Jennifer is always impeccably dressed. It's a part of her job. She has the slightest hint of a mustache on her upper lip, invisible to anyone who would not examine her up close, in person. On tape, or on a live-feed, covered with make-up, no one notices it. At home, or at a beauty salon, she may have taken additional measures to disguise it, depilatory cream, wax treatments, whatever it is that women do to remove unwanted hair. She would be wise, in her profession, to have expensive and thorough electrolysis sessions, however that all works. Dennis didn't know. He only knew what he saw, the image, and the reality, but he didn't know what women did to achieve the image they created, not most of it anyway.

Dennis watches Jennifer. That's his job, but he'd watch her anyway, even if it weren't his occupation. He'd do it for free. It's his pre-occupation. He watches her through the viewer, and in editing, if he has the time and can get into the lab, if he can slip in while they're not watching, because they (the managers and supervisors; not the technicians, they don't care) don't like the cameramen kibitzing in the lab, trying to interfere with the final product, thinking they all are Felinis and Bergmans. Dennis watches her at home too. You'd think he'd get enough of news at work, but he watches Jennifer on every broadcast, to see her and to see how they butcher his work.

At the air base, a specialist carries Dennis' camera for him, one of the conditions which they had to agree to in order to be allowed in. They'd seen News And Views and The China Syndrome. Dennis had disconnected the leads to the red indicator light on the front of the camera a long time ago.

So, since they won't let him film, Dennis watches Jennifer live, without the camera. He walks as close to her as he dares to get, to see her in close-up. She should definitely have electrolysis done. Women complain about men being hairy. They hate hair, in the wrong places. They spend a lot of time trying to deny their animal natures.

The air base has been off limits to all civilian personnel since the riots at the turn of the century. News of government operations has been severely sanitzied, and it is only now, in the face of the serious threat of revolution, that the government is lightening up, turning to PR again, hoping to win over the populace. You'd think they'd have learned the value of not letting their relationship with the news organizations lapse, especially since the problems they encountered during the Arab wars.

The filming of the demonstration of the new mobile command ship was being allowed in order that the public might be less wary of its potential for damage to the public sector. X-Span's story the previous week revealing the existence of the MCS precipitated a complete turn-around of policy by the military. The Chief of Staff stated that the Armed Services had no intention of using the ship against the population at large. It had no tactical advantage in this regard, and in order to prove it, he would allow a news team onto the air base to film it. It made Dennis wonder what it was that the public would not be seeing.

Jennifer, of course, got the assignment, and Dennis had gone on every assignment with her for the last year and a half, because he had convinced her that he would leave her alone, when the other cameramen would not--leave her alone sexually, that is. Everyone was always hitting on her. And he would let her frame the shots, when she wanted to, and make other technical decisions. Other cameramen wouldn't do those things for her, because they didn't respect her, he convinced her. He was only too happy to let her have her lead, when she wanted it. She didn't want it that often, really, but she'd gotten into verbal battles and struggles of office politics with other cameramen, and even supervisors, who thought they had an influence that they didn't have, so Dennis knew to leave her alone. He knew a lot about Jennifer. He'd been studying her for years.

Outside the hanger in which the new airship sat, Jennifer and Dennis waited for their clearance. Jennifer shifted her weight from foot to foot, anxious, chomping at the bit, but controlling it, appearing to be patient.

"You'd think they'd have had this all worked out," she said, to no one.

Finally, the large building-high door slid slowly open and the specialist handed Dennis his camera, which he immediately switched on to record as he lifted it onto his shoulder. Allowing it to droop, as if he were not yet recording, he turned in a wide circle looking up at the roof, as if the vastness of the room amazed him, and when he had turned back in the direction they had come from, he leaned far back, ostensibly to take in the distance overhead, which action caused the camera to rise and catch the environment outside the building as the huge door slid back shut, the environment that they had walked through, but which he was not allowed to film. Probably, it was of no value, the shot, but he didn't like to be censored, except by Jennifer.

He continued to turn, too obtrusively, so that he looked naive, so that they certainly couldn't believe he was filming.

Jennifer started up the metal stairs which rose to overlook the airship at the far end of the building, but she had to stop immediately to remove her heels, to keep them from getting stuck in the openings in the metal grating. As she bent down, standing on the second step, to remove each shoe, her tight skirt hiked itself, revealing each narrow thigh up high. The Colonel, who stood in front of Dennis on the floor in front of the steps, looked down, to watch. Dennis filmed. Jennifer removed her shoes and continued on up the steps.

The airship in the distance looked like a huge but ordinary helicopter. Dennis didn't understand what the big deal was. The Colonel walked close behind Jennifer up the steps. The specialist waited at the bottom. So, as Dennis headed up the steps, he slowed, to allow the Colonel and Jennifer to ascend ahead of him, so that he could get a better angle on the backs of Jennifer's thighs as he jockeyed for a line of sight past the Colonel. He made no pretense of trying to hide his shot, looking out only for Jennifer to turn, so that he could pull away before she saw him shooting. He didn't care what the Colonel thought. He knew intuitively that he'd understand.

As Dennis reached the top of the walkway, one of those metal structures built out of grating that allows you to see down through it, Dennis began to feel dizzy. He didn't care for heights, and he had to invoke his desensitization training to overcome his vertigo, even at this modest elevation. Jennifer and the Colonel wavered in the frame ahead of him.

As they approached the airship, Dennis noticed that it seemed far larger than it appeared. From up on this scaffolding, it looked huge. It was nearly two stories high, and Dennis thought that he should have realized that it was this big, but everything in the hanger, even the ship, seemed so dwarfed from below. And something else was strange about it. It emitted a soft, almost unhearable noise.

All at once, a horror filled his chest, his being, and he felt like he'd topple over the railing and fall hard to the concrete floor. The ship was off the ground about a foot. It flew, there in front of them, silently, and it had been flying since they'd entered the building.

Dennis stopped short of the end of the walkway as Jennifer and the Colonel proceeded to its termination. He steadied the camera on his shoulder. Jennifer turned to face him and bent to set her shoes down on the grating beside her. The Colonel stepped aside, recognizing the preliminaries of their intention. Jennifer stood at a place where the railing ended. The ship hovered close, nearby. Its props did not turn. It did not drift toward and away from the platform as you might expect a hovering ship to do, but rather it remained rock-steady in place, about twenty feet away. In the viewer Dennis saw Jennifer watch his fingers at the side of the camera: 3-2-1-fist. She began to speak, but before she got a single word out, he heard her gasp in his headset and saw her disappear from the viewer, down.

Dennis instinctively moved the camera to follow her in the viewer, and found her teetering backward at a forty-five degree angle at the edge of the platform, already too far gone to catch herself up. She let out a short whine and, as the Colonel darted into the frame, she fell away from him, out toward the ship and down.

Dennis started to lower the camera, almost dropping it, to start after her, but when he realized he would not get to her, he found her again falling in the frame, and he regretted doing it, even before she would have hit the ground.

But she didn't hit. In the viewer, he saw her springing below him, in a net. Tears came to his eyes, but he kept filming, zooming in, as Jennifer's skirt slid farther up her thighs with each bounce, and the expression on her face turned from horror to anxious relief.

"Oh!" she cried and laughed. That was all she said. Nothing more.

The Colonel stood at the gap in the railing looking down. Dennis, looking up over the camera at him, would have pushed him after her, except that he thought he'd land on Jennifer. He raised his camera at him, finding him in the viewer. He focused in close on the helplessness of his face. He looked back down at Jennifer, leaving the camera on the Colonel. She was working her way to the edge of the net, wavering, springing slightly as she found her footing on the ropes of the net. He lowered the camera back to her and closed in tight.

Men appeared beneath her, running in from the sides, one of them the specialist. They reached up to her. She reached down to them. She let herself drop over the edge into their open arms. One of the men wrapped his arms around her as she fell to him, and as she slid down his body, his arms gathered her skirt up around her, lifting it up around her torso, revealing everything, pantyhose, panties, the thin muscular legs and buttocks. She hastened to lower the skirt as soon as her feet touched the floor, before the man let go of her, pulling herself out of his grasp to grab at her clothing.

But the floor was slippery, with oil, or mud, or something. It looked like an oily mud, which she slipped down into, grabbing onto the man and pulling him down into it with her.

They sat in the scum together. She lifted her hands which, after she had plopped down on her rump to the floor, she had placed on the ground on either side of her in a failed attempt to break her fall, and she saw, as she raised the hands in front of her face, the dirty oily mess she had fallen into.

"Oh!" she said again, this time a bit more painfully. Dennis was still recording. With the camera seated firmly on his shoulder, he walked cautiously to the gap in the railing and, framing the net with Jennifer seated below it, summoning a courage he didn't think he had, steadying the camera as flexibly rigid as he could, as his stomach rose rapidly into his neck, threatening to exit him altogether, he jumped into the net, maintaining the frame in front of him. losing it only as he hit and bounced.

Before he recovered, as he bounced in the netting, feeling lightheaded to the point of illness, trapped in a dizziness he could not control, his training having abandoned him like the firmness of the earth which he half-floated above, unable to orient himself, a phantasmagoria of the faces of Jennifer and the men around her looking up at, down at, and around him, as if they surrounded him in an attempt to haunt him to death, he fought himself and cursed his weakness. He forced his recovery to the extent that he enabled himself to crawl to the other side of the net away from the mess below, handed down his camera to the specialist who wavered below him, lowered himself to the floor without help, took his camera back, and with the firmness of earth securely beneath him, understanding that they would never know how brave a man he really was, he immediately began recording Jennifer again.

"Get that thing off me," she snarled.

Immediately, he turned it away.

He was hurt, upset, more so even than by the fall.

Jennifer's clothing was smeared with the dark slimy residue. She had it all over her panty hose. She had it all over hands, which she held out at her sides, fingers spread, wrists bent up.

Women complain about men being dirty pigs. They can't stand it, most of them, when they become unwittingly soiled. They complain about men being hairy, about men farting, and belching, and scratching themselves. These are projections, because women are the same, they do the same things, women are hairy, and they go to great lengths to deny it, shaving it off, getting rid of it in any way they can, to pretend, even to themselves, that it doesn't exist. And they belch. Dennis had know several women who belched, proudly. And farted too. They all fart. They have to. And they scratch. He didn't know any women who let him know they scratched, but they had to scratch, when they were alone, when they knew that no one could see them doing it. They would have you believe they don't, and they criticize men for it. And for being dirty, because they don't want to be dirty, women. They want to wash it all away, the dirt of the world.

Dennis heard the Colonel behind him chastizing someone about the mess on the floor. He turned to see him walking toward them with Jennifer's shoes in his hands.

The airship settled silently to the floor of the hanger. The Colonel escorted Jennifer through a door at the side of the ship. Dennis followed, still lightheaded, still wavering, uncertain on his feet, but not sick, mercifully relieved of nausea.

Inside the ship, the corridors were extremely narrow.

The Colonel spoke softly to Jennifer, cooing at her.

Dennis raised the camera when their backs were to him and caught a few quick shots.

The Colonel escorted Jennifer to a washroom with a shower. It was nothing more than an opaque plastic cubicle. The shower, when turned on, would spray onto the small sink and toilet, between which there was just enough room to stand. Dennis caught a quick shot of the tiny room before Jennifer closed the door.

Dennis stood guard outside. She handed out her soiled clothes to him. He felt honored, just to hold them, just to wait on her. He folded her soiled clothing perfectly neatly and set them on the floor beside his camera as he listened to the shower run. An airman came down from the upper reaches of the ship with a towel and a pair of white coveralls with the insignia of the airship on the shoulders. He entrusted them to Dennis. A pride filled him, to be the self-appointed guardian at her shower door. His excitement grew as he heard the shower stop. The door moved, and through the narrow opening he saw a sliver of Jennifer's face. She looked out plaintively at him. He held up the towel and coveralls to her. She opened the door to take the towel, and the room was that small that in opening she had no choice but to reveal herself. He saw her naked form, her small firm breasts and narrow torso, her thin legs, the delta of neatly trimmed fur at the top of them, the miniscule opening of space below it which on another woman might be closed off by an excess of fatty thighs, all of this revealed in one quick take, for only the shortest instant, for only as long as it took to pull in the towel and close the door. A minute later, she opened the door again, this time more freely, and wrapped in the towel, she took the coveralls from him, and as she closed the door, she said, "Thank you," warmly, which filled Dennis with delight.


The Colonel wanted to postpone the flight, but Jennifer wouldn't hear of it, so they left, only slightly behind schedule. They flew out over the mountains to the residential areas at the outskirts of the city as Jennifer taped spots, dressed in coveralls, which Dennis assured her looked quite good on her, creating the impression that she was one of the crew. He spoke to Jennifer at every opportunity, always; every time she turned her attention toward him, he intensified his attention toward her, even though he felt a little queasy, because although the flight was rock-steady, still he was aware he was on an airship, and it took a concentration to prevent his imagination from creating a false impression of unsteadiness, a concentration which he begrudgingly stole from that greater part of which he devoted to Jennifer.

But her attention toward him, he noticed, seemed to momentarily take the queasiness away. He also noticed that she seemed to be paying closer attention to him than she normally did, but this may have been wishful thinking on his part, or a desire, out of his slight debility, to have her closer, comforting him. Dennis continued to feel queasy and disoriented the entire time they were airborne, even though there was no apparent motion that could have contributed to motion sickness, except for the rapidly passing landscape below which Dennis could not avoid seeing, frequently. Even as he consciously kept his attention off of it, the lens kept sucking it up. He had to consciously and continuously focus on his desensitization training in order to remain functional, splitting his awareness between it and Jennifer.

She had liked Dennis' idea that she looked like one of the crew. He'd watched her face respond in the viewer as he'd said it. It was one of the highlights of the flight. It made him feel important. He was a relatively important person anyway, he knew, being a video cameraman, but he seldom felt important, day to day, or moment to moment, except when Jennifer paid attention to him, and especially when she actually looked as if she enjoyed what he was saying to her.

The Colonel demonstrated a few of the maneuvers that the silent machine was capable of and, half an hour later, they were back at the base.

At one point in the flight, Jennifer had asked the Colonel, on tape, what the purpose of the airship was, what military uses it would be put to. He didn't answer, acting as if he hadn't heard the question.


On the drive back to the city from the air base, Jennifer asked Dennis to drop her off at her home instead of taking her to the studio.

"It was an interesting assignment," Dennis said.

But all she answered was, "Yes."

She remained quiet for most of the ride.

He had been hoping to get her to talk about it. He had, as usual, gotten over his illness as soon as he had been removed from the conditions that created it; and now he was returned to the pleasurable aspects of it, the vertiginous but pleasant affect he experienced being merely in her presence.

"Are you going to tell everyone what happened?" she asked him as she was about to get out of the van.

"Not if you don't want me to."

"I'd rather you didn't."

"How'll you explain the coveralls?"

She gathered her things together and opened the door.

"I don't know," she said.

Dennis rushed the tapes to the lab, sneaking in before anyone saw him. He made 8mm copies of everything, of each assignment. He watched them at home, before the late news. That night, he was especially interested in the segment where Jennifer opens the door to get the towel, when he had the camera sitting on the floor beside him, tilted up, the front end propped up with one of her shoes. He edited that scene out of the originals, along with those of her falling into the net and into the grime. Their spot on the late news ran one minute.


That night he dreams he's on the airship when the crew gets a call to respond to a riot in the 4th district. The specialist confiscates his camera, but he dreams he has been implanted with a digital recording device that operates through the lenses of his eyes and transmits the signal using his brain as an antenna to a relay and back to the station. He faithfully observes the scene, being careful not to turn his attention onto Jennifer, a feat he has a hard time accomplishing as she stands beside him observing with him. He feels her close at his side, warm and soft. From time to time she touches him. It's all he can do not to look her way, to prevent transmission of the evidence.

He notices that he has no queasiness, no disorientation, nothing.

A car burns on a street at an entrance to a railway tunnel.

When rioters see the airship coming, they scatter.

Some of them enter the tunnel, and some of them spread out through the neighborhoods, across yards and streets.

Dennis hears transmissions of commands from the console telling the pilot to pursue the rioters into the tunnel. He turns toward the console, to observe it, but the operator switches transmission to headphones and the specialist, from behind, places a firm hand on each side of his face and forces him to look straight out ahead.

The airship enters the tunnel, gracefully, without a hesitation.

Bright lights from the front of the ship illuminate the tunnel interior.

The ship speeds, zapping out electric-like arcs at each running form it overtakes, frying them to a nonexistent crisp.

It horrifies him, the death and the tremendous speed; but he isn't sick.

Light at the end of the tunnel rapidly approaches and as they zoom out into the daylight, he sees that they have turned into a high speed train which has left the tracks and propels itself through the air out above the landscape, floating. He's been pushed down onto the floor by the G-force of the train accelerating upward, and now, at the apogee of the trajectory, he almost hovers, lying lightly, his head held in Jennifer's soft lap as she comforts him, the sick feeling starting in his stomach, caused by the height he feels, countered by Jennifer's embrace.

He awakens, terrified at first, but giving himself over to the comfort that Jennifer has provided for him. The smell of an electrical discharge seems to fill the air. Reluctantly, he gets out of bed, to check out the apartment, to make certain that nothing is burning, that no electrical fire is in progress.

After he's sure that he is safe, after the smell of electricity has faded, he crawls back into bed, back into the soft of lap of the memory of Jennifer.

5-11-97