the man who wasn't there

Robert Downey Jr. has made the leap from tortured rebel to leading man.

So why does he feel he's "still not human"?

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AT A RESTAURANT CALLED CRAFT, IN LOS ANGELES, NEAR the new CAA building,
outside, under sunlight, not on a couch but on the warm, warm ground,
Robert Downey Jr. lights a cigarette, takes a sip of his double
espresso, listens politely to a waitress extolling the virtues of the
halibut, orders the halibut on her recommendation, regards her through
the dark bubble of teardrop shades, remembers then what his first
thought of the day was. ("Obligation is the mother of deformity")and
says to her, "Look, I don't want to be an asshole here, but I've had a
change of heart on the halibut. I'm now going Scottish salmon
well-done." After that, breathing easier, he goes on talking, almost to
himself as much as to anyone else present.

"I'm between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and
the transition can be tricky," he says, shifting and smoking. "It used
to be, I'd drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, 'Less Than
Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!' Now it's, 'Iron Man!' It's not an algorithm
anymore. It's a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it's the
beginning of something. But right now, it's still a void, and we tend to
think of the void. as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. in fact
it's a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for
repairs -- close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to
work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing
that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if
there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything
that's led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn't
work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much
like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue."

Downey tugs on the leaf-green sweater knotted around his neck and
rearranges himself on the ground. His words hang in the air,
atmospherically. He's got one crazy, free-floating, head-spinning way of
expressing himself, and though he could say more, explain more, he
doesn't. He's already moved on to some other rabbit hole and can't be
brought back. That's just how his mind is. Plus he knows that we know
all we need to know in order to fill in most of the blanks. It's like
this. At 43, he's a witty, charming, fun-loving,
mixed-metaphorically-minded, entirely off-slant kind of guy who got his
start in mid-Eighties teen comedies like Weird Science and Back to
School, spent a year on Saturday Night Live during its worst season
ever, received his best early notices playing a doomed drug addict in
Less Than Zero and then hit the Oscar-nominated big time with Chaplin,
in 1992. For about 20 years, he was also a Hollywood profligate of the
first water, a thoroughly doped-up Absolut-loving wastrel. And when
voids loomed, whirl was king: He'd put the pedal to the metal, stopping
only to get arrested while driving naked in his Porsche (1996); or to
pass out in a stranger's house, in a child's bed, and wake up with
medics staring at him (1996); or to spend some heel-cooling time in jail
(various). About five years ago, though, he decided to clean himself up,
and so far, so good. Since then, he's continued to make movies, most of
them great but small (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; Good Night, and Good Luck;
Zodiac) until Iron Man hit theaters earlier this year. And Iron Man has
killed. Critics loved it, audiences loved it, ticket sales have shot
past the half-billion-dollar mark, and Suddenly Downey is sitting pretty
once again.

"Right now, my BlackBerry is literally overloading and crashing, and the
phone is never not ringing," he says, hauling the damn thing out and
turning it off. "It's crazy. Like a Super Bowl. Like a landslide. Like
nothing I've ever experienced."

Which really is supergreat for him. His per-movie quote has gone into
the multimillions. He's moving into a different, bigger, better house.
He's driving a shiny black Bentley, a gift from Marvel Studios, which
made Iron Man. He's been resplendent on Leno, Letterman and The View;
stellar pretending to be one of Gladys Knight's Pips on American Idol
(although he hated it: "dreadful, awful, depressing, and disquieting to
my integrity"); and the only debonair presenter to take the stage at
this year's MTV Movie Awards. All good stuff. But there is the void to
think about, and this particular void may last longer than most, because
he's got two more movies coming out soon, and both of them are likely to
be big.

In November, it's The Soloist, costarring Jamie Foxx, a true story about
a journalist (Downey) who befriends a homeless schizophrenic violinist.
But first, there's the riotous, topsy-turvy movie-within-a-movie world
of Tropic Thunder, in which he stars alongside Jack Black and Ben
Stiller (who also directed). In this one, Downey plays a wacked-out
Australian Method actor named Kirk Lazarus who tints his skin black to
play an African-American soldier in a big-budget Vietnam War movie.
Downey does it just right -- no offense meant, no offense taken -- and
he pretty much steals the show. It was, however, a part he nearly turned
down. He'd just finished shooting Iron Man, and Tropic Thunder was due
to start filming in about two weeks. "A lot of people do big movies back
to back," Stiller said, trying to convince him. "Yeah," said Downey,
"but I'm not a lot of people. I've got to be careful here." Once on
board, though, he apparently went all out. "We all have our demons and
stuff," says Stiller, "but I've never seen anybody get lit for the
acting moment as much as him. He was in a crazy zone and totally
committed to his character." So committed that he occasionally stayed
black even when black wasn't called for. "We'd be watching a monitor,
and he just kept going on about Tm going to get me some barbecued ribs
and chicken,' and I'm like, 'No, man, you can't do that. You gotta stop
that, for real,'" says Brandon T. Jackson, one of the only black actors
on the project. "But he just kept on, and then when we were doing the
scene where I get pissed off at him, all that stuff just came out there,
and magic happened. I don't know, but I think in his genius he was just
trying to egg me on."

Played for big, broad laughs, what the movie is really about is
identity. At one point, Downey's Lazarus says, "I know who I am. I'm a
dude playing a dude disguised as another dude," which is a perfect line
for Downey to have to deliver, because in a sense, his own identity, and
who he really is, has long been up for grabs. Only two years ago, he
looked at himself and his situation this way: "I'm not an actor. It's my
day job, and I learned how to hustle it really good. [But] it's a
hustle. I got some fuckin' juice, man, I got some tools.… I learned some
shit. I learned shit on the streets. It was providence, dude, and
proximity to where I could get my grift on.… This is fuckin' gypsy
heaven, dude -- there's a million suckers out here."

What a great big bag of shiftless hooey.

"When did I say that?" he says today, picking through his Scottish
salmon. "Was it more than three weeks ago? Puh-leaze! That guy is
someone who is a foulmouthed liar who thinks he sounds really hip. As
far as faking and a hustle, how could I bring I-want-to-say depth to my
work if that's all it was? How could I do that?"

The answer is, it all depends on how good your grift is when you get it
on. But let's give the guy a break and take him at his word. It's the
summer of Downey, after many long, hard, cold winters, and he deserves
it. Like his old friend Mel Gibson says, "He's ebullient and mercurial,
up and down like a yo-yo, but he's grown, and he's going to move forward
and conquer the world. And you know what? He's a good guy. That's what
he is. He always is, always has been, always will be, no matter what
kind of hot water he gets in."

It's time for him to head home now. He's got to get back to Susan, his
wife of three years, and Indio, 14, his son from his previous marriage.
Before leaving, however, he's got one or two things left to say. "I'm
such a work in progress at the moment, it's crazy, and life wants me on
edge, I swear to you," he says. "But as long as I don't forget the past,
I'm cool. One must always be mindful, just like you might forget that
old girlfriend who tried to slit your throat, but she's really still
hot. If you remember the stitches more than you remember the pussy,
you're going to be just fine."

Then he closes his eyes and is silent for a brief moment, lizardlike,
steady right where he is, hot, rock, sun, fly and tongue.

HAS EVER A HOLLYWOOD creature been so far down -- down as in a
year-in-a-state-pen down, fending off killer cellmates and guards
bearing scripts about unicorns -- and risen so far in such a short time
as Downey? It's a miracle, is what it is, worthy of major signage the
entire length of Sunset Boulevard. On the other hand, the whole
redemption thing is pretty much toast at this point. It's been trotted
out on Downey's behalf nearly every other year since his drug-bedeviled
career first took off. In 2000, for example, he resurfaced after one of
his more major debacles and almost immediately was signed to the cast of
Ally McBeal, where he boosted the show's ratings, received rave reviews
and was positioned by almost everyone as a man redeemed, whereupon the
cops collared him once again, and all the redemption hoopla got filed
away for next time. And so it's gone. But one of the great, remarkable
things about Downey is that you can, in fact, always count on him for a
next time. It's like some grand divinity has awarded him 100 shots in a
row at salvation. He once said, "What's amazing is, no matter how much I
fuck up, it keeps straightening itself out." And he's right. That's
exactly how it's worked. And you know what another amazing thing is?
Unlike today's crop of wayward movie stars, he's never once worn out his
welcome. It's always good to have him back. It's always good to see him.
He projects such good-natured, easygoing bonhomie that to greet one of
his returns with anything less than wide-open arms would seem cruel
beyond measure. And so, once again, he is in our midst, riding high and
fighting the good fight to stay at least a few steps ahead of the void.

It's morning in L.A. now, clear skies, no rain, some wind, little heat.
At a California-modern home in the Brentwood section, toward the
terminus of a cul-de-sac road, up in one of the bedrooms, Downey has
risen off his Tempur-Pedic pillows, sleepy-headed, naked and free,
wobbled into the bathroom, thrust a toothbrush into his mouth and taken
a leak. Downstairs, he whips up breakfast for the boy, Indio, whom he
sometimes calls "Little Lord Fauntleroy" and sometimes, with great
fondness, "little prick," as in, "My entire life is a love note to this
little prick!" He dabbles an exact amount of maple syrup into a bowl for
the boy, pours Kashi on top, prepares a cup of tea for him too,
lightened with nonfat half-and-half, sweetened with a squirt of agave.
He goes to the boy's bedroom, where the boy still sleeps. He beseeches
him, "Please let your feet hit the floor." They do. Then they don't.
Downey can feel the heat rising in his cheeks and leaves before it can
get the better of him. Downstairs again, he ponders the strawberry
jelly. Why is it here? He hates strawberry jelly. Why is he paying for
something he hates? Here's why. His wife and kid love it. And then,
halfway through the traditional browning of the kid's spelt toast, he
stops what he's doing and decides to look out for number one. He makes
himself a triple shot for a nice caffeine jolt and settles down at a
table to read the morning paper.

Several hours later, he will describe how he's able to make this
transition: "I behaviorally model someone who's having a morning that
may, in some way, loosely be centered around their own desires."

It's a curious way of putting it, and it makes you wonder how much of
what else he does might be derived from someone other than himself. It
raises the question: If Downey isn't himself much of the time, then who
is he? It's a slippery thing, and Downey is a slippery guy. He'll say,
"I'm really, really rigorously honest," and then two beats later say,
"Honestly, I can tell you that for the most part I don't lie." For the
most part, it's hard to know what to make of that, except that he can be
a little squishy, a little neither here nor there, a little
semipermeable, which maybe is an actor thing, a drug-user thing or a
jailhouse thing. But if you ever want to get to the heart of a guy like
Downey, it bears watching, the full extent of it and what it might mean.

Now he's out the front door and racing with the kid to school, a little
pissed off that he's already 15 minutes behind schedule, then racing
back home again for his daily Wing Chun kung-fu lesson. In the old days,
he was more likely to steal out the front door solo, cop, return, do the
whatever and say hi to whomever, with no one the wiser, all in 45
minutes flat. These days, that's 45 minutes he doesn't have. His kung-fu
teacher puts him through a strict and rather brutal regimen that leaves
him panting. After that, he takes his daily shower, dresses again and
heads for his Bentley to go see his agent at the CAA building.

He's not allowed to smoke during the meeting at CAA, so he chews up a
tab of Nicorette and parks it in his cheek, where it remains until the
talk turns to upcoming release dates, new opportunities and strategies,
and the vastly improved size of his salary (current reported asking
price: $12.5 million), at which point he starts chewing furiously and
with great resolve. Once the meeting is over, he drops downstairs and
steps outside to enjoy his first real cigarette of the day. He's tired.
So much is pressing in. The other day, his wife wanted him to go to a
hospital to see friends who just had twins. His first thoughts were
"Hospitals? Virus? Friend? Epidural? Exhausted? Parents? Inundated?
Husband? Tired? You want to what? Leave them alone. Leave me alone. I
don't want to do anything that's numinous to me, nor less than
evocative. I just don't want to do anything." This led to a strenuous
series of negotiations that ended with him happily holding a newborn
baby named Madeline in his arms. His wife knows how to deal with him.
She's a vice president at Joel Silver's production company and no soft case.

One evening at a party, for example, he was supposed to be living it up;
instead, he was studying a message on his BlackBerry with a frown. "It
just never ends," he said to Susan. "Basically, what it says I've got
here is a whole new invented Tropic Thunder press day." He started
reciting the lineup but she cut him short. "Let me tell you," she said,
putting her hands on the table. "You can complain all you want, but it's
Ben, and you're going to do it. So if it feels good to build up a lot of
resentment and rage, fine. But with all due respect, it's not that big a
deal. You're not performing surgery during each of those events. You're
standing there fucking looking hot." He sighed and rested his head on
her hands, hibernating there for a good five minutes.

"I'm still not human, and this past year has been part of a humanization
process," he says in the shadow of the CAA building. "My fear of things.
That there's nothing to be scared of anymore, like bugs and viruses, all
that tripped-out neurotic shit that isn't the way I operate anymore, but
that's a twitching phantom limb. I differentiate myself by my
eccentricities, and when I am not being heard, I will act out. But I'm
changing, even though my conscious mind is oftentimes resisting, and
then it becomes a matter of just how much do I want to resist?"

ACTUALLY, DOWNEY'S got more than a few of those twitching phantom limbs.
For the most part, he's stopped telling stones about his time in jail,
but at parties, he sometimes can't help himself, because "jailhouse
stories really bring the house down." He knows that's not good -- "It's
the sociopath using his trauma as currency" -- and has vowed to stop.
The same for how he behaves on TV talk shows, out of habit always
coughing up some offhand lilting reference to his traumatic past, even
when the host doesn't, just to get a few yuks. "Bad form,
self-deprecation, another character flaw," he says. He also says that
he's looking forward to a time when his past becomes parenthetical and
isn't talked about at all, by anyone. He says he sees such a day coming.
He says, hopefully, "There seems to be a bit of erasure happening."

No doubt such a thing would be nice for Downey, his teenage son and his
wife, but for the rest of us, it'd be a real shame. Part of the miracle
of Downey is his past. Without that back story, much of the drama of the
present is lost. Take the recent but already legendary tale of how
Marvel initially didn't think Downey would work in Iron Man. In fact,
according to director Jon Favreau, it went much deeper than that: He was
told by Marvel that "under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him
for any price," after which Favreau had to call Downey and say, "Look, I
fought, I tried, I did what I could, it's a pity and a shame, but
unfortunately it's going to stop here." Downey said, "With your
permission, I'm going to hold out hope" -- a statement of faith that
inspired Favreau to redouble his efforts and eventually led to the
screen test that got Downey the job.

Faith rewarded: It's a beautiful thing, almost enough to make you weep.
At the same time, though, it's a little cornball and a little too
mythoheroic Hollywood pat. It's also the kind of thing that makes Downey
extremely uncomfortable, mainly because he knows that he hasn't, in
fact, been reborn yet. It may happen. But at the moment, he's still
somewhere in the birth canal, drifting along, amazed at what's going on
inside and around him, and sometimes quite alarmed.

"I have to say that when things turned for me, there was an inclination,
an impulse for revenge that was fucking palpable," he says. "Palpable.
Though it had nothing to do with any particular person, it was really
kind of alarming. I hadn't been aware of having a vindictive bone in my
body. But once all that water of being hugely self-destructive went
under the bridge, to see that what's left is this fucking dark shit,
this capacity for random revenge, well, it's just so weird. It's weird,
dude. It's weird. Life is weird," he says, correctly, of course, but for
him maybe more than for most.

FORGET THAT HIS DAD INTRODUCED him to pot as an eight-year-old kid. It
was the early Seventies; they were living in Greenwich Village; the
father, Robert Sr., was an avant-garde filmmaker who made the seminal
underground film Putney Swope; the mother, Elsie, an actress; and that's
how it goes, the pieces to be picked up later, the dad full of regrets,
which is how that goes too. But life among the Downeys was passingly odd
anyway. At age five, Junior went to work for Senior in a movie called
Pound, playing a puppy who is on the verge of being gassed. His big
line, which he spoke with an actorly lisp: "Have any hair on your
balls?" Two years later, in a religious parable called Greaser's Palace,
he had his throat cut by God and then watched as God repeatedly struck
down his mom, who was also in the cast. "It could have been too much to
expose him to," the father mused a while back. "It was traumatic for him
to see that kind of violence. He didn't comprehend that everybody comes
back again."

At home, the father would stir his iced tea with an upside-down hammer
and at the dinner table pretend to read the mind of the family terrier,
Sturgess, to great uproarious effect.

They never stayed in the same place long. They moved from Manhattan, to
Queens, to Manhattan again, to London, to Manhattan again, to New
Mexico, to Los Angeles, to Connecticut and to Woodstock, New York, with
the parents separating when he was 13. In all that time, his mom has
said, she never once saw her son happy: "I've never seen Bobby happy --
really, really happy.… I've never seen him enjoy life. He enjoys lives."

The mom is German and Scottish. The dad is Jewish and Irish. The dad was
born with the last name Elias but changed it to Downey to get into the
Army when he was underage. The son once toyed with the idea of going
mono-name. He would move to China and call himself Elias, only that. "I
thought that it would be such a shocking, significant and incendiary
rearrangement that it would also rearrange my fragmented psyche," he
says. Instead, he stuck with Robert Downey, despite the last name being
a kind of twitching fictional phantom of an identifier.

One of his directors once said, "Even Robert doesn't know who he's going
to be from one moment to another." One of his co-stars once said, "He's
an ever-changing thing." And Downey himself once said, "I was a sober
nonsmoking vegetarian once, and I was never so miserable in my whole
life. There was nothing, nowhere to go.… No blood? No smoke? No
sniffy-sniffy? Why go on?" And he also once said, "I'm not fucked up or
anything like that."

In 1981, when he first lived in Los Angeles, the other kids in his high
school figured that since he came from New York, he had to be a tough
guy. Aiming to please, Downey began cruising Santa Monica on his bicycle
with a knife tucked into his sock. In his early days as an actor, he
wore spats and ascots. For a while, he wore lacy, frilly things, too,
even during his youthful seven-year courtship of Sarah Jessica Parker,
his first real girlfriend. Once upon a time, he also talked about a
tendency to make out with guys. "A lot of my peer group think I'm an
eccentric bisexual," he said. "That's OK. Being relaxed about sexuality
is something you're born with."

So there's all that and lots more, bits and pieces of stuff, colorful
dots in a colorful pointillism, all in the past, not the present. Surely
it adds up to something. Surely it means something. But if you ask
Downey, he's pretty much at a loss. "I always find it hard to convince
myself that I'm figuring out anything from before," he says. And as to
his so-called bisexuality, he now says that he made it all up, that it's
just one more fiction he went by. "It was manufactured. I didn't have an
identity. I was playing around. I expressed it. I grew up in the Rocky
Horror Picture Show world, where even my butch friends turned out to be
androgynous on Saturday night. I mean, I was altered for 20 years. I got
the ball, and I ran with it. I never said I ran the right way, but what
is the right way when you're looking at an overall season? It got me here."

Again with the squishy and semi-permeable. He's like that a lot. About
his abilities as an actor, he used to say, "There's no one that can act
better than me. There's no one that will go places that I will go."
Today he calls this the bleating of "an egomaniac with an inferiority
complex" but then feels compelled to add, "even if at times it were
true." It's a fun approach to explanation, however, and probably says
more about the heart of Downey than any direct statement ever could. In
a way, he's too evocative, complex and conflicted for direct. It's like
he says about his faux-black Australian actor character in Tropic
Thunder: "And there I am, in kind of a mask, voicing the voice of an
aspect of what I've become, or an aspect of what I could well become, or
an aspect of what I've become and not become aware of yet." In the end,
you have to take him as he is, where he is, and go on from there.

"My identity now?" he goes on from here. He thinks about it for a while.
Then he says, "My identity was written on the wall by ancient and
formidable guides and forces. The best thing I can do is keep my hand
out of it."

AT DUSK, DOWNEY IS ON Sunset, in his Bentley, being driven by his
factotum, a burly tattooed guy named Jimmy, to the Chateau Marmont
hotel, the scene of many a historic Hollywood debauch. Inside, he rents
a room to hang out in before heading to a party on the patio. Standing
by the elevators, he runs into a semicelebrated writer who once did an
exposé-type jailhouse piece on him. The writer is all smiles and
hi-how-ya-doings, with a drink in his hand. The writer says, "Hey, man,
congratulations on everything. Fucking great movie. It's, like, awesome."

They get on the elevator together. The writer wants to know if Downey is
going to be around, maybe they could get together again.

Downey nods. "I want to say I'm happy to see you," he says, which is an
odd way of putting it but OK. "Anyway, yeah, I'm still at the same numbers."

The doors open, and Downey goes to his room, where he says, "I thought
that guy and I were friends, but the story he did on me…" He shakes his
head in dismay. The story detailed Downey's stay as Inmate No. P50522 in
Cell No. 17 of the F-1 building at a California state prison where he
earned eight cents an hour working in the kitchen, slept on a
three-inch-thick mattress and apparently struggled with his sanity. A
bad time. "And now the guy's in here with his 75th fucking screwdriver
of the day," Downey says, scowling, "and I'm like, 'Whatever floor you
can get off on, I'll go back to the lobby, just as long as you're
somewhere else. You've got my numbers, right? You can call me any time.
My number is seven. Goodbye.'"

Downey looks seriously angry, and even he seems momentarily taken aback
by the sarcastic harshness of his words. He hasn't cloaked them in his
usual cascade of far-flung images and leaping non sequiturs. He didn't
have time. His feelings hit him too hard and too fast. He spoke straight
from the heart, nakedly and without adornment, in a way that he rarely
does in public. But he doesn't stay in that place for long. He waves his
hand, smiles and says, "Let's not bring him into this," as if to also
say, "Let's not bring the real me into this, nor any real moments of
doubt, humiliation, fear and betrayal that I may have suffered and that
I'm so easily able to disguise and make amusing with my wit, my charm
and my great actor's skills. Let's leave that stuff out. Let's pretend
it never happened. Let's not even begin to suggest that it has anything
to do with my true identity, my basal self. Let's move on."

And so he does, to sunnier topics. Among other things, he says that when
it comes to underwear, he is in "a bit of a free-ball phase right now,"
and that oddly enough, his early exploits as a chronic masturbator have
ended up serving him well. "I was a compulsive, serial masturbator, but
the funny thing is, looking back on it, it was the best thing I could
have been," he says cheerfully. "I utilized that organ and rode it for
everything it was worth. I couldn't leave that little root alone, and I
still very much enjoy its presence, but it's no longer a motivating
factor for me. Almost always, guys want to get laid. They have a
girlfriend, they want to fuck her friend. I'm not that guy. It's not
like I've ever wanted to tie it off like a wart. Quite the reverse. But
my union with Susan is sacred."

Just then, Susan knocks on the door. She's sandy blond and slender, and
when she leans in to nuzzle Downey, he draws a finger across her cheek.
He looks relieved to see her. They talk about the party downstairs for a
moment, then she steps forward to say a few words about the man next to
her. She says that when they first met, in 2002, on the set of Gothika,
which she was co-producing, she thought he was "just weird. He still is
weird. But he was very weird." Also, if she had to list everything she'd
ever said she didn't want in a guy, "he fit every one of those and
created new categories." So far, so good, however, even though, in bed,
he does like to drift off to the sound of the Science Channel or the
History Channel or Biography or the Discovery Channel, "and then there's
the whole period where it was all Nazis all the time." Laughing, she
says, "He's my best friend, and he drives me crazy. And he talks in his
sleep."

"I do?" says Downey. "What do I say?"

"You're usually threatening somebody."

"Huh," he says, thinking it over.

After she leaves to go downstairs, a bee floats in from somewhere and
begins bouncing off windows and lights.

Downey slurps on his coffee and grabs for another cigarette. He paces
the room, looks outside at the enveloping darkness, sits down, stands
up, sits down, the bee buzzing around. He seems a little antsy, like
maybe the chance encounter with the jailhouse writer and the memories it
dredged up are still working him over. He takes off his shirt and puts
on a nicer one, for the party.

"At heart, I'm a soldier who didn't know how nasty and ongoing the
battle was going to be and lost some people and took some hits, and I
feel like now I've got a Purple Heart, and I'm back," he says finally.
"At the same time, I can sometimes just feel the call of the wild. Life
wants me like a Doberman about to go chase Wesley Snipes into Blade 4. I
know this is the time to be in cranial planning mode. But an archetypal
anxiety out there is calling me to the fucking rocks, and I don't want
to have to be tied to the mast. I've got the rope. I've got the knot.
But what I really should do is fucking go clean the deck or something."

Instead, he hops up suddenly, grabs a plastic bag and starts chasing the
bee. Never at rest, never at home, the bee heads crazily for the
curtains, then for the ceiling, then for a window, then for a wall.
That's where Downey traps it in the bag. He steps outside onto the
balcony and begins shuffling the bag around in the air. Ever so briefly,
he hesitates, peering into the darkness and void. Then he turns around
smiling, with his chest puffed up, triumphant, all doubts and fears
banished and a new certainty in place. "Dude, he made it," he says. "I
gave him a nice inertial push. lie's good. I saw him go. I saw him fly
free." Maybe that's what happened, maybe he made the whole thing up. He
is Downey. But you really do have to hand it to him. He sure played the
moment well.

~~~~~~~~

By Erik Hedegaard