“They’re in the porn business. You can’t trust them any more than you can bankers. What I mean is, there’s been a deplorable falling of standards in the trade.” He wore an expression of solemn confidentiality. “These days, you got to fight tooth and nail, hand to mouth to turn out something meaningful. Everybody wants to cock up the detail with his own input. Actors, directors, they none of ’em dig the symbolism. Like in my last picture—about what you call necrophilia. People are in love with death, get it? And then this son of a bitch cutter cuts it with a helicopter. If,” he added wistfully, “I could just get my hands on one hot property.” He eyed me. “Val tells me you’re a college man. How’d you like to write one of my pictures?”

“I don’t think I’m qualified.”

Pause. Then: “What you got to tell your people at RAT, tell them I think big, okay?”

He got to his feet, extending a hand. I shook it, although I didn’t want to touch any part of him. “I’ve delayed you long enough,” he said, “but I needed Val for some rush orders, and we’re trying to get product out for the Christmas market.” He held on to my hand. I pulled it gently. He held on. “She’s something, that kid,” he said. “She’s got that piece of divine flame, that elusive quality that makes for immortality among performers. I could make a star out of her, bring her along slowly, start her in the bull pen…”

I jerked my hand from his and walked fast to the door.

“Remember,” he called after me, “tell ’em I think big.”

TWENTY-TWO
INCOMING MAIL

Footsteps in the corridor, the footsteps of my Assaman keepers who walk softly and carry weapons, my ushers to spear-sharp stakes when the time comes, and it could be now. Weakness drips from my every pore, I am a vessel of weakness, already posthumous.

It happens every day and persists like a sickness long after they deliver my lunch bucket of slop or show in a visitor. And once again, in the ominous here-and-now, a guard is at the door. It swings open and he hands me a letter. It had come in the way all our mail arrives, forwarded from the UGH flagship in New York. The envelope has of course been opened, either by Abdul or by Grady, so the contents have to be less than earth-shaking or I wouldn’t be permitted to see them.

The format is unmistakable and exactingly crafted.

“My most darling son,” Mother writes in an outpouring of tenderness,