Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi (read me like a book .TXT) 📕
Chapter Two
I came out of the bathroom with 30 seconds left on the ticker, and started walking briskly towards the conference room. Miranda was trotting immediately behind.
"What's the meeting about?" I asked, nodding to Drew Roberts as I passed his office.
"He didn't say," Miranda said.
"Do we know who else is in the meeting?"
"He didn't say," Miranda said.
The second-floor conference room sits adjacent to Carl's office, which is at the smaller end of our agency's vaguely egg-shaped building. The building itself has been written up in Architectural Digest, which described it as a "Four-way collision between Frank Gehry, Le Corbousier, Jay Ward and the salmonella bacteria." It's unfair to the salmonella bacteria. My office is stacked on the larger arc of the egg on the first floor, along with the offices of all the other junior agents. After today, a second-floor, little-arc office was
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“Not yet,” Leigh piped, “Not until November.”
“Something for us boys to look forward too, then,” Ben said.
“Hello, Leigh,” I said, shaking her hand. “It’s pleasure to meet you. Excuse me for just one second, please.” I turned, leaned over the desk, and sucker-punched Ben in the nose. I turned back to Leigh, who sat, stunned, watching as Ben yodeled in pain at his desk, holding his bleeding nose in his splayed fingers. I sat on the edge of Ben’s desk and smiled winningly.
“So,” I said. “Found an agent?”
Leigh ran screaming from the room. I turned back to Ben. He had fingers jammed into his nostrils to staunch the bleeding.
“You fucker,” he said. “You broke my fucking nose!”
“You cherry-picked Elliot Young from me, Ben. I don’t appreciate that very much. I also don’t appreciate what you said about me in The Biz. Those were hurtful words. I was bothered. Since you don’t have any clients I want, and I’m not planning to talk to the press, I had to do something to even up our ledgers. I think we’re about even now, don’t you?”
“You’re totally fucking insane,” Ben said. “Enjoy your last day as an agent, you asshole.”
“Ben, let me make this clear to you,” I said. “If you ever stick your nose in my business again, I’m going to work you over with a sledgehammer. I don’t mean that figuratively. I literally mean that I will walk into this office, lock the door behind me, pull out a sledgehammer and work on you until your bones resemble gravel. Are we clear?”
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Tom,” Ben said.
“Ben, are we clear?”
“Yes,” Ben glared at me through the beginnings of bruises. “Yes, we’re fucking clear, already. Get out of my fucking office, Tom. Just get out.”
I walked to the door. A crowd was waiting on the other side. I stared at them.
“Congratulate Ben,” I said. “He’s the proud father of a bouncing baby nosebleed.”
Ben started screaming for Monica. I walked the short distance to my office.
Miranda followed me in. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I am in so much pain. I think I broke a finger.”
Miranda slipped her notepad under her arm. “Let me see,” she said. She reached over. I gave her my hand. She palpitated my middle finger.
“Ouch,” I said.
“It’s not broken,” Miranda said. “it’s not even sprained. But you clearly don’t know how to throw a punch.”
“I’ll do better next time,” I said.
Miranda pinched down hard on my finger. I screamed.
“Don’t you ever do something like that again,” she said, “or I’ll kill you myself. I like my job, and I’m not going to have you risk it just because you’re my boss. Got it?”
“Yes!” I said. “Let go.” She did.
“Now,” she said, pulling her notepad back out. “Messages. Jim Van Doren called.”
“The hell you say,” I said.
“No lie,” she said. “he says he’s working on another story and wanted to see if you wanted to comment this time.”
“I can’t comment,” I said. “I already promised you I wouldn’t punch anyone else.”
“That’s my boss,” Miranda said. “Amanda called. She says she wanted you to know she made Tea ‘grovel like the she-dog she is’ for the part in the Chevy Chase film. Says that she and Tea have come to an understanding and that she doesn’t expect too many more problems.”
“And here you thought you were going to have to do a lot of hand holding,” I said.
“No kidding,” Miranda said. “I think we created a monster. Carl called. He wants to know if you’re available for lunch tomorrow.”
“This is a question?” I asked.
“That’s what I thought you might say,” Miranda said, “So I told him you’d be free at 12:30. Meet him at his office.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Last message,” Miranda said. “Someone I’ve never heard of, but says he knows you. Didn’t leave his last name.”
“Joshua?”
“That’s him,” Miranda said. “Sort of cryptic message. Said you’d understand.”
“What is it?”
“He said, ‘Something happened. I’ll be late.’”
Carl leaned on the railing of the Santa Monica Pier, happily munching on a corn dog. I had a corn dog of my own, but I was somewhat more somber. I was figuring out how I was going to tell my boss that the alien he had entrusted to my care had mysteriously disappeared into the Angeles National Forest.
The good news was that Joshua did take one of the cellular phones with him; it was from that phone that he had called my office and left the message. The bad news was that after leaving the message he wasn’t answering the phone. As soon as I got his message, I began calling his phone at five minute intervals until I got home. There was no answer.
When I got home, I changed into sweats, a T-shirt and my long-neglected hiking boots, and hauled my carcass out of the backyard. Between a fifteen-year-old dog and pile of goo, I figured the chances were slim that the two of them had gotten very far. I picked the direction that I figured they might go in and went thataway.
When I was thirteen, I knew every tree, every slope, every large rock in the woods out back of my house. Every once in a while, I’d drop a book, several candy bars and a couple of Cokes in a backpack, leave a note for the parents and head into the hills. I’d come back several hours later in pitch darkness, unconcerned that I might get lost or misdirected. This was Los Angeles, after all; just point yourself in the direction of the lights, and ten minutes later you’re on one suburban street or another. More to the point, however, was the fact that I knew my way around — it was as unthinkable for me to get lost in those woods as it was for me to get lost in my own back yard.
In the fifteen years between my thirteen-year-old self and my current one, someone went into the woods and switched the trees and rocks around. Five minutes in, I was utterly lost.
Three hours later, scratched, bruised, and limping from where I jammed my foot into a rabbit hole, twisting my ankle, I resurfaced from the Angeles National Forest miles from where I had entered. I would have been completely disoriented if I hadn’t had the luck to emerge from the brush two hundred yards from my high school; as it was it took me nearly another hour to get home because of my ankle.
Later, as I soaked in the tub, I formulated a plan: when Joshua came home, I would discover if it were possible to strangle protoplasm. It was a good plan, and I congratulated myself for coming up with it on my own.
Joshua, however, stayed one step ahead. He simply didn’t reappear.
At 2 am, I gave up and headed to bed. The rational portion of my mind figured that a creature that had crossed trillions of miles of hard vacuum would be able to keep himself alive for a night in the suburban woods above Los Angeles. The crazy little man in my head, however, was convinced that Joshua had already been eaten by the coyotes. I briefly considered trying to get my cellular company to triangulate the phone’s position, but I suspected that the phone had to be receiving for that. There was the other small matter of Joshua being an extraterrestrial; it would be hard to explain to search teams what my phone was doing immersed in a puddle of sentient mucus. The best I could do was leave the patio door unlocked and hope Joshua and Ralph made it home.
I got to sleep at six. Neither Joshua or Ralph had made an appearance. When I finally left the house at 11 for my lunch with Carl, the two of them were still missing.
The one space alien on the entire planet, and I had managed to lose him. I was fired for sure.
“God,” Carl said, holding his half-eaten corn dog in front of him. “I love corn dogs. Who would have thought that hog snouts could taste so good if you just rolled them into a tube, shot them up with nitrates and breaded them in corn paste? But there it is. How old are you, Tom?”
“I’m 28,” I said.
“When I was your age, Tom, I’d come out here with Susan, my first wife, and we’d get a couple of corn dogs and then we’d walk to the end of the pier and watch the sunset. This was in the late 70s, when the smog was so bad breathing the air constituted a health hazard.”
“I remember those days,” I said. “I got out of a lot of P.E. classes that way. We had to stay inside and watch filmstrips. I learned all about the California missions that way.”
“I don’t really miss all the smog, mind you,” Carl said, staring off. “But they made for some beautiful sunsets. The late 70s were a horrible period in the history of the universe, Tom — you had stagflation, the American hostages in Iran, and some terrible, terrible apparel. And smog. But the sunsets weren’t so bad. It doesn’t make up for anything, but it goes to show not everything can be bad all at once.”
“I didn’t know you had been married more than once,” I said. “I had thought Elise was your first wife.” Carl’s wife Elise was the scariest person you’d ever want to meet — a terrifyingly intelligent trial lawyer who also had a doctorate in psychology. She was thinking of running for Los Angeles District Attorney. From there it would be a short hop to mayor. Between the two of them, Carl and Elise would be running southern California within the decade.
Carl glanced over. “Elise is my second wife. We were married in ‘88. Susan died in ‘81. Car accident; some drunk idiot came up the wrong way on an onramp and plowed right into her car. They both died instantly. Pregnant at the time, you know.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring up any painful memories.”
Carl waved it off. “No reason you should know. I never talk about it and no one ever talks about it around me. One of the advantages of being the sort of boss that scares the Hell out of the subordinates. Susan was a wonderful woman — but so is Elise. I’ve been very lucky.”
“Yes, sir.” We ate our corn dogs in silence.
“Come on,” Carl said, after he had finished his dog. “I haven’t walked on the beach for weeks. We can chat while we walk.” We walked off the pier, stopped off at Carl’s car to drop off our shoes and socks, and then walked into the sand towards the surf.
“So,” he said, when we walked to the water. “How is Joshua doing?”
I swallowed and saw my career flash before my eyes. “He’s missing at the moment, Carl,” I said.
“Missing? Explain.”
“He and Ralph — my neighbor’s dog — went out for a walk in the woods yesterday, while I was off seeing Elliot Young. When I got back into the office, Miranda had a message from him, saying that something had happened, and that he’d be late. That’s the last I’ve heard of him. I went looking for him last night, but I didn’t find him. I stayed up until six this morning, and he hadn’t returned.”
“Where would he go?” Carl said. “He’s not exactly inconspicuous.”
“The Angeles National Forest starts more or less in my backyard,” I said. “They went into the
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