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it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought. J. nods at Dave, who is suited up in his bulging khaki jacket. Dave starts, “I think that in all my years of freelancing, I have never been to West Virginia. I’ve been all through Europe, South America. I saw Ali take out Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila—remind me to tell you about that sometime—I was one of the first people to interview Vaclav Havel—we talked about Lou Reed. The U.S.S.R., former U.S.S.R., Brazil, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever been to West Virginia.”
    “Clear night,” J. says.
    “Clear now,” Dave responds. “But that’s weather for you.”
    “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
    They turn to see Tiny and Frenchie, two fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America. Hail, hail. They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The jun-keteers are soldiers, and they hail each other. “What’s up, Dave? Hey, Bobby Figgis.”
    “I hope you don’t mind that I told Tiny about your streak,” Dave says. “I ran into him at the ice machine earlier.”
    J. shrugs. He appraises his comrades. “Tiny, Frenchie. Good to see you.”
    The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying. Tiny of course, is not; he earned his nickname by not being so. At three hundred pounds, the man is hunger, gorging and grazing at the free spreads of life. If any person deserves to be on the List, it is Tiny, a creature who has evolved into the perfect mooching machine, leaving no glass undrained or napkin unstained by chicken skewer residue. He sucks up freebies in a banquet room like a baleen whale inhaling colonies of hapless plankton, swooping primeval and perfect, eyelids blinking slowly in the unlit fathoms of media. The dirigible prowls the food and travel magazine circuit; as a party trick he has been known to throw darts at a map of the world and name a princely dish native to that region, belching up its flavor on command, an archival gust from deep in his belly. Not to mention his thoroughly unwholesome fascination with curry.
    Frenchie, for his part, retains an accent from his internment at a French boarding school during his adolescence. His parents were world-traveling sophisticates who unloaded their offspring with paid attendants half the year; the migrant’s ways are in his blood. Tall and slender, proud owner of a shiny black mane, this lipless wonder has cultivated a satisfied Parisian air that serves him well while playing footsie with the editors of women’s fashion magazines. For the world of international fashion is Frenchie’s specialty, he knows where to buy rice cakes and had been linked in the gossip pages to that new Italian runway model before she discovered her bisexuality. She appeared to evaporate with every step and was perceived to be the marvelous avatar of a current brand of beauty. Frenchie took his expulsion from the empyrean badly; he had ascended from reporter-of to reported-upon, his name inflated in bold type among the gossip ledgers, and now he is back in the trenches. The other junketeers saw it coming; those they write about are not their kind, and mixing with them can only