“… Saturday, with John Oliver Banion … a discussion of millennial issues, with top leaders from the UFO world …”
Except for the name, time slot, announcer’s voice, theme music, set, graphics, guests, and sponsor, Banion’s new television show was just like his old one. The press was treating it with whooping derision and Prozac jokes, but this Saturday, even as the general presidential campaign was ending its second week and all the talking heads in town were getting ready for sweaty pontificating on the weekend shows, a number of TV sets in town were tuned in for the debut of Saturday, out of curiosity. Self-immolation makes for fine viewing.
“… brought to you by Gooey-Lube. When your car starts to make that grinding sound, drive on into Gooey-Lube. They’ll grease your moving parts so fast your wheels will spin! And now, the host of Saturday, John Oliver Banion.”
The Washington Post had run an article about the new show illustrated with a caricature showing Banion dressed in a pointy-shouldered robe of the kind associated with intergalactic shamans, but the John O. Banion who appeared on the screen was every bit the old John O. Banion, owlish in his horn-rims, still boyish, and yet—viewers noted—less solemn. Instead of the usual dark suit, he wore a sports jacket, with a little green ribbon pinned to the lapel. He seemed buoyant, sprightly, almost—one Georgetown dowager remarked—happy, if that was the right word.
“Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Saturday. My guest today—Fina Delmar.”
Washington gasped.
“Miss Delmar is of course best known as the Academy Award–winning actress. Her films include The Lobsterman’s Wife and Wetly, My Darling. She is less well known as a multiple alien abductee. It is both a pleasure and an honor to have her on this show. Welcome to Saturday.”
“Thank you, John.” Fina Delmar looked quite dazzling, no less so for a woman of her certain age. If they expected her to be encrusted with New Age crystals, they were mistaken. She wore a flattering, jewel-toned shantung silk pantsuit and simple gold earrings.
“How many times is it now?” Banion asked.
“Six.”
“All by Tall Nordics?”
Fina Delmar smiled coyly. “Darling, I don’t go with Short Uglies.” A star is a star, whatever the firmament.
“I want to talk about that. But first, I want to ask you if you’ve picked up anything from your captors about their motives, plans for increasing abductions, invading the earth, and such. What intelligence can you share with us on this?”
“You’re trying to get me in trouble, aren’t you?” She smiled.
“No, I’m trying to find out what you know.”
“What I know. Where do I begin?”
“How about at the beginning?”
“There was this map. It was the time before last. No—it wasn’t. It was three times ago.”
“Yes?”
“They came for me at the Golden Door.* I’d just finished shooting Going Postal, with Burt Reynolds. My God, that was an interminable shoot. Burt kept—”
“Tell us about the abduction.”
“After they got me inside, and I was strapped down—and you know what that’s like, these freezing cold tables, you’d think they’d at least cover them—and, so, they’re doing their little things that they do, down there. Maybe after it’s all over, we’ll find out it was all training for alien proctologists and gynecologists. I mean, Who knows? I was trying to distract myself by singing show tunes—maybe Ethel Merman would get their attention. Can you imagine abducting her? That would have been one short abduction, let me tell you.”
“Yes? And?”
“I look up and I see this map over the control panel and it was of the United States of America, and I’m thinking, This isn’t random. This is all part of a plan.”
NATHAN SCRUBBS WAS WATCHING FROM HIS ROOM IN THE Hotel Majestic, in a part of Washington that politicians periodically denounced as a national scandal, situated as it is only a few blocks from the White House. He had been living in various cheap locales for several months now, having decided that it would be unwise to continue living at his apartment until he received some kind of communication from MJ-12 as to his status, such as it was.
The room smelled of a half century of cigarette smoke, loneliness, and bad karma. It was the kind of room one read about in the newspapers following a terrible crime: the lair of the perpetrator, where he had lived in wanky squalor, eating only cat food or other vile nourishment while hatching his outrage. The bed sagged like a sinkhole; the porcelain on the sink was rusted through—what horrible things that sink had endured, Scrubbs did not want to think about—the faucet dripped, and emitted chthonic rumbling from the hotel’s no doubt hellish bowels; the fluorescent light buzzed like a bug zapper; and lately he had begun to hear nocturnal scratchings that sounded like rodent quality time with the whole family. But the room was seventeen dollars a day and came with cable TV to while away his long, bleak hours.
Miserably, he viewed his Frankenstein creation. Fina Delmar was now elaborating on her insight that aliens traveled “interdimensionally” rather than, “you know, vertically.” This would explain, she said, why they did not appear on military radar screens. Assuming the military wasn’t lying through its teeth, of course. Scrubbs thought he detected the beginning of glaze starting to gel on Banion’s eyeballs.
Scrubbs calculated. Had the moment of maximum danger passed? Banion’s bracing J’Accuse! at the Texas UFO convention had not resulted in the hoped-for Senate hearings. Indeed, the U.S. government had not collapsed from exposure and embarrassment. The Russians had not admitted to possessing alien death technology. (Plasma Beam Device? Where did they get this stuff?) Indeed, the only Russian reaction at all was conveyed by a junior embassy press officer, who publicly and somewhat humiliatingly dismissed Banion’s allegations as “intellectual hooliganism” and “brazen hysterics.” The Revolt of the Mushrooms had wilted, and now Banion, the former lion king of Washington punditry, was reduced to Saturday morning with an over-the-hill Hollywood diva who seemed genuinely to have convinced herself she had had sex with aliens as well as eighteenth-century French nobles. Under these circumstances, it was possible that his superiors at MJ-12 might incline to letting bygones be bygones. He had kept his MJ-12 pager, having dismantled it to check for explosives. Yet MJ-12 had made no effort to summon him electronically. It was, as John Wayne used to say, quiet out there—too quiet.
He bit on another Cheezo. Really, he had to watch the junk food. He’d put on almost ten pounds since going into hiding. He brushed yellow chemical crumbs from his lips and watched.
“Let’s take some calls,” Banion said. “Elbo, Texas, you’re on the line.”
“Yeah, I’d like to ask Miss Fina—hello? Hello? I can’t hear nothing.”
“Yes, you’re on.”
“Okay. Is it true that you and Tony Curtis had a thing on?”
“I didn’t ask Miss Delmar on to talk about that,” Banion said stiffly. “This is a public affairs program.”
Washington choked on its brunch.
“She said she’d slept with aliens and that two-hundred-year-old French duke or whatever he was. I don’t see how it’s different asking what it was like having sex with Tony Curtis. And I admire Tony Curtis.”
“Let’s take a call from someone with a substantive question for Miss Delmar. Sump, Arkansas, you’re on the air.”
“I have a question for Miz Delmar. I have been kidnapped many, many times by aliens. I don’t use the word abducting because kidnapping is what it is, and they ought to be hung or fried in the electric chair for what they done to me. It’s shameful. My husband, Euple, he won’t have sex with me no more. He says—”
“What is your question, madam?”
Scrubbs shut his eyes. It was too painful. Banion might be a pompous asshole, but Scrubbs couldn’t help but feel a wring of sympathy for the man. He had, after all, destroyed his life. A copy of that morning’s Style section of the Post lay inside the sagging bed crater, open to the headline
BITSEY BANION, COPING, PINCH BY PINCH
“I’m taking things as they come,” Bitsey Banion said at last night’s “Salute to Rich People” at the Fripps Gallery. If she didn’t arrive on the arm of curator Tyler Pinch, she certainly spent a lot of time holding on to it during the festivities. The two of them have been spending a lot of quality time together since she separated from her TV-host-turned-UFO-abductee husband, former Sunday big John O. Banion. During the dinner, Pinch told the 500 attendees, each of whom had given $5,000, that they were “the best human beings who have ever lived.”
Scrubbs wondered if it would cheer Banion to know that Scrubbs’s own life, too, had taken a grim turn.
He gazed out his window, with its panoramic view of the back of Uncle Big Busy’s Fried Chicken and twenty-four-hour XXX ADULT VIDEOS. Last night he had gone to sleep to the sound of gunfire and police sirens.
So, he mused, what shall we do today? Stay in and lidocaine the brain with daytime TV, or will it be another fucking museum? He felt safe in museums, since they had guards who might, in the event he screamed, prevent MJ-12 agents from kidnapping him. At least if they got him, he would know more than before about the Bronze Age, the Dawn of Steam, and Fra Angelico, which up to now he’d thought was a liqueur.
How long would his cash last him? He had cleaned out his bank account when he went on the lam. He was reluctant to use his credit cards, since they could use those to trace him in a flash.
Suddenly he felt sticky and claustrophobic inside his squalid cell. He forlornly checked the newspaper for his entertainment alternatives, a Hobson’s choice between the only unexplored aesthetic experiences left to him in town: a Jean-Michel Basquiat* retrospective on the artist’s “Middle Period” or thirteenth-century Korean porcelain. MJ-12 wouldn’t have to bother killing him. At this rate, they’d find him dead on a park bench, of boredom.
Scrubbs peeled off twenty dollars for food, stuffed his diminishing wad of cash underneath an ancient floorboard that he had pried loose beneath his bed, and ventured blinkingly into the unartificial light.
“MR. CROCANELLI ON THE LINE, FROM GOOEY-LUBE,” Renira announced. Renira, who had once told a president of the United States that Banion was not available at the moment, was now fielding calls from the president of Gooey-Lube, his new TV sponsor. Banion wondered why she had stayed on through his career transition. Brits could be magnificently stubborn when they wanted. Just look at how they held on to India and all the other pink bits on the map for so long. For all her apparent disdain for this brave new world of his, he suspected that she might actually, deep down, believe in UFO’s, though as a correct Englishwoman she would never admit to it. There was this, too: she was from Devonshire, scene of the infamous “Devil’s Footprints” in 1855, when mysterious unhuman tracks were found in the snow extending forty miles. Or perhaps it was her new friendship with Fina Delmar that kept her here. The two spoke on the phone incessantly.
“Jackieeeee! Have you seen these numbers? They’re fucking incredible!”
Despite the man’s deplorable vocabulary, it was, Banion reflected, a pleasure to have such an earthy and straightforward sponsor. Andy Crocanelli, president of Gooey-Lube, the national chain of automotive lubricating centers, was not one to bore you witless with brayed insincerities about the excellence of your golf game. The man came to the point like a lathe drill.
“I wanna expand the show to two hours.”
“It’s not that sort of program, Andy.”
“Are you kidding? A fuckin’ twelve, with a sixteen share?* I wanna run this show twenty-four hours a day!”
“It’s very gratifying.”
“You fucking WASPs, you get some good news and you go, ‘Oo, oo, I am so graaaatified. Maybe I will have another cup of teeee.’ Jesus Christ, Jackie, you oughta be celebrating in Atlantic City inna fuckin’ penthouse suite, Jacuzzi filled with Dom Pérignon, smokin’ pre-Castros and gettin’ a blow job from a five-hundred-dollar hooker. From two five-hundred-dollar hookers. You want? It’s on me.”
Coarse as it sounded, it was certainly more alluring than the kind of blandishments Ample Ampere used to offer him, such as celebrity golf tournaments at Bel Mellow.
“Thank you, Andy. Let me get back to you on that.”
“We’re turning people away! Coast to coast, we got lines outside, customers killing themselves, for a lube job. I’m gonna have to start buying my own tankers.”
“I’m very pleased. The important part is, we’re getting the message out.”
“I want this show on network television. Next week I want this show on network TV. I already called Shick Farber at VBS. I told him, ‘You got dick on your Sunday morning lineup. Bible thumpers—all of em’ fuckin’ ex-cons on parole. I got a hot show for you.’ By the way, Jackie, I wanna move you back to your old Sunday slot—I want Saturday on Sunday. I guess we better change the name, huh?”
“Let’s take this a step at a time. But I really do appreciate your support and enthusiasm—”
“There you go again with that WASP shit! I really fucking appreciate your enthuuuuusiasm. Pull that fuckin’ tea bag outta your ass. Talk to me! We got a hit show!”
True enough, Saturday had had a huge debut. Banion was vindicated in his decision—over the growls from Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit—to have had Fina Delmar on the first show, instead of someone of more, well, scientific background. Renira, whose loathing of the two had increased to the point that she now treated them with open, dripping contempt, said they were obviously jealous of Miss Delmar. Miss Delmar, she called her.
At any rate, the response to the first show was, as WASPs would say, gratifying in the extreme. The Washington Post, tail between their legs, phoned to ask meekly if they might send a photographer. Banion instructed Renira to tell them he was “too busy.” The headline nonetheless told the story: NEW BANION SHOW SCORES RECORD RATINGS. Banion’s office phone, silent for so many months now—other than with calls from the more lurid of the tabloids—began to ring again. Amidst the torrent of interview requests came this:
“Someone named Roz to speak with you, from Cosmospolitan magazine? Says she met you at the Austin thrash.”
“I’ll take it.” Banion dove for the phone.
“I hope I’m not bothering you,” Roz said. “I had to tell you how fantastic the show was.”
“Where are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m in Washington.”
“Really? Can you have dinner with me?”
“I’d love that.”
What had come over him? He felt like a teenager. He was grinning, his pulse was racing, he felt, he felt … wonderful.
“Renira!”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine! Great! What am I doing tonight?”
“Eight o’clock dinner at Le Chat Énorme, with that alleged scientist Falopian was so avid for you to meet, the expert on swamp gas.”
“Cancel it.”
“I didn’t want to make the reservation in the first place.”
“Are there any romantic restaurants in Washington?”
“I assume.”
“Where? What’s a romantic restaurant—the most romantic restaurant?”
“Well, I suppose it rather depends.”
“Don’t give me that WASP shit, Renira.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Romantic! Don’t you speak English? Not tragico-comico-historical-pastoral. Romantic!”
“There’s Swann’s Way. It’s a bit far, and you usually have to book weeks ahead, but—”
“Call them. Offer them—how much do I have left in the bank? Offer them all of it. Renira—get me a table.”
“Will you be …”
“What? Out with it.”
“Spending the night. It is an inn.”
“Yes! Maybe. I don’t know. See if they have a room. A suite. With a Jacuzzi.”
“It’s not Las Vegas. It’s a quaint spot in the Shenandoah foothills. The chairman of the Federal Reserve got married there. I gather the food is—”
“Ask.”
What had gotten into Mr. Banion? So unlike him. She wasn’t hugely looking forward to asking them if (a) they had a room, in a hurry, and (b) did it have a Jacuzzi? But it was good to hear Mr. Banion sounding happy. It had been a while. In fact, Renira couldn’t really think when she’d heard him like this. Maybe she could help make it more romantic.
IF ROZ HAD LOOKED GOOD BACK IN TEXAS AT THE ALIEN CORRAL, she looked dazzling standing outside the Hotel Importance when Banion pulled up in his foreign convertible. She was wearing an iridescent blue-green silk dress suit, cut high on the thigh, and Manolo Blahnik stiletto heels at the end of endless long legs. Within seconds of her getting in the car, her perfume filled the inside. It was all Banion could do not to begin baying like a bloodhound as they crossed over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, heading west. He must get a grip. But it was so good to see her.
It was good to see him, too.
What brought her to town?
Sales conference. Had to meet with marketing people. Trying to reposition Cosmos. Going more upscale. The advertisers, of course, still balked at the abductee market, still stuck in the old demographic model. Yawn. Sorry, long day. Smile. Really good to see you again.
How long is the conference?
Wrapped up today.
Oh.
Um.
What time was she leaving the next day?
No particular time. Thought she might stay on a day or two, see the Basquiat.
The what?
Art show. Might as well. Didn’t get to Washington that often. Smile.
“Roz?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“I’m so glad you called.”
“Me too.”
“In Austin, when we met, it was … I was married and … But that’s over now. Not technically yet, but—”
“I know. I read about it. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s—she’s really better off without me at this point. She wasn’t cut out for life as Mrs. Prominent Abductee.”
“It’s so difficult. Our readers tell us that all the time. Imagine if your spouse came home one day and said, ‘Hi, honey, I’ve become a Jehovah’s Witness. So, what’s for dinner?’ ”
“Roz?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“Are you …”
“Yes?”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
Roz leaned over and kissed Banion on the ear.
A moment later she said, “Jack, you’re going eighty-five.”
THEY SAT AT A CORNER TABLE, A FEW FEET FROM A WARBLING caged finch, sipping champagne out of flutes and eating caviar and scrambled eggs out of eggshells nestled in cups. The room had been extravagantly decorated by a London stage designer: florid Edwardian wallpapers, velvety chairs, tasseled lamps casting soft, focused light on the culinary prodigies that emerged, dish after dish, from the kitchen. The room was hushed, the diners emitting a collective uuummm as they gave themselves over to the food. A fire burned. A large bust of a splendid Nubian noblewoman perched majestically on a marble mantel. A Dalmatian lay at the entrance, forepaws dangling over the step, as decorative as a porcelain figure. Waiters and sommeliers glided by silently, like synchronized swimmers.
Banion felt himself being borne aloft on a mist of well-being. Normally he would be inwardly fretting. Did enough people in the restaurant recognize him? Did he have as good a table as the chairman of the Federal Reserve? Was the service sufficiently deferential? But now all he could think of was this exquisite, unlikely creature before him, editor of a magazine for the female abductee, delicately spooning Caspian beluga onto her tongue in a way that made his heart and other organs swell and ache. Through his tunneled vision, she appeared as an eighteenth-century cameo—perfect, voluptuous, luminous. All else was excluded. Stay this moment …
She almost startled him when she spoke, as if the jewelry had come suddenly to life.
“Do you think it might have been a hallucination?”
“I think I am hallucinating.”
Two waiters arrived simultaneously with the next dish on the tasting menu.
“This is the monkfish in a pistachio crust, on a puree of whipped parsnips with a suggestion of coriander.”
“I hate to admit this,” Roz said, “but I’ve sort of started to wonder if some of my readers really were abducted. Visions, hallucinations, whatever, can be a reaction to some kind of trauma. Or, you can just want it to happen. The Germans have a word for it. Wundersucht. It means a thirst for miracles.”
“The Germans,” Banion said, dabbing at his lips, “have a word for everything. How’s your monkfish?”
“Delicious. Do you think everyone you’ve met in the UFO world is on the level?”
“Do we have to talk about aliens tonight?”
“No.” She smiled. Their fingers interlaced across the tablecloth. Did the Germans have a word for this? He wanted to take her into bed upstairs, remove her silky netherthings, and ravish her until the cows mooed.
“Let’s talk about you,” he said. My God, what had come over him? No Washington alpha male had ever uttered those words to a woman. “Who are you, Roz? Tell me your story.”
She reached across and caressed his cheek with a finger. Her hand smelled of perfume. Roses. Heaven; I’m in heaven.…
“I’m a government agent sent to seduce you.”
“I knew it. How’s your mission going?”
“Contact is established. It’s not a difficult assignment. I’ve had tougher.”
“I could make it harder.”
“I bet you could.”
Banion blushed.
“Maybe I’ll have to go to Plan R.”
“Plan R?” Banion swallowed dryly.
“It’s very extreme.”
“How does it work?”
“You lean forward across the table, like this, look the target right in the eye, and whisper, ‘I don’t think I can wait any longer. I’ve got to have you now.’ ”
Banion had to shift in his chair to release certain pressure. “That’s some plan, your Plan R.”
“It never fails.”
There were still five courses to go. If only he hadn’t ordered the tasting menu. More waiters arrived with more exquisite food, all of it now wasted on Banion, who yearned only for dessert.
“Venison mignonettes,” the waiter announced, “in blackberry reduction, accompanied by truffled risotto.”
“What,” Banion asked in a businesslike way, as if he were doing a TV interview, “would the ultimate purpose of this seduction be?”
He looked up from his truffled risotto to a pair of golden dimples.
“To replace one obsession with another. You see, Jack, you are making the government very worried.” She leaned forward, her breasts almost grazing her venison—oh lucky venison! “You know too much.”
“Ah,” Banion said, swirling the remains of his Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the glass, plum-colored vortex, “then there’s no use struggling, is there? What can one man do, against the power of the entire government?”
“It’s no use. We have you surrounded. Surrender.”
“Yes,” Banion croaked. “I guess there’s no way out.”
They sat, finishing their wine, unspeaking, playing fingertips until the waiter arrived, carrying what looked like a chocolate cake with a little plastic dome on top and legs sticking out underneath.
“This,” he said as he set it down with quiet flourish between them, “is from Renira. Normally we would call this our Chocolate Decadence. But tonight we’re calling it an Out-of-This-World cake. Renira said you would understand. She also sent this.” The sommelier arrived with a bottle of vintage champagne.
“And she said to tell you that she didn’t want you driving all the way back after dinner, so if you want to stay, she’s reserved a room for you upstairs. One of our nicest ones, with a Jacuzzi.”
“That was smooth,” Roz said after the waiter had left.
“I … honestly …” Banion flushed.
“I’ll take the Jacuzzi. You get the couch.”
SCRUBBS RETURNED TO HIS ROOM AT THE MAJESTIC HAVING failed to achieve aesthetic epiphany, and with indigestion from the two half smokes he had consumed al fresco at a hot dog stand on Constitution Avenue.
The Basquiat exhibit brochure, gravid with proclamations of the painter’s importance in the scheme, strove to make it sound as though dying of a heroin overdose at age twenty-seven had been a sacramental act, yet Scrubbs still scratched his head. But the visit to the Fripps Gallery had not been altogether a failure, for there, standing amidst such perplexing genius, Scrubbs had experienced an epiphany of another sort. He had resolved to get out of town and start anew. A little plastic surgery, a new Social Security number, new surroundings. Miami, he thought. Yes, Miami was a good place for exiles. What better shade for the shady than palms? Warmer climes, employment opportunities for the creatively inclined. Why wait? He could be there this very night.
He turned on the television as he gathered up his possessions. There was a report on the big Celeste launch a month from now. The president would of course attend, and would personally press the ignition button to launch the crown in the jewel of America’s space program, leaving his opponent to rail on about how it was more urgent for America to build high-speed trains. The campaign had boiled down to: My millennium is brighter than your millennium.
Take your millennium and shove it. Scrubbs would take his to Miami. He felt good for the first time in weeks. On hands and knees, he pried up the floorboard over his wad of cash. He stared incredulously at the unlovely sight.
His wad of cash was no longer the tightly rolled little log of hundred-dollar bills. Now it resembled sofa stuffing. Crisp currency of a proud nation had been ignominiously used by rodents—a family of them—as a gnawing post and litter box. Scrubbs peered dismally at a shredded visage of Ben Franklin—thrifty Franklin!—embedded with pellets of rat crap. Over two thousand dollars, and not a single bill presentable as legal tender.
Scrubbs indulged in the kind of release of emotions that modern therapists say is healthy. When rats have dined on your life savings, why keep it in? Cursing violently, he ripped up a few more floorboards. The rats, of course, had retreated elsewhere to digest their rich meal in peace. He gave the wall a kick that made the mirror over the sink fall off and shatter.
He counted his uneaten money. Nine dollars and change. That would get him to the airport. But then he would have to present a credit card and photo ID.
“Checking out,” he said to the night clerk sitting behind the bulletproof glass in the Majestic lobby. You can tell a really first-class hotel by the bulletproofing around the front desk, and the buzzer locks on the double doors to the lobby. Scrubbs slid his room key and credit card through the slot with a show of nonchalance.
The clerk was a chain smoker; he was enveloped in a miasma of his own smog inside the Plexiglas booth. He looked like an exhibit at a tobacco trade show. All that was missing was a sign: IF SMOKING IS SO BAD FOR YOU, WHY IS THIS MAN STILL ALIVE?
Without taking his eyes from his TV, which was showing a documentary about sharks eating unsuspecting seabirds, the clerk pointed to a sign that said, PAYMENT BY CASH ONLY. NO CREDIT CARDS, CHECKS, FOOD STAMPS, PERSONAL EFFECTS. NO EXEPTIONS.
“Oh,” Scrubbs said, affecting mild surprise, “then I gotta go to the cash machine.”
The clerk, absorbed by a great white shark’s attempt to fit an entire Tasmanian muttonbird—or was it a tawny frogmouth?—into its mouth, said, “Lemme see yo’ cash card.”
Scrubbs held it up to the glass, as if displaying travel documents to a twitchy border guard with a machine gun.
“Leave yo’ bag and wallet here.”
The problem with this arrangement was that the ATM machine would only laugh hysterically if Scrubbs asked it for money. He had cleared out his account. He was therefore reluctant to part with his last remaining personal effects—how far can one go in life with the clothes on one’s back and nine dollars?
“Is the manager around?”
He realized immediately that his petition to a more exalted member of the Majestic’s managerial hierarchy had been an error, for now the clerk turned his attention wholly back to the shark and the unfortunate pelican.
“Uh uh.”
Scrubbs examined his options. Alphabetically, they ran the gamut from abominable to atrocious.
“That’s okay, I’ll have the money wired to me in the morning. Just give me my room key back.”
The clerk shook his head. “You already checked out.”
“Yeah, and I’m checking back in.”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Room’s taken.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pay fo’ yo’ room.”
There was one other option: wait for the clerk to die of lung cancer.
“Lemme make a call,” Scrubbs said. His training was kicking in. Faced with an intractable situation, create a diversion to buy yourself time to evaluate alternatives.
Scrubbs went to the pay phone, dropped in coins, and punched the number for the time recording. He listened. Nothing. Not even a dial tone. No matter. He went through the motions, speaking loudly for the benefit of the clerk.
“Fred? Yeah, hi, it’s Nate. How are you? Listen, I’m in a ridiculous situation here, can you bring, hold on”—he called out to the clerk—“how much do I owe you?”
“Two hunnerd fo-teen dollars.”
“I need two hundred and fourteen dollars. Could you bring it down? I’m really sorry to do this to you. You can? That’s great. The Majestic, on tenth, between E and F. Can’t miss it. It’s got a huge Mobil Five Diamond Award outside. The Queen of England stays here when she’s in town. Thanks, you’re a pal.”
Scrubbs hung up and with an air of aggrieved triumph announced, “He’s coming with the money. Okay?”
“Phone’s broke,” said the clerk, not looking up from his TV.
BANION AWOKE ON THE COUCH WITH A CRICK IN HIS NECK and a hangover. He hadn’t drunk that much—since college, probably. Outside he could see the Shenandoah frosted with moonlight, but he was more interested in another sight, through the opened door to the next room: Roz, asleep, alone, on the bed. She looked like a partially unwrapped alabaster statue, lying there in a tumble of sheets. He yearned to be there in bed with her. But he had hopes. Apart from the disastrous appearance of the waiter, it had all gone so well, even afterwards, in the suite, as they talked—through the door—while she soaked in the Jacuzzi. Maybe it was even better this way, he mused, more romantic not to have …
He heard the voice of Andy Crocanelli saying, “You fuckin’ WASPs! You get a babe like this in a hotel room and say to yourself, Oo, how romantic not to fuck her!”
“I WASN’T TRYING TO RUN OUT ON MY HOTEL BILL,” SCRUBBS said as he sat in the back of the police car, handcuffed. “I was trying to get to the cash machine.”
“I told you to shut up.”
“You should be arresting that asshole clerk. It was his rats that ate my money. Two thousand dollars. It’s there, in my room. It’s proof.”
After hours of enduring the night clerk’s baleful glare, punctuated by occasional taunts of “Yo fren’ with the money musta died on his way here,” Scrubbs couldn’t stand it any longer. When the clerk buzzed someone in, he made his move, a bold lunge for the opened door. Unfortunately, the person coming in turned out to be not a resident of the Majestic but a narcotics detective.
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll spray you in the eyeballs with pepper gas and say you resisted arrest.”
Scrubbs had never had the pleasure of being thrown into the Central Detention Facility. He had read that the best thing you can do, on finding yourself in a holding cell with a dozen or so of the most frightening human beings on the planet is—show no fear! Viewing the minatory specimens circling him, who appeared to be calculating which of Scrubbs’s bodily orifices to make merry with first, this advice seemed impractical.
“Yo, whitemeat, get over here and suck my dick.”
Show no fear!
“I said, get over here and suck my dick.”
Scrubbs knew some rudimentary karate, a neat, two-fingered stab to the Adam’s apple. He could probably incapacitate the man currently extending this thoughtful invitation. It was the dozen others chortling who worried him. They might take exception to Scrubbs’s leaving their friend choking on the floor. On the other hand, Scrubbs thought, perhaps being swiftly beaten to death by a savage mob was preferable to the looming evening of amorous rapture.
“Fuck you,” Scrubbs said.
Show no fear! Nothing to it.
THEY HAD BEEN KICKING HIM IN HIS KIDNEYS AND OTHER sweetbreads for what seemed a very long time when Scrubbs became aware of electrical sounds and shrieks as the guards broke up the soccer game.
“You Scrubbs?”
He made a gurgling noise.
“You’re free to go.”
As, hunched over in pain, he retrieved his possessions from the desk sergeant, Scrubbs was informed that the charges were being dropped. He was handed a manila envelope. Scrubbs opened it. It was a page from the day’s newspaper, the stock market report. No note was attached.
“Who gave you this?”
“He didn’t say.”
Scrubbs examined the stock report. Various letters and numbers had been circled in blue ink. It took him a few minutes to figure out the sequence
A phone number.
He made the call from an all-night coffee shop a few blocks from the station.
A cheery female voice, entirely out of place at this time of night, answered. “Creative Solutions, how may I route your call?”
“It’s Scrubbs.”
“One moment please,” she chirped. Scrubbs waited. MJ-12 did not entertain callers on hold with classical music or the weather station. She came back on. “What number are you calling from?”
Scrubbs gave the number on the pay phone. He heard clicking over the line.
“Hang up please, and stand by.”
Less than a minute later, the phone rang. It was a male voice, tired, unhappy at being awake at this hour, but in command, a voice accustomed to giving the orders.
“Is this Agent Double-O Seven?”
“Who is this?” Scrubbs said.
The voice yawned. “Two unauthorized abductions of a leading media figure, unauthorized removal of official equipment, absent without official permission, and now this career capper—arrested for trying to run out on the bill at a fleabag hotel. We’re all real proud of you, Nathan.”
“You shut me down. I thought—”
“No, no, no. Do not use the words I and thought in the same sentence. They don’t go together in your case.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Don’t get me started. Let me see. Contact us on your field communicator, your laptop computer. Speaking of which, where is it? You don’t have it with you.”
How did he know that?
“You didn’t pawn it or anything stupid like that, did you? Scrubbs, you with me?”
“No, I still have it.”
“Where?”
“At my apartment.”
“Negative that. We’ll get along a whole lot better if you don’t blow smoke up my ass.”
So they had been to his apartment.
“Why are you so interested in the computer?”
“Another brainteaser. Because it’s government property. It’s not a piece of equipment that should be floating around in the civilian world. And I’m conducting the interview.”
“It’s in a safe place,” Scrubbs said.
“You know, we could have left you in lockup with your boyfriends. There were some who wanted to do that.”
Okay, he had something they wanted. It was a start. “Then why didn’t you?”
Another yawn. “We’re going to bring you in.”
“Bring me in? Is that normal procedure?”
“Nothing in your case qualifies as ‘normal,’ Nathan. But you’ve made such a pig’s breakfast of everything, the only thing to do is stick you somewhere where you can’t do too much more damage.”
“Like where?”
“One of our desert facilities.”
“Nevada?”
“What did you have in mind? Paris? I guarantee you it’s an improvement over that Hotel Majestic—Majestic, Jesus, Scrubbs—and jail. I need you to bring in your computer. We can’t leave that on the outside. So where is it?”
“I buried it in a public park.”
“Man, it’s one thing after another with you.”
“I didn’t want it in my apartment. I thought you were going to set it off.”
“If we wanted to, we could have done a CE-Six on you at any time.”
“CE-Six?” The MJ-12 Close Encounters Playbook only went up to five—rough sex with aliens.
“Close Encounter of the Final Kind. Where’s the computer?”
“Theodore Roosevelt Island.”
“At least you didn’t bury it at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s five-ten now. Go to the island. You have nine dollars, that’s enough cab money to get you there. There’s a parking lot and a bridge to the island. Retrieve the machine, walk back across the bridge to the parking lot, there will be a car waiting for you.”
“How will I know which car?”
The voice sighed. “I’ll have your driver hold up a sign with your name on it. How many cars are going to be in the Teddy Roosevelt Island parking lot at six o’clock in the morning? I don’t think you’re cut out for fieldwork. To be honest, I don’t know what you’re cut out for, at this point. Maybe washing aircraft in the desert. The car will take you to the safe house in Virginia. From there, you’ll proceed to an air base where we can fly you out west to the facility. Prior to that, I will debrief you. I’ll see you at the safe house in one hour and a half. Try not to get arrested for something stupid.”
DAWN WAS JUST STARTING TO BREAK WHEN SCRUBBS reached the entrance to Theodore Roosevelt Island. The gate at the end of the pedestrian footbridge was locked, so he had to climb around it, which made him feel like a criminal for the second time in twelve hours. No one watching his awkward, crablike exertions—due to his still aching kidneys—would have mistaken him for a professional cat burglar. Mr. Majestic had been right about that: Scrubbs was no field man. He thought about his future as he finagled his limbs around the gate spikes, trying to avoid Bobbitting* himself on them. What dreary job in the Nevada wasteland were they preparing for him? UFO groups had romantic names like Dreamland for the mysterious installations out in the desert, where the U.S. government was supposedly reverse-engineering captured alien spacecraft so that they could build their own. But these sites, from the inside, were anything but dreamy. Security was so intense you weren’t allowed to leave, except for two weeks a year. It was the worst post in the organization. In the MajestNet chat rooms, people spoke with shudders of the stints they’d served in these top-secret Potemkin villages, where all they did, day in, day out, was turn lights on and off and drive mock-ups of flying saucers around on the sizzling tarmac in order to keep Russian spy satellites and UFO nuts with telescopes goggle-eyed with excitement. Maybe, Scrubbs thought, almost impaling his calf on a nasty spike, if he worked hard and kept his nose clean, they’d transfer him after a decent interval. After all, Banion had been promoting interest in UFO’s.
What a mess.
The woods were lonely, dark, and deep, but there was sufficient light to find the spot where he’d buried his laptop, fifteen or so feet from the stone tablet engraved with manly exhortations from the twenty-sixth president. He got down on his knees and began to claw at the damp, leafy earth, grumbling over his lack of a shovel, feeling distinctly unlike James Bond. For one thing, Bond would have managed to make it out of the Hotel Majestic without getting himself arrested. In his moment of extremis, Scrubbs finally came to terms with his rejection by the CIA: it was probably the one thing the agency had gotten right.
A few minutes of digging with blackened fingernails, and the laptop, wrapped in plastic, revealed itself like a treasure chest. Almost there.
He was about to lift it out of the hole when he heard something to his left. He looked.
He saw three shadows approaching. This was not part of Mr. Majestic’s program. They didn’t look like bums or bagmen, unless the bagmen who inhabited Theodore Roosevelt kept themselves well groomed and in athletic trim, in deference to TR.
What the hell?
They must have been dispatched by MJ-12 to ensure the safety of the valued object. Then why weren’t they greeting him with cheery hellos and a grande latte? Could they have some murkier agenda?
“Hello?” Scrubbs tried. No answer. Not especially reassuring. There was something inherently unreassuring about a trio of crew-cut trolls pretending to be pine trees, unless this was some local amateur theatrical troupe rehearsing the final act of Macbeth.
“Hello?”
Something definitely unwell here.
His brain shouted, Abort abort abort.
Scrubbs saw a hand appear from behind a thick tree twenty feet away. There was something in the hand, something small and metallic, with a tiny rubberized antenna. A walkie-talkie? Then why was he aiming it directly at Scrubbs, and why was a thumb closing down on a button?
What would Bond do?
Scrubbs picked the laptop from its hole and heaved it through the air in the direction of the hand.
The blast knocked him back several feet and rolled him over. When he had cleared his head, he tasted earth in his mouth, and his ears felt like Quasimodo was inside ringing every bell. Gradually he made out other sounds: men shouting. Angry men shouting. Extremely angry men.
The voices apparent belonged to the remaining two, both of them staggering like drunks, weaving into tree trunks, holding their ears, while their shredded clothing smoldered. Their partner, the one who had been holding the remote detonation device, seemed to have disappeared, in the way people do when bombs have gone off in proximity.
Scrubbs lurched to his feet. Quasimodo ringing in Easter Sunday. He stumbled into a tree trunk, hurting his shoulder. He was eager for this wretched day to be over, and it had just begun.
The two smoldering goons had now produced what looked like—yes, those were definitely guns, and they were pointing them in Scrubbs’s direction, if unsteadily. It was time to be away from this unhappy bower.
New explosive sounds filled the woods, puny by contrast with the previous big bang, but argument enough to get the adrenals pumping.
Scrubbs began to run, briskly, in the direction of the Potomac River.
“DO YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO CHICAGO RIGHT AWAY?” BANION asked moonily over his untouched panfried trout and hash browns. Nearby, the finch chirped sweetly in its Victorian bamboo cage. Through the open door to the garden came the trickling of water. For someone who had spent the night on a couch in a state of advanced sexual frustration, he felt oddly relaxed and happy.
Roz looked back at him through eyeglasses over the rim of her coffee cup and smiled. “Not right away.”
“Do you have to go back at all?”
“How’s that?”
“Why don’t you stay here in Washington?”
“Woo. That’s sudden.”
“I’m serious.”
“What would I do in Washington?”
“Work for me.”
Roz frowned. “You want me to give up the editorship of the leading abductee magazine to get you coffee and do your filing and give you blow jobs in the office?”
An older couple nearby stared. Banion blushed.
“I already have someone who takes care of that.”
“Sure you do.”
“Renira would probably bite it off.” He took her hand. “I’m serious.”
“I worked very hard to get where I am.”
“I know you did. And I respect that. It’s a terrific magazine. Your last cover article on whether Short Uglies make better lovers was the best of its kind I’ve read. But you’ve done that. Take on a challenge. The new show’s taking off like a rocket. This is exciting. Come on.”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s something else.”
“Yeah?”
“I think I, well, love you. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”
“Falling in love?”
“I don’t have a baseline on which to make any definitive assessment, or …”
“I love it when you talk about me like I’m a fiscal outlay.” Roz put a forkful of trout in his mouth. “You’re married.”
“It’s nothing six months of expensive lawyers screaming at each other can’t fix.”
She was smiling. Yes! She was so beautiful! He loved her!
“What would my title be?”
“Executive Assistant.”
“Please.”
“Executive Director?”
“I was thinking Chief Executive Officer.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh come on,” Banion said. “Say yes. It’s the most beautiful word in the English language. West Saxon, originally.”
“How does it pay?”
“Oh, very well.”
“Benefits?”
“Many.”
“Medical?”
“Major.”
“Vacations?”
“Frequent.”
“So.” She smiled, taking his hand. “Do I apply for this position in person?”
“Um. You do have to pass a physical exam first.”
“What sort of physical?”
“Pretty rigorous, from what I hear.”
“I’ll … think about it.”
SUBMERGED UP TO HIS CROTCH IN THE FRIGID POTOMAC River, Scrubbs hid behind a large rock on the eastern bank of the island, directly across from the Kennedy Center. Early-morning commuters were driving in to work. He was hiding from assassins. Another day, another dollar.
They were getting closer. Soon, he guessed, the police helicopter would appear. An amplified voice would bark at him to put his hands in the air. The rest was predictable. He would be taken into custody. In the car he would feel the jab of a hypodermic needle. Or perhaps they’d use sevoflurane on him, straight, without the ammonia and cinnamon flavoring. He would fall into a deep, untroubled sleep for, oh, ever.
He peered over the top of the rock. They were a hundred feet away and closing on him, sweeping the bank, guns at the ready.
The river was cold and dirty, but it beat getting shot. Scrubbs slipped in, gasping, up to his neck, and pushed out until he felt the current start to carry him downriver. It was swift.
As he was passing the southern tip of Theodore Roosevelt Island, moving swiftly now toward God knew where, he saw a fishing boat, about fifteen feet long, anchored in the lee of the island. A number of fishing rods were deployed in holders. A man was sitting in the boat, leaning back. He appeared to be asleep. Scrubbs began to drift toward the lines. He tried to kick away, but the current was drawing him in.
Fifty feet past the boat, he felt a sharp pain in his leg.
In the distance, he heard the distinctive and normally cheering zzzzzzzzzzz of unspooling fishing line.
The pain in his leg—ahh! He thrashed against the current, trying to reach the boat. The fisherman was now standing, holding his rod.
With enormous effort, Scrubbs reached the boat. He grabbed the transom, spat water.
“Morning,” he said.
The fisherman was a black man in his early sixties, roly-poly in the belly, with a finely trimmed mustache. At the moment, however, his most prominent feature was his mouth, which was hanging open.
Scrubbs coughed up more Potomac water. “Sorry to disturb you, but your line hooked my leg.”
“What,” the man said, “are you doing in the water?”
Scrubbs was too tired for invention. “There are some men with guns on the island trying to kill me.”
“Police?”
“Sort of. Not really.”
“Well, which is it?”
“They’re with the government.” Scrubbs gasped from the exertion required to hold on. “They want to kill me because I know about flying saucers.”
Well, there—the ball was now squarely in the man’s court.
“Mister, are you drunk?”
“No. They’re going to see us any minute. Do you suppose you could pull in your anchor so maybe we could drift out of their range while we talk?”
“Oh, man …”
Scrubbs sympathized. Here you come out on the river for a nice, peaceful early-morning bit of fishing, and you catch a man who tells you he’s on the run from the UFO police. What would you do?
The man was shaking his head, as if trying to make Scrubbs vanish mentally. Just then the first shots zipped into the water a yard away.
“Sweet Jesus!” the man said. Quick as a flash he sliced the anchor line clean with a razor-sharp fillet knife and ducked under the gunwales. More shots were fired. Scrubbs heard one connect with the side of the boat, eliciting a “Damn!” from the crouching fisherman.
But the boat, borne by the current, was drifting rapidly away from the island, and in minutes they were under the Memorial Bridge and out of range.
“Thank you,” Scrubbs spluttered. “Appreciate it.” He was exhausted, frozen, and bleeding. He began to slip under. As his head went in, he felt arms pulling him into the boat.
Next thing he knew he was lying in the bottom of the boat, smelling gasoline and fish. Above him, he saw a 727 landing at Reagan National Airport.
The fisherman started the outboard. The boat buzzed south.
“Scrubbs,” he said, wincing as he tried to pull the hook out of his thigh. “Nathan.”
“Did I ask to know that? Do I want to know that?”
“You can drop me near the airport if you want.”
The man shook his head again.
“Look at you,” said the fisherman with a mixture of disgust and concern. “You’re wet, stuck full of hooks. I’ve seen better looking roadkill. You’re gonna get far.”
“Ow!”
“And now you just sat on another of my seventy-nine-cent triple hooks. I’m going to have to ruin that hook to get it out of you. Plus you’re sitting on my fish. Nothin’ much going right for you today. Now what’s this you telling me, about UFO’s?”
“The government is afraid of what I know about UFO’s.” No sense in hitting him with the entire history of MJ-12 at this hour of the morning.
“Hm.” The man snorted. “You from Saint Lizbeth’s?”
“No. I know this must sound strange.”
“It does.”
“I’m too tired to lie.”
“Hm.” But it was a gentler hm.
“I seen a UFO once. In the Chesapeake Bay. Three of ’em. One red, one blue, one sorta yellow. Crisscrossing like fireflies, except they weren’t no bugs. I could see that. Know what I’m saying?”
“I do.”
“I told my wife about it, and she said, ‘You been drinking.’ I said the only drinking that was going on was in those UFO’s, from the way they were driving. Never seen such a thing. Never have since.”
He was warming to the subject. “What I don’t get is—if they so damn intelligent to come all the way here from wherever it is, how come they don’t just set down on the president’s lawn over there like they do in the movies and say, ‘Okay, we’re here. Deal with the situation.’ Know what I’m saying? Make a hell of lot more sense than drunk drivin’ over the Chesapeake. What is that supposed to prove? That they’re intelligent? If that’s all they got to do, they aren’t no more intelligent than humans.” He stared at Scrubbs. “But they may be one up on you.”
“Don’t doubt that.”
“Do you have money?”
“I’ll give you what I’ve got. It’s not much.”
“I didn’t say I want your money, did I? There’s easier ways of making money than catching fugitives in the Potomac.”
He shook his head again. He seemed to be trying to reach a decision. Scrubbs knew that much depended on whatever it was.
Suddenly the man turned the outboard throttle to the right, angling the boat east, away from the airport.
“Where we going?” Scrubbs asked.
“We are going to get you some dry clothes. Then we’ll see about getting you some running money.”
“Thank you,” Scrubbs said.
“Don’t think you’re getting something for nothing. So you know about UFO’s. Do you know about hanging Sheetrock?”
“Huh?”
“Well, you going to learn about Sheetrock.”
* A fashionable spa in Arizona.
* Andy Warhol protégé who died of embarrassment at the age of twenty-seven when his paintings began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
* A Nielsen rating point equals about 980,000 households. Share indicates the percentage of homes with television in use.
* Neologism derived from the surname of a wife batterer whose Latin spouse settled the score by severing his penis with a kitchen knife. The penis was famously reattached, providing its owner with gainful, if undignified, employment as a celebrity penis reattachee.