out as he mentally drove through different cells, picking up garbled snippets of different
conversations. He suddenly recalled what his wife had said at breakfast about stopping
for dog food on the way home. He remembered he had to take his wife’s puppy to the
veterinarian at three for some sort of shot, then Packer had a doctor’s appointment after
that.
“Don’t you understand?” Brazil went on.
“They’re just handling me.
They’re just trying to use me for PR! ”
Packer got up. He towered wearily over Brazil like a weathered tree gathering more
shadow the older it grows.
“What can I say?” Packer said, and his shirt was untucked again.
“We’ve never done this before. It’s what the cops, the city, are offering. You’ll have to
sign a waiver. Take notes. No pictures. No videotapes. Do what you’re told. I don’t
want you getting shot out there.”
“Well, I’ve got to go back home to change into my uniform,” Brazil decided.
Packer walked off, hitching up his pants, heading to the men’s room.
Brazil slumped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if the only stock he
owned had just crashed. Panesa watched him through glass, interested in how he was
going to turn this around, and convinced he would. Systems analyst Brenda Bond
blatantly glared at him from a nearby computer she was fixing. Brazil never paid her any
mind. She was repulsive to him, thin and pale, with coarse black hair. She was hateful
and jealous, and certain she was smarter than Brazil and all because computer experts and
scientists were like that. He imagined Brenda Bond spending her life on the Internet
inside chat rooms, because who would have her?
Sighing, Brazil got up from his chair. Panesa watched Brazil pick up an ugly red rose in
a Snapple bottle, and the publisher smiled. Panesa and his wife had desperately wanted a
son, and after five daughters it was either move to a larger home, become Catholic or Mormon, or practice safe sex. Instead, they had gotten divorced. He could not imagine
what it must be like to have a son like Andy Brazil. Brazil was striking to look at, and
sensitive, and, though all the results weren’t in, the biggest talent ever to walk through
Panesa’s door.
tw Tommy Axel was typing a big review of a new k. d. lang album that he was listening
to on earphones. He was a goofball, sort of a Matt Dillon who wasn’t famous and never
would be, Brazil thought. He walked up to Axel’s desk and clunked the rose next to the
keyboard as Axel boogied in his Star Trek T-shirt. Surprised, Axel pushed the earphones
down around his neck, faint, thin music leaking out. Axel’s face was smitten. This was
the One for him. He had known it since he was six, somehow had a premonition that a
divine creature like this would overlap orbits with his when the planets were aligned.
“Axel,” Brazil’s heavenly voice sounded like a thunderclap, ‘no more flowers. ”
Axel stared at his lovely rose as Brazil stalked off. Brazil didn’t mean it, Axel was
certain, as he watched Brazil. Axel was grateful for
his desk. He scooted his chair in closer and crossed his legs, aching for the blond “od walking with purpose out of the newsroom. Axel wondered where he was going.
Brazil carried his briefcase as if he wasn’t coming back. Axel had Brazil’s home phone
number because he had looked it up in the book.
Brazil didn’t live in the city, sort of out in the sticks, and Axel didn’t quite understand it.
Of course, Brazil probably didn’t make twenty thousand dollars a year, but he had a bad
car. Axel drove a Ford Escort that wasn’t new. The paint job was beginning to remind
him of Keith Richards’s face. There was no CD player and the Observer wouldn’t buy
him one, and he planned to remind everyone there of that someday when he landed a job
with Rolling Stone. Axel was thirty-two. He had been married once, for exactly a year,
when he and his wife looked at each other during a candlelight dinner, their relationship