“You’re half-asleep,” she says, “you don’t mean that.”
“I mean it, bitch,” I say, “you cheating bitch, sleeping with me all that time and then calling it off because you felt ‘guilty.’ Fuck your guilt.”
“Fuck it all,” she says, closing her eyes.
I get on top of her.
“Go ahead and slam me,” she says, “fuck it, go ahead, just fuck it.”
VIII.
A dark figure stands by my bed, looking down at me. I expect it to be Gretchen. It is my wife, Janice, my second wife. “How could you,” she says, “how could you with your sister-in-law? Isn’t that incest?”
IX.
“Twelve hours left for your answer,” Colonel Jack Kornbluth announces.
X.
“Fuck it,” Gretchen says, “just say fuck it at times like these. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I say.
I know I’m still dreaming. She gets up and goes into the bathroom. When she comes out, she has changed. She’s a man. At first I think it is my brother. This man is naked. He does not have a helmet. The naked man is I. I get into bed with myself. “Time to fuck,” he/I say(s). This is interesting, I think, as this doppelgänger buggers me. What would Freud or Lacan make of such a dream?
XI.
“Listen, Jack,” I say into the microphone, “listen to me: this madness has to stop.”
He replies, finally: “I agree.”
“Fuck it,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “Fuck me, why not.”
I reflect on the dream.
“That’s it,” I say, “that’s what it’s all about.”
“What?”
“Do it,” I say.
XII.
Eleven hours later, he presses the button. “Fuck it,” he says, and that’s the last words the world hears from Colonel Jack Kornbluth.
XIII.
Gretchen holds me close. I’m still inside her. “We did it,” she whispers into my ear, nibbling on the lobe; “we showed the bastards. We did it. Everything worked as planned.…”
XIV.
“You tricked us,” the psychologist says, coming into the room with several armed soldiers. One takes the microphone from me. “Goddamn you,” he says, “you tricked us.”
“Fuck me,” I say, before the world burns.
XV.
I remove the simulation goggles and sit up. From the look on the NASA psychologist’s face, I know I have flunked this portion of the test. Badly. I’ll never make it as an astronaut. “You tricked us,” the psychologist says, “and that will never work, not for this mission,” My wife, Gretchen, is going to be disappointed. So will my whole family, especially my younger brother, who has always looked up to me. I love my brother; I even forgave him for what he did.
—September, 2009
San Diego
MORE ALLISONS THAN I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH
I.
I didn’t intend to murder Allison Benning twice; she was having a flashback of something that happened in Afghanistan or Iraq and she went crazy on me; it was a heat-of-the-moment action, and I believe it could be classified as self-defense. You would have to know the full story, which I am prepared to tell.
I met Allison seven weeks ago at my friend Wendy’s birthday party. She had just turned thirty and was ambiguous about this milestone age. “So many candles on the cake,” she laughed sarcastically, but I could hear her thoughts: I haven’t accomplished enough yet, I haven’t done enough yet, I haven’t put my mark on the world. I knew because I had the same thoughts, five months ago, when I turned thirty-three.
Allison was the sister of one of Wendy’s friends. She claimed she was dragged to this party, her sister insisted she get out and meet new people. She had just returned from two tours in the Middle East, stationed both in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was Army.
I was taken with her. She was tall, fit, with piercing blue eyes and a pointed jaw. Blonde hair pulled back in a tail. She had the best posture I had ever seen on a woman, and I knew that was the Army. She was twenty-seven.
She gave me her number and I played the rules and waited three days to call her. “Took your time, Mr. Thompson,” she said. She agreed to meet me for dinner that night.
We had Italian in a small cozy joint I knew in West Hollywood. I told her I was a screen and TV writer, that I had two independent films under my belt and had sold a pilot that never made it test on the air.
“They paid you for it,” she said, “but it was never shown?”
“Paid well,” I said; “that’s the nature of the business.”
“Tell me. I have no idea how it works.”
I was more than pleased to talk about my world. “Every year the networks and cables buy, say, 80-100 TV ideas. You go in and pitch the idea, write a three-to-four-page proposal, what they call a leave behind. If the execs like it, they buy it, you write the pilot before Christmas. Over the holidays, these execs read the 80-100 pilots they bought anywhere from $50-100,000 each, and decide which ones to go forward with and shoot the test pilot. Which will be, say, eighteen or twenty. These get shot, using non-union actors, and go through meetings, and more meetings, and focus groups, and more meetings, then focus groups, then screenings by Madison Avenue suits, and more meetings. The ad guys determine what kind of ads they may sell to match a show, based on what they think the mass public out there wants to watch when they sit in from of the glass teat. Perhaps eight or ten of these will get lucky, the pilot re-shot with union actors, a few known faces and names, and then aired. Numbers of viewers and audience reaction are analyzed. Of those eight or ten, one or two will make it to a full season and go on to season two.”
“How far did yours go?”
“Focus groups. Two million spent, down the drain.”
“Seems like a waste of money.”
“Like I said, nature of the business.”
“I don’t know why my sister wanted to get into the business. She’s a costumer, like your friend Wendy, but she really wants to be a producer of some sort. Doesn’t everyone want to be in the entertainment biz here in L.A.?”
“Of course.”
“Not me.”
“I
