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“What’s wrong with me, Scott?”
    “Your taste in men.”
    “It’s that simple, huh?”
    “He’s beneath you and he knows it. I mean, he’s not that smart. Or interesting. And he chuckles at his own jokes. Nervously.”
    She laughed. “I know, I know. He just got me at a good young age, when I was still wet cement. Now I feel like I’m stuck with him. Even if we split up, I’ll always be carrying him around.”
    The credits were running on Judge Judy . Still no teaser.
    “I’m just tired of all the bullshit,” she continued. “And I don’t just mean his kind. Or even your kind. My job is just...fuck. I don’t know, Scott. I’m sick of the whole business.”
    Short of faking a seizure, there was nothing I could say or do to prevent her from elaborating.
    “There was this woman who died last week. Pika Kumari. She was eighty-four and blind as a bat, but she died just hours after finishing her three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eighth clay sculpture. They were all of Ganesha, the Indian god of fortune. She’d been working on them day in and day out for seventeen years. She was blinded in that 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal. You know, the poison leak. You know how many people died in that thing?”
    “Three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight,” I guessed.
    “Exactly. She stayed alive just long enough to finish her tribute to those victims. I cried when I found that out. I wrote this thousand-word piece on her. It wasn’t just an obituary, it was my tribute to her. Do you know how many newspapers ended up running it?”
    “Zero.”
    “Four. But they all whittled it down to a little nub before sticking it in the back, right below the pet obituaries.” She pushed away her drink. “Assholes. Too bad there weren’t any naked women involved.”
    I checked the TV yet again. Why weren’t they plugging my story, goddamn it? I gave them plenty of lead time.
    Miranda went on. “Human interest. What a bullshit term. Have people gotten so dumb that they need mass slaughter or full-frontal nudity to get their attention?”
    “There’s a book by Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment . Ever read it?”
    “No.”
    “It’s basically a hyper-Freudian analysis of all the classic fairy tales. Screwed-up stuff. He has a whole chapter on ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ how it’s basically an unconscious allegory about sexual awakening.”
    “You’re shitting me.”
    “No. For example, Jack’s mother makes him sell the cow because she doesn’t provide milk anymore. Are we talking about the cow or the mother? Aha. Then he buys some magic testicular beans, plants them in the fertile ground, and then overnight...” I rose a hand from my groin to the sky.
    She laughed. “That is such crap.”
    “That was my first reaction, too. But Bettelheim goes on to make a good point. There have been thousands of fairy tales written over the course of history, but only a handful have survived to become classics. How did that happen? It wasn’t good marketing. There was never a GrimmCo pushing these things. They were simply the stories that stuck in the minds of kids. They grew up and passed them on to their own kids. Lather, rinse, repeat. Why do you think that happens?”
    Miranda rolled her eyes. “Because on a deeper human level, sex and violence sell.”
    “We didn’t create the need. We’re just filling it.”
    “Whatever happened to a need for the truth?”
    “Yeah, right. Out of the millions of people who love Big Macs, how many would want a list of all the industrial-strength chemicals that go into one? How many of them would jump at the chance to see their favorite burger get put together by some hygienically challenged teenager who probably fondled himself in the restroom without—”
    “All right. All right!” She held up her hands, repulsed. “Bastard.”
    “See, that’s the problem. You’re like a media fry cook. You can’t enjoy your own product because you see all the shit