Fritz’s monocle glinted. “You shouldn’t tell this to me. I might lose my contempt.”

“If I know Fritz Wong, it’ll be back in about thirty seconds.”

Fritz watched as I lifted my bike from the car.

“You are almost German, I think.”

I climbed on my bike. “I’m insulted.”

“Do you speak to all people this way?”

“No, only to Frederick the Great, whose manners I deplore but whose films I love.”

Fritz Wong unscrewed the monocle from his eye and dropped it in his shirt pocket. It was as if he had let a coin fall to start some inner machine.

“I’ve been watching you for some days,” he intoned. “In fits of insanity, I read your stories. You are not lacking talent, which I could polish. I am working, God help me, on a hopeless film about Christ, Herod Antipas, and all those knucklehead saints. The film started nine million dollars back with a dipso director who couldn’t handle kindergarten traffic. I have been elected to bury the corpse. What kind of Christian are you?”

“Fallen away.”

“Good! Don’t be surprised if I get you fired from your dumb dinosaur epic. If you could help me embalm this Christ horror film, it’s a step up for you. The Lazarus principle! If you work on a dead turkey and pry it out of the film vaults, you earn points. Let me watch and read you a few more days. Appear at the commissary at one sharp today. Eat what I eat, speak when spoken to, yes? you talented little bastard.”

“Yes, Unterseeboot Kapitan, you big bastard, sir.”

As I biked off, he gave me a shove. But it was not a shove to hurt, only the quietist old philosopher’s push, to help me go.

I did not look back.

I feared to see him looking back.

6

“Good God!” I said. “He made me forget!”