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happen!’ The students stared at him, and he was immediately aware that he was talking too loudly. He cleared his throat and attempted a disarming smile, which came off more like an incongruous grimace. ‘It’s always fun to speculate, of course, but let’s move on.’
    Given his certitude on the subject, Perry was more than a little surprised when Brent Laskey strode into the classroom the next day and dropped a newspaper clipping on his desk.
    ‘I guess that settles it,’ the student said.
    Perry picked up the clipping and read this headline:
    COLOMBIAN DRUG LORD SLAIN BY HELICOPTER
    INVERTED CHOPPER DECAPITATES KINGPIN

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    THE STRANGE THING ABOUT PERRY BUNT
    At the end of the day, Perry gathered up his things and was almost out the door when he noticed the newspaper article. It was still lying on his desk where Brent Laskey had dropped it, transforming his 10 a.m. class into an ordeal. Perry’s students couldn’t seem to get enough of their teacher eating his words, piling it on to mock his discredited belief in believability. Only Amanda Mundo stood back from the feeding frenzy, looking on with an expression of concern that Perry perceived to be pity, which was somehow worse than if she had joined in his humiliation. Now alone in the classroom, he picked up the offending clipping and, after suppressing the urge to hurl it into the trash, tossed it into his briefcase.
    Perry made his way from the college’s main building through the ochre air to the faculty parking lot, where he found his Ford Festiva dusted with a thin layer of ash. It was the penultimate day of August. Perry referred to August as The Apocaugust , the month that saw Los Angeles shrug off its veils of grass lawns, pleasant gardens and swimming pools and reveal its true nature as a searing, Old Testament desert. Blistering dry summer heat gave way to wildfires that filled the San Fernando Valley with acrid smoke, turning sunlight a sickly yellow and giving every resident – man, woman and child – the phlegmy hack of a chain smoker. Accountants received grim portents of their mortality.
    Perry started up the Festiva, used his wipers to clear the ash from his windshield, and wedged himself into rush-hour traffic.
    He was eager to get home and write.
    Teaching isn’t all that bad , he convincingly told himself and the few friends who still returned his calls. Yes, he had lost his girlfriend, his BMW and his home in the Hollywood Hills. Yes, he was more likely to be called by a debt collector than his agent. But Perry Bunt hadn’t given up. In his darkest hours, pausing from reading the terrible screenplays of his students to watch a cockroach scuttle over bits of petrified food on the matted grey carpet, he would tell himself that he would find some way to write his way out of this jam. As he’d told Amanda Mundo in one confessional moment, he continued to believe in the limitless power of his imagination and the transcendent powers of creativity. Despite a run of failure that would’ve made Job switch careers, Perry Bunt was still stalking the Big Idea.
    From his first memory, Perry had carried around the feeling that he was destined for greatness, and no amount of failure would disabuse him of this fanciful notion. After reading the news that aerial artist Philippe Petit had walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center, six-year-old Perry had tied a rope between the chimney and a tree in the garden and started across. He always felt that it was the sound of his mother shrieking his name that had caused him to fall, but it’s doubtful that he would have made it in any case, even with the fishing rod as a balancing pole. He broke his right leg, and fractured his skull. Lying in traction in the hospital, two metal plates in his head, Perry was mystified that his daring feat hadn’t generated any media attention.
    Encouraged by his parents and teachers, Perry gave up the tightrope for the typewriter and became a