Jerry tried to keep his jaw from dropping. Fail # 28. He stared google-eyed, his gaze moving from the giant mop of blonde-highlighted hair on her head, to her rugged, manly face, her twice-or-more-broken nose, her dead-on Kirk Douglas jawline and down, down oh yes down drawn by inevitability past the v-shaped lines of her half-unzipped blue coverall, over the sweat dappled ripples of pectoral muscle peeking out from the top of her weight-lifter chest, and into the deep shadow of cleavage between Spartacus’ un-nameably gorgeous and impossibly immense breasts, each a perfectly shaped boulder, but perky in a way one does not generally associate with rocks, unless they are formed of purest alabaster, and chiseled by the hand of a God-crazed master sculptor.

A small drop of drool formed at the corner of Jerry’s mouth and hung for two agonizing seconds before dropping to the floor with a tiny splat that, in the sudden silence of the showroom, echoed like a gunshot. Somewhere in the reptilian backwaters of his muddled brain, images flashed: fake lattes and raven hair and milk mustaches and trendy suburban abattoirs, a face, a butt and a job description that shall not be mentioned again until the last Higg’s boson in the universe has flickered out of existence…

“Gah,” Jerry said.

“What’s with the retread?” Spartacus said, her tinny, Valley-Girl voice attenuated by the wet sound of chewing as she obsessively popped a chunk of gum in her Burt’s Bees glossed mouth.

Hands went to hips, hips thrust outward, and a look of growing hostility spread across a face only Nick Nolte’s mother could love. Spartacus sneered, rolled her eyes and hefted a rather large wrench over her right shoulder.

“What? Like, you never seen a pair of decent tits, latte boy?” she asked.

The Dude adjusted his bathrobe and stepped instinctively between the two.

“Jerry’s a bit, er, fragile at the moment,” he said. “You know, he just found out he’s responsible for the end of the world and got kidnapped by disco-dancing aliens and he hasn’t gotten laid in — (to Jerry) how long?”

“Gah,” Jerry said.

“Well, a good long while, and anyway he’s on PCP at the moment so –”

“I’m gonna crack his drooling-ass skull if he don’t quit staring at my freakin TITS!” Spartacus said, raising the wrench.

“OK, everybody relax,” Henry said. “The kid’s tripin’! It’s cool. He’s had a bad day. I can let the Prius go for $25,000.”

The Dude looked at Henry.

“Dude,” the Dude said. “It’s 10 years old.”

“Yeah, and you wanna save the world, right?”

Jerry, waking up a bit from hit trance, pointed at Spartacus and said: “Boobies!”

“That’s it!” Spartacus shouted. She lunged at Jerry and hit him straight across the forehead with the wrench. It made a sound like a bag of wet cement hitting a sidewalk from 100 feet or so. By the time he hit the floor, Jerry was already out of his body, falling down a deep deep well.

Down and down Jerry fell, into the well. There was Timmy, crouched at the bottom in a puddle and waiting for Lassie to come. Before Jerry could say hello he was falling again, then, inexplicably rising. Up, up, out of the well, until he was hovering near the ceiling of the showroom, looking down on his own body and at the cast of unlikely characters crouching now around it.

“Oh crap!” Jerry thought. “I’m dead!”

“No, you’re not,” said a voice. Nasal, wheezy, a thick Brooklyn accent.

Jerry looked around. “Who? What?”

“You can’t see me yet,” the voice said. “Watch. And hold on. This is gonna scare the shit outta yas.”

The scene stopped still, then went into reverse. Jerry stood up, the wrench went back to Spartacus’ shoulder. Faster and faster all the events of the day unwound backward, a film reel spinning the wrong way, accelerating with every turn: sidewalks, disco aliens, cafe carnage, glassy eyed dudes, hot unnameable end-of the-world baristas, and more — the day before and the day before that and the years and decades of Jerry’s life spinning faster and faster out of control. A slurping sound as he reenters his mother’s womb, and by then its so fast he can’t keep up, rising higher until the Earth lies before him spinning and spinning, turning from blue and green to grey and black and showers of asteroids bursting from its surface and finally dissolving to dust, and the sun itself shrinking to a tiny point and all the other stars racing inward to a central nexus so bright he can’t look at it. And then… nothing.

In the beginning there was nothing, then a belch, and in the belch there was a word. Two words, actually.

Irving. Irving Finklebaum. The words echoed in Jerry’s head until he could barely make them out.

“That’s me!” The voice said. Jerry turned and saw a skinny man with a scraggly beard in a yarmulke, white shirt and khaki slacks, a pen protector bristling in his shirt pocket. “I’m your guardian angel!”

Jerry stared. “My guardian angel is a Jewish accountant from Flatbush?” he said.

“Computer geek, actually. Virtual reality. And I don’t write the script,” Irving said. “Listen, I don’t have time. I already said too much (freakin’ editors!) The bleach-blonde with the boobs? She’s a Sleestack!”

“Uh. You mean a a Silge?”

“Whatever. There’s a zipper on top of her head — it’s a suit. Pull the zipper, Jerry!”

“What the —”

But then Irving started to grow, getting taller and taller until Olympus Mons was just a tiny bunion on his left big toe, which had given him nothing but grief since he was ten. In seconds that might have been eons, the mega-Irving filled all of space and time. And as Jerry watched frozen with fear, Irving’s body trembled and shook, and he took a mighty in-breath and Jerry was swept up, a blot of dust sucked into Irving’s cavernous left nostril and carried deep into a titanic sinus, hanging there for a moment.

“Remember the zipper!” Irving, said.

And then, Irving Finklebaum, inhaler of cosmi, sneezed. …