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peyote visions are a tired franchise. Plus you look hard enough one of them’s wearing a diver’s watch or an Adidas shirt. You go to the movies?”
    â€œHardly ever.”
    â€œWhat was the last thing you saw?”
    â€œI can’t remember. Independence Day , maybe.”
    Harper smiles. “One of a whole genre of American movies thatspends millions of dollars creating utterly realistic visions of America suffering terrible destruction. Deep Impact. Armageddon. Godzilla. The Day After Tomorrow . Someone should be doing a Ph.D. on the number of times we need to see Yellow Cabs flying through the air or the Statue of Liberty falling over. Then Baudrillard says the U.S. secretly wished for 9/11 and everyone jumps on him. It’s hardly a stretch. The dominatrix’s Rolodex is all bankers and judges. Makes you think the administration knew we were ready for it.”
    The virus in this conversation for Augustus is that he knows it’s going to end. There’s a temptation to go with the fantasy that he’s got it all wrong, that what he believes is going to happen can’t possibly happen if they’re going to talk like this, if they’re going to get along. But he knows it’s pointless. Harper’s big enough to contain all the contradictions. As God would have to be.
    â€œLook at the way we consume our science fictions now,” Harper says. “We do it with a bored concession that this is most likely the way the future will be. It used to involve quantum imaginative leaps. Now it’s just weary logical extension. This is also the tired franchise, the future. You know they’re showing this new soap in Brazil, called America ?”
    The sudden shift confuses Augustus. “I haven’t heard of it,” he says.
    â€œWell it’s called America. You can imagine. OTM illegals have gone up 400 percent since it started. OTMs—you’re familiar?”
    â€œOther Than Mexicans.”
    â€œRight. Coyotes are smuggling Brazilians into the U.S. door-to-door for ten thousand dollars. If you don’t have the franchise you want it, tired or not.”
    The adolescent Harper’s girl would have been WASP cheerleader to his quarterback, part of the desired franchise, Harper surprised at the sadness and ferocity of himself when her sweater comes off over her head with a click of static. From her hot hair and the smell of her nail polish he’s carried back into her childhood’s blind exercise of its entitlement to calcium, carbohydrates, proteins. Privilege is arousing, he discovers, but underneath the arousal is something dismal: his first acknowledgment of the contingency of power. She’s white, rich, educated, at liberty in the land her fathers calmed with genocide. Your ability to do what you want derives from where and when you find yourself. If you’re in the wrong place or time no amount of volition will set you free. In the back of the fogged Buick she straddles him, kisses him with a beery flower-soft mouth while he holds her bare waist and feels the edge of her ribs. Her breath comes through her nose against his face and lowers them to a new level of intensity. Suddenly it occurs to him that he likes her—there have been moments when their eyes have met and he’s seen beneath her posture of baroque boredom a greedy energy and an invitation to allegiance—he could love her! The realization panics him. His fingers fumble at the hooks of her bra and she breaks off kissing him to say let me get that and uglily reaches round with fluid skill and undoes it and he knows in fact that he hates her. His genuine self rises up: all his lust has contempt at its core because desire makes him weak and it’s weakness he hates. The finality of this truth detains him and he knows that if he stays with it he’ll lose his erection. So he begins, internally, as the vinyl gasps under their shifting weight, yeah, that’s right