Mickey Spillane’s lost Mike Hammer Cold War thriller, completed by his friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins is finally making it to print for the first time. Though the crime novel had been announced for publication in the 1960s, Complex 90 never appeared…until now.

"Mickey Spillane has been a huge part of my private and professional life since childhood. He was the role model that led me into mystery," says Collins. "We became friends in the early 1980s...Over the years, Mickey entrusted me with numerous unpublished manuscripts, including two half-completed Mike Hammer novels. Shortly before his death, he said to his wife, Jane, 'When I'm gone, it will be a treasure hunt around here. Call Max -- he'll know what to do with what you find.'"

“The setting [in Complex 90] is 1964 and the novel is, in part, a sequel to the Mike Hammer comeback novel of 1961, The Girl Hunters, the film version of which starred Mickey Spillane himself. While reading this novel,” says Collins, “you are encouraged to picture Mike Hammer in just that way.”

Hammer accompanies a conservative politician to Moscow on a fact-finding mission. Arrested and imprisoned by the KGB on a bogus charge; he quickly escapes, creating an international incident by getting into a fire fight with Russian agents. On his stateside return, the government is none too happy with Hammer. Russia is insisting upon his return to stand charges, and various government agencies are following him. A question dogs our hero: why him? Why does Russia want him back, and why was he singled out to accompany the senator to Russia in the first place?

CHAPTER ONE

The older of the pair of armed M.P.s flanking me opened the door and stood there, waiting. Did they think I was going to try something, here in the heart of the Pentagon? Or was that the bowels?

I grinned at them, as if to say, Not a chance, fellas. Not without my .45, anyway.

Behind me, the general and his aide muttered something back and forth and then I felt the palm of a hand against my back—the general’s hand, which made it an order, not a shove.

He said in that peculiar imperial growl exclusive to the top brass, “Okay, Hammer, let’s go.”

The older M.P.—a Negro with a scarred face and a triple row of ribbons—grinned back at me with his eyes speaking a silent language I’d rarely heard since the war. Not this Cold War, either, but that hot one I’d fought in, in the Pacific.

The other M.P. wore a professional scowl of indignant disapproval that represented a lapse in military discipline. But he was pretty young and had never seen combat and what he’d picked up about this situation might have thrown him off his game.

I shrugged away the hand at my back and stepped inside.

Originally, this smooth-walled, unadorned chamber had been designed for conferences, but from the expressions on the faces lining the huge oak table, this meeting was going to be an inquisition. And I was the guest of honor. The only thing missing was the rack, and maybe a red hot poker or two.

Tony Wale, Head of Special Sections, stood up, and with a barely perceptible nod indicated the chair at the far end of the table, the Prodigal Son’s slot. Wale—tall, pale, dark-haired, looking like a top business exec in his Brooks Brothers number—didn’t like what he had to do at all. Twice we had worked together and I had gotten his tail out of a hot spot, so he probably didn’t relish returning a favor this way.

Eighteen pairs of hostile eyes watched me take the long walk down the aisle. I was a remarkably well-preserved specimen of a creature that should have been extinct a long time ago, but by some queer twist of nature had been instilled with instincts too potent to be erased, managing to survive into their pretty little world of appeasement and concession.

Somehow I knew that the older M.P., guarding the door behind me, was either still grinning or working hard not to, so I didn’t feel too damn bad. Somebody was on my side.

I passed the four United States senators, the State Department contingent, and the high-level military advisors who didn’t need uniforms or insignia to display their rank. They watched me with the cold, unblinking stares of nervous predators facing an unknown if natural enemy they knew inhabited their domain but which they had never encountered before.

One other pair of eyes watched, not hostile but betraying nothing, belonging to a small, quiet, plain-looking individual in a gray suit and rimless bifocals.

I took the seat Tony Wale had indicated and sat down carefully, still sore from the previous twelve hours wedged in behind the crates loaded on the C-121. In one unintentionally comic motion, my audience all swung around in their seats to face me, ready to hang on every word, minds already dancing with accusations at the same time they were formulating their own finely worded excuses.

It was too bad my buddy Ralph Marley wasn’t here to watch the show.

But Marley was dead.


And that left only me to play Scrooge....


Then the general pulled his seat out and, before he sat down, said, “Gentlemen, shall I summarize?”


It wasn’t really necessary, but they all nodded anyway. Another group action. You could find the same shared expression of blank willingness at a Nazi rally or in a lynch mob or any gathering of frightened people who had lost something human somewhere and didn’t know how to get it back.

All but that one little man in gray, however. Him you couldn’t read.

And yet I could.

As he usually did, Senator Willy Asnet—big and beefy and draped in self-importance—took the initiative, a comma of white hair hanging on his forehead, part of that phony folksy persona of his.

“If you please, General,” he said in his practiced Southern drawl. “We would indeed appreciate a briefing.”

The general, who when outranked could take an order as well as any enlisted man, sat down, took a pen from his inside pocket and began to doodle on the pad in front of him. For some reason, the aimless motion of his hand seemed to mesmerize those nearest him and they watched his intricate patterns form while his words made their own patterns in precise phrases, couched in his commanding officer’s growl.

“For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Hammer’s background,” he stated, “I would like to supply the pertinent details.”

His doodling stopped momentarily and he turned to a new page and lined the edge of the paper with numbers from one to ten.

Hell, I figured I was made up of more details than that.

“Name, Michael Hammer. Profession, private investigator licensed to operate in New York State, date of issuance of certificate, November, 1945. Military record exemplary, six citations, Bronze Star recipient, discharged honorably with five years voluntary active reserve duty. No prior criminal record, although numerous arrests for assault, manslaughter, and homicide. No convictions, however, due in every case to assertions, and sometimes pleas, of self-defense. Despite a reputation for vigilante ‘justice,’ his cooperation with civilian and military police and intelligence agencies is noted in his file.”

What the general did not mention, because of its extreme classification, was that I remained attached to one of those intelligence agencies. An agency that served to deal with those matters that the F.B.I. could not handle because of its limitations as a domestic entity and that the C.I.A. could not take on because of its strict international mandate.

An agency that did not officially exist.


Even if one of its top people was seated at this table.


The general looked up from his scratch pad and laid his pen down in a rather grand gesture that apparently had some significance when he was addressing his men. Except that this time he was in the wrong company and nobody knew to be impressed.

“Mr. Hammer was admitted to Russia on a visitor’s visa three months ago,” the general continued. “We know from a tacit admission by Senator Allen Jasper that Mr. Hammer’s role in accompanying the senator was that of a bodyguard.”

Everyone here knew that the senator had suffered physical attacks at home by those objecting to what some would call his ultra-conservative policies. What might happen to him in Russia staggered the imagination.

“Excuse me, General,” Senator Leonard Garris said, his professorial mien clenched in thought. “It seems unlikely that the Soviet government would sanction a visit from a controversial figure like Senator Jasper without providing its own considerable security. And why would the senator want private security when he could have requested Secret Service protection?”

Senator Asnet said, “I would have to concur with my colleague, General. Any violence on Russian soil, whether simple civil disobedience or an assassination attempt, would have created considerable international turmoil.”

Garris picked back up: “Which is why I question how it was Mr. Hammer here, who has a colorful background to say the least, might be granted permission for this trip by either our government or theirs.”

Down the table, between a senator and a state department flunkie, silently sat that little gray man who could have explained. If the agency he represented existed, that is.

“That would appear to be a moot point,” Tony Wale put in from his chair to the general’s right. “Mr. Hammer was given permission, and did make the trip, or we would not be here.”

“Be that as it may,” the general said, barreling on, “Mr. Hammer was arrested by the Soviet police and held in a Moscow prison. He escaped, slowly making his way across the continent to our air base in Turkey, leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake, and smuggled himself onboard a United States Air Force cargo plane to this country... Mr. Hammer, since this sketchy outline of events is all we have, we call upon you to fill in the rest of the details.”

Once more, like puppets on a string, they all turned and looked at me.

I said, “That’s only eight.”


Silence hung in the air.


The general frowned. “What?”


“General,” I said, pointing to his scribbled-on pad, “you have numbers one to ten there. That’s only eight. Or maybe nine. Depends on whether you consider my escape and flight one ‘detail’ or two.”

Senator Asnet took his glasses off in that same deliberate motion he used when his committees were in session and he was about to chastise an underling or challenge a recalcitrant witness.

He said, “The point is, Mr. Hammer, that in the course of your escape, you killed forty-five men. Two were members of the Politburo, one was the warden of the prison, three were high- ranking officers of the Soviet military intelligence service, the others all officially detailed to either maintain your captivity or expedite your capture. Forty-five men, Mr. Hammer!”

“Sorry, Willy,” I said with a shrug. “It was the best I could manage.”

The senator looked as if he might choke, then recovered himself and glared at me. “Mr. Hammer, you will remember that you are addressing a United States—”

I didn’t let him finish. I got up with enough melodrama and floor scraping by my wooden chair to make them all jump. Then I stood there looking down at them one and all, with that seasoned M.P. still grinning at me with his eyes. So there was one guy around, anyway, who would understand what I was saying. Him and the little gray man who wasn’t there...

I made it damn deliberate.

“Willy boy,” I told him, “I’m not addressing anybody. Not anybody at all. Try to keep in your superannuated mind that I am not under oath or subpoena and as far as I’m concerned, this is damn near a kidnapping. You yanked me off an airplane in my own country, and if you want to charge me with anything, try a hitchhiking rap... or using military transport for personal purposes, maybe. Think up any damn thing you like. You should be smart enough for that, or am I giving you too much credit?”

I leaned both hands on the table. I could see all of them and they could see all of me.

“At least somebody has finally asked me what the hell happened over there,” I said. “My own government grabs hold of whatever details the Soviets are willing to hand out, accepts those as facts, and now I’m elected sacrificial lamb.”

Tony Wale wasn’t looking at me. He couldn’t meet my eyes.

“Well, I don’t play patsy for anybody, gents, not even Uncle Sam. I’m not holding still for a public whipping and if you want to try it, then go ahead and take a running jump at it. I’ll bust this story wide open to the press and let them have a field day at your expense. Without any compunction at all.”

I straightened, then grinned at them again. The silence itself was audible as these self-appointed Knights of this not-so- Round Table held their collective breath. You could almost hear capillaries popping under the skin.

The M.P. at the door couldn’t hold back that grin any longer.

Something had gone through them, like a sudden attack of the flu. They all wanted to speak, yet didn’t know what to say. Their eyes were bright little things focused on my face, then they stopped looking and started watching because the contempt I felt showed so plainly I could feel it in the way my mouth was pulled back tight over my teeth.

I was back in the middle of that incredible jungle of stupidity and self-serving calculation that was the political establishment, served by military minds who had never set foot on a battlefield.

These bastards needed a civics lesson.

“American citizens have certain rights, even in Russia,” I said. “I wasn’t given an opportunity to contact my consulate or Senator Jasper, either. Hell, it felt like I was in the middle of a one-man purge. And I wasn’t about to sit in a prison cell learning to love cockroach-laced borscht waiting for diplomatic efforts to spring me. So I did it on my own.”


Senator Willy Asnet seemed to be crouching in his chair, as if ready to pounce. “Mr. Hammer... your reckless actions have created an international incident.”

“Screw it. That was my neck on the line.”

Asnet came to his feet slowly, his face a barely controlled mask of anger. “You, Mr. Hammer, have put this country in an untenably dangerous position. Right now, thanks to you, we are teetering on the precarious edge of hostilities with the only other nuclear superpower on this planet.”

“How about that,” I said.


This time all it took was my tone to make them jump.
There was no respect in it, no remorse for what I had done, and no fear of any reprisals that might hit me. They looked at each other with a peculiar frustration because I was standing right there yet they couldn’t quite reach me.

But they sure were going to try.

Complex 90

5. Don’t waste people’s time. People are busy. They resent it when you waste their time. When the reader comes to our site, they’re not going to land on a post that says, “This is amazing,” and forces you to click on the link. Our posts explain what’s important about what you’re reading and why. It may be tempting to write cute headlines but the most important function of a headline is to sum up what the post is about. If you’ve developed a trust with your readers that they’ll get good value for the time they invest in visiting your site, they’ll be back.

Camille and Josh interviewed a bunch of other people for the book, including: Laura Linney (How to act), Cesar Millan (How to be a dog whisperer), Ken Jennings (How to be a game show champion), Alec Baldwin and Robert Carlock (How to be funny on TV), Will Shortz (How to create a mind-bending crossword puzzle), Jill Tarter (How to find extraterrestrial life), Ed Rosenthal (How to grow killer weed), Stephen Dubner (How to write a runaway bestseller). I'm interviewing Camille and Josh about The Art of Doing next week on Gweek.

10 Tips From Boing Boing on making online content sing | Buy The Art of Doing

Ping Fu knows what it’s like to be a child soldier, a factory worker, and a political prisoner. To be beaten and raped for the crime of being born into a well-educated family. To be deported with barely enough money for a plane ticket to a bewildering new land. To start all over, without family or friends, as a maid, waitress, and student.

Ping Fu also knows what it’s like to be a pioneering software programmer, an innovator, a CEO, and Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. To be a friend and mentor to some of the best-known names in tech­nology. To build some of the coolest new products in the world. To give speeches that inspire huge crowds. To meet and advise the president of the United States.

It sounds too unbelievable for fiction, but this is the true story of a life in two worlds.

Born on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ping was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the teenagers in Mao’s Red Guard. At twenty-five, she found her way to the United States; her only resources were $80 in traveler’s checks and three phrases of English: thank you, hello, and help.

Yet Ping persevered, and the hard-won lessons of her childhood guided her to success in her new home­land. Aided by her well-honed survival instincts, a few good friends, and the kindness of strangers, she grew into someone she never thought she’d be—a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader. A love of problem solving led her to computer science, and Ping became part of the team that created NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape, the Web browser that forever changed how we access information. She then started a company, Geomagic, that has literally reshaped the world, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repair­ing NASA spaceships.

Bend, Not Break depicts a journey from imprisonment to freedom, and from the dogmatic anticapitalism of Mao’s China to the high-stakes, take-no-prisoners world of technology start-ups in the United States. It is a tribute to one woman’s courage in the face of cruelty and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.

The year 1996 was nearing its end and I was determined to get a company started. Xixi was three, sweet and chatty, and I truly enjoyed being a mother. Ironically, it took me a little over nine months to bring Geomagic to life as well.

I spent the first few months gathering information and researching potential business ideas before plunging into anything. I interviewed, and mostly just listened to, dozens of people: experts, scientists, and business founders—anyone with an opinion or an idea. I also attended conferences and learning sessions. This was the height of the Internet era, and everywhere people were chattering about starting dot-com companies. At a panel at NCSA with representatives from Kodak, Sun Microsystems, GE, Morgan Stanley, and IBM, each one proudly pronounced, “We are a dot-com company.”

That doesn’t make sense, I thought. Why would they call themselves dot-com companies? I had learned that whenever there were breakthroughs in transportation and communication, big things happened. The invention of the railroad, highway, and aerospace industries had helped transport people and goods to new places with unprecedented speed. The radio, telephone, and now Internet enabled us to access information and connect virtually. Those innovations in transportation and communication had fundamentally altered our perception of space and time. Nevertheless, when the telephone came into being, businesses didn’t rush to call themselves “phone companies” simply because they used the new device. Why should they redefine themselves as “dot-com companies” just because they now had a .com in their domain name?

“I don’t want to create another dot-com company,” I told Herbert one evening.

He nodded. “Well, at least you know now what it is that you don’t want to do.”

“I want to create something of value,” I said. This was my New Year’s resolution in 1997.

I asked three questions:

1. Why should I start a company?

2. What will it have to offer?

3. How can I build it?

One day, I saw a demo of a 3D printing machine called a stereolithography apparatus, or SLA . I was mesmerized by it. From my factory work in China, I knew the subtractive (milling) and formative (casting) process. But this was different—it was additive. Just as a regular printer lays down colored ink on a blank page in order to form two-dimensional words and pictures, this machine laid down printable materials—plastic, metal, or ceramic—a layer at a time. The SLA machine was capable of re-creating complex three-dimensional shapes that couldn’t be milled or casted.

Three-dimensional printers were not yet advanced enough to make complex consumer products like cars or cameras. But they could produce specialized parts for the space shuttle or one of Frank Gehry’s buildings. Engineers could print the parts in solid form as a prototype before sending their designs off to a factory for expensive manufacturing.

These printers depended on 3D computer models, which I wrote software to create at NCSA . Herbert was a leading research figure in the field of computational geometry. It was alpha shapes, a theory developed by Herbert and his PhD students, that had enabled us at NCSA to help scientists create and visualize 3D shapes on their computer screens that were either too small for our eyes to see or too large for our minds to comprehend—from the 3D structure of molecules to the shape composition of galaxies. I already knew that people were downloading alpha shapes software from the public domain site where we gave the software away for free, but I had not checked into what anyone other than the scientists at NCSA were using it for.

I discovered that many people were using the alpha shapes software to process data captured by 3D scanners—not medical CT and MRI scanners, but industrial ones made from digital cameras. With the aid of either a laser or light patterns, they would produce 3D point clouds. Imagine dots floating in space, arranged to cover the surface of an object to form an impression of its shape. In 2D digital pictures, those dots lie directly on the paper or flat screen; we call them pixels. In 3D, the dots are not projected onto a flat surface, but rather retain the depth of an object’s true shape in space.

This was my aha moment. State-of-the-art 3D appliances, such as 3D scanners and 3D printers, already existed. If we offered software that could take the data from 3D scanners, process it, and output it on 3D printers, our new company could do in three dimensions for desktop fabrication what Adobe had done for desktop publishing in two dimensions. My head spun with possibilities.

After graduating from UNM and starting a family, Hong had founded a specialty retail store in Scottsdale, Arizona. She told me that shoes were one of the most challenging merchandise items to carry because the store needed to stock so many different sizes and styles, yet the one the customer wanted always seemed to be missing. In the nineteenth century, cobblers measured people’s feet and made shoes to fit them precisely. But their skills were not scalable, and the shoes they custom made were costly. In the twentieth century, such personalized products gave way to factory assembly lines. Scale was achieved and costs plummeted, but the products became standardized. Stores carried racks full of shoes that nobody wanted because so many didn’t fit quite right—in size, shape, or style.

Ask a factory today to make you a single pair of shoes of your own design and you will be presented with a bill for thousands of dollars. If you produce thousands of shoes, each one of them will be much cheaper thanks to economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though, economies of scale matter far less. Its software can be endlessly tweaked so that it can make just about anything. The cost of setting up the machine is the same whether it prints one object or many. It will keep going, at about the same cost per item, until it runs out of materials, just like your home printer will keep going until it runs out of paper and ink.

I wondered, Could we develop technology and software to enable a digital form-fitting and manufacturing system that made shoes and thousands of other items that were both one of a kind and produced with the efficiency of mass production? “Mass customization”: I had heard people talk about it before, but so far it had come to mean little more than nonfat-soy extra-foam lattes and made-to-order jeans that still didn’t fit well.

I started to get excited. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. “We’ll call it the Personal Factory,” I told Mike Facello, a bright PhD student of Herbert’s who would become one of our first employees. “It’s intuitive. People already know the PC. Now we’ll have the PF.”

“Cute, Ping,” he observed. “You’ve managed to name an industry after your own initials.”

I was possessed by the idea of revolutionizing the manufacturing process, just as Henry Ford once had with his invention of the assembly line. That night when I fell asleep, I had a dream about the years I’d spent in factories in China. I awoke the next morning with visions of spinning parts and shining metal floating through my head. I found that I could recall details about those years that I hadn’t been able to for decades. I thought to myself, No wonder I came up with the “personal factory” idea for my business. Working in factories had ingrained not just the knowledge but also the visceral experience of manufacturing into my brain and body.

That day, I felt even more convinced that I should build a technology company to enable the “personal factory.” This was my destiny, I realized, my calling as an entrepreneur. I could see where it came from—the depths of my subconscious. For the first time since volunteering to create a business, I felt confident that I could actually do it because I had found my reason why.

Death is inevitable. Especially when you have an expiration date.

As a replicant, or “techno-human,” Detective Bruna Husky knows two things: humans bioengineered her to perform dangerous, undesirable tasks; and she has just ten years on the United States of Earth before her body automatically self-destructs. But with “anti-techno” rage on the rise and a rash of premature deaths striking her fellow replicants, she may have even less time than she originally thought.

Investigating the mysterious deaths, Bruna delves into the fractious, violent history shared by humans and replicants, and struggles to engage the society that fails to understand her—yet created her. The deeper she gets, the deadlier her work becomes as she uncovers a vast, terrifying conspiracy bent on changing the very course of the world. But even as the darkness of her reality closes in, Bruna clings fiercely to life.

Chapter Eight

Both the subway and the sky-trams were on strike, which meant the travelators were so crammed with people that the excessive weight slowed their speed and, in some cases, even managed to stop them. There was no hope of finding an available cab, so some desperate people were trying to hitch a ride in private vehicles. But it was already well known that those few individuals authorized to own their own vehicles were not usually the most sympathetic.

Bruna had left home in good time, anticipating the long walk and the confusion typical of strike days, but even so she was having a hard time forcing her way through the hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians. It was 17:10, rush hour, and she was already ten minutes late for her appointment with Pablo Nopal. The memorist had suggested they meet in the Museum of Modern Art, an uncomfortable and unsuitable place for a conversation. But Bruna couldn't impose her own conditions; she was the one who'd asked for the meeting. Taking them two at a time, she went up the hundreds of little steps that seemed to cascade around the enormous, luminous cube of the museum like a concrete waterfall. She held her wrist mobile up against the electronic ticket machine at the entrance and once in, she crossed the lobby at top speed, heading for the temporary exhibition hall. And there, at the entrance to the hall, she spotted the memorist: white, collarless shirt; wide black pants; lank, dark hair falling over his forehead. The very picture of casual elegance. Such lustrous hair. Was it the result of expensive capillary treatment or his genetic inheritance from generations of rich ancestors? The writer was leaning against the wall with graceful indolence. When he noticed the detective approaching, he half-smiled and stood upright. They had only seen each other on the screen when they set up the meeting, but there was no question the android was easy to spot.

"You're late, Husky."

"The strike. My apologies."

Bruna took a quick look around her. In the main hall she'd just crossed there were some armchairs and at the far end, a cafeteria.

"Where shall we talk? Shall we sit over there? Or maybe you'd prefer to have something in the cafe?"

"Hold on! Are you in a hurry? We could have a look at the exhibition first."

The rep looked at Nopal uneasily. She had no idea what he had in mind; she didn't have a good sense of what his game was, and that always made her anxious. The man was about her height and his eyes were right in line with hers. Too close, too inquisitive. By the great Morlay, how she hated memorists! The detective couldn't help but look away, and faked interest in a poster promoting the exhibition. She read it three times before becoming conscious of what he was saying.

"The History of Fakes: Fraud as Revolutionary Art," Nopal read out loud. "Interesting, isn't it?"

The android looked at him. What was he going on about? Was there a hidden message in his comment? A double meaning? The detective had already heard people talking about this exhibition and she would never have come to see it of her own accord. She was irritated by the fakes phenomenon -- the latest thing in the plastic arts. Pedantic critics and delirious aesthetes had decreed that imposture was the purest and most radical artistic manifestation of modernity, the vanguard of the twentysecond century. The most sought-after artists of the moment were all successful forgers whose fakes had been thought authentic for some period of time. Because, as Yiannis -- who always knew about everything -- had told her, to be a true fake you not only had to imitate to perfection the picture or the sculpture of a famous artist, but you also had to get someone to believe it: a buyer, the owner of a gallery, a museum, the critics, the media. The bigger the deception, the greater the prestige of the fake work once the forgery had been uncovered. And if nobody noticed the artifice and it was the artist himself who had to reveal it after some time had passed, then the work was considered a real masterpiece. This fashion had changed the art world. Now, at auctions, many people bid madly for a Goya or a Bacon or a Gabriela Lambretta secretly hoping that in a few months' time it would be found to be a fake and its value would triple.

"To be honest, it's a topic that's of no interest to me at all," growled Bruna.

"No? How strange; I thought you'd like it."

"Why? Because I'm a copy, too, an imitation, a fake human being?"

Pablo Nopal gave a charming smile. Charming and totally untrustworthy. He started to walk around the exhibition and Bruna found herself compelled to follow him. He was a slim man, and he moved lightly inside his roomy, floating garments, as if he had no bones.

"Not at all. I didn't say that. I thought you'd like it because you're an intelligent person. I've learned a bit about you. And intelligent people know that, one way or another, we're all frauds. That's why I find the fakes to be the most perfect representation of our times. They're not art; they're sociology. We're all fakes. But, I find you extraordinarily hypersensitive -- wouldn't you agree, Husky? If I were you, I'd try to analyze the reason behind such an exaggerated susceptibility."

Because you're a damn memorist, condescending and pedantic, Bruna would have liked to reply. She chewed over her words for a few seconds, trying to tone them down a little.

"Well, I don't think I'm hypersensitive. It's more a weariness in the face of prejudice. It's as if people assumed you'd be interested in forgery because of your past. What I mean is, you ought to be used to people looking at you and asking themselves who you really are. Are you Pablo Nopal, the memorist and the writer? Or an individual who killed his uncle and got out of jail because the evidence was tainted?"

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, a little frightened by her own words. Maybe she'd gone too far and the interview would be over then and there. But that air of bored superiority seemed to be asking to be goaded. Bruna knew the type: they liked to be challenged, even humiliated. At least a little.

"Bad example, Husky. I haven't assumed anything about you. You're the one who's imagined an insult and then felt offended. That's another thing they say about you. They say you are easily stirred up and quite intractable. By the way, my uncle was an evil man and I'm innocent. The tainted evidence had to do with another matter."

They viewed the exhibition in silence for a few minutes. The fakes recover the historical, artistic legacy and transmute it into a social intervention, simultaneously reaffirming and negating its meaning. There is no greater act of cultural subversion, read the text written on the wall in 3-D letters. The usual nonsense, thought Bruna. There were works from various periods, from a twentieth-century painting by Elmyr D'Ory, to two pieces by the famous Mary Kings, the most acclaimed artist of the moment, who had invented another persona, an alien painter called Zapulek, and then dedicated herself to forging Zapuleks -- in other words, to forging herself.

"Right, let's start again," said Nopal. "What did you want to see me about? Let's sit down over there."

On the other side of the room there was a skylight, and beneath it, two soft armchairs. It was actually a good place to talk, isolated and yet so visible that it seemed to convert the meeting into something accidental and innocent. The perfect spot for a difficult rendezvous, Bruna said to herself, mentally taking note of the fact, in case she should ever have need of such a space. But why had Nopal chosen it? It was obvious that they hadn't ended up there by chance.

"Why did you have me come to the museum?" she asked.

"I don't like people coming to my home. And this is a comfortable place. So talk to me."

Clearly, he was an extremely private person. Somehow he had managed to remove part of his biography on the web. No matter how hard she searched, the android could not find a single detail about his childhood. Nopal seemed to appear from nowhere at the age of ten when he was officially adopted by his uncle. So much mystery was a feat of disinformation in this hyperinformed society.

"My client -- I didn't tell you her name before -- is Myriam Chi..."

Bruna paused briefly to see if the information was producing any sort of reaction, but the man remained impassive. "She thinks you might be able to help us with our investigation."

"What investigation?"

"Those reps who suddenly seem to go mad, kill other reps, and commit suicide."

"The tram case?"

"Not just that one. There are, in fact, at least four other similar cases."

"And where do I fit in?"

"It's not public knowledge, but they go out of their minds because they inject themselves with adulterated artificial memories. Someone has started selling deadly mems."

Nopal's thin lips curved in an acid smile; he leaned forward until he was a few inches from Bruna's face, and repeated slowly and sarcastically, "And where do I fit in?"

What an annoying character, thought Bruna. This was one of those moments when the detective wished that the formal way of addressing people was still in use -- a usage that was originally courteous in intent but in the end, before it became obsolete, had enabled you to distance yourself disdainfully from the person to whom you were speaking, as Bruna had observed so many times in old movies. Yes, an icy sir would have suited her very well right now. Sir is a revolting memorist, she would have said to him. You, sir, might well be the bastard who wrote the lethal mems. If it would please you, sir, sit back in your chair and stop trying to impress me.

"Well, you are a memorist."

The writer sprawled in his chair and sighed.

"I gave that up -- or rather, they fired me some years ago, as

you no doubt know. And before you foolishly make another rude remark, I'll tell you that, no, I don't write illegal memories. I have no need to. My novels sell very well, in case you didn't know. And I have the money I inherited from my dear uncle."

"But you might know of other memorists. There aren't many. Do you know anyone who might be involved in that business?"

"I cut all ties with that world when they sacked me. Let's just say I didn't particularly enjoy continuing my association with them."

"Well, Myriam Chi thinks you might know something."

Nopal smiled again. This time almost fondly, much to Bruna's surprise.

"Myriam has always believed me to be more powerful than I am."

His brow furrowed in thought. Bruna waited in silence, sensing that the man was about to say something, but she wasn't expecting to hear what he finally came out with.

"How old are you, Husky?"/p>

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"I'd say you're about 5/30 years...Maybe 6/31. Which would make it possible."

"Make what possible?"

"That I wrote your memory."

Bruna gasped. Sweat drenched the back of her neck.

"That's a revolting idea," she whispered.

She clenched her teeth to hold back the nausea.

"You know what, Husky? There's another reason I decided to meet you here rather than at home. I've had problems with some reps. On the whole, you technohumans aren't too fond of memorists, and on one level, I can understand why."

"You're not allowed to identify yourself as the author of a memory. It's forbidden. You can't do that."

"I know, I know. Calm down, Bruna. Forgive my earlier comment. Honestly, I'd never tell you. Even if it weren't banned, I wouldn't tell you. Even if I knew. I promise."

The slight feeling of relief she felt at Nopal's words made her realize how terrified she was. She also felt something akin to gratitude. It was a stupid emotion, unjustified and too close to Stockholm Syndrome, but she couldn't avoid it. Four years, three months, and twenty-two days.

"Nevertheless, we memorists not only feel no antipathy toward reps, but we also have a special fondness for you. Or at least I do. To be able to construct a person's memory is a privilege beyond description. Can you imagine? Memory is at the root of our identity, so in a way I'm the father of hundreds of beings. More than the father. I'm their personal little god."

Bruna shivered. "I'm not my memory. Which, moreover, I know is fake. I am my actions and my days."

"Well, now, that's debatable. And in any case, it doesn't alter what I was saying to you, because I was talking about my feelings, about how I see things. And I was telling you that I love reps. You inspire a special feeling in me. A deep complicity."

"Right. Well, forgive me for not feeling the same way. Forgive me for not thanking my little personal god, whoever that might be, for that entire arbitrary fake garbage."

"Arbitrary garbage? It's real life that's arbitrary. Much more arbitrary than we memorists are. I've always tried to do the best possible job; I thought about and wrote every one of those five hundred scenes so carefully."

"Five hundred?"

"You didn't know? A life consists of five hundred memories, five hundred scenes. That's enough. I always tried to balance some things with others, offer a certain illusion of meaning, a sense -- in the end -- of a harmonious whole. My speciality was the revelation scenes."

"The damned dance of the phantoms."

"My revelation scenes were...compassionate -- that would be the word. Enlightening and compassionate. They encouraged maturity in the rep."

"My memorist killed my father when I was nine. I adored him, and a criminal stupidly killed him in the street one night."

"Those things do happen, unfortunately."

"I was nine years old! And I spent five years suffering like hell until I turned fourteen and experienced my dance of the phantoms. Until I found out that my father didn't really exist, which meant that he hadn't been killed, either."

"It's not like that, Bruna. As you know, those five years you refer to didn't exist. It's nothing more than a false memory. All the scenes were inserted at the same time into your brain."

A knot of angry, burning tears squeezed the detective's throat. She had to make an effort to speak, and her voice came out hoarse.

"And the grief? All that pain I have inside? All that suffering in my memory?"

Nopal looked at her gravely. "That's life, Bruna. That's how it is. Life hurts."

There was a brief silence and then the man stood up.

"I'll make a few phone calls and try to find out what's going on among the memorists. I'll get in touch with you if I find anything."

Nopal leaned over and brushed Bruna's tattooed cheek with a finger. Such a light touch that the rep almost thought she had imagined it. Then the memorist smoothed his hair, regained his charming and barely trustworthy smile and, giving a half-turn, walked away. The android -- still seated, still stunned -- watched him as he left, her thoughts buzzing around in her head like a swarm of bees. Five hundred scenes. That miserable pittance was her entire life? She was trying to gather the strength to stand up when she heard the sound of an incoming call. She looked at her wrist mobile: it was Myriam Chi.

"We have to talk," said the leader without even bothering to greet her.

"What's up?"

"I'll tell you in person. Come and see me tomorrow morning at nine."

And she cut the connection. Bruna was left staring at a blank screen, filled with self-loathing. She was bitter about having to obey a client like Myriam Chi, who trumpeted her orders as if Bruna were her slave; and losing her self-control with the memorist made her feel literally ill. The armchair in which the detective was sitting was at the back of the exhibition space, and a slow stream of visitors was passing by in front of her, crossing from the one side of the gallery to the other, and beginning the return walk to the entrance. But strangely, no one was looking at her. No one appeared to notice the tall, striking technohuman; too much invisibility for it to be normal. Yes indeed, Nopal had gotten it right when he arranged to meet her here. Illuminated by the skylight as if by a spotlight, Bruna felt like one more fake. Without a doubt, the least valuable one in the entire collection.

About the Author

Rosa Montero is an acclaimed novelist and an award-winning journalist for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. A native of Madrid and the daughter of a professional bullfighter, Montero published her first novel at age twenty-eight. She has won Spain's top book award, the Que Leer Prize, twice -- for The Lunatic of the House in 2003 and Story of the Transparent King in 2005. A prolific author of twenty-six books, her other titles include the short-story collection Lovers and Enemies and the novels Beautiful and Dark, My Beloved Boss, and The Heart of the Tartar.

About the Translator

Lilit Zekulin Thwaites is a Hispanist specializing in contemporary Spanish literature, a literary translator, and former Head of the Spanish department of La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She lives in Melbourne with her husband, Tim, and their three children.

Tears in Rain

This is one thing that changed for me during the course of researching and writing Before the Lights Go Out, my upcoming book about the future of energy. I used to approach conversations about energy from a climate-centric perspective. First, I have to help people understand the science of climate change and get them past the misinformation and blatant lies surrounding that issue. THEN, we could talk about energy solutions.

But now I think that perspective is dead wrong.

Polls show that a majority of Americans want to change the way we make and use energy. What we disagree on is why that change needs to happen. The good news: We don't have to agree on the "whys" to reach the same solutions.

My book comes out April 10th, but you can read the introduction online now. It'll give you a better idea about why I think that climate change—important as it is—is not the only way to engage Americans on energy issues.

“Climate change is a lie.” The man leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “Climate change is a lie,” he said again. “It’s just something made up by environmentalists to scare us.”

I heard this story a few years after it actually happened, from Eileen Horn, one of the environmentalists who watched this man’s speech from the other side of a two-way mirror. At the time, Horn and her colleagues were about to launch a new nonprofit organization called the Climate and Energy Project (CEP), an environmental activism group based in the state of Kansas. The man was a participant in one of a series of focus groups that the CEP had put together in Wichita. The idea behind the focus groups: don’t be stupid. Too often, Horn told me, environmental activism started with what the activists thought the public believed. Focus groups were a nice way to get around the sloppy art of assumptions. Instead, the Climate and Energy Project could get a bunch of Kansans together in a room, lob some ideas at them, and watch how they respond. What did the intended audience already know, and what did they not know? What did the people of Kansas think about the future of energy?

It was a nice plan, but it wasn’t too enlightening at first. The participants talked about where they got their news—NPR and CNN on one side, Fox News and a handful of radio talk shows on the other. Opinions on climate change split right along the lines of favorite news sources. You will probably not be shocked to learn that the man who declared climate change a lie fell squarely on the Fox News side. Whether or not you disagree with him, his position was fairly predictable. You and I have met any number of people with the same background and ideas.

Yet Horn remembered that man, specifically, because he changed her outlook on the world. In a way, he changed her life. Not because of his position on climate change, but because of what she learned about him—and other people like him—as the focus group continued.

“No matter how the conversation started, whether they believed in climate change or not, the discussion always, eventually, turned to energy solutions,” she told me. “And when it did, it turned out that this guy drove a hybrid car and had changed all his lightbulbs out to CFLs.”

Read the rest at BeforeLightsOut.com. Just scroll down the page and you'll see the link.

Buy Goliath on Amazon

How can my two weeks of guest boinging be over already? I was just starting to get my blog on, and now it's time to bail. Thanks to Rob, and big big thanks to Xeni. I'll drop one last excerpt of the book on my way out the door. The Year Before The Flood replays the last year the city of New Orleans was whole, 2004-05. As such, it's about the way time passes in the city. (My previous book, The World that Made New Orleans, was about the unique space of the "Crescent City"; constrained from expanding by the swamp, New Orleans was dense and urban from early on.)

The party schedule gets intense. I write elsewhere in the book that New Orleans is "ruled by the year-long cyclical rhythm of festivals, saints' days, parties, and holidays. To relax in between, and to pay for everything, you have a job. It's a relief to go back to work after a big weekend." There's always another Sunday parade coming up. The whole year is modulated by the crescendo toward Mardi Gras, but then come what I heard a WWOZ announcer refer to as "the high holy days between Mardi Gras and Jazzfest."

It's something of a cliché that the past is always present in New Orleans. I used to think that was an overly romantic notion, even as I could feel its truth. Then I learned that cultural historians have a word for this: chronotope, which refers (among other things) to a community's concept of time.

Late in my writing project, I read a book that unexpectedly helped me get a handle on how time passes in New Orleans: Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharoahs, a cultural history that for the first time made the contours of ancient Egyptian history comprehensible to me. Come to think of it, it might not seem so surprising that Nilotic civilization should shed light on the Mississippi delta if you've been through Mardi Gras.

After reading Jan Assmann, I starting thinking about New Orleans in terms of cyclical time versus linear time. By that I mean: linear time is the time history takes place in, that progression of numbered years that's about to get to 2010. It's the scale of Christian philosophy, where there is a beginning, middle, and end. But cyclical time, in which each year is the same as the last, is pagan, and local; it's the time myth takes place in. And here's where I'm going with this: cyclical time relies on an elaborate schedule of festivals associated with the calendar to reinforce its timelessness, creating a rhythm that propels the year.

This excerpt from The Year Before The Flood samples the mythical year-wheel of New Orleans at the point known as the Ponderosa Stomp. (Note: in 2005 the Stomp took place in April, between the two weekends of Jazzfest, but in 2010 it will break out of its spot in the calendar rhythm, moving to an as-yet-undetermined date in the fall. Another note: the Mid-City Rock 'n' Bowl, seen above as it was in April 2005, re-opened after the flood but subsequently moved to a new location at 3000 Carrollton.)

Thanking you kindly, I remain Postmamboistically yours. We now join the 2005 Ponderosa Stomp in progress...

The fourth annual Ponderosa Stomp took place at the Mid-City Rock 'n' Bowl, a two-level bowling alley that shared a strip mall with Family Beauty Supply and Thrift City in a low-lying part of town. With a bandstand on the second floor, as well as a short-order kitchen and a bar, you could bowl, dance zydeco, eat an alligator po'boy, and drink beer all at the same time. In an overwhelming two nights going from five p.m. to five a.m. each night, on the main upstairs stage and another simultaneous one downstairs, the Ponderosa Stomp presented an astonishing array of still-surviving sexagenarian-or-more legends of the regional first-generation rock 'n' roll scene, including swamp-pop, old-school New Orleans R & B, and rockabilly, with no small presence from Memphis.

The downstairs area boasted perhaps the densest nicotine cloud I had encountered in New Orleans. The music was so much fun that I tried to ignore the air quality, but I wound up taking frequent oxygen breaks to join the considerable party of fellow airheads accumulating out in the Rock 'n' Bowl's spacious parking lot. Which is how I found myself talking to a tall, skinny, bearded guy who turned out to be Paul Cebar, the Milwaukee singer-songwriter. He comes down every year for Jazzfest. We hit it off immediately.

We checked out Dale Hawkins (Mr. "Suzie Q") from Shreveport. There was Ace Cannon--how great is that?--down from Memphis with a darn good little combo. The surviving members of Elvis's band--Scotty Moore on guitar and D. J. Fontana on drums--played the early Elvis repertoire, with Memphian Billy Swan ("I Can Help") filling in on the Elvis parts, though it's understood with a thankless task like this that the voice is only a cipher. The real point was to watch Scotty Moore, the guy who played the guitar part on "Blue Moon of Kentucky," cut #1 on A Date with Elvis, playing the part live in front of me. Behind him, D. J. Fontana showed you exactly what kind of drummer Elvis had: a solid one.

Up till now, the music hadn't even been very loud. But that changed. Cebar and I were hanging out downstairs when Link Wraycame on. One of the most influential electric guitarists for the later loud-rock generation, Link Wray and his Ray Men had an all-time hit in 1958 with the crunchy, distorted, proto-psychedelic guitar instrumental "Rumble." Wray was about to turn seventy-six, making him the oldest bona fide punk I'd ever seen. He wore a leather jacket, looking like a '50s juvenile delinquent turned denture-wearer. His only facial expression was a scowl. Part Shawnee Indian, he'd been living in Denmark for twenty years or so, and he sounded for all the world like a loud European art-guitar band, though of course the influence ran the other way round. Most people tune their guitars silently now with electronic tuners, right? Not Link Wray. He had his much younger second guitarist--his son, it turned out--play through the amp while he tuned out loud to it, with the amp wide open. He didn't even get it close to in tune before he kicked off the first number, which was a timbral excursion into the harmonics generated by thick-gauge metal strings at high volumes.

"He's like your ornery grandpa who won't turn his amp down!" laughed Cebar, who by now I seemed to have known for years. Despite rocking out, Wray brought his domestic drama onto the stage with him in the form of his chunky, longhaired Danish wife, Olive, who stood onstage with him, bizarrely holding a plastic tambourine in the air and whacking it amusically against the heel of her hand the entire time, like something out of This Is Spinal Tap.She had been doing this since 1997, when she debuted as a tambourine nonplayer alongside Wray on The Conan O'Brien Show.

I'd known "Rumble" forever, but I'd never seen Link Wray play before. Nor would I again; he died a little more than six months later. He went out distorting.

I hadn't had this much fun in . . . well, maybe since Mardi Gras. Upstairs in front of the bowling lanes, I saw Classie Ballou, from Baton Rouge and now living in Waco, playing a Gibson SG just like mine. I'd never heard of him before, but I recognized the riff he played when he started doing "Just a Little Bit," It was the guitar lick the Beatles used at the beginning of "Birthday." Classie Ballou was the guy who came up with that lick, playing with Rosco Gordon on "Just a Little Bit." Herbert Hardesty, best known as Fats Domino's longtime sax man, was onstage with him.

And up came Rudy Ray Moore, better known as Dolemite, the dirty-talking comedian from party records and, later, blaxploitation films. He came onstage looking like a pimp from one of the lesser southern cities, resplendent in rhinestone-studded shades and ceremonially encrusted walking cane.

( Photo: Dolemite at the Stomp )

"I ain't gonna get no pussy tonight!" he shouted. Now there's an icebreaker for you.

"You know why I ain't gonna get no pussy tonight?" Pause. He pointed out a guy in the front of the audience. "Cause you done ate it all up!"

He sold Dolemite souvenir walking canes from the stage for ten bucks. You know I bought one, handed the money right up to the man onstage. It's been a personal power object for me ever since.

And then it was time for the surprise hit of the evening.

"How do you perform solo when all your hits are based on overdubbing your own voice in octaves?" asked Cebar, still laughing, as I cracked open another beer. Brenton Wood went for the higher octave when he came out to sing "The Oogum Boogum Song," "Gimme Little Sign," and "Baby, You Got It."

I had always thought of Brenton Wood as being from Los Angeles, but no, it turns out he was born in Shreveport before moving to Compton as a child--the LA-to-L.A. migration that so many New Orleanians made during the years of white supremacy. He was great, plus he played his album tracks. Brenton Wood's hits were on an independent label called Double Shot, which had only one other hit group, and a one-hit wonder at that: Count Five. Presumably because the label owned the publishing, Brenton Wood recorded a version of the Count Five's hit.

Which is how it happened that a sixty-three-year-old black man from Shreveport in a brown pinstriped zoot suit came to sing "Psychotic Reaction" in a bowling alley in New Orleans, complete with double-time freakout break. On guitar was Alex Chilton, a Memphian living in New Orleans, whose brush with permanent-rotation supermarket immortality was singing "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" with the Boxtops), and on keyboards was Mr. Quintron. Cebar and I were howling. When Brenton Wood finally left the stage, we shouted, "Do 'Oogum Boogum' again! Do 'Oogum Boogum' again!" in unison at the top of our voices.

He did "Oogum Boogum" again.

I was getting hoarse. My bronchs were on fire from the intense tobacco haze. Lady Bo was starting up--Bo Diddley's female second guitarist for many years, she was the first woman to be regularly hired as a musician by a major rock 'n' roll group--but I was done.

I pointed the Saturn back to the Irish Channel and wheezed my way home.

I would have to miss Blowfly.

Excerpt from The Year Before The Flood

To hear me reading this excerpt (in a shout, as I tend to do in clubs) at Joe's Pub, click here. Oh, and if you want to get on my e-mail list, send an e-mail saying "subscribe" to ned.sublette at gmail.com

Fully conscious and quite annoyed, Idelber was lying on the sidewalk on Magazine Street, bleeding from a long window-glass cut on the side of his head. It looked dramatic, but he wasn't badly hurt.

You can easily get creamed driving across Magazine. You have to creep way out into the street until you can see around the parked cars. Then you have to look both ways and go! In the time it took Idelber to look left and right and turn onto the street, an SUV came barrelling down the road from behind the phalanx of parked cars, outside his field of vision. It was going at least fifty when it made impact over Idelber's left front tire. Had he started out from the intersection a half-second earlier, he would probably have been dead.

As I got there, Idelber was being strapped onto a stretcher, and was asking them not to immobilize his head until he could have a cigarette. He had asked bystanders to come tell us about the accident not because he needed help but because he was concerned we'd think he was a jerk for pulling a no-show at dinner. I went through his glove compartment and scooped up all his insurance and personal info and jammed it into a bag. I called Chris, who raced over. The police said that since Idelber had a head injury he had to go to [cue ominous music] . . .

Charity Hospital! [Sound of screams in the background.]

Founded in 1736 (though not at the same location) with a bequest of ten thousand francs from a French sailor, Charity was the oldest continuously operating hospital in the United States. In 2004, Charity was the only place a lot of people in New Orleans could go for medical attention, and it was famous for its combat-hardened medical staff. It got the head wounds and the Saturday night gang-war casualties. A couple of years before, there had been a gunfight in the emergency room.

Chris went in the ambulance while I stayed with Idelber's car until it was towed. About an hour later, they called to say they were bailing from Charity, and they'd be waiting outside for me to pick them up. No one at Charity had looked at Idelber, who was perfectly able to walk and had had it with waiting around in what he called, possibly being hyperbolic, the hip-hop version of Dante's Inferno. As Idelber waited, someone came in with an eye torn out. Then someone arrived who'd been shot in the stomach, and then someone who'd been shot in the leg. But the one that sent Idelber out of there was the man who came running in, covered in blood, holding his detached penis in his hand and shouting, "My woman just chopped it off!"

Idelber was basically fine, though his head needed stitching up. We went to another emergency room, Touro. I sent Chris home and waited it out under the fluorescent glare in the orange plastic bucket seats while Idelber kept slipping out to smoke cigarettes, his head still bleeding somewhat.

Most of the people in the waiting room at Touro seemed to be there for emergency liposuction. They looked like eyes and mouths set in blobs of fat. I wasn't sure which ones were patients and which ones were waiting, though I figured the enormous teenage girl who went out and came back with a bucket of fried chicken was not a patient. Yet.

Idelber and I would have had plenty of time to go out for fried chicken. Since he wasn't bleeding to death, it took a couple of hours for the doctor at Touro to see him. When he did, he took a quick look and gave Idelber the choice of having the wound closed up with stitches or staples. But, he pointed out, the injection of anesthetic along such a long cut before the stitching would be about as painful as the staples. With the staples, no anesthetic, but it's quick.

"If it were me?" he said, "I'd choose the staples."

He was pretty much telling Idelber which to choose. Well, OK, said Idelber without realizing that what the doctor was really saying was that staples hurt like a motherfucker, but they were quicker and easier for him to do.

I had never seen this procedure. I thought, staples, well, that's some kind of technical term. No, the guy pulled out a stapler. Not a puny little office stapler, either. A big one.

If you are ever given this choice, don't choose the staples.