Agent to the Stars

  “What position did they use? How many thrusts did it take? Did your mom bark in pleasure?”

  I reddened. “I think I see what you’re saying.”

  “I thought you might,” Joshua said. “Speaking of which—any brothers or sisters?”

  “No,” I said. “Mom had complications during the pregnancy and nearly died. They thought about adopting for a while but they decided against it. Can you die?”

  “Sure,” Joshua said. “More ways than you can, too. Individual cells in this collection die all the time, like cells in your body die. The whole collection can die, too—I’d say we’re probably less prone to random death than your species is, but it happens. The soul can also die, even if the collection survives. You in a relationship?”

  “No. I had a girlfriend at the agency for a while, but she took a job in New York about six months ago. It wasn’t very serious, anyway—more of a tension release thing. How long do you live?”

  “Three score and ten, just like you,” Joshua said. “More or less. It’s actually a very complicated question. Do you like your job?”

  “Most of the time,” I said. “I don’t know. I think I’m good at it. And I don’t know what else I’d do if I wasn’t doing this. What’s your spaceship like?”

  “Crowded. Smelly. Poorly lit. What do you do when you’re not working?”

  “I’m pretty much always working. When I’m not, I read a lot. Got that from being the son of a literary agent. When my mother moved out, I made my old room into a library. Other than that, I don’t do too much. I’m sort of pathetic. How do you know so much about us?”

  “What do you mean?” Joshua said.

  “Your English is as good as mine. You know about stuff like video games and cable television. You make references to fifties horror films. You seem to know more about us than most of us do.”

  “No offense, but it’s not that hard being smarter than most of you folks,” Joshua said. “Your planet’s been broadcasting a bunch of stuff for the better part of the last century. We’ve been paying attention to a lot of it. You can actually learn English from watching situation comedies several thousand times.”

  “I don’t know how to feel about that,” I said.

  “There are some gaps,” Joshua allowed. “Until I actually got down here, we were under the impression ‘groovy’ was still current. It’s all those Brady Bunch reruns. Stupid Nick at Night. For the longest time it never really occurred to us that they weren’t live broadcasts. We thought that the repetition had some ritual significance. Like they were religious texts or something.”

  “I’d think the fact that the Brady Bunch never aged might have been a tip-off.”

  “Don’t take this wrong,” Joshua said. “But you all pretty much look the same to us. Anyway, we figured it out eventually. My turn.”

  The question-and-answer session went on for another couple of hours, with me asking larger, cosmic questions, and Joshua asking smaller, personal questions. I learned that the Yherajk spaceship was a hollowed-out asteroid that traveled at slower-than- light speeds, and that it had taken them decades to travel from their home planet to here. Joshua learned that my favorite color was green. I learned that Yherajk-to-Yherajk communication most often took the form of complex pheromone “ideographs” launched into the air or passed on through touch: the “speaker” was identified with an identifier molecule—his own personal smell. Joshua learned that I preferred Eurotrash dance music to American guitar rock and roll.

  At the end of it, I knew more about the Yherajk than any other person on the planet, and Joshua knew more about me than any other person on the planet. I ended up thinking that Joshua had somehow gotten the better end of that bargain; there was only one other person who knew about Joshua, after all. But presumably a lot of other people knew about me.

  Only one question remained unanswered: how Joshua got his name. He refused to tell me.

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “You said no lying or evading.”

  “This is the exception that proves the rule,” Joshua said. “Besides, it’s not my story to tell. You need to ask Carl how it came about. Now,” he executed a maneuver that looked very much like a stretch after a long bout of sitting, “where is that computer of yours? I need to sign in. I want to see how much spam I have.”

  I led him to my home office, where my computer was; he slithered onto the seat, glopped himself onto the keyboard, and shot out a tendril to the mouse. I was mildly worried that parts of him might get stuck in my keyboard. But when he moved from the table on the way to the office, he didn’t leave any slime trails. Chalk one up for my upholstery. I figured my keyboard would be okay. I left him to clack away online and headed out to the back porch.

  My backyard was sloped up into the mountainside and heavily wooded in the back. It was on slightly higher ground than the adjoining houses’ backyards—something I appreciated greatly when I was thirteen and Trish Escobedo next door would lay out next to her pool. I settled into my usual chair, which looked out onto the Escobedo backyard—Trish was now married and hadn’t lived there for nearly twelve years, but old habits died hard. On the way out, I had pulled a beer from the fridge; I twisted off the top and sat back to look up at the stars.

  I was thinking about Joshua and the Yherajk. Joshua was an immediate problem—very smart, very amusing, very liquid, and, I was beginning to suspect, very prone to boredom. I was giving him a week before he went off his rocker in the house. I was going to have to figure some way of getting him out of the house on an occasional basis; I didn’t know what a bored Yherajk was like but I didn’t aim to find out. Priority one: field trips for Joshua.

  The Yherajk were a less immediate but infinitely more complicated problem—alien globs who want to befriend a humanity that, if asked, would probably prefer to be befriended by something with an endoskeleton. The only thing that possibly could have been worse was if the Yherajk looked like giant bugs: that would have turned the half of humanity already afraid of spiders and roaches into insane gibbering messes. Maybe that was the way to go: “The Yherajk—At Least They’re Not Insects.” I glanced back up at the stars and wondered idly if one of them was the Yherajk asteroid ship.

  I heard a scratching at the side gate. I went over to unlatch it; Ralph, the World’s Oldest Retriever, was on the other side, huffing slightly. His tail was wagging feebly and he was looking up at me with a tired doggie grin as if to say, I got out again. Not bad for an old fart.

  I liked Ralph. The youngest Escobedo kid, Richie, had graduated from college and moved out about two years ago, and I suspected since then Ralph didn’t get that much notice; Esteban, who owned a mainframe software company, didn’t have the time, and anyone could tell that Mary just wasn’t a dog person. He was fed but ignored.

  Richie used to drop by every now and then with Ralph; he was only a few years younger than I was, and for a while had been thinking about becoming an agent before he got nervous and went pre-law instead. After Richie moved out, Ralph would keep dropping by. I think I reminded him of times when someone was around to pay attention to him. I didn’t mind. Ralph didn’t want anything other than to be around somebody else. He’s like a lot of old folks that way. Eventually Esteban or Mary would realize he was gone and would come over to get him. Ralph would look at me sadly and follow the one or the other home. A week later he’d get bored and the cycle would repeat.

  I headed back to the patio. Ralph shuffled along at my feet and sat next to me when I got to my chair. I knuckled him on the head gently, and returned my thoughts to the Yherajk situation.

  For some reason, a memory of my childhood popped into my head: my father, Daniel Stein, sitting at the dining room table with Krzysztof Kordus, a Polish poet who had been sent to a concentration camp during World War II after he, a Catholic, had been caught trying to smuggle Jews out of Poland. Late in life he had emigrated to America, and he hoped that he would be able to publish his poems in English.

  I eventually read
the poems when I was in college. They were terrible and beautiful: terrible in their themes of Holocaust and death, beautiful because they somehow managed to find moments of hope in the shadow of that terrifying destruction. I remember feeling the need to go out into the sun after reading them, crying because for the first time I was made to understand what happened.

  I had had relatives who had died in the Holocaust: great aunts and uncles on my mother’s side. My own grandmother had been in a work camp when the war ended. But she would never talk about it while I was growing up, and then she had a stroke that took away her ability to speak. It wasn’t until Krzysztof’s poems that the story was brought home to me.

  The night Krzysztof and my father sat at our dining room table, however, Krzysztof had received yet another rejection letter for his book. He sat raging at my father, for not being able to sell the book, and at the publishers, for not buying the book.

  “You have to understand,” my dad said to Krzysztof, “hardly anyone buys books of poetry anymore.”

  “I understand shit,” Krzysztof said, thumping the table. “This is what I do. These poems are as good as any you will find in the bookstore. Better. You must be able to convince someone to buy these, Daniel. That is what you do.”

  “Krzysztof,” my father said. “The bottom line is that no one is going to publish these poems right now. If you were Elie Wiesel, you could sell these poems. But you’re nobody here. No one knows you. No publisher is going to throw money away publishing poems that no one’s going to read.”

  That set Krzysztof off for another ten minutes on the stupidity of my father, the publishing world, and the American people in general, for not recognizing genius when it sat arrayed before them. Dad sat there calmly, waiting for Krzysztof to take a breath.

  When he did, my dad jumped in. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying, Krzysztof,” he said. “I know these poems are masterworks. That’s not in dispute. The problem is not the poems, it’s you. No one knows who you are.”

  “Who cares about me?” Krzysztof said. “The poems, they speak for themselves.”

  “You’re a great man, Krzysztof,” my father said. “But you know diddly about the American public.” And then my father told Krzysztof a plan that would thereafter be known as The Trojan Horse.

  The plan was simple. In order to sell Krzysztof’s poems, people had to know who Krzysztof was first. Dad accomplished this by convincing Krzysztof, after much arguing and protestations of humiliation, to take a lullaby that he had written decades earlier to amuse his daughter, and publish it as a children’s book. The book, The Dreamers and the Sleepers, sold millions, much to Krzysztof’s horror and my father’s delight.

  During the publicity tour for the book, Krzysztof’s Holocaust story was splashed across the features pages of every large and midsized daily in the country. From that, my father was able to wrangle a made-for-television movie on Krzysztof’s story out of TNT. It was the most widely watched television show that month on cable. Krzysztof was embarrassed (he was played by Tom Selleck) but also both rich and famous.

  “There,” my dad said. “Now we can sell your book of poems.” And he did.

  I needed a Trojan Horse. There had to be some back door way to slip the Yherajk through, like my dad did with Krzysztof. But I had no idea what it was. It’s one thing to sell a book of poems. It’s another thing entirely to introduce a planet to the thing they’ve hoped for and feared for the last century.

  The doorbell rang. Ralph looked at me sadly. His owners had come for him. I patted his flank gently, and then we went to answer the door.

  CHAPTER Six

  I glanced through the window into my office. “Tell me that’s not Tea Reader I see in there,” I said.

  “All right,” Miranda said. “That’s not Tea Reader you see in there.”

  “Thank you for conforming to my reality,” I said.

  “Not at all,” Miranda said. “It’s an honor and a privilege.”

  I grabbed my doorknob, took a deep breath, and went into my office.

  If nothing else, Tea Reader was heart-stoppingly beautiful; half Hawaiian, half Hungarian, five feet ten inches, and naturally possessed of the sort of proportions that most women insist exist only on foot-high plastic dolls. Her record company publicist once drunkenly confided in me that his company estimated at least forty-five percent of Tea’s record sales were to boys aged thirteen through fifteen, who bought them for the CD insert that featured Tea rising from the waters of the Pacific, clad in a thin T-shirt and a thong bikini bottom, both a particularly transparent shade of tan.

  I drunkenly confided to him that, when I had inherited her from my former podmate, I held the poorly masked hope that she might be one of those actresses who occasionally slept with their agents. Then I got to know her. I learned to be glad that she was not.

  “Hello, Tea,” I said.

  “Hello, Tom, you miserable fuckhead,” Tea said.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, too, Tea,” I said. I walked to my desk and set down. “Now,” I said. “How can I help you?”

  “You can explain to me why I suddenly seem to be represented by Little Miss Hysterical over here.” Tea motioned to the far chair in the corner, where Amanda Hewson sat, crying. At the mention of her existence, Amanda let out an audible sob and lifted her feet, in an attempt to curl into a fetal position while still sitting. The chair was getting in the way.

  “Amanda is a full agent here at the company,” I said. “And she’s quite good.”

  “Bullshit,” Tea said. Amanda gave another sob. Tea rolled her eyes dramatically and shouted over her shoulder at Amanda, “Could you please shut the fuck up? I’m trying to talk to my real agent over here, and it’s hard enough without you crying a fucking river.”

  Amanda exploded from her seat like a flock of birds flushed out of the underbrush, and attempted to flee the room. She grabbed at the door, pulled it, and whacked herself on the side of the face. I winced; that was going to leave a mark. Amanda wailed and sprinted towards her pod. Tea watched the scene and then turned back to me. She had the expression of the cat who ate the canary and then threw it up in her owner’s favorite shoes.

  “Where were we?” she said.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I said, mildly.

  “I’ll tell you what’s not very fucking nice, Tom,” Tea said. “It’s not nice to get back from Honolulu, where I’ve been visiting my family, and having a message from Mandy, telling me how excited she is to be working with me.” From her sinister stretch, Tea straightened up, preternaturally perky. Her voice became a dead-on ringer for Amanda’s Girl Scout–like tone. “‘I have your album! I love to listen to it while I’m exercising!’” Tea slouched again. “Great. Add that to the half that are whacking off to my picture on the cover, sister.”

  “It’s actually only forty-five percent,” I said.

  Tea’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “Forty-five percent are whacking off,” I said. “Your record company’s own estimate. Tea, Amanda’s working with me. She’s my assistant.”

  “I thought Miss Bitch back there was your assistant,” Tea said, jerking a thumb towards Miranda’s desk. “She almost didn’t let me in to your office today. I was getting ready to smack her.”

  Before getting her act together and working her way through college, Miranda spent a reasonable portion of her teen years gang-banging in East LA. One night, at a company party, Miranda showed me her collection of scars, inflicted by razors in a number of cat fights. The other girls got it worse, she said. I didn’t suspect Tea realized how close to death she had gotten this morning.

  “Miranda is my administrative assistant,” I said. “Amanda is working with me with some of my clients.”

  “Well, I don’t want to work with her,” Tea said.

  “Why not?”

  “Hello? Tom? Did you not see Miss Mandy in here today? What a fucking crybaby.”

  “How did she get that way, Tea?” I asked. br />
  “Beats me,” Tea said. “We were just sitting here, waiting for you, and I was just telling her that there was no fucking way on the planet she was going to be my agent.”

  “How long were you in here before I got here?”

  Tea shrugged. “A half-hour, forty-five minutes.”

  “I see,” I said. “And you don’t think being shat on for three-quarters of an hour is a good reason to get upset.”

  “Hey,” Tea sat up again and jabbed a finger at me. “You’re the one that put her in that situation. Don’t get angry at me because I went off on her a little.”

  “Forty-five minutes is not a little, Tea,” I said.

  “What the fuck does that mean? I’m the one getting screwed here.” She slumped back, sullen.

  I was getting a headache. “Tea, what do you want from me?” I asked.

  “I want you to do your fucking job,” Tea said. “I’m not giving you ten percent so you can palm me off on Mandy, the Teenage Agent. I can think of about ten agents in town who’d get on their hands and knees to represent me. You’re not doing me any favors, Tom.”

  “Really,” I said. “Ten agents.”

  “At least.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Name one.”

  “What?”

  “Name one,” I said. “Give me the name of one of those agents.”

  “Hell, no,” Tea said. “Why should I tell you who your competition is? Stay nervous.”

  “Nervous? Hell, Tea, I want to call them up,” I said. “If they’re so gung-ho to have you, I’ll let you go. I don’t want you to be unhappy. So let’s do this thing. Let’s get it over with. Unless you’re running off at the mouth.”

  That got her. “Alan Finley at ACR,” she said.

  I buzzed Miranda. She came to the door. “Yes, Tom?”

  “Miranda, would you call Alan Finley over at Associated Client Representation, and put him on the speaker when you get him?”

  “Sure, Tom.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Oh, one other thing. After you get Alan, would you mind bringing me Tea’s file?”