Stardust

Today Is school lunch brought to you by KQVD:

•NE SPtlLEI SHtCK JtCK,

his fired career on toast and served with a pink slip for encouraging sidcide, finds himself added to a stale local radio station to spice iq> the news. Romantic pickle on the side

I

t's a beautiful day, one of several distinctly autumnal afternoons this year. Trees exfoliate; the afternoon winds sweep the dead leaves into blazing drifts that line the sidewalks. Often I want to get out and walk, but Phoebe almost always needs a lift, and since my ad­mittedly immoderate desire is to drive her wherever she wishes from the station when each workday ends, I never do.

My car bounces and rattles. I can smell wood smoke. We are having an innocuous discussion.

"You have a nice voice," she says. "No wonder you became a radio

announcer.

She sits beside me in the passenger seat, sipping from a squat fist-size bottle containing a tan sweetened coffee beverage.

"I mean, I always thought that. What is that? Haven't you gotten the brakes fixed yet?"

"It's the strut rod bushings," I say. "There's nothing to worry about."

If we were to walk, I might this once feel comfortable taking her hand in mine, perhaps as we pass the little plaza where a man, cast in bronze, checks his BlackBerry for messages in perpetuity.

"Anyways," she says. "What was it you said? That got you in trouble?"

"That was just a regrettable lapse."

"'If anyone within die sound of my voice feels suicidal, just do it'?"

"That's not exactly-

"Awesome. I remember hearing about it. I was in liigh school."

Half to myself, I say, "It couldn't possibly have been that long ago."

"Thanks a lot."

I turn to see Phoebe sitting with her arms folded across her chest, staring straight ahead. I realize what I've suggested and hasten to explain.

"You," I say, "you look great. That is, not that it's boon a long time particularly, certainly not for someone like me, who already is old, in a way, though I suppose the younger you are to begin witli the more proportionately old you get in a shorter span of time. Not that, I mean, well, you \onk great."

"You have a nice voice," she says, turning to look out the window at the llaming leaves, "but you ought to learn to talk like a radio announcer."

Tho criticism gnaws at me, tears otf raw hunks of my flesh, deep into the night. "I am a verbose idiot," I advise myself. It's disappointing. I'd hoped that Phoebe's presence at my side for that after-work period usually lasting roughly 30 to 45 minutes depending on traffic conditions would concen­trate me, make me whole and human. From the moment I walk into the station each morning I anticipate this intorval, imagine myself laugliing and talking animatedly, see Phoebe laugliing in response. When I imagine myself like this, my nose always feels right. But after Phoebe makes one of her occasionally critical remarks, once the initial swells of pain have subsided, I often find myself wondering whether I've been foolish enough to believe in sometliing that simply doesn't exist or if she has recklessly disturbed the membrane of a reality so fragile, so subtle, that she is unaware of it. "The ecosystem of our love," I characterize it. I plot the overall situation—our situation—on a graph whose exact axes are difficult to determine but where gains and losses are imme­diately clear and utterly unambiguous. I'm confident that, overall, the situation is one marked by gradual advances. "I'm working on her," I tell myself. Today, though, is turning out to bo a slight setback. I touch my nose: It seems to be rotting.

As Assistant to Station Manager Brea Peach, Phoebe has been in a position to know about my so-called promotion, about the new show, before nearly ovoryono else. The show is the prod­uct of Peach's vast desire, packed into which is the roquiromont that the station live up to its doomed self-designation as "Sili­con Valley's Public Radio Voice." In my eagerness to return to radio I agreed to be legally bound by the narrow terms of my contract, temporarily blinded to the more distasteful possibili­ties suggested by the station's promise that I would at some point host an unnamed project of an undetermined nature,

and now there's little I can do about my misgivings. The pro­gram will attempt to incorporate both variety and quiz show formats, with an emphasis on high-tech issues geared toward the layman. Brea is veiy high on it. For example, he says, we could contact vacationing industry executives and ask them (a) what they are doing at that veiy moment and (b) what big plans are in the works for their companies, painting a vivid picture of a studio audience sitting rapt as a staticky satellite connection captures, say, Alexander Olnitsky as he wrestles a marlin onto the deck of liis 75-foot yacht while sharing soft­ware industry secrets in his barely comprehensible Russian accent. But so far, according to some obscure design of Brea's, my own on-air exposure has been carefully restricted.

"We don't want you recommending mass self-immolation again any time loo soon," laughs Peach, dapping me on the shoulder. "Nasdaq has been too volatile this week for that."

I grimace, which encourages him.

"Ilow'd it go? 'Save the state the trouble of doing you in when you're older, take care of it yourself today'?"

"No, that's "

"Keep up the good work. We'll rehabilitate you yet."

As a sort of "teaser" I've been assigned the reading of the school lunch menus. Each weekday at 6:50 a.m. the morning announcer, Hill Clement, turns the microphone over to me: "And now, Joe Lampion with today's school lunch for the Oro Verde Unified School District." My fans listen and cheer me on. I understand that it is available as a podcast. The rat­ings reveal that it is an inordinately popular part of the sta­tion's broadcast day. Today, the children ate Ilamburdog on Sesame Seed Bun, Relish (hip, Tato Nuggets and Fruit Bar.

Today after work when I go to Phoebe's desk to quietly await our daily drive, I catch her in the midst of a tele­phone conversation, which she does not bother to discon­tinue or temper when she spots me.

"Oh, God!" she cries. "I gave Caillin all my extra-large condoms."

I sit, as nonchalantly as possible, on the visitor's chair adjacent to her cluttered desk. Previous eavesdropping had already revealed that Caillin was seeing Phoebe's "ex-lover," a phrase Phoebe expels from the depths of her lungs as if to imbue it with a certain drama it might otherwise lack. I touch my nose, then bring my hand to rest on the roll of flesh that has begun to protrude slightly over my waist­band. I try to determine whether I am more injured by the breathy gutturalism of "ex-lover" or the mat.ter-oi-fact.ncss of the pronouncements she makes now, as the conversation turns to AIDS testing.

"Well, one of the rubbers broke inside me..." she says.

"They're just longer tubes, not fatter around..." she says.

How long and fat, I wonder, is her ex-lmier's cock?

"I had sex with Cynthia while he (continued on page 100)

STARDUST

(continued from page 50) was away..." she says.

"Plus I sucked oil'my masseur..." she says.

My feet begin to ache. I sigh deeply and Phoebe looks at me, laughs silently while pointing at the receiver and then forming a bla-bla puppet with her free hand.

When she hangs up she asks me to drive her to the Hall of Justice so that she can provide one of her boyfriends—one of her "lovers"—witli money to pay the tow fee he incurred after parking in a bus zone. It's absolutely necessaiy to pay the tow fee, she continues, because, actually, the car is her husband's. A "non-person," she has called him. She also, she says, probably will have to post bond since her lover, who presum­ably is a person of some kind, showed up at the impound lot drunk and disorderly and took a wild swing at one of the police officers stationed there. Ibday the children ate Bean and Cheese Burrito with Mexicali Corn, Small Pretzel and Applesauce.

The new show takes ugly shape at a series of regular meetings. Brea is adamant about retaining the formula of musical guests and high-tech chat. He is partic­ularly interested in initiating a rivalry between the new show and San Francisco Saturday!, a weekly radio program broad­cast live from a waterside theater in that city and itself blatantly imitative of Gar­rison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, or "the Benchmark," as Peach annoyingly insists on referring to it.

"Keillor has emerged as one of the most distinctive personalities in contemporary broadcasting," lectures Brea. It's a ridic­ulous statement, like suggesting that the sun is a distinctive object in the solar sys­tem, but none of us takes it seriously or responds since Brea's pithy superlatives generally are lifted wholesale from other sources. I do, however, take the rivalry between these two provincial shows very seriously: It is, albeit by proxy, a rivalry with Keillor. Keillor once, in the course of one of the countless interviews he grants in his capacity as a beloved national fig­ure, referred to me as a "very sick man" and a "scourge." Granted, I can't disagree with his assessment of my personality at thai lime, but I was somewhat upset by his remarks, and I remain so.

Frankly, Keillor's show has always made me nervous. The fact that San Francisco Saturday! and a dozen other shows around the country have been m<xleled success­fully upon it confirms that Keillor himself is easily replaceable (which, I might point out, cannot be said about me in connec­tion with any of my former showcases): It is a show that reflects the message of its audience. Somewhere, in the midst of the anecdotes, the imitation commercial messages, the performances by bluegrass quartets, there is always a moment when its essentially xenophobic bias surfaces. What

occurs at these moments, when the usually gracious audience, which has applauded politely alter energetically hokey musical performances and admittedly funny skits as if clustered around a putting green, rouses itself to roar and whistle and clap in discordant unanimity, is the terrifying sound of an onrushing thing, the death of something precious, something capable of feeling intense pain.

Tonight, as I shower, I notice dark loops of hair amidst the lather in my hands after I shampoo. More hair swirls down the drain. I place my head under the stream­ing water again to clear my nose, gaze at the bright red matter in my hand before rinsing it away as well.

Phoebe shows up for work today with a child's composition book, from which she begins to read aloud after removing it from her purse. I am rapt.

"I am drowning in my tears/with my passion tied around my neck," she reads. "Well?"

Her smile tells me that I must answer this correctly.

"It's very interesting," I reply, hedging. I touch my nose.

"My husband wrote it. I found this note­book while I was talking on the phone. Usually I don't go through his things, but hey. I left him on the sofa this morning, hungover."

I analyze the fragment tonight, at that familiar moment when I put down the book I'm pretending to read and play back the day's significant events—i.e., the events in which Plux-be and I interacted. "I am drowning in my tears/with my passion tied around my neck." The non-person clearly is capable of human emotion (if not poetry). Phoebe's judgment strikes me as unnecessarily harsh, but if it is necessary for her to have made it, then the conclu­sion I draw is that Phoebe is the "person" in the marriage. I envision her draped, wrapped, tied around the non-person's neck, with the lively imitation eyes of a fur stole, which would be hilarious if not for the fact that my brain is burning and my toenails are growing into my flesh. My nose is on lire. I realize with sudden anger that I'd like to point out to her that "if he's 'drowning,' then where does that leave you, the symbiotic (Greek: state of liv­ing together) and eternal Other?"

When I testified before the Federal Com­munications Commission—having been offered, in effect, a confession to sign— the commissioner to whom I spoke, the FCC chair himself, asked me the following question: "Who in the hell do you think you are?" This question was actually read into the permanent record of the United States government. A thousand flashbulbs

popped as it was asked. A tiiousand popped as I began to grope for an answer.

Drifting to sleep, I realize that for several nights running my heart has skipped beats, the absence of the pulse filling my body with a dry, rushing sensation, a moment of physical abatement in which the dark continuum of my life's rhythms carries me from the brink of death through sheer momentum alone, the knotted central muscle resuming just before the decay­ing tempo ceases altogether. Today the children ate Pepperoni Pizza with Tossed Salad, Diced Pears and Jungle Crackers.

The station's Executive Director had given each of us a Personal Life Clock at the Holiday Party the year before. He hadn't actually given them to us; he had arranged for them to be provided free of charge, as Holiday Gifts (likewise, he probably had not paid for them himself, either).

Phoebe had informed me then that the clocks had been provided in lieu of the modest but helpful holiday bonus checks that the staff had been given in prior years. In my last year of employment at my previ­ous situation I had been awarded a bonus of close to a half-million dollars at year-end, and I'd mentioned this offhandedly to Phoebe, whose charms were just then beginning to make their indelible impres­sion on me.

"You don't have to show off," she'd said.

I'd stammered, "I—it's all gone now."

Slowly, theatrically, she'd taken in our shabby surroundings. "No shit."

The wrapped boxes sat on our chairs at our assigned places in the banquet nxmi where the punctually conducted two-hour celebration was held. They awaited us, the Personal Life Clocks; we had to move them out of the way in order to sit down: In this way they were noticed.

The function of the Personal life Cl<x:k is to calculate and display, on the basis of the barest information, the number of hours, minutes and seconds remaining in one's statistical lifetime. It alternates between 150 inspirational messages, which flicker, in turn, beneath the diminishing number. The clock also, almost incidentally, displays the correct time. It's a handsome device, its mechanism embedded in an obelisk of smooth veined granite. Thus each clock is in its own small way as unique as the fig­ure it digitally erases, or rather what that figure supposedly represents.

Ph<K'be is so disturbed by the Personal Life Clock that she refuses even to discuss it. I once tried to joke with her, reading from the pamphlet that had accompanied my clock.

"Savor every minute with your Personal Life Clock...."

"I don't want to even talk about it."

"Clock as shown in photo at left indicates that owner has 321,847 hours, 14 minutes and 55 seconds of joy left in life...."

"It's really not funny. It's disgusting."

"...The time is 8:30 p.m...."

"Please. Will you?"

"Time is the most precious commodity each of

us possesses, yet one which is all too often taken

Jor granted "

For italic type I spoke from the veiy top of my diaphragm, imbuing my voice with an airy, ethereal quality. Phoebe is quite right about my voice: It is unusually expressive.

"lie has years left," I said in a normal tone.

"Yeah? How many?"

"Thirty-seven."

"You figured it out. Your problem is, you stage everything."

"Where does that leave you, you god­damned bitch?" Is this really me thinking of my beloved Phoebe, or are these the unwit-nessable perceptions of the non-person,

her husband, suffering this faithless wife? I think of him as inert, immobile on the couch where he lies hungover as Phoebe "goes to the street fair," which f understand to be the euphemism she uses to describe this Sunday's extramarital rendezvous as well as the literal alibi with which she had explained her whereabouts to the non-person. 1 imagine the annoying crowd, the smells, the stupid wares for sale, and she is conspicuous by her absence, though where she is and what she's doing 1 try not to think about. She's told me that her lover is "pretty good in bed," that for the most part it's "a sensual thing"; in fact she describes it as "an experiment." 1 want to ask if he has a long fat cock but realize that 1 already think he does and don't want to hear her contempt for his inadequacy if he doesn't— yet more contempt from this "goddamned bitch," this "faithless wife," who pays for her massages by "sucking off her masseur,"

like a "whore." It occurs to me that the non-person and I are locked in the fellowship of some unanimous mirage of perverse voy­eurism, horrible and endless; I wonder if he is as troubled as I am by the swelling of his anger, if he has to struggle as hard to control it. Today the children ate Subma­rine Sandwich with Shredded Lettuce and Tomato, Carrot Sticks and Diced Pears.

The unmistakable odor of putrescence seems to cling to me, follow me. Alone in the men's room, I pick clots of dried blood from my nose, bringing with them dark wet bristles of hair and fleshy mat­ter. My nose is definitely rotting. When the men's room door opens, I unaccount­ably begin to sing the lines, I am drowning in my tears/with my passion tied around my neck, while pretending to wash my hands. One of the interns enters. "Hey," he says, "isn't that Barrett Eli?"

I have a problem with this intern. lie is always telling me what a "hero" I am to him "for what [I] did on the air in New York." I always thank him graciously, although I resent that my reputation still rests on that extended, grotesque, regrettable lapse. I do not tell him that I now believe in Jesus Christ, in mankind's unlimited potential for goodness despite the constant bar­rage of temptation and sin. I do not tell this intern about the vulgarity I discern in the association of such regrettable lapses with heroism or that I find his obvious view that such heroism broadens one's career opportunities (since it is this kind of mis-characterization of my disgusting behavior that led to my being approached by the station to begin with) to be even more vul­gar. I do not tell him that this pathetic station's hiring of me was the conjunc­tion of both our last-ditch efforts. I do not tell him that some people were very badly injured by what Tel done.

Some people: After my wife had left me and the period of pain had expired, I realized with bitter ambivalence that I had won a war of attrition. 98.fi" had left the bed, little else, and my obligation to commune with the greater world had been paid. A somewhat murky period followed. Attorneys-at-law. Drug dealers. Covernment buildings. Unan­swered phone calls. Debt collectors. Today the children ate Barbecue Rib Dippers with Celery Sticks and Carrot Coins, with Diced Peaches and Southern Biscuit.

Tonight, Phoebe does not require a lift because she is going to a nearby restaurant to meet a man whom she "did" at a party after "getting bombed." I know the restau­rant well, having eaten lunch there several times; remember the protruding concrete eaves beneath which I usually park my car to shield it from the sun. Perhaps in the relative seclusion there she can suck off his long fat cock.

"It's an acting job. I don't see what you're so upset about."

"It's not the way I want to act." Peach and I are going over the tone of the show, the one element on which I have chosen to concentrate, having long ago abandoned any hope of gaining control over its content. At moments like this Brea likes to brandish, with gross theatricality, my contract. The show is set to premiere this weekend, head-to-head against San Francisco Saturday! It will begin with my Monologue, move on to a Skit performed by members of the Knsemble Cast, then to the performance of the first Guest Art­ist, whom I will then Interview, followed by another Skit, during which time the telephone connection with the Indus­try Executive will be made, wherever in the world that executive may be, while the interns gather the Genuine Audi-

ence Queries to be put to the Industry Executive. After this five-minute segment (the "Nucleus of the Show," as Brea puts it) is complete, there will be a break for local News, Traffic and Weather, fol­lowed by another Skit, an appearance by a second, and somewhat lesser, Guest Artist and then, finally, Radio Interactive, in which I engage in badinage with the audience. The implications about me contained within the free-form nature of Radio Interactive are what have me worried. Peach makes it clear that I am expected to cut through the questions to expose the naked heart of the questioners; he says—he leers— that he knows I'm a good "improvisa-tionalist," really "on the ball" when it comes to "identify­ing weaknesses and

worrying them." He alternately refers to me as either a pit bull or a junkyard dog. For effect he reaches over and snatches a small cloth puppet that hangs from some anon­ymous trophy on the credenza behind his desk and puts it between his teeth, shaking his head rapidly and growling. The pup­pet's head flails in a caricature of agony.

"Why," he says, the puppet still in his mouth, "do you think we were interested in you to begin with?"

Initially, I'd thought that the station's interest was a chance at redemption. Since arriving in California, I'd assumed that the sense of loneliness and dislocation I expe­rienced here was objective—more so than the intense self-condemnation that I'd felt in New York. But I'm certain now that what passes before my perceptions here occurs

strictly for me: that the changing of the sea­sons has halted for my benefit; that the spartan plazas and broad unshaded boule­vards were commissioned and planned not as public works but with me in mind; that the punishing, inhuman architecture was put up to house me, to service my needs, for me to conduct business in; that the celebration of shopping and costly recreation as healthy civic activity has been devised to point out some ineffable but evident truth to me; that the boosterism, even as any sense of place fades from memory, as history falls victim to bulldozers and patented entrepreneurialism, is staged for me; and tiiat the people here (so happy, so caring, so paper-thin)—these peo­ple could not possibly have grown naturally to this; they have been transformed, altered for me. Hell has its purposes.

As these things occur to me, in the bright sun of Brea's office, as he sits oppo­site me behind his desk, the puppet still hanging from between his teeth, I realize that I am obliged to play the part in which I have been cast, that it has all led to this. Brea opens his mouth and lets the pup­pet drop. It hits the desktop before him, a thin strand of drool spanning the dis­tance between his lips and his shirt cuff. As if to confirm my thoughts, he speaks, answering his own question. His voice is gentle, reassuring.

"Just look at the work you've done for us so far. Those institutional menus, for Christ's sake. Utterly beyond reproach. Yet it's become the region's daily fix. You can't help it. You do something to them."

He chuckles, picks up the puppet and

puls it on his hand. Speaks to me through the puppet. A high falsetto.

"Come on," he chirps. "What do you really think of them?" I'm not sure to what he's referring as "them." lie and the pup­pet wait for their answer.

"They sound like balanced meals." Brea laughs, pounds the desk with his puppeted hand. Ibday the children ate Fish Nuggets with Macaroni and Cheese, Sea­soned Green Beans, Petite Roll and Chilled Sliced Peaches.

Something in my body has begun a course of irreversible betrayal, and I spend the morn­ing at the doctor's office, allowing him to examine me. I awakened today to find that my right side had begun to tingle, that in

places it had gone entirely numb. After the examination, the doctor watches me carefully as I struggle to button my shirt.

"Radiculitis," he decides. "Probably a pinched nerve. You do a lot of sitting?"

I shrug.

"Get your boss to buy you a better chair. Here's a prescription for a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication. Here's a badly photocopied sheet illustrating a number of helpful back exercises. Apply cold, not heat."

"And my nose?"

"Your nose? Again?" he asks. With a sigh of exasperation, he picks up his light scope and gives it a cursoiy look.

I leave his office, disappointed: I want him to cut the ailment out of me. I go into the men's room to inspect myself in the mirror; see if I can track the disease's march through my

body. In the harsh fluorescent light I see my father's image gazing back at me. We sag under the burden of our lives, although in his case death has eased the burden. The tingling in my light hand is so insistent that I jam the hand into my pants p<x:kct, pressing the palm flat against my thigh. With my left I squeeze the tip of my nose in an explor­atory way, then begin to sing: I am drowning in my tears/xinlh my passion tied anmnd my neck. There's a rustling from within one of the stalls and I leave immediately, pausing in the doorway as I think I hear someone mutter, "It's Tenderloin Jefferson!" I flee through the corridors of the new Medical Aits build­ing, following sporadic signs directing me to the parking garage, descending a pedes­trian ramp at the end of which I can hear the squeal of brakes on slick concrete. I can

almost smell the wet unstable earth sur­rounding the garage.

Phoebe reports to work today an hour late. She wears a blouse with a turtleneck collar above which the purple and yellow of mul­tiple contusions creeps, and she has a large bruise under her left eye. Evidently the non-person "freaked out" yesterday evening when, in her absence, he discovered what she calls her "condom collection." Through­out their relationship, apparently, their sole method of contraception has been coitus interruptus: hence the "freak out." Yet she is indignant; apparently he has told her that if she wants to "fuck somebody else," to go ahead; "just don't bring home any diseases." She tearfully confides that she has tried to include him in her sexual explorations but that he brusquely declines to join any of her proposed menages. "He's a real American

after all," she complains, "a fucking Puritan." She loudly pines for the days when they were happy; when they had plenty of money from "dealing" on campus; when they "gallivanted around Europe" together; how something "happened to him" when they moved to California and he fust, gave up; wears the same clothes day after day; she's sorry but if after throw­ing everything she's got into the relationship and getting nothing Imck can she be blamed for every now and then feeling me urge to go to a party, gel bombed and fuck someone ? Now all he does is sit on me couch, watching TVanaI pitting forfucking Detroit. I overhear all of this from the privacy of the vantage point I've long since made my own, a small alcove formed by the U-shaped conjunction of three tall lateral filing cabinets where with relative discretion I can eavesdrop on Phoebe's conversations. In this case, how­ever, discretion is unnecessary since Phoebe's lamentations begin to draw a crowd. All at once it occurs to me that Phoebe is being

somewhat louder than necessary—that, while lost in concentration on her words, her dirty mouth, I haven't noticed that Phoebe seems on the edge of hysteria, that she is actu­ally shrieking. I wander out of the alcove to join the five or six others, including Brea, who watch Plux-be shatter into pieces, and although I try to wear an expression of con­cern, both for my sweet Phoebe—so that she knows I'm present, aware of her anguish— and for the benefit of the others, the•shocked others, I'm busy wondering whether the non-pcrson made his discovery as a result of some sloppiness on her part, perhaps her failure to adequately conceal the stockpile after giving Caitlin all her extra-large condoms so that Caitlin could enjoy being penetrated by the abnormally large penis, the Long Fat Clock, of Phoebe's Ex-Lover as Phoebe moved on to other things; Sex With Cynthia and Sucking Off her Masseur and Doing People at Parties After Getting Bombed, all manner of sensual experiments; wondering if the non-person, this husband, flailed in his own anguish beyond humiliation, flailed as drowning peo­ple tend to do, flailed and struck his faithless wife, who left him to his sadness and confu­sion on the couch as he grieved the loss of Detroit and its umber industrial mysteries, its colossal defeat and stunted revival; left him to donate her Ixxly, drawn by the darkness of unruly yearning to flesh which pined for nothing but the moment of her; flailed, and struck her, and then fixed his grieving non-pcrson's non-hands around her living throat, soft and yielding, hot with panicked blood, unexpectedly fragile; her throat, just above which, in her deceitful brain, her contempt for him had taken root and blossomed: his passion, then, tied around her neck.

Brea calls Phoebe into his office, the privacy of his office, "Let's go into my office where we can have some privacy," he says, and the door shuts behind them.

The witnesses to Phoebe's outburst dis­perse silently. I gaze at the tableau Phoebe lias left for latecomers to the scene (her coat where it has fallen to the floor behind her swivel chair, the cardboard container that held her coffee lying on its side on her desk, its contents saturating the papers stacked there, the simple banality of the work aban­doned, characters and graphics branding her computer screen with their images), the remains of the expenditure of great emo­tional energy and a measurable amount of physical violence. I'm panting, my heart beats rapidly, and I realize that I'm hold­ing the final draft of my script in my hands, twisting its bound pages into a corkscrew shape. I have the familial' sense that there's something I should be doing. The situation seems to call for something. I am trying to remember. Do I call the police? My attorney-at-law? Do I submit to a Breathalyzer test? A polygraph? Is it necessary for me to clean out my office? I leave behind the evidence, evidence that might be subject to a forensic examination in order to determine what, if anything, happened here.

Now that I think of it, Phoebe often shows up for work, usually on Monday mornings, with

bruises. She seems to "fall oil" her bicycle" quite frequently. Her Personal Life Clock says that she has roughly 473,000 hours of joy left in life. Of course, there would be no use in pointing this out to her. 1 can point out nothing to her. Today the children ate Bratwurst on a Whole Grain Roll, with Oven Baked Potato Rounds, Mixed Vegetables and Crunchy Peanut Butter Cookies.

Phoebe has been granted a leave of absence, a veiy generous leave of absence consisting of the bundling of her accumulated vacation, sick and personal days. Evidently (and to my total surprise), the goddamned bitch has amassed quite a few of each, for a total paid leave of absence of 23 working days, as well as a reasonable ammtnt oj additional, unpaid, time if required, to be discussed at a later date, accord­ing to the confidential memorandum that I read, feverishly, in a men's rm stall after having stolen it from Brea's desk. 1 am sur­prised at Brea's munificence, but 1 have after all heard him say many times that Phoebe is "a valuable member of the team." She and the non-person are "going to try to work things out." She wants to "work on the rela­tionship," and tonight I'm driving Phoebe home for the last time. The ecosystem of our love? What about it? Tonight the earth has spun out of its orbit and rolls toward the frozen vacancies of deep space. 1 know that it is the absolute end of whatever it is we may have together. It is the pulverization of my longing. 'Ibnight waves are cresting wild and high, breaking and then being pulled back into the silver and gray sea after toss­ing the things they carry onto the darkened sand. 'Ibnight gigantic scales, calibrated to the most infinitesimal precision, are Ix-ing constructed out of the rusted chewed parts of mammoth industrial machinery. Heavy things fall quivering into their pans. Phoebe is telling me that we'll have to get together for lunch sometime. When they get back, she says. 'They're going to Michigan to chill out for a while. Ibnight every living thing on the planet shrivels and perishes, while the dead rise. She says that usually she can keep it all separate; that she loves her husband but that she really cares for some of tfie people she's seeing, as people but that she loves sex, and I realize suddenly that she means it, that her convic­tions regarding sex and her commitment to its diverse enactments do indeed constitute a true fealty, that she loves it; accepts as eucha-ristic the things that fill her: human, animal or molded rubber.

And then she asks me a question as weighted with the time it has lingered unspoken, as swollen in its full gestation, as any I might yearn to ask her: "IIow do you keep it separate; I mean, it's not the same thing, but you seem like a pretty nice guy... but after what you did, what you said on the air in New York and all.... I mean I know it has to have been an act to you on some level, but also real, right, but like you didn't take it home, or something? IIow did ^tm do it?"

"Well," I say. "Well "

/ believe in Jesus Christ arid in mankind's unlim­ited potential for goodness despite the constant barrage of temptation and sin. Today the

children ate Chicken Patty Sandwich with Oven Baked French Fries, Fresh Zucchini and Cherry Cobbler.

For the monologue, I stick to the script, which is so stilted and unfunny that I deliver it with a lisp, which sets the audience on edge. I evade Brea by withdrawing to my small office during the skit and guest perfor­mance, then emerge to interview the guest artist, asking questions only about what her mother used to make her for lunch. It turns out her mother has recently died, which makes for a touching segment and also causes the skit that follows to fall com­pletely flat. The industry executive—who isn't on a yacht or in a Swiss chalet but in an office a quarter mile away—has developed a new form of digital compression so bor-ingly incomprehensible that even he wants to talk only about a cover band he performs with on weekends. There are no queries for him from the audience. I feel as if I am perched in my own skull, peering out from behind my eyes, the operator of an enor­mous piece of demolition equipment. I ask the executive if he has ever played the silent trombone. He himself is silent on the other end of the line. I have trouble refraining from putting my fingers in my rotten nose in front of the audience, which has begun to leave by twos and threes.

The rest of the show limps along until it's time for Radio Interactive, at which point the band strikes up "I Feel Fine," its unmistak­able opening rilf blunted and smashed in this particular rendition as a banjo arpeggio. The vocalists dispense with the syncopation of the original arrangement to sing their parts in a kind of groaning, sucking ostinato. I wave my hands wildly, as if chasing away a suddenly appearing swarm of bees. There are, in fact,

bees in my head. Everywhere I look is bright yellow. I focus on a particularly insipid face sitting in one of the bleacher-style seats.

"'Dial's fine entertainment, but...." I make an ambiguous gesture with my left hand. It could be conciliatory. It could be obscene. Testing the waters. There is a certain hesi­tancy on the part of the audience as well. We are all about to learn something together. This is the moment they've been waiting for, the moment of my comeback. It is radio, and the gesture fades into its eternal impalpabil­ity. It is part of the cohesion of the universe that it happened here, once; I swept the air with my left hand and left someone amused, someone angered, someone veiy badly hurt; someone who leaves the studio and begins, perhaps still angered, to drive back home on the freeway; perhaps so distracted by anger that he misses his exit; perhaps swerving suddenly, a vehicular lunge for the exit; perhaps cutting off an old car carrying four unbelted teenagers, a car with worn strut rod bushings, perhaps, which perhaps now fatally fail; the old car plowing into a pole and throwing its occupants, who are killed instantly. Perhaps an elderly woman, listen­ing alone 80 niiles away, will perish at the sound of my slanders. Perhaps people, cer­tain people, will move further from me, and in less time, than I ever would have thought possible. Perhaps solitude is depthless, goes beyond the numerical fact—one—of alone-ness. The yellow audience starts to laugh, unsure of its action. "All," I say. "Now what shall we talk about?" My target face, glowing ochre, laughs too. It is Saturday morning, and the children are eating nothing. I have fed them nothing. The sun and the stars shine, yellow and bright, in Studio J. I am death and chaos. I advance on my target.

SHE HAS BISTURBEB

the membrane of a reality so fragile, so subtle, that she is unaware of it.

"THE ECOSYSTEM

•F tUP ¦ WE,"

/ characterize it.