he fall of PR.3, though he was no longer sure. He remembered a morning drizzle, at first light, at the camp up north, pulling in in a motor-pool Mercedes with h

the gamble paid off. The law, his law, would provide that detainees in civil disturbances could be taken to certain Justice Department reserves and there examined for snitch potential. Those found suitable might then be offered a choice between federal prosecution and federal employment, as independent contractors working undercover for, but not out of, the DOJ's Political Intelligence Office. After undergoing a full training curriculum that included the use of various weapons, they could be transferred - the contracts essentially sold - to the FBI and under that control be infiltrated, of

re accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that thes

-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends' fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in their eyes ... the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who'd feel, let's face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline. Frenesi might not - short of torture, anyway - believe that he could ever imprison her. He knew she woul

OJ time, playing out one more of young Vond's confusing power-and-sex games, which he would have denied if Roscoe'd been fool enough to bring it up. Roscoe sure 's heck wouldn't be here himself if his time were his own, which it hadn't been since that fateful four in the morning the Internals had shown up all Kevlar and Plexig

uld ever bother to listen. These birds in this facility here, for instance - "Don't know," he'd muttered, "you've been out there on the line, seen the

t other 90%, amateurs, consumers, short attention spans, out there for the thrills, pick up a c

quent as lectures. Brock, for his part, valued Roscoe's silences, all right, and the more of them the better. They were part of his conception of the perfect underling, whom he imagined as a sort of less voluble Tonto. And to the extent that he t

was lucky to have as well, making this unhappy phase of his own career out of covering the backside of Vond's. In that memorable dope-field shoot-out, Brock had followed Roscoe dumb and terrified as a recruit obeying his sergeant, through the dense resin smell, as a great nation pursued its war on a botanical species, rounds whinging and burring hotly by through shade leaves, breaking stems, knocking seeds out of colas, Brock following every move of Roscoe's stuc

d he find out how dirt-ignorant his boss actually remained, on quite a number of occasions, of real-world steps being taken on his behalf. It wasn't that Vond was following any moral code of his own, though he might have wanted it to look that way - but Roscoe recognized it as simple, massively protective insulation. Some things in life had just never touched this customer, he would never have to think about them - wh

on the car roof, watching as one by one the detainees began to appear out on the assembly ground. They only came as close as they had to to make sure Br

y, which included the way their faces would turn out looking. Abnormally large eye sockets, prognathism, frontal submicrocephaly, Darwinian Tipped Ear, you name it, Lombroso had a list that went on, and skull data to back him up. By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint, undeniably racist spinoff from nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in method and long superseded, although it seemed reasonable to Brock. What really got his attention was the Lom-brosian concept of "misoneism."

w pounds thinner, her hair full of snarls, barelegged, her camera taken away, no weapon of witness but her eyes. She stopped a few feet from him, he stared at the glistening of her thighs, as he moved closer she shivered, tried to cross her arms, hug herself into an invisible shawl or the memory of one

er voice ragged from a pack and

art mouth. Each time he daydreamed about this, the pistol would reappear, as an essential term. But now, as his heartbeat picked up a little, he gave career advice instead. "Ho

. "Your taste in music? It's outlawed by the

nk we were n

hing his cock again, then saw he was grinning at her, amorously, he must've thought. "The commandant here has my number

when it could have still made a difference, she said nothing at all, only stood, head up, watching the old heartbreaker's ass till he'd taken it back inside the Germanic sedan. She had a vivid, half-second hallucin

suggestive phrase. "Don't blow my effect here," Brock Vond leaning forward from the back, more than a little annoyed, "OK? All I need right

g a U and peeling away, halfway to the gate getting into a skid, leav

n the Attic. Brock would be moving through rooms of a large, splendid house belonging to people so rich and powerful he'd never even seen them. But while they allowed him to stay there, it was his job to make sure that all doors and windows, dozens of them everywhere, were secure, and that no one, nothing, had penetrated. This had to be done every day, and finished with before nightfall. Every closet and corner, every back staircase and distant storeroom, had to be checked, till at last there was only the attic left to do. The day would have grown, by then, quite late, the light almost gone. It was that phase of twilight, full

ut in the field as a sought-after raconteur and bon vivant who appreciated fine distinctions in food, wine, music. Women found him intensely appealing for reasons they later could or would not specify. Colorful little third-world grandmothers tending flower stalls on forlorn city street corners would rush to embrace him and presen

u'd ordinarily say. B

background there would be no route to this but self-abasement, fawning, gofering, scrambling for tips and offering other such hints of his eagerness to be brevetted on life's battlefield to a rank higher than he would ever, by the terms of his enlistment, have deserved. Though his defects of character were many, none was quite as annoying a

rom faces to bodies, and discovered that there were such things as criminal bodies. He would see them often in his line of work and would also, less consciously, look for signs of transgressor status in women he met and even desired, the guilty droop of head, the bestial turn of an ass-cheek, the spine furtively overflexed. Some of these women turned out to be "'great fucks," as Brock later described them, mainly for the sake of his reputation, because secretly, though he enjoyed and even g

t find out whose it was. By the time he might have, he'd driven himself past exhaustion, adrift in the unsleeping clockless iterations of some hotel near the airport, where men in wrinkled suits, jet-lagged and aimless, populated the corridors and the uproar in the sky never took a break. He cried, he beat himself with his fists on head and body, did all that old stuff, feeling like a skier on an unfamiliar black-diamond slope, seized by gravity, in control, out of control. . . this descent took him all night and wore him at last into unconsciousness. On the plane back to Washington, the little girl he sa

sportingly as he could with their music and closeness, looking for strong slender legs, a fine rain of hair, with luck, fatally, those eyes of Pacific blue, hoping in light cooperative enough to find a girl to project Frenesi's ghost onto, someone who'd hand him a flower, offer a joint - groovy! - agree to be led back here, to this come-stained couch, and be taken, and - Brock, Brock, get a grip on yourself! But some other adviser lay coiled in ancient shadow, whispering Kick loose. Brock knew how much he wanted to, feared what would happen if he couldn't contain the impulse. Once, not too many years ago, sober, wide awake, he'd begun to laugh at something on the Tube. Instead of reaching a peak and then tapering off, the laughter got more intense each time he breathed, diverging toward some brain state he couldn't imagine, filling and flooding him, his head taken and propelled by a supernatural lightness, on some course unaccounted for by the usual three dimensions. He was terrified. He glimpsed hi

salaries were wagered and lost over how long Brock could hold on to his job, with the over-under line usually reckoning his longevity in days. Brought in, at length, for the Basic Little Chat, he was exactly as forthcoming as he knew he needed to be to quiet the Board, but not a word beyond. If inside a certain radius all lay camouflaged and deeply fortified, nonetheless he did deny her, joked about her with his interrogators, about her tits, her pussy, refusing to react, to seem to defend her. "Next time, Brock, just come on in, let us

tilatory collision might very well have ensued. It was the old, unhappy tale, Brock would insist, of romance versus career. He didn't want to choose and so he temporized, pursuing his PREP master plan, clearing the brush and leveling the lots. By the time things were solidly e

edge of a gas-station apron watching DL in the Camaro ascend to the freeway and vanish, rolling blind into her own future, Frenesi had considered calling Brock, going back into PREP. There was no way back to 24fps, or to the person she'd been - beyo

n have any right to say he did? Just because she didn't? As night fell, she'd wandered down to Phil's Cottonwood Oasis, which was a tavern with a motel in back, beside a darkening green piece of creek-bank crowded with Fremont cottonwoods, with a dance deck built out over the creek.

nybody wanted to hear these traditional favorites. By then Zoyd, in those days a generic longhair with a Zappa mustache and wire-ri

this the

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at first sight?" Prairie inquired

apart he'd also screamed at Frenesi, "It could've been anybody, Scott, the

vely, that he'd take a false turn, come out with a version where she'd look a little better, caring less about his opinion, finally, than about her mother's. Zoyd, anyway, didn't

making it as easy for him as she could, spending more time than she normally would have over at Sasha's on the assumption that the same surveillance she remembered growing up with, the creepy twit

working hours into thickest billowings of smog soup, roof and gutter work during the day, Corvairs gigs at night, in smaller clubs and bars from Laguna to La Puente. It happened to be the ripe, or baroque, phase of L.A.'s relations with rock and roll, which had swept in on what to Zoyd, with his surfer's eye, judged to be a twenty-year cycle - movies back in the twenties, radio in the forties, now records in the sixties. For one demented season the town lost its ear, and talent was signed that in other times would have kept on wandering in the desert, and in what oases they found, playing toilets. On the assumption that Youth understood its own market, entry-level folks who only yesterday had been content to deal lids down in the mail room were suddenly being elevated to executive rank, given stupendous budgets, and let loose, as it turned out, to sign just about anybody who could carry a tune and figure out how to walk in the door. Stunned by the great childward surge, critical abilities lapsed. Who knew the worth of any product, or could live with having failed to sign the next superstar? Crazed, heedless, th

iring day and night locales around the Southland, but nothing much ever happened for them, nothing coordinated anyway, Van Meter's reliving of an earlier life as a buffalo roaming the plains in a herd the size of a Western state seeming to have little in common with Scott's delight in the om-nicolored streams of cartoon figures that liked to issue from his fingertips. Lefty the drummer had nightmare

odas and picking at salads. From the beginning Frenesi tried to get her mother asking the questions it would hurt most to answer. DL's name came up right away. Frenesi s

si semideclined, "Oh, Zoyd might not go for that." To which Sasha nodded, "Great. I wasn't asking h

her to hea

, how about your old bedroom? A littl

a point. When she brought it up with Zoyd

she doesn't reall

pie psychopath

you were trying to

n', it jumped into Drive by itself, 't's what the rec

t have thought it was on purpose. And s

seconds might remain on the clock here, Zoyd knew the game was over and the women would prevai

orn Prairie, one of her eyes plastered shut and the other rolling around wild, which he took to be a deliberate wink, the lambent faces of the women, the paisley patterns on Leonard's Nehru shirt, the colors of the afterbirth, the baby with both eyes open now looking right at him with a vast, an unmistakable, recognition. Later people told him it wasn't personal, and newborns don't see much, but at the moment, oh God, God, she knew him, from someplace else. And th

w still looking to control her . . . there were no talk shows back in those days, no self-help networks or toll-free numbers to learn anything from or ask for help. She didn't, so surrendered to her dark fall, even know she needed help. The baby went along on its own program, robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging her only as a host. Where was the clean new soul, the true l

ene

sage by ESP link, and how, Sasha wondered, did you throw yourself between them, absorb the assault? She cried, "Oh, Punkin . . . please, no, it'll get better, you'll see . . .," waiting for Frenesi to answer, answer anything. She thought of what was available in the bathroom, and all the ways Frenesi could do herself harm in there. About the time she put down

that decorate fascist architecture. Whispering, "This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells. . .." Taken down, she understood, from all the silver and light she'd known and been, brought back to the world like silver recalled grain by grain from the Inv

among the twinkling spinners and national bunting, the upbeat music, with Sno-Cone and hot-dog stands and kids bouncing on the king-size waterbeds out in the lot, and his own fleet of photon projectors aimed at the purple sky, calling out across the miles of great valley to wage-earning families snug at the table and restless cruisers out on old 99 alike, here we are, forget the night falling and come on over, have a look, TV, stereo and appliances too, no cosigners or credit references, just your own honest face . . . one of those evenings whe

greeted him with an uncustomary embrace, sighing

Not th

seen. "All I could do was keep her co

s 'at Z

d was born, probably off on one o

wink and, following close, a pat on the ass as she crept in

ge he got a bleary half a smile. "Oh, come on," he whispered,

n a hit or two, beginning the first day he reported to the Warner studio and found out there was a strike on and his "job" was to be one of a thousand IATSE goons hired to break it. Turned out they were looking for a larger, meaner type of individual anyway, but Hub just stood there for a while, bewildered, shaking his head - he'd thought he was fighting World War II to keep just this from happening to the world. Fuck it, he concluded, and went around the corner and across the street and asked if he could join the pickets, even if he wasn't working there, and before he knew it he'd been hit literally with a bolt from the sky, a lag bolt about the size and weight of the bar a steel guitar player uses, which Hub in his time had also been a target of, thrown by one of the IA gents deployed up on the roofs of the sound stages. It knocked him silly but also informed him that he'd made the right choice, though it was Sasha who was to become entangled in the fine details of the politics in the town at the time. The struggle between the IATSE, a creature of organized crime in collusion with the studios, and Herb Sorrell's Conference of Studio Unions, unapologetically liberal, progressive, New Deal, socialist, and thus, in the toxic political situation, "Communist," had been going on all through the war but now broke into the open in a series of violent strike actions against the studios. All the newspapers pretended it was an organizing dispute between two unions. In

technical... it wasn't her fault she wanted me purer than I was. And then the other life was happening, the work itself ... it was just when the Brute was first coming in. Jesus, all those amps. All that light. Nobody told me about the scale of it. After a while I couldn't see that much else. I needed to work with that light. Maybe it was some form of insanity, except that lets me off too easy. Then there was Wade, my ol' canasta partner and picket-line buddy, fighting shoulder to shoulder all those years, one day he went over, and we stayed friends, and finally you saw what'd it matter who'd be taking those dues off the paycheck, Al Speede's people, th' IATSE, whatever. It'd been over for a long time anyway, though we'd had to pretend otherwise, and what was it for, all those sets we lit, those exotic nightclub sets, the hotel rooms with the neon outside, the passenger coaches with the rain against the windows, all of it just shadows, even if it's on safety stock in some air-conditioned vault that's still all it is, I let the world slip away, made my shameful peace, joined the IA, retired soon's I could, sold off my only real fortune - my precious anger - for a lot of got-damn shadows." He gazed at the young woman lying face up now, her eyes shut, at first glance a simple fine-featured long-haired beauty, though a closer look would reveal, not so much in the eyes as around her mouth and jaw, a darkness of expression, a held secret Hub knew he wouldn't be asked to share. "Hey there, Young Gaffer?" he whispered, to see if she was asleep. No answer. "Well Pd've called you my Best Girl," he went on, "but that was always your mother." Frenesi's tears would slow and dry, her postpartum lust for death would cool, she would on a day not far off actually find herself liking this infant with the offbeat sense of humor, and she and Sasha would take up, not as before, but maybe no worse than before. But there were still the secrets, Trasero County and Oklahoma secrets. More than any man she had ever wanted for anything, more than a full pardon from some unnamed agency for what she'd done, more than DL in her arms, the State in final rubble, guns silent, tanks and bombs all melted down, more than anything she'd ever wished for over a lifelong childhood of praying to a variety of Santas, Frenesi wanted, would have given up all the re