"No," he was saying now, "you have to coat it before insertion. You didn't coat it, did you?"
We walked down a corridor and through a doorway into darkness. And then there was light, or lights, high blinding banks of them blasting down on an enormous soundstage. Camera crews clustered around a series of sets, three-walled ceilingless rooms, some white, some papered over with photo sheets of trees, or seascapes, or city squares at night. People scurried by with power strips and prop boxes. We passed the soil room, saw a masked man there in buckskin. He was tinier than he'd seemed on TV. He leaned on his shovel near a man spooling cable on his arm.
"Let's do one," said the man. He called for quiet and we stood off near some steel cases. The Digger dug, struck concrete, began his drag and scrape.
Renee led me away from the shovel screech.
"They'll shoot that shit for hours."
"What's the gimmick?" I said. "I don't get it. It's boring."
"We prefer trance-friendly."
Renee hobbled on towards the next set, a barren blue room with gym mats on the floor, a lone stool. Identical posters lined the wall. "Go, Gimp Snatch!" they said. The Rad Balm girl approached us with a clipboard.
"Sweetie," she said. "Feeling the magic?"
"I guess," said Renee.
"Hey, honey, you got a problem tonight?"
"No problem."
"Goody."
The Rad Balm girl smeared some ointment on her mouth.
"Where's the Spokesman?" said Renee.
"Warren? He's in makeup. I'll get him."
A few minutes later the kid with the muttonchops stepped bare-chested through the set door. He wore white, therapeutic-looking trousers, nurse shoes. He took a seat on the stool, started to knead his crotch.
"Places," said the Rad Balm girl.
Renee handed me her crutches, slid down to her belly at the lip of the stage.
"Action!"
Some song started pumping through the PA, the one I'd heard on the radio in Indiana, the authentic version, pre-viola. It sounded derivative now.
"I love my dog," Warren began, still fondling himself. "My dog loves me. That's all there is in life. I raised my dog from infancy. Puppyhood. Whatever. Both his parents were put down, so I had to do it myself. No help. Nobody gave a shit whether my dog lived or died. So I took it upon myself to give a shit. He was my dog. There are beautiful things in this world, and if you can escape your narcissism, or the collective hallucination of the media, or the singular hallucination of your narcissism, you might get to see them sometime. But it's like you're encased in some kind of fucking titanium pod cruising through the atmosphere, you're not quite the pilot but there's a joystick in your hand, and it feels like you're steering but you've never been steering, never in your life have you been steering, not when your dad remarried for the seventh time, not when your mom got weird and distant, not when your brother tried to butt in with the raising of your dog that you alone were raising from puppyhood, you've never been steering anything, really, you've just been cruising along in this pod with all these gleaming buttons on the control panel but they don't connect to anything, and you're just whistling along through the dead air, dead space, through the nothingness of the world's chatter and the nothingness of your own-most you jabbering away in your head, and you just have to get out of that pod, you must eject from the fucking pod, and you're like, Oh fuck, I must fucking eject, I must, I must fucking. . and then you notice a little button that's gleaming, that's glowing a little differently from the others, and it's got a big E on it and it's glowing and it's even kind of like blinking as though maybe this button, as opposed to the other buttons, maybe this button actually fucking works, so you hit it, you hit it hard. ."
Warren's cock popped out of his pants. Renee stabbed towards him on her elbows. Her legs swayed dead behind her. Occasionally, and with a terrible grunt, she'd put out her hand as though to grip air.
"Punching out," said Warren, his voice gaining velocity, "that's what they call ejection in all those jet pilot movies, where they're always going on about how you have to be careful punching out because you hit the wrong angle, boom, you lose an arm, you lose a head, you lose your head. But fuck it, I mean you can't go on in this pod, this little self-contained smugness apparatus of yours and-"
"Cut!" said the Rad Balm girl.
Renee collapsed near the tips of Warren's shoes, weeping.
"What?" said Warren.
"The dog," said the Rad Balm girl. "What happened to the dog?"
"I was looping back around to it."
"Renee was at her mark."
"I had a few seconds."
"Bullshit you did. Look at her. She's practically at your feet. Warren, this show isn't about you, it's about her. You have to be more generous."
"How is it about her? I'm the one talking. I'm the one beating off."
"That's the point. It's from a dyke's perspective."
I ducked out of there.
I wandered awhile, found a vault crammed with winking circuit boards, lay down and dozed on a hump of cable there. Maybe I dreamed. When I woke, somebody's boot tip nuzzling my ear, I did have that sense of being led out of some kind of subterrain, me discombobulated, a bit embarrassed, a tourist nearly lost in some regionally famous cave.
It was Desmond's boot. I studied the palisades of grain in the leather.
"He's up now. He'd like to see you."
Desmond walked me out to my mark, took my arm as I went to open the thin pine door.
"Just be yourself," he said.
"Just let go of my arm."
Heinrich sat up in his hospital bed, tissue balls and clementine peels spilled out on the counterpane. The sky on the wallpaper was paler than I'd seen on TV, the desert darker.
"Steve-o!" called the studio audience. You could hear the tape hiss as the cries died down to some stray handclaps, a few knowing hoots.
Steve-o devotees.
"Do my tumors understand that when I go, they go, too?" said Heinrich.
I looked around for cue cards. Spotlights popped.
"Tumors," I said. "Tumors shmoomers."
"Cut!"
Trubate bobbed up out of the darkness.
"What the fuck was that?"
"Ad lib," I said.
"Ad lib," said Trubate.
"That's right."
"Listen," said Trubate, "don't wait for the laugh track. Makes you look like an amateur."
"I am an amateur."
"Point taken. Just don't ruin my show."
"Or what?"
"I'm a sick man," said Trubate. "And I don't have the luxury of dying, like you do. I have to live with my sickness. I have to take it out on other people. Or the people other people care about."
"Is that a threat?"
"Vague. Veiled."
He stuck an old light meter under my chin. The dial didn't move, looked busted, and Trubate didn't check it anyway.
"Let's take it from the dead dad speech," he said.
Heinrich coughed, pulled a clementine from a sack that hung on his bedpost, started to peel it down.
"You know," he said, "I watched my old man die. Kind of like this. He gathered us all to him. He said he had something to show us. When we were all there in the room he lifted up his blanket, pointed down to his bedpan. To what was in the bedpan. 'There it is,' he said. 'I wish I could leave you more.' He was dead by dusk."
"I don't believe that story," I said.
"Jeez, you want a gazelle?"
He had his tongue out. It was hard to tell if he was razzing me, or just gagging, dry.
"Can I get you some water?"
His eyelids were caked with paste. Beige fluid frothed at the hems of his mouth. He shuddered like some piece of overheating machinery.
"Hey," called Trubate from the darkness, "Code Blue Man!"
The Philosopher leaped through the door in his Lycra hood, a heel of French bread in his hand. The recorded applause was a concert-hall roar, maybe something bootlegged from a diva's farewell. The Philosopher did some bug-eyed business to the camera, a vampy strut to the bed. He sopped up Heinrich's froth with his baguette.