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By Root 445 0

the choice of location for the manufacturing plant—you have to be careful about state regulations—executives to hire, designers to work under me, a sales team, accountants, benefits, desks, telephones, workshops, paychecks, taxes, computers, copiers, decor, watercoolers, doormats, parking spaces, electric bills. Maybe a humidifier. A lot to consider. As I speak, I notice that others in the restaurant are turning to listen as well. It’s usually out of the corner of my eye that I see it, and the people disguise it well, returning to their conversations in what they probably think is convincing pantomime. The Westinghouse reindeer pops to mind. How ingenious they were to plant him there in the diner I ate at each Friday morning, knowing my affection for the Christmas myth, determined to steal my intellectual property.

• Re: Chevy Chase incident. Look also into whether or not I might have invented autoreverse tape decks and also therefore did Sony or GE own property adjacent to my Baltimore residence—noise, distraction tactics, phony road construction, etc., and also Schwinn, Raleigh, etc., presence during Los Angeles visit.

“Could we talk about something else?” Graham asks.

“Whatever you like,” I say and then inform the waiter our entrées were twenty-six minutes in transit. Turns out my fish is tough as leather. The waiter’s barely left when I have to begin snapping my fingers for his return.

“Stop that!” Graham says. I’ve reached the end of my tether with his passivity and freely ignore him. He’s leaning over the table about to swat my arm down when the fellow returns.

“Is there a problem?”

“My halibut’s dry as sand.”

The goateed young man eyes my dish suspiciously as though I might have replaced the original plate with some duplicate entrée pulled from a bag beneath the table.

“I’ll need a new one.”

“No he won’t,” Graham says at once.

The waiter pauses, considering on whose authority to proceed.

“Do you have anything to do with bicycles?” I ask him.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Professionally.”

The young man looks across the room to the maître d’, who offers a coded nod.

“That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” I say, grabbing bread rolls.

“Sit down,” Graham insists.

But it’s too late. I know the restaurant’s lousy with mountain bike executives. “You think I’m going to let a bunch of industry hustlers steal an idea that’s going to change the way every American and one day every person on the globe conceives of a bicycle? Do you realize what bicycles mean to people? They’re like ice cream or children’s stories, they’re primal objects woven into the fabric of our earliest memories, not to mention our most intimate connection with the wheel itself an invention that marks the commencement of the great ascent of human knowledge that brought us through printing presses, religious transformations, undreamt-of speed, the moon. When you ride a bicycle you participate in an unbroken chain of human endeavor stretching back to stone-carting Egyptian peasants and I’m on the verge of revolutionizing that invention, making its almost mythical power a storable quantity. You have the chance to be there with me—like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific—and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The things we’ll see!”

Because I’m standing as I say this a quorum of the restaurant feels I’m addressing them as well and though I’ve slipped in giving them a research lead I can see in their awed expressions they know as I do not everyone can scale the high white peaks of real invention. Some—such as these—must sojourn in the lowlands where the air is thick with half measures and dreams die of inertia. Yes! It is true.

This seems to convince Graham we indeed need to leave. He throws some cash on the table and steers me by the arm out of the restaurant. We walk slowly along the boulevard. There’s something sluggish about Graham, his rounded shoulders and bowed head.

“Look, there’s a Japanese place right over there we can get maki rolls and teriyaki, maybe some blowfish,