He could tell that Golly—paddling cool water against his neck goiter—wasn’t hearing. The man existed entirely within the spongiform angel food cake of his brain. Briefly Fanta considered trying to shock him to attention by asking a few of the many painfully obvious questions.

So Faith will drive you to France in my Tercel?

Are you going to charm all thirteen thousand security gendarmes?

Do you think you should wear pants?

Dear Mr. Secretary: Look out the window.

Look out the window? Do you think they’ll all be partying together in Angela Merkel’s hotel suite?

Never mind. In Golly’s obsolescence, Fanta had glimpsed a special opening.

“Thich Quang Duc,” he proceeded, returning to the Buddhist martyr on fire in the middle of a Saigon street, “would livestream himself on YouTube. The entire world would look into their smartphones and see him burn in real time.”

This got the man’s attention. Golly rose shedding water and glared through dappled shade. Through his uncorrected blur, Fanta felt the murderous indignance of this decaying hustler, this tumor-clad berserker. Fanta had affronted him.

YouTube. Smartphone. Real time.

These words had reached Golly. Fanta thought of the newspapers he had seen on the floor of Derp Hubbard’s truck. If Golly read other people’s old newspapers, then he recognized these nouns, but he had never witnessed the action of the verbs around them. His notion of how truth was constructed revolved entirely around canonical poetry, news articles, letters to the editor, and photojournalistic essays. The man was stuck in print. And in his gathering blindness it was unlikely that he could read print anymore. He had lost whatever grip he once had. Fanta felt his desperation.

He also felt his own traction. Thich Quang Duc. YouTube. Now he had to cycle carefully back toward bring the world to you. He had to show he understood, admired, and approved of Golly’s crimes. His lungs felt weak, but he squeezed out the words.

“You are a very smart man, Jim. And very well informed.”

Golly, re-sinking below his shoulders, nodded and coaxed fresh currents across the goiter on his neck.

“You read my Broadcaster series on chronic wasting disease.”

Golly grunted and nodded again. Across three articles that ran during deer hunting season, Fanta had used the expertise of Dr. Blaine Kleekamp to describe for readers how whitetail deer shed the chronic wasting prions in their urine, feces, and decomposing flesh. Plant roots absorbed these prions, incorporated them into stem and leaf—deer food—which was how the herd reinfected itself. Deer ate themselves, basically.