He reached out and put a hand on her cheek, then gathered her into his arms, pulling her onto the narrow bed with him.
She wasn't sure at first what he was doing, or even if he was sure. Then she was helping him strip away his jumpsuit, tearing off her own. Her urgency surprised her, and his surprised her even more. They might have been two frantic kids, hurrying to steal a moment in some space of uncertain privacy.
A feeling of intense familiarity swept through her, body and mind, warming her to him; there was nothing of each other they didn't know, it seemed, as if they had never had separate lives at all.
Manny watched the new video, if that was what it really was, twice through, paying no attention to Travis's running commentary about the clarity and the reality and all that shit.
He was still put out about Travis's failure to install full surveillance in the rooms.
It was every bit as good as Travis was saying it was. He just hoped he'd be able to get the burnout case it had come from focused in the right direction after they got back to the States.
21
On one of the many screens set into the wall in Rana Copperthwait's office, an actress with wild black hair crossed her arms and looked petulant. "Couldn't we at least get a couple of German shepherds or something?"
"Not a chance," said Rana Copperthwait. "Now, die. And this time, make it look like death, not a multiple orgasm." She stabbed at the console on her desk, turning off the sound, and let out a tired breath. "She knows she's supposed to be freezing to death in the wilderness with wolves all around her, waiting to gobble her up, she knows it's all going to be put in later, during the finish. What could be clearer? I have to watch these productions constantly to make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to do, not what they think they want to do."
She gestured at the other screens showing different features in various stages of production and then flicked on her million-watt smile again. Gabe felt blinded. "I love what you've done. Just the little bit I've seen is enough to let me know you've got a winning combination in those women. How soon do you suppose you could work up a treatment for a feature?"
Gabe swallowed. "I don't know. I don't really, uh, work that way with them. With the program, I mean."
"With them," Copperthwait corrected him. "Look, you don't have to pretend with me, I know they're real to you. I told you, I understand artistic people." Her smile faded a bit. "Just how do you work?"
He glanced at Manny from the corner of his eye. There were no secrets now, nothing to hide, but he still felt uncomfortable talking about it in front of Manny. "Well, I just, uh, put on the programs, and then the RNG-"
"Orange E?" Copperthwait blinked her overdone eyes at him.
"Uh, R-N-G. Random number generator. It, uh, selects situations and prompts from a random pool of choices-"
"But surely you have produced results you've desired?"
Gabe shifted in the too-comfortable chair, bumping his foot against the front of her desk. Manny was frowning at him again. "Even then I try to leave room for some random elements. So it's more like a real experience. If you see what I mean."
"I'm sure I do." Copperthwait kept her smile on him as if she were pinning him to the chair with it. "Is an outline just completely out of the question?"
He opened his mouth to answer, and she suddenly sat up straight. "Maybe it is," she said, staring at him thoughtfully. "Maybe I'm missing the point here, maybe I'm missing the very thing that gives your creation the charm that captivates me and will captivate the whole country. Orange E. Orange E. Like life. You cant know exactly what's going to happen, not exactly." She rubbed her fingers delicately against each other. "All right, how about this-you give me some locales, a basic situation as a starting point, and that's all. Bare bones. Make it something like, oh…" She made a painful, thinking-hard face.
Manny kicked him, discreetly but hard.
"A zeppelin trip around the world," Gabe blurted. It was the first thing that came into his head. MORE DRUGS.
Copperthwait banged a hand down on her desk. "The last zeppelin! That's brilliantl That's what the giants from the old days used to call 'high concept.' "
"Um, you know, I don't think that's what happened with the last zeppelin," Gabe said politely.
"Well, it should have," she said, breezily. "It's too beautiful to waste. You'll be the crew on the last zeppelin. Or the passengers. Or they'll be the crew, and you'll be one of the passengers, or vice versa, however you want, it's totally up to you." She pointed a long, elegant finger at him. "I'm giving you total artistic control. All you have to do is come in here once in a while and talk to me about what you're doing. Just because I love to talk to artistic people, I think you're all just the crown of creation, I truly, truly do, and being around you artists makes me feel like I'm really alive. More alive than the best feature this studio has ever released, and that's saying a lot, I assure you, because my headmount is my best friend. I want us to get together as friends, just shooting the old- ahem-shit about the stuff you love to do. If you know what I mean, and I think you do."
"He certainly does," Manny said heartily, turning a fond face to him. Gabe thought it was the most frightening expression he'd ever seen on Manny.
"Well, that's magnum, and I really mean that from the bottom of my heart. Or should I say, my brain?" Copperthwait stood up and reached across the desk for his hand. He gave it to her, and she pumped it up and down hard. "This is going to be so… magnum. And profitable. We're going to give people what they really need, something which I happen to personally feel is the highest purpose of entertainment. This is going to feed people's souls, it'll be a boon to the lonely, and you know, I don't think anyone besides us really realizes how many lonely people are out there. I can tell, just by the fan mail we get." She pointed at Gabe again. "You, my friend, are going to give everyone a reason to go on living. We'll get a matching pair of men later."
Her smile vanished abruptly as her gaze went to the wall with the screens. She stabbed a finger down on the console again. "Excuse me, but what do you think you're doing now?"
"I'm being eaten. By wolves," the actress said as Manny ushered Gabe from the office.
"Well," Manny said, setting himself a little more comfortably at the other end of the limo's capacious backseat, "I'd say all's well that ends well. Especially when it all ends well in Hollywood, eh?"
Gabe managed a murmur that passed for agreement. Manny was sticking to the story that one of the sequences with Marly and Caritha had somehow been copied from the volatile memory onto the end of one of the commercial spots. They both knew that was a pile of horseshit, but Manny had been standing by it for the last three weeks, ever since he'd sprung it on Gabe in his office the morning Gabe had emerged from night court.
It had been a good morning for lies; Manny could not have timed it better. He'd been too fried to challenge Manny's version of reality, and he was sure Manny had fixed his evidence anyway. He'd just sat and listened, fingering the old-fashioned onionskin flimsy the cashier had given him. He still had it; it looked more like a certificate than a receipt for his fines. Know ye by these presents that the undersigned now has an official criminal misdemeanor record. Souvenir of the longest walk of his life, or at least of the parts he could remember.