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with an airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but living in the tangible, material world. With assets . Yes, sir.

Zeeny stroked the hairs curling over his ears. “Sometimes, when you’re quiet,” she murmured, “when you aren’t doing funny voices or acting grand, and when you forget people are watching, you look just like a blank. You know? An empty slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to slap you. To sting you back into life. But I also get sad about it. Such a fool, you, the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their colour T Vs, who has to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu part on top of it, just to get into a play. They kick you around and still you stay, you love them, bloody slave mentality, I swear. Chamcha,” she grabbed his shoulders and shook him, sitting astride him with her forbidden breasts a few inches from his face, “Salad baba, whatever you call yourself, for Pete’s sake come home .”

His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had started small: children’s television, a thing called The Aliens Show , by The Munsters out of Star Wars by way of Sesame Street . It was a situation comedy about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to psycho, from animal to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an artistic space—rock that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then regenerate itself in time for the next week’s episode; this rock was named Pygmalien, and owing to the stunted sense of humour of the show’s producers there was also a coarse, belching creature like a puking cactus that came from a desert planet at the end of time: this was Matilda, the Australien, and there were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team of Venusian hip-hoppers and subway spraypainters and soul-brothers who called themselves the Alien Nation, and under a bed in the spaceship that was the programme’s main location there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula who had run away from his father, and in a fish-tank you could find Brains the super-intelligent giant abalone who liked eating Chinese, and then there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis Bacon painting” of a mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. The stars of the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly hairstyled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who yearned to be—what else? -- television personalities. They were played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could go from purple to

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