Man, they had this breaking news thing down to a science.
And the world watches-why? Because the word is watching.
So please don’t tell me the media are sane. I thought of Molly. I thought of Mandy. I wanted to weep, but all I could do was laugh. But my room, the prick, swallowed my hilarity whole. It was too shoddy not to be mean-spirited. A Holiday Inn would have joined in.
Someone-I couldn’t see who-had imposed some kind of order on the scrum. Baars had moved to Jennifer’s side. Now he spoke into at least a dozen microphones. You could just see her in the corner of the screen, gazing up with the adoration of a Republican’s wife.
“Yourwhole life,” he said in an evangelist’s tones, only sadder, wiser. “Your whole life you’ve been dogged by this feeling, this baseless faith that somehow, someway, you are more… More than a grocery clerk, line worker, tax auditor, stonemason. More than your children, your husband or your wife. More than the slapstick you watch night after night parading across your TV. At some level, you already know what I am about to tell you.”
“And what might that be?” The CNN reporter’s voice rose above the fray of questions.
But Baars had moved beyond interviews and into the realm of religious calling. He was staring into my eyes now, peering through the fog of all the intervening cameras and transmissions-through the fog that was me. “I have lived ten thousand lives ten thousand times,” he explained. “I have dreamed across the ages, and so have you. I have been emperors and I have been slaves…
“I have endured far more suffering than joy.”
A sad smile. A recognition.
“And so have you.. “
Was this some kind of trick? I turned to make sure he wasn’t sitting beside me. When I glanced back, a new tag line gleamed below his erudite image…