“You sure, Ray? She looks kind enough.”
“Neal, I stopped trying to nail that type a decade ago. Birds of her calibre have been getting hit on since they were two years old; by the time they’re four, they’re already technically out of my league.”
As Sarah came closer to us, I realized she was sniffling as if something sad had just occurred.
“Are you … Sarah?”
“Yes. Hello.” Her body language said almost too upset to shake hands.
“Raymond Gunt.”
“Neal Crossley,” Neal chimed in, then added, “Sarah, hey, what’s wrong?”
“It’s awful,” she said.
“What’s awful?”
“Matt Bradley—he’s dead!”
Oh dear. I looked at Neal, and he at me, and he said, “Oh?”
I disingenuously asked, “Was Mr. Bradley with the TV network?”
“He was.”
I thought about this. “Why on earth wasn’t he on a corporate jet?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Something about wanting to be with the common folk who made him what he was.”
I thought, Good fucking thing he’s dead, the way I treated him. “What was his role in the show?” I asked.
“He was the brains. The show’s soul. He knew the answer to everything, how everything actually worked: casting, cameras, human behaviour under stressful conditions.” She honked her nose loudly into a tissue. “It’s just awful. I don’t know who’s going to replace him.”
It took every molecule of falsity within me to say, “No wonder you’re so sad.”
“Sad? About Matt Bradley? Good God, no. He was awful. I’m thrilled he’s gone. I’m just sad because my workload’s tripled and I was supposed to go to Fiji with my boyfriend and now I have to fly to Kiribati myself to oversee a bunch of imbeciles who, in turn, oversee our bikini-wearing human lab rats. It’s so unfair.”
Now this is my kind of woman. I think that was when I first contemplated falling in love. “Join us for a drink? Nothing to mix it with, though.”
“What do you have? Ooh! Tia Maria!” She grabbed the bottle and tipped it back.
I said, “It really is a terrible fucking thing, Matt Bradley being dead and all.”
She held up a hand as Neal twisted the cap off another mini bottle for her. “Please, your language.”
“Sarah, what is it with you Americans and swearing?” I asked. “You crow over enhanced interrogation procedures and the current destruction of shitholes like Africa, but I throw in one ‘fuck’ and you all go nuclear.”
Sarah chugged her drink as she looked at me, then tossed her mini bottle in the trash. She was going to say something sanctimonious. Oh God …
She said, “Bono still thinks there’s hope for Africa.”
I blinked and we passed a moment in total silence.
Then she laughed. “Come on! I’m totally fricking kidding. Look! You’ve got me swearing now! Pass me another Tia Maria.”
Phew.
“I was sitting next to Mr. Bradley when it happened, you know,” I confessed. (Actually, I was bragging.)
“No!” She was unscrewing the next mini bottle’s top.
“Seat 1K. Twelve inches away.”
This sank in to Sarah’s mind as she guzzled the bottle. “They put you in business class?”
“I … yes, they did.”
“You must have friends in high places. I would have thought they’d put a B-unit cameraman in a cage with the goats.”
“Well, that makes me feel great.”
“It’s a food chain, Raymond. Get used to it. There are a few things you need to know about this show and how it’s run.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, it’s a temple of lies built on fear and cocaine.”
“I suspected as much, but hadn’t dared hope it was the truth.”
She laughed at me. “I’m messing with you! It’s actually more like a church or a cult. You can’t make any mistakes or it’s …” She mimicked slicing her throat. I honestly can’t think of any other point in my life when I’ve fallen so hard and so fast for a woman.
She patted my arm then—contact! Please, dear God, there has to be a broom closet we can use nearby. I don’t think I’ve ever troubled you much; just making a small request here.
“We’ve got to be flying to Kiribati soon enough,” Neal interjected, wrecking the mood. “Any idea where our plane is?”
“Follow me.”
We followed her with pleasure towards an exit surrounded by GIs or commandos or whomever it is the president hurls off to face certain death in whatever goatfuck war his country happens to be waging.