The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [42]
The next morning, Annie resisted the urge to make another drink and waited for Daniel to take her to the airport. She had hardly slept last night; she had a dream where Daniel stood in the doorway of their cabin, wearing fringed buckskins, his arm torn off by a grizzly bear. “Big, wonderful Wyoming,” he said to her as she tried, and failed, to apply a tourniquet.
When Daniel arrived, cowboy hat returned to prominence, an unlit Marlboro hanging from his lips, sporting a pair of waterproof boots that looked like something astronauts or ice fishermen would wear, he quickly took her bags out of her hands and wedged them into the tiny trunk of his sports car. Annie found it difficult to follow him to the car, still standing on the front steps of her house, wondering, now sober, what the hell she was doing. “Tell me again what I’m going to do in Wyoming,” she asked him.
“You’re going to be my muse,” he said.
“I know this is a little late to be asking, but is there a TV?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s just you and me.”
“I’m going to get a deck of cards,” she said, hurrying back inside the house.
At the airport, checked in, through security, waiting for the plane to depart, Annie listened to Daniel discuss his initial ideas for the third installment of Powers That Be. “No more Nazis,” he said, nodding wisely. “Nazis are played out. I’m thinking we need to go bigger than that, raise the stakes.”
“Okay,” Annie said.
“Dinosaurs,” he said.
“What?”
“They’re going to fight dinosaurs. It’ll be awesome, trust me.”
“How about Nazi dinosaurs?”
Daniel frowned and then said, “Annie, part of being someone’s muse is not to make fun of their ideas.”
It occurred to Annie that, aside from Buster, no one but Daniel knew where she was going. She was heading to a remote cabin in Wyoming with her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had a volatile relationship. She would listen to Daniel talk for hours about dinosaurs and rocket launchers and the catchphrase “Bomb them back to the Stone Age.” This seemed, suddenly, to be a big mistake.
She had no publicist but she still had an agent and a manager, people that, one would hope, would want to know of her plans. “I better call my agent,” Annie said, “and let him know I’m going to be out of pocket for a little while.”
“He probably knows by now,” Daniel said.
“What’s that?”
“I sent word out to a few contacts in the media about our trip, how we were heading into the wild for business and pleasure.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Daniel?” Annie asked.
“I leaked some information to several key entertainment journalists about my being offered the Powers That Be sequel and how you were coming with me to Wyoming to work on the script. And . . .”
“Yes?”
“And I told them that we were back together,” Daniel said.
For an instant, Daniel looked exactly, every feature correct, like Minda Laughton.
“We’re not back together, though,” Annie reminded him.
“Jesus, Annie, what do you think is going to happen? We’re going to be in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, just the two of us.”
“We’re going to work on the screenplay. The Nazi dinosaurs and whatnot.”
“Without me, Annie, honestly, you’re done. Together, we’re a power couple. We can rule this town.”
“Daniel, you’re sounding like an evil scientist.”
“You need me, and, I know this may be hard to understand, I need you.”
“You need many, many things, Daniel, most of them pharmaceutical.”
“I hate turning this into something ugly, but if you don’t come with me to Wyoming, I’ll do whatever I can to ruin your career to the point that it can’t be fixed.”
Annie felt the words pass through her, which rendered her body fuzzy and uncoordinated. “I need a second,” Annie said. Daniel nodded and then told her that he was going to use the restroom. “When I come back, we’ll pretend like this never happened. We’ll head to Wyoming and get back to what we do best.” Annie had no idea what it was that they did best; the two of them together seemed