Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart Page B

forms and checklists that guide us through this kind of survey. That information can be entered into a computer for analysis. This is really a sales tool and the analysis is adjusted to the client’s level of fear and ability to spend.
    The heaviest installations I’ve ever done were in Miami when I was on loan to that office for a six-month period in the mid-eighties. It was when it was all happening down there, drugs and guns and money, Marielitos and Colombians and Jamaicans, everyone watching Miami Vice and ready to go to war. We turned quite a few homes into electronically defended private fortresses with full system redundancies. Of course, those people had both the need and the will to kill.
    But the people in Maggie’s life—I got to figure their idea of killing someone is a back-stabbing phone call that murders their next picture deal. Sure, there are those among the rich and famous who get cranked up on their favorite recreational drugs and private brand of madness and hurt each other. But those people don’t come over the wall. They’re already inside the gate. This is not Miami and this is not Nam. I’m not going to be in a firefight here. Digging in with the mortars coming in over the wall. Calling in air support. The friendly fire comes in a lot fucking closer than it should.
    When I’m done with my inspection, I’m fairly grimy and sweaty anyway. I go up to my room and change into shorts and a T-shirt As I go out through the living room, Maggie is on the phone, preoccupied. She nods, barely, at me. I go out on the deck, down the exterior stairs, and out the back door, onto the beach.
    At home I’ve got to get in my car and drive to one of the parks or up on Mulholland or somewhere. Then drive home in my own sweat and if I get caught in traffic end up spending more time in the car than on my feet. It’s either that or run in the streets, breathing exhaust fumes. I run about six miles in the canyons, where it’s up and down. I figure to do eight to ten here, where it’s flat I can do more, and sometimes when I have to, I do.
    I look back. There’s Maggie. She’s out on the deck. She’s still on the phone, but she’s watching me.
    I run hard, trying to get her image away from my mind. She keeps walking in and out of my private screen and we play scenes together. Sometimes they’re about sex, sometimes about things more complicated than that. Eventually, eventually, I banish her and things go blank. Then the war comes, like it usually does when I run. That’s OK. Because it’s just pictures. No sound. No smells. You see, it’s not like a dream, which can terrify you, give you the cold sweats and wake you up screaming, screams in your ears, and your nostrils full of those peculiar odors of decimation. Burned bodies, the insides of bodies coming out of the sacks of their skin. No, it’s just a series of images. Just pictures. A game plan. Sometimes, when I get real deep into it, it turns into a kind of map, like a video game, where I can see the path that I need to take to come out alive. The path I did take. Around this mine, away from that booby trap, behind this tree, into that firefight. I try to show the way to others, but I can’t. Survival is a personal thing.
    By the time I get back, the sweat is flowing good and the pictures are gone. There’s just the beach and the houses of rich people all in a row. Maggie, standing on her deck, is watching me.
    When I get up there, she’s gone. Which makes me morecomfortable. I do what I was going to do anyway—two hundred sit-ups, a hundred push-ups. I can do more. But to what purpose? I’m not even entirely sure why I settled on this routine. Why I choose to be fit. It’s not as if the Marines are going to call me back for another war.
    She’s there again when I’m done. She smiles at me.
    â€œI need a shower,” I say.
    The bathroom is as big as a