Rubin’s diet consists of vending-machine sandwiches, Pakistani takeout food, and espresso. I’ve never seen him eat anything else. We eat samosas in a narrow shop on Fourth that has a single plastic table wedged between the counter and the door to the can. Rubin eats his dozen samosas, six meat and six veggie, with total con- centration, one after another, and doesn’t bother to wipe his chin. He’s devoted to the place. He loathes the Greek counterman; it’s mutual, a real relationship. If the counterman ~ft, Rubin might not come back. The Greek glares at the crumbs on Rubin’s chin and jacket. Between samosas, he shoots daggers right back, his eyes narrowed behind the smudged lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. The samosas are dinner. Breakfast will be egg salad on dead white bread, packed in one of those triangles of milky plastic, on top of six little cups of poisonously strong espresso. “You didn’t see it coming, Casey.” He peers at me out of the thumbprinted depths of his glasses.” `Cause you’re no good at lateral thinking. You read the hand- book. What else did you think she was after? Sex? More win? A world tour? She was past all that. That’s what made her so strong. She was past it. That’s why Kings of Sleep’s as big as it is, and why the kids buy it, why they believe it. They know. Those kids back down the Market, warming their butts around the fires and wondering if they’ll find someplace to sleep tonight, they believe it. It’s the hottest soft in eight years. Guy at a shop on Granville told me he gets more of the damned things lifted than he sells of anything else. Says it’s a hassle to even stock it. . . . She’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they aren’t going anywhere.” He brushes a greasy crumb of meat from his chin, missing three more. “So she sang it for them, said it that way they can’t, painted them a picture. And she used the money to buy herself a way out, that’s all.” I watch the steam bead roll down the window in big drops, streaks in the condensation. Beyond the window I can make out a partially stripped Lada, wheels scav- enged, axles down on the pavement. “How many people have done it, Rubin? Have any idea?” “Not too many. Hard to say, anyway, because a lot of them are probably politicans we think of as being comfortably and reliably dead.” He gives me a funny look. “Not a nice thought. Anyway, they had first shot at the technology. It still costs too much for any or- dinary dozen millionaires, but I’ve heard of at least seven. They say Mitsubishi did it to Weinberg before his immune system finally went tits up. He was head of their hybridoma lab in Okayama. Well, their stock’s still pretty high, in monoclonals, so maybe it’s true. And Langlais, the French kid, the novelist . . .” He shrugs. “Lise didn’t have the money for it. Wouldn’t now, even. But she put herself in the right place at the right time. She was about to croak, she was in Hollywood, and they could already see what Kings was going to do.” shuttle out of London, four skinny kids who operated like a well-oiled machine and displayed a hypertrophied fashion sense and a total lack of affect. I set them up in a row at the Pilot, in identical white Ikea office chairs, smeared saline paste on their temples, taped the trodes on, and ran the rough version of what was going to become Kings of Sleep. When they came out of it, they all started talking at once, ignoring me totally, in the British version of that secret language all studio musi- cians speak, four sets of pale hands zooming and chop- ping the air. I could catch enough of it to decide that they were excited. That they thought it was good. So I got my jacket and left. They could wipe their own saline paste off, thanks. And that night I saw Lise for the last time, though I didn’t plan to.