My wife,’ said Larry, ‘is presently a Buddhist, so some kind of high-fibre sushi might be suitable. My daughter won’t eat anything that looks like food. I eat whatever you can send out for at two in the morning.’

She smiled at him with what seemed her entire being. All the food was prepared by a team of nutritionists. There were vegetarian meals and special children’s meals. Everybody’s needs were catered for. Larry smiled back and said that he appreciated it. He wondered if she had recognized him: Americans were not usually shy of saying so. ‘Hey, aren’t you...?’ Being on TV here meant being injected into the bloodstream of the democracy, but in the eighteen months since he had ‘parted’ from the show – he, incandescent with rage and badly cut cocaine; L. Liverwitz Jnr, the new director, their fourteenth, incandescent with rage and too many exotic vitamins – he had begun to look less like Dr Barry, that suave and effective man who had brought a touch of English class to the high-tech corridors of Sun Valley, and more like the doctor’s uncle, a heavier man, more florid than tanned.

‘How d’ya like California?’ she asked.

‘I live here,’ he said.

‘I guess you like it, then.’

She passed over the wallet containing the tickets, her look of professional rapture beginning to fade as their business concluded. Larry wished her a nice day and pocketed the tickets. There were fifteen minutes before the shuttle left. He swallowed, dry, a tab of pink Xanax, and hurried past disciplined queues of elderly tourists (Taiwanese? Korean?), wondering to himself how the BA girl might have reacted if, in some confessional outburst, he had told her the truth about himself, about where he was going and why. He imagined her pressing some secret panic button under her desk and his being led away by airport security, raving as they handcuffed him in some back office with two-way mirrors. Or perhaps he underestimated her. Who was to say what her own private life was like, what dramas she went home to at night? At her age, a face betrayed so little. How were you supposed to tell?

The shuttle was on time: a crowded lunch-time flight. Businessmen and businesswomen filed into their seats and switched off their cellphones. Some began impromptu conferences with colleagues, talking what to Larry’s ears was a kind of corporate super-babble, a strange fusion of figures and gossip and euphemisms of a vaguely military character. The younger ones looked extremely fit, as if they were all members of expensive gyms, which they probably were. Some wore elegant spectacles; most had laptops. Above all, they were people tense with purpose, decision-makers, movers and shakers, compared with whom he – ex-sportsman and soap star manqué – was a kind of decoration, a baroque squiggle.