"Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while then?" "No Huck," he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasn't the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn't the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though -- gregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone. "So, how long are you staying?" "I'm just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, 'Shit, Lester's in Burbank, I should say hello.' But I got places to go." "Come on, man, stay a while. We've got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too." "Living the dream, huh?" He sounded unexpectedly bitter. Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks -- kid-reporters she'd trained and set up in business -- ran, and they never had to worry about a thing. "Well, apart from dying. And working here." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasn't happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing -- well, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought. Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. "Must be hard on Suzanne." Now that was hitting the nail on the head. "You always were a perceptive son of a bitch." "She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame her --" This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, they'd popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico. But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking: "-- the FDA, the doctors. That's what we pay them for. The way I see it, you're a victim, their victim." Lester couldn't say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, "Change the subject, OK?" Perry looked down. "Sorry. I'm out of practice with people." "I hope you'll stay with us," he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon and never come back*. "You miss it, huh?" "Sometimes." "You said working here --" "Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick." "I hate working with assholes."