Glamorama

"No!" he cries, falling to the floor, crouching down.

I pull the trigger, screaming while firing.

Nothing.

Bobby's gun is jammed, not firing, and I realize, too late, that somehow the safety on mine got switched on.

He's running at me.

Fumbling, I drop the gun and, still on my back, pull my pant leg up.

Bobby tosses his gun away and shouts out, scrambling toward where I'm lying on the floor.

I pull the knife up out of its sheath.

Bobby sees the knife before he falls on me, and tries to turn away.

I bury the blade in his shoulder to the hilt.

He screams, rolling over.

I yank the knife out, weeping, and when I plunge it into his throat Bobby's expression turns surprised and his face tightens up.

Bobby pushes himself away, making hissing noises, a thick stream of blood squirting out of the wound in his throat, which gets bigger, gaping, as he staggers back.

His knees buckle and he keeps trying to close the wound with his hands, but he can't breathe.

I start inching toward a gun, my hand reaching out until it lands on the smooth, cold metal.

Wincing, I struggle into a sitting position.

The crew keeps filming, moving in as Bobby bleeds to death.

Swooning with pain, I stagger up and aim the gun at his head.

"Ith too laye," he gasps, blood pumping out of his throat in arcs as he manages to grin. "Ith too laye."

I check the safety.

And when I fire at close range it knocks me back, hard.

I stagger toward the exit. I look back and where Bobby's head was there is now just a slanted pile of bone and brain and tissue.

The director is helping me into the production office that has been set up in a first-class lounge, because he wants to show me something on the video console. The crew is high-fiving one another, preparing to clean up.

I wince when the director grabs my arm.

"Don't worry, nothing's broken," the director says, excited. "You're just badly bruised."

1

I'm sitting on a couch by a bank of windows while the crew's doctor wraps my fingers with bandages, applies alcohol to disinfect various wounds, and I'm whispering "Everyone's dead" to myself and a video monitor has been wheeled over to where I'm sitting and the director takes a seat next to me.

"Everyone's dead," I say again, in a monotone. "I think Jamie Fields is dead."

"Don't rush to conclusions." The director brushes me off, peering at another console.

"She was wrapped in plastic and dying," I murmur.

"But her death wasn't in vain," the director says.

"Oh?" I'm asking.

"She tipped you off," the director explains. "She saved lives. She saved an airliner."

As if to remind me, the director hands me the printout I took from the computer in the house in the 8th or the 16th.

WINGS. NOV 15. BAND ON THE RUN. 1985. 511.

"Victor," the director says. "Watch this. It's rough and certain elements have to be edited out, but just watch."

He pulls the console closer and black-and-white video images, hastily shot with handheld cameras, flash across the monitor, but I'm zoning out on the month I grew a goatee after reading an article about them in Young Guy magazine, the afternoon I debated for hours the best angle a new designer beret should be tilted on my head, the various bodies I rejected because the girl didn't have any tits, she wasn't "toned" enough, she wasn't "hard" enough, was "too old" or not "famous" enough, how I waved hi to a model who kept calling my name from across First Avenue and all the CDs you bought because movie stars in VIP rooms late at night told you that the bands were cool. "You were never taught what shame means, Victor," said a girl I didn't think was hot enough to lay but who I otherwise thought was pretty nice. "Like I care," I told her before I walked into a Gap. I'm vaguely aware that my entire body has fallen asleep.

On the video monitor, soldiers storm a plane.

"Who are... they?" I ask, vaguely gesturing.

"French commandos along with the occasional CIA agent," the director says blithely.

"Oh," I say in a soft voice.

Delta and Crater find what they think is a bomb in the first-class cabin and begin to dismantle it.

but it's not really a bomb, it's a decoy, the agents are on the wrong plane, there's a bomb on a plane but not this one, what they found isn't really a bomb because this is the movie and those are actors and the real bomb is on a different plane