Miss Wyoming Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a razor.
    Who to call?
He had to think quickly because he felt numbers leaving him. Kay would be back home in Inglewood now, well into her second bottle of Chablis. Melody was over in Rancho Mirage organizing a fantasy weekend for bankers. Ivan was in Davos, Switzerland, nookying with investors. His mother? No way was he going to let
her
see him like this. His assistant, Jennifer, had quit yesterday when she found the nannycam that Lopez, his security man, had installed in the bathroom's plug-in deodorizer. («John, I can't believe you'd sink to accusing me of stealing your coke.» «But Jennifer, you
were
stealing my coke.» «Even still, how could you harbor such ugly thoughts about me in your head?») Bridge burned.
    And then John couldn't remember numbers, period, so he pushed the «Old Lady Button,» the one marked with the little red cross, and he croaked to the teenager manning the dispatch to «send me a goddamn ambulance,» which finally showed up what seemed like two REM cycles later, after he'd squirreled himself into a pair of track pants and scooped a Halloween sack of pills into their baggy pockets, which rattled out, one by one, as he inchwormed his way down the staircase to the front door just as the paramedics arrived, at which point he passed out again.
    Hours later, after the medical help had analyzed his career arc and removed the soup from his lungs, he lay in a cool, quiet room at Cedars-Sinai. Beside the bed there was a TV the size of a pack of Marlboros. He heard the sound of a laugh track, a few commercials, and then he used the sum of his strength to turn his head to watch. It was some piece-of-crap show from the early eighties. A bunch of has-beens.
    He was dizzy sick, feverish. He remembered being young in Kentucky with his mother when a freak tornado had hit. He had walked through a street across the town that had been flattened. A cow was lying beside a pickup truck with its hide sucked right off. A horse was stuck up inside the one standing tree, its leaves plucked off in the middle of summer. Thousands of perch flopped inside a swath of Russian thistle as though the earth had sprouted erupting, percolating sores.
    He suddenly felt sixteen years old again; his body was clean. He felt springy and he wanted to do somersaults off the high school's trampette. He wanted to ski a glacier. He wanted to climb the glass windows of the First Interstate Bank Tower with suction cups. He felt like flying. And so he flew, up above the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Los Angeles, toward the sun, into the upper atmosphere where he rapped his knuckles on the Mir Space Station, and then he heard a woman's voice and saw her face. It said to him, «No, John. Time to go back.»
    «Oh, you have
got
to be kidding.» John kept propelling himself toward the sun.
    «I don't kid, John Johnson. It's not a part of my job description.»
    John turned and saw Susan's face and voice, so recently stolen from the TV. It was a lovely, TV-proportioned all-American face — the face of a child raised with tetracycline, baton twirling and kung fu lessons. «Like
you
run the studio or something?»
    «John, we're not here to cut a deal for Canadian and Mexican distribution rights. We're here to make you better.»
    «Better? I've never
been
better. Shit, I just rang the doorbell on the Mir Space Station.» He could feel himself falling back down to earth again, through the ionosphere and the troposphere and the creamy blue atmosphere. «Stop that!» he shouted. «And who are you — do I know you or something? Send me back up!»
    «Look at me, John.»
    «I'm looking. I'm
looking
.»
    «No you're not. You're looking for a way to get rid of me and fly back into space again.»
    «Okay, okay, you're
good
. But do you blame me? I don't want to go back down there to my crappy little life.»
    «Your life is crappy?»
    His body stopped where it was, his feet inside the atmosphere, his head out in space, as though he were wading in the