Author's Note: Todd Brendan Fahey is the author of Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel; his collection of short stories, Dogshit Park & other Atrocities, will be published in 2003.

The phone rang around two in the afternoon. I tried to ignore it for the first five or nine rings, but suddenly became glad to have picked it up. An editor from Salt Lake City magazine was on the line, wanting to alleviate my temporal suffering by sending me to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for five days, everything paid and nothing due in return.

"How does this work?" I wondered, twisting the phone cord around a finger, my heel tapping on the hardwood floor of my downtown apartment, a block from Temple Square.

"We do it all the time," the editor said. "It's called a FAM trip: media familiarization. Jackson's Chamber of Commerce wants writers to promote its annual Old West Days, so they send a letter to all us West Coast glossy regionals. We'd usually assign a staffer to cover this kind of thing, but we've all been to Jackson Hole so I'm calling you."

"You're going to want an article out of it?" I wondered, struggling to make sense of the sudden turn of fortune.

"Probably not," he said. "But it's magazine policy to ask you if you have any ethical problem with this sort of assignment."

I told him the only problem I could foresee now was a clock that told me I had exactly forty-eight minutes to pack, haul my ass down to the airport, and carry my luggage across the bubbling tarmac to avoid another lonely weekend in Salt Lake City.

"Relax," he said. "I'll send a taxi over to your place with the tickets. You just be ready."

After filling a garment bag with clothes for a long weekend, I slapped a Tropical Holiday feeder against the inside wall of a new eighty-gallon aquarium I had purchased recently and for which I had sacrificed dearly. I knelt before the stylish octagonal tank and placed my nose against the glass, and watched the four unblinking eyes recede even further into the dark recesses of a custom-built "spawning cave" that had yet to foster any of the promised free-swimming cichlid fry. Then I went under the sink and fetched my receipts for the fish and the cave, along with a bottle of Clorox to use on the expensive little buggers if I did not return to children by Monday.

A horn honked out front. I jogged down the apartment steps and into the back of the taxi, which smelled vaguely familiar; the dull-red eyes staring back at me through the rearview mirror gave it away.

"I'd keep that stuff low, Akhmed. You're in a whole different world."

A gaunt, dusky-skinned young man grinned and bowed deeply from the driver's seat, then eased the car into a steady flow of surface traffic toward Temple Square, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. I rolled my window down and sank back in the seat, with a firm knowledge that in less than 90 minutes I would be riding bareback on some brute-steed, deep in the center of a cool Wyoming forest. But then a bone-chilling burst from a siren caused my driver to go all to pieces in the middle of the intersection.

"Jesus!" I was thrown sideways in my seat as the taxi jerked violently, narrowly missing a black stretch limo. Suddenly, we were in the center of a great confusion. "I hope you have your green card," I muttered to the cabbie, who was sobbing into his hands.

A team of plainclothes agents descended upon our car with a grim determination: "Open-your-fucking-doors!" a man shouted. "Do it, do it!!!"

I shrugged and got out of the car, and felt the hot roof of the taxi against my cheek, eight or nine hands patting down every square inch of my body. After extracting the wallet from my back pocket, an agent retrieved the bogus press card I had earned from the three hours I once spent at the copy desk of the Salt Lake Tribune.

He smiled crookedly. "We got ourselves another maggot trying to cause the President trouble." Then he turned to my driver. "And who are you: Abu Nidal?"

The cabbie bowed. "My name is Hamza Al-Assad. I am strong supporter of U.S. Democratic Party."

"Oh bullshit," the Fed snorted. "You're all terrorists. It's in your goddamn genes . . . and what's that smell?"

I waved the cabbie off, stepping very lightly now. "It's incense," I said. "He was burning it when he picked me up for the airport; but I told him to get rid of it, it makes me sneeze."

The agent eyed me coldly. "You're in the middle of a Presidential motorcade," he hissed through his teeth. "I don't know how the hell you got here, but I want you to follow that car up ahead, then get the fuck out of this city block. I know how your kind works. In a couple seconds, this'll be some sort of racial demonstration. You got that, Dan Rather? Just move your ass after the car in front of you."

I nodded, saying nothing, and guided the trembling driver back into the front seat of the taxi. "Slowly," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "You can do it. For godssake, just drive slowly."

He nodded and worked his way through a clot of dark vehicles, which parted graciously to let us onto the freeway entrance. When we had scaled the onramp and leveled out heading west, I saw my driver engage the cruise control and open his glove compartment with two fingers, gripping the wheel with his knees. "It is time for the pipe," he nodded inwardly.

"Why not?" I shrugged, my hands still twitching. "I thought we were going to get our heads blown off back there."

"As did I," he said, taking a stainless-steel Zippo to the bowl of an elegant porcelain drug utensil. He breathed in the vapors from a big chunk of hash, holding it in his lungs until I thought he might succumb to a fatal apoplexy. When he smiled, a blueish, perfumy cloud slid gruesomely through the cracks of his teeth.

He passed the burning felony back over his shoulder and I stared at it for several seconds, then drew on the hot cherry until it turned grey. "Local?" I wondered.

He grinned stupidly into the rear-view mirror. "It is very best from home."

"And where would that be?" I wondered, settling back, feeling the onset of something I hadn't in a long, long time a giddy numbness that anesthetized the length of my spine and turned my tongue to nylon.

"Very close to Tehran," he said.

I shuddered again and sank down into my seat. "I don't think we're going to make it."

He looked at his watch and nodded. "Then I will drive you."

"To Jackson Hole, Wyoming?" I coughed. "I don't think either of us could afford the fare."