Chapter 2 Summary

Crass television executives ponder the potential popularity of a new program, Lives of the Saints, as news of an attempted suicide reaches the TV station. Crews are pulled from the studio to cover what one executive calls "a jump" as the sound track of a fatuous TV ad rolls in the background. At the scene of the jump, reporters with flashbulbs swarm like flies around a carcass, but the woman, discovered breathing, survives and is carried off to the hospital. She is a Hawaiian woman called Huki-lau who jettisoned herself from a hotel window. Morning mail is delayed because the falling body struck the mailman. Shocked and sickened, one newspaper reporter returns to the newsroom to write his story. The city editor becomes enraged when the reporter realizes he left the name of the woman's doctor at the scene. "You stupid stupid bastard...