Uh-oh, I thought, is he looking at me?

"Why, just last night," he thundered, "down at the RDS"—uh-oh— "they had this big show. I could hear it here, so I can imagine how loud it was there! And people paid 25 pounds a ticket for this . . . stupidity!" The priest bowed his head and said, "And my spies told me there were things in that show that were not fit for children or adults!"

I relate this near-death experience to Suzanne Doyle, who says, "if I'd been there I'd have cried."

Suzanne is sitting next to Edge, to whom she is reading travel orders. She has been assigned to escort Edge to Los Angeles tomorrow for the MTV Awards. "It's you and me," she says, "all the way to L.A."

"That'll be nice," Edge says. Then Suzanne tells him she's got a big stack of work for him to do on the long plane ride. Edge sinks lower in his seat as she ticks off the list ending with, "And by the time you land you're going to know all the lyrics to 'Numb'!" Edge groans. "You're going to have it down!" Edge puts his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

Boy, I sure wouldn't want to be the passenger in front of Edge on that flight! If I had to sit on a plane from Ireland to California listening to an eleven-hour monotone recitation of "Numb" I'd chew off all my nails and start on the fingers of the person next to me.

Bono is eating his dinner with Rushdie at his left and Wim Wenders at his right. When I tell the great German director of Until the End of the World that my book is called he looks at me with such sour discomfort that you'd think I told him I had a pet rat named Wim.

Later on I asked Bono what he thinks the connection is between U2 and Wenders, aside from the fact that the band keeps writing title songs for his movies. Bono says that in the 1980s U2 and Wenders were the two European artists devoted to getting a handle on America. "The monologue in Paris, Texas was a big influence on 'Running to Stand Still,' " Bono says. "You just have to be in my house to see that I share Wim's fascination with angels. His Until the End of the World is ostensibly about perception, vision, how we see. Blindness is the metaphor of that movie, as it is of 'Love Is Blindness.' Wim said a very important thing. He said he had lost his faith in pictures. It's an amazing statement for a

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filmmaker. In the end, Zoo TV is an image bonfire. Zoo TV is finally about the end of the idea of the Image and the wake of the imagination. Wim is plugged into that. That's where he's at and that's where we're at, so we're in synch."

Bono—and in fact all of Zoo TV—has been greatly influenced by Daniel Boorstin's 1962 book The Image, which popularized the notions of people who are famous only for being famous and of "pseudoevents" —phenomena such as press conferences and photo opportunities that exist only to be reported. U2's invasion of Sellafield fits Boorstin's criteria. I ask Bono what exists after the death of the image. He says, "Words. There is a part of me that says, 'I'm thirty-three, maybe I should start writing more, and focusing on words and language. Songs are still great vehicles for words. Granted, my voice is quite limited in comparison to other voices, but I can get to places that those other voices can't get to."

If Bono pursues this course, if he takes U2 in the direction Rushdie and his other literary friends hope he will take, then the whole Zoo TV experience will turn out to have been not the beginning of U2's future but the public funeral of U2's past. Admittedly, not even Lincoln had such a long funeral. But then, Lincoln wasn't as popular as U2.

"Bono is very needy," Rushdie says—and calls it an admirable trait. 'He needs food for his mind all the time. I think that one of the reasons he may be interested in meeting people like me or like Wim Wenders or many of the other artists that are around here is that they give him food. I like that hunger in him because it means that he won't stand still. In a way, looking at the show it seems to me that it takes this kind of idea almost as far as it can go. So now what?"

I grab some lunch while pondering that and take a seat at a table next to Edge, who is sitting closer to Morleigh than you are to this page. That's funny, I think. The two of them have been getting chummier for the last month, but now they're rubbing each other's shoulders and laughing together like young lovers. Maybe Edge won't have to look so far to find out where he goes when he can't keep U2 working anymore.

Superstar Trailer Park

the mtv awards/ switching cerebral hemispheres/ a man in uniform/ "it looks like bono!"/ the pixies problem/ edge in love/ the many different ways to be a rock star

all I have to do is make it across the lobby of the Sunset Marquis hotel, pick up my room key, and get to bed without seeing Edge or anyone else who will make me stay up all night. I am determined to get some sleep. Since Bono's party ended in Dublin in the early hours of Monday morning I have been in London, flown back to New York, dealt with about two dozen crises at my office, and tried to make up for lost time with my kids. Since landing in Los Angeles two hours ago I have driven out to the Bel-Air hotel to pick up credentials for tomorrow's MTV Video Music Awards show from Tom Freston (who threw in an MTV watch "So you show up on time!"), and made it over here to Hollywood. It is Wednesday evening. It is sixty hours since I left Bono's house after the week of staying awake walking and talking in Ireland. I am exhausted. I only have to cross the lobby without running into anybody and I can sleep through the night with a clear conscience.

As I pass the little bar to the left of the front door I look in and see Edge sitting at a table with Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Connor, and Peter Buck and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. So much for going to bed. I might miss something. I get my key, drop my bag in my room, and head back toward the bar. In the lobby I run into Keryn Kaplan, who is here representing Principle America. Keryn says she's booked a big table at an exclusive Japanese restaurant, so let's grab Edge and go. Keryn is imploring a portable phone to hold that reservation, we are on our way. I duck into the bathroom and Chris Robinson, the singer from the Black Crowes, is at the urinal next to me. Hollywood may not have the

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