JAY: I can’t, I’ve got all my stuff unpacked.

BEN: Pack it back up. Right now. Let’s go. We’re going to get out of Washington. This place isn’t healthy for you.

JAY: I have a mission.

BEN: Your mission is over. Now move it, or I’ll — I’ll shoot you in the leg.

JAY: You’re not capable of that.

BEN: Don’t push me, I’ve had a very long afternoon. We’re going to bury this gun somewhere. Ugh, it’s got my fingerprints all over it. We’re going to bury the bullets, too. And the hammer. We’re going to get you home, you demented bum, we’ll get you a chair, you can sit outside in the chair, I’ll lash you to it, you can take your shoes off, put your feet in the grass. It’s beautiful outside! I’ll show you my camera. Now get packing!

JAY: Are you sure you don’t want to take a little walk with me while we’re in town? See the sights?

BEN: No.

JAY: We should at least drive by the White House. I could show you where I marched.

BEN: Absolutely not.

JAY: How about Dick Cheney’s house? The vice presidential mansion, in all its stateliness. Hmmmmm?

BEN: No! Now pack up. And let’s turn that thing off now.

JAY: You sure?

BEN: Really. Off. OFF.

JAY: All right, all right, all right, here we go. Over and out.

[Click.]

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six previous novels—The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994), The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998), and A Box of Matches (2003) — and three works of nonfiction, U and I (1991), The Size of Thoughts (1996), and Double Fold (2001), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.