“If you think I’m letting you walk out of my office with this movie in your head you’re crazy. I need something from you, Dylan. Don’t screw me, man. This is my movie. I feel this one.”

“It’s great,” I said, holding up my hands, hoping to slow the madness. “We’re both excited. Just tell me what should happen next.”

“Call your agent from here.”

“What?”

He held up both hands. “Sit at my desk. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll go out in the hall.” He paced madly. “Just sit and call him from here.”

“I-”

“I’m giving you my office, man. Go. Sit.”

There was no refusing. I took his chair. He shut himself out in Mike’s antechamber, first pointing at me from behind the half-closed door. “Tell him I’m holding you hostage until I have something I can take into a meeting.”

“Okay.”

When he’d sealed the door I dialed my home number. It rang through to the machine, of course. Abby was at school. I hung up without leaving a message, then retrieved my address book and rang Randolph Treadwell at the Weekly. I got him.

“Help,” I said.

“You had the meeting?”

“I’m in the meeting. He left the room so I could call my agent, only I don’t have an agent. I’m at his desk.”

“Interesting.” Randolph ’s voice was neutral.

“Is Jared always so, uh, volatile?”

“I don’t really know him that well. Why?”

“He’s seems to think we’re about to have a baby together. A solid-gold baby.”

“That’s the way these things go,” said Randolph, unimpressed. “It’s sort of like a faucet. If it’s on, it gushes. Now you have to keep it open.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“You want to come by the office after this? How long are you in town?”

“I have to go see my dad, in Anaheim.”

“What’s he doing in Anaheim?”

Jared barreled through the door. “I gotta go.” I hung up the phone.

“What’s the ending?” said Jared.

“Sorry?”

“I was trying to do it for Mike, the whole thing, the black guys, the jail, Elvis. And I forgot if you told me the ending.”

“I… think we didn’t get to the ending,” I said carefully.

“And?”

“Well, Johnny Bragg was in and out of prison a couple more times, I think. He made music whenever he could. No big hits, though.”

“The Prisonaires?”

“They died, I think.”

“Could we have, like, a big comeback?”

I shrugged a why not? I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce the words, though. Was there any aspect of Johnny Bragg’s story I hadn’t dishonored by my pitch? What further harm would a little comeback bring? Or a big one?

“What about Elvis? Elvis is really important to this whole thing. That was a really great part, when Elvis visits and you were crying, remember?”

Maybe Elvis could return and bust the warden in the jaw, then personally break Bragg out of prison. Or the two of them, Bragg and Presley, could be shackled together at the ankles and sent to break up rocks. The singing would be amazing, anyway.

“Well, the story doesn’t really have a big ending,” I said. “It just sort of goes on and on. I’m sure we can figure out a good place to end it, though. Maybe Johnny Bragg walking through the gates, a free man. The last time.”

“It has to be good.”

“It can be good.”

“Do they catch the guys who really did it?”

“Did what?”

“You know, killed all those women.”

“There aren’t any dead women. There wasn’t a big legal showdown or anything. Eventually he was just old and they stopped picking on him, I guess.”

“How old?”

I’d wondered when this might come up. “He might even still be alive,” I said. At the time of Colin Escott’s liner note, nine years ago, Johnny Bragg was still alive and giving interviews. His anecdotes were the source for half my pitch. For years I’d been planning a visit to Memphis to try and interview him myself. That visit waited, with so many other speculative projects, for an entity like Dreamworks to bankroll. Anyway, that was my excuse.

“Alive? ”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible? ”

Yes! Alive! Possible! I wanted to scream. “He’d be in his seventies.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll find out.”

“This is a serious problem, Dylan.” Jared raked his hand through his hair and frowned, under stress I couldn’t possibly understand. “Can I have my desk back, please?”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked as we swapped places.

Scowling, he settled back, crossed his legs, and with two fingers kneaded the bridge of his nose and then the periphery of his jaw. He appeared to be recovering from a sort of bender, coming down as after an orgasm or a hit of crack. I wondered how often he indulged.

“You just came in here and pitched me someone’s life story, a living person,” he said, not angrily, but with deep regret. “Well, we’d have to option life rights. That can get really sticky.”

“He’d want it told,” I suggested.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I don’t know about the ending, though, Dylan. I’m not happy about that ending.”

He spoke as though The Prisonaires was already filmed and edited and he’d just screened it and been disappointed. Now we were left with the sorry task of mopping up, cutting our losses. “It’s so vague, he gets out, he goes back, the band never reunites. And I kept expecting something to happen with that woman, the one in the audience, you know? The crying one.”

Inescapably, absurdly, I fell to the same tone. “I guess we could end it sooner. After the first parole.”

“Oh, I doubt that would work.”

“Okay,” I said, helpless.

“Listen, I don’t want to-I don’t want to tell anyone about this thing until we pull it together. It should be perfect. A slam dunk. You and I should both think really hard about the third-act problems and do nothing until we’ve cracked them. If I bring this upstairs I want it to be airtight, you know?”

“That makes sense.”

“Did you talk to your agent?”

“He, uh, feels the same way, actually.”

“Of course he does. He knows how these things work.”

“So-” I was baffled. “What happens next?”

“The question is what you do next. This is all in your hands.”

“Uh, okay.”

“I’m not easily discouraged, you know. I believe in you, mister.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing wrong with taking some time, by the way. This isn’t going anywhere. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.”

“Okay.”

“So, do you have a driver? Because I need to have you out of my office now.”

“I can call-”

“Yes, but use Mike’s phone.”

In the middle chamber I handed Nicholas Brawley’s card to Mike and asked him to call.

“Jared was really knocked out,” Mike whispered, eyes wide at what I’d accomplished inside.

“I think he’ll recover,” I said.

I waited with my overnight bag in the shady lot for a long fifteen minutes before Nicholas Brawley’s cab pulled up again at the gate. The man with the Oscar never came back. Brawley’s radio was still tuned to MEGA 100, and the station was broadcasting my old nemesis of a theme song, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Of course, the thirty-five-year-old rock critic knew what the thirteen-year-old scrap of prey on the sidewalks outside Intermediate School 293 never did: Wild Cherry was a bunch of white guys. The tune which had been enlisted as an indictment of my teenage existence was in fact a Midwestern rock band’s rueful self-parody. I’d wondered many times since then whether knowing would have helped. Probably not. Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had been taken from me, stripped off like clothes I’d only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.