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bottle.
    â€œComfortable?” I asked.
    â€œRemind me to stuff you into a medium-sized suitcase and ask you that same question,” Joshua said. His voice was diminished and tinny, no doubt due to the relatively tiny amount of surface area he had to vibrate.
    â€œSorry,” I said. “Listen, do you need this open? I’m thinking it might be better if I put the top back on this thing.”
    â€œAre you out of your mind?” Joshua said. “Keep it open.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “I didn’t know. I suppose you need to breathe.”
    â€œIt’s not that,” Joshua said. “I’m claustrophobic.”
    â€œReally?”

    â€œLook,” Joshua said. “Just because I come from a highly advanced alien species doesn’t mean I can’t be intensely neurotic. Can we go now? I already feel like I want to scream.”
    I hiked the dolly up on its wheels, wheeled over to the door, unlocked it, and headed out into the hallway. It was still early enough in the day that the office was still busy. I was worried that someone might ask me why I was wheeling a five-gallon water bottle around until I remembered that I was on the second floor, the land of senior agents. A senior agent would naturally assume it was my job to wheel water bottles around. I was probably safe until I hit the lobby.
    Which is in fact where I got noticed. As I passed the receptionist’s desk on the way to the parking lot, some guy at the desk turned around. “Tom Stein?” he asked.
    The Just Keep Moving command left my brain a tenth of a second after the Look Around reflex kicked in. By then, of course, it was too late; I had already stopped and looked back. “Yes?”
    The man jogged the short distance over and extended his hand. “Glad I caught you,” he said, as we shook. “Your assistant said you had already left.”
    â€œI had,” I said. “I just had to stop elsewhere and pick something up.”
    â€œI can see that,” he said, glancing down at the water bottle. “I guess you’ve gone past office supplies.”
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “Jim Van Doren. I write for The Biz .”
    The Biz was a magazine written in a snide, knowing sort of tone that implied the folks who slapped together The Biz were just coming from lunch with movie company heads, who couldn’t wait to slip them the latest gossip. Neither I nor anyone
I knew knew anyone who had ever actually spoken to anyone at the magazine. No one knew how the magazine got written. No one knew anyone who would actually pay to read it. Blogs should have killed it by now, but it just kept going.
    Van Doren himself was about my age, blond and balding, sort of pudgy. He looked like what happened to former USC frat boys about three months after they realize that their college days were never, ever coming back.
    â€œVan Doren,” I said. “No relation to Charles, I assume.”
    â€œThe guy from Quiz Show ? I wish,” Van Doren said. “His dad won a Pulitzer Prize, you know. Wouldn’t mind getting one of those myself.”
    â€œYou’d probably have to work for a magazine that didn’t devote six pages to an illustrated article about fake porn on the Internet,” I said. “You remember, the one where big stars’ heads were Photoshopped on to pictures of women having sex with dogs and glass bottles? The one that just about every movie studio in the city sued you over.”
    â€œI didn’t have anything to do with that story,” he said.
    â€œThat’s good,” I said. “Michelle Beck is my client. She was rather unamused by the picture that had her taking it up the back door from George Clooney while eating out Lindsay Lohan. As her agent, I’d be required to break your nose on her behalf. Of course, I’d take my ten percent, too.” I started walking towards the