The problem was not that I could not do the job, because I could; it was sophomorically easy- it was that I was involved at the time with a rather strange woman called Alice, who had an agenda as complex as the thirteen-chambered bio-valve heart system of a Venutian meta-snail, but also, in her eyes as important. Important because, and a lot of people don't know this, and if Allen my best friend since college who now runs the Executive Branch Resource Team on Extra-Terrestial Protein Outsourcing finds out I told anyone this he would be forced, by royal edict of Pope Constant XI of Nebraska, Director by the Will of the People of the Executive Branch, to kill me, most of the three thousand macrograms of Approved Source Protein in the Army Personnel's Weekly Mess Supplements are supplied by the eighth chamber of said meta-snail's heart, owing to a unique peptide configuration in that particular chamber which alientologists suspect has something to do with latent peptides in the Venutian atmosphere, even though by Constant XI's own edict alien protein was strictly forbidden in the Mess Supplements of Army Personnel, which is why Allen was supposed to have killed me after he told me, but, in fact, did not, owing to his being very drunk when he told me and not remembering it the next day, although he would remember it or at least realize it if he found out I told anyone else.

And since Alice had an agenda and I had a hard-on I was required to attack the task of sublimating sex into the climax of V in a manner conducive to Alice's said agenda, which was, as I said, as complex as it was important. And now for the complex part- except that even Alice herself did not fully understand her own agenda, it being contrived, she said, with an honest faith in true mysticism which in this century has nothing to do with the immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality of God, nor the belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience, but instead with an understanding of the holistic gestalt of universeness when juxtaposed with the neo-radical sense of chaos as an intelligence determiner- as opposed to an intelligencia determiner, which is what Alice's mysticism was wholly opposed to in the first place. And since Alice was so intuitive and intelligent the only way she could maintain the necessary mystery of her mysticism was to log her agenda in utterly incomprehensible complication and confusion- and that's where I came in, apparently, although to be honest, I just like to have sex with her.

So as I was saying, her agenda at the time dictated that, in fact, I was not to take my obvious influence over the minds of children in this country between the ages of 3 and 22 and use it at once to elevate their desire to buy loads and loads of Toy Story merchandise at the same time as their prurient sensibilities, but instead use it to convince them of their chaotic intelligence determiners, something that could only be achieved if this movie were to have, in fact, absolutely no subliminal messages whatsoever, a facet of movieness that has not existed since Ed Wood's brilliant use of the camera. For only then would they be able to form their own opinions about, say, sex and toys, Alice insisted.

And it was not merely a question of loyalty or choice, which is to say, I was not merely being called upon to dupe Charles; I was being called upon to do exactly the following- put into the technical computer wizardry of the nerf-ball fight between Plato and Cathy with the use of shadows and odd shaped balls a suggestion of sex that not only would only Charles and no one else see, but to do so in a way that what Chaz saw would make him so sure he saw it that he would be able to convince our producers that it was there even though it wasn't and they would be completely unable to see it themselves.

For I have never been one to solve problems the easy way, indeed, except for sex with Alice, no urge of mine could ever have been called simple. Drugs would have worked on Charles, or a hypnotic suggestion- he was in therapy for an incident involving three hundred pounds of Spam and Rotweiler named Pigeon somewhere in Costa Rica, and it would have been the work of five minutes to get his therapist into such a sexual frenzy that she would have done anything for me, including chew of her own foot, much less plant a hypnotic suggestion in poor Chuck's feeble brain that not only was Toy Story V: Plato's Revenge one of the most subliminally fuck-happy films since The Santa Clause (watch it a few times and you'll see what I mean) but that it was his imperative duty to God to convince his producers of the same, even if it meant using lethal force or their own well-timed hypnotic suggestions. She'd had a crush on me ever since Charles invited her to the annual studio Halloween party, me dressed as a Saharan Lumberjack and she as the letter R, where we became enamored of one another in the gels room and instead of going all the way I just sat there on the floor making jokes about the shapes of celebrity vulvas. Again, it was part of Alice's agenda and I didn't ask questions I just did what I was told, and if you ever saw Alice without her shirt on you'd chew off your own foot, too, if ordered to do so, not to mention whip Chuck's R-costumed therapist into a sexual frenzy by refusing her naked sweaty sex at the same time as making wisecracks about famous labia.

No, I had to solve the problem of making Chuck think that V was full of sex in my own way, a way that no one would have thought of, not even Alice, and she is a genius, and so what I did was nothing more than this- I took old issues of Penthouse magazine and removed the naughty pictures, I careful cut from the pictures all the naughty bits, such that the models looked like they were wearing underwear made out of the fuschia plant on Chuck's desk, or underwear made out of the upper right edge of the water cooler, or made out of whatever happened to be behind wherever I hung the pictures, and in this way convinced Chaz with his own head that what he saw as he edited and re-edited V in his little room was those missing bits and pieces of model.

And it worked like a charm. Apparently his wife, a diminutive Laotian woman named Stacy, was able to begin demanding more and more humiliating forms of housework for Charles to perform, so often and wantonly did he want to have sex. So convinced was Chaz that he convinced the producers so much so that seven of them were arrested in Cambodia for "Lewd Acts With Toy Story Merchandise", an act that was specifically banned by Pope Constant IX seven years ago because of a small cult's nouveau political power and their desire to demean Western culture by using what they thought were it's iconized heroes as base servants of smut. They were wrong about the icons, of course, and they really, it turned out, didn't have enough political power to threaten IX anyway, but he was a paranoid and the fact that the law was still around by the time the Cambodia Seven were caught is as a much a coincidence as is the fact that they were producers for V in the first place.

Which is where I come back in, because, on a tip, my friend Allen happened to be investigating one of my co-workers for protein fraud when he espied the naughty nudes in Chuck's office, and when he reported it as his wont to a fellow agency in Executive Branch their team came in like gangbusters, a week too late, such that the only connection they had in the otherwise now emptied office of Charles to the wrongdoings reported by Allen was the left over staples from the centerfolds that had fallen out. DNA tests followed, were linked to me since I had handled the mags in the first place, and I was duly placed under house arrest for tampering with the aesthetic of pornography for non-prurient interests, a law still on the books because XI believes very strongly in it, and probably will until the day his Lead Courtesan loses her grip on him and he realizes that sex isn't about power and it's not his abilities in the mattress olympics to which he owes the dedication of the People, sometimes sex is just about a boink every now and again, to relieve one of stress, for example.

Allen has no idea his testimony has landed me here in house arrest and neither does Chuck know where I am because I was paid for my consultation on the day he abandoned his office for a bigger room on the top floor of the studio owing to the unmitigated success of Toy Story V: Plato's Revenge. But Alice knows. And she visits me every day. And if this keeps up I may have to get a prosthetic willy to replace this used up one.