt to convey seedy decrepitude, she discovered grace, muscles, and that rhythm in his shoes. Hector was interested to find himself with a hardon, not for Frenesi who was here, but for Debbi who wasn't, that girl in the Mormon makeup who'd always held the pink slip to his heart, and the memory of the last time they'd danced together, to the radio, in the kitchen, with the lights off, and the night of love and sex strangely as always intermingled. ... In other embedded rooms the croupiers called, the winners shrieked and the drunks cackled, plastic foliage the size and weight of motel curtains rippled slowly, just below the human threshold for seeing it, arching high against the room lights, throwing lobed and sawtoothed shadows, while a thousand strangers were taken on into a continuing education in the ways of the House, and in general what would be expected of them, along with the usual statistics and psych courses, and Frenesi and Hector had somehow danced out into all the deep pile and sparkle of it, like a ritzy parable of the world, leaving the picture of Prairie face up on the table, she and Desmond, both squinting upward at nothing, at high risk for hostile magic against the image, the two most likely means in here being fire and ice, but there the Polaroid lay, safe, till it was rescued by a Las Vegas showgirl with a hard glaze but a liquid center whom Prairie reminded of a younger sister, and who returned it to Frenesi when she came around the next day, her heart pounding, her skin aching for it still to be there, to find it again and claim it.

Just before they left for the airport, step-lively time once again, Justin took her aside. "Is something after us, Mom?" According to his dreams, a nightly news service, the thing pursuing was big and invisible. Would she even let on that she knew about it? "Don't worry," she told him, "it doesn't eat kids," but didn't sound that sure. They had both been acting weirder than Justin had ever seen them, flaring up at each other and at him, drinking and smoking too much, appearing and disappearing on no schedule he knew of. The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. "Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch, and not go into it." The advice came especially in handy when they got to McCarran International and found some service workers out on strike, and a picket line. "Uh-oh," said Frenesi. Uh-oh, went Justin to himself. His mom didn't cross picket lines — she told him someday he'd understand.

"Darlin'," Flash advised her, "these folks don't fly the airplane, all's they take care of's the maintenance in the terminal, so just don't use the toilet or nothin', OK?"

"Can't use the toilet?" Justin said.

"Fletcher, we can get on the bus, take the plane from someplace else?"

"Sweetheart — they took the bags already."

"No — you go in and get 'em back."

His head and neck suddenly forward at an angle she'd learned to connect with meanness on down, "Telling me to do what, now?" his tone and volume enough to bring some pickets out of the line to have a listen, along with a few passengers from the waiting area who were forsaking the daytime dramas on their coin-operated TV sets for this free episode. "You know what it is, it's your fuckin' family, tryin' to keep 'at old union-kid cherry for your daddy."

"Don't you bring Hub into this, motherfucker, not that she would have noticed if you did —"

"Nothing," Flash bellowed, "about her, all right? Bitch?"

Frenesi smiled, inhaling through her nose. "Tell you what," in a strenuously perky voice, "I'll cross your picket line if you'll go and get fucked up your ass, OK? 'N' then we can talk about busted cherries — unless o' course there's something you haven't told me...."

Finally a picket coordinator came over. "We took a vote," she told Frenesi. "Just this once, it's OK, you can go on through."

"Was it close?"

"Unanimous. You a good child. Enjoy your flight."

Justin made a point of sitting between them. He already had the bowl haircut, and it had been a short step for him to learn to get in there and push them apart like Moe separating Larry and Curly, going, "Spread out, spread out!" But by the time the