The U.S. Senator from Illinois sits on a purple & green Ottoman before the window to his 13th floor Washington apartment.

WALL CLOCK: ".... TICK -- TOCK -- TICK -- TOCK -- TICK ... "

His silhouette in the pre-dawn darkness of the bedroom is illuminated soley by the florescent yellow boxer shorts he sports; the print is choreographed with a vast heard of Elephants, each saddled with a half-crazed Donkey that digs its glowing spurs into the grey hides of the GOP emblazoned beasts.

WALL CLOCK: ".... TICK -- TOCK -- TICK ... "

His heels tapping on the floor, the Freshman senator sits nervously, biting his clenched fingers while both elbows remain nailed to his knock-knees. Tis a muggy, sweltering summer's evening in the nation's capital; beading sweat threatens a downpour when the looming day breaks upon the political canvas.

In the faint twilight, young Barry begins to make out the wall poster of his nemisis and adversary in the upcoming election. The Arizona statesman has been hung upsidedown, mustachioed-a-la-Schicklegruber and heavily graffitied with swastikas. His pasty-white, white-haired, white wife has had her eirie white blue orbs specktacled with clorox-white frames.

WALL CLOCK: ".... COO-COO -- KUU-COO -- KUCKOO -- KUCKHOLD ... "

The Illinois senator's bleary, bloodshot eyes suddenly affix upon the coo-coo clock over the bed where his wife (pasty-white with skin-creme and heavily festooned & barnacled in hair rollers) lays open-mouthed, her loud snores & soft mumblings evincing the pleasantries of a deep slumber.

She wears a nightshirt with a very loud portrait of "OPRAH", cross-eyed & clenching a thorny rose-stem in her teeth, whose captions read: "OPRAH for VICE PRES !! WHO ELSE ??" -- The SNORING suddenly stops; REM's accelerate, a sweet smile blankets her dispostion as she briefly cuddles her heavily-creamed face into her pillow.

SHELLY: (mumbling, giggling, tweaking her nose like a bunny) "... OH !! -- that is SO naughty !! --- Whisper it again, Denzel ..."

BARRY: (bug-eyed & jumping to his feet) "HEY !! HEY !! -- What is that Lout telling you ??"

*Suddenly ----- the phone "RINGS"

*Reaching for the telly, the senator's eyes momentarily dart over to the nightstand before returning to his wife whose peaceful sleep has been seemingly eclipsed by the undulating spasms of a Perfect Storm.

BARRY: (softly shouts, so as to not wake his dearly beloved) -- "YESSSSS -- WHAT IS IT ??"

HENRY: (raises voice over the background JFK Airport commotion) "Senator, its me -- Henry. -- While waiting for my plane I've had a little time to think about what we were discussing a few hours ago."

BARRY: (turns his back from the spiriling background commotion emoting from every quadrant of his bed). "Oh, Doctor K -- Thanks for getting back to me."

SHELLY: (more mumbling & rolling about as REM's abate) -- "Denze -- Oooo -- You Da Man !!"

BARRY: (squeezing eyes shut, gnashing teeth) -- "I haven't been able to grab a wink all night."

HENRY: "Vell son, I just dontz vant you to preoccupy your noodle with dat monkey Binladin fellow."

BARRY: "No-no-no, Secretary -- you hit that nail on the head -- You Da Man!!" -- (again, clenches teeth with a hard nod) -- "That is ... you were right, Sir. -- It truly would come across as sophmoric and laughable if I were to tow the party line in Denver that this war on terror should be refocused on that numbskull, Bin Ladin."

HENRY: "The, 'numbskull', as you call him, will certainly be far more dangerous to the world -- and to history -- if we succeed in 'getting him'. Such would guarantee his martyrdom in a world that lurches toward economic misery with each passing day. -- Just consider what happened to the world once they martyred that carpenter from Nazareth."

BARRY: (looks out toward the red crack of dawn that has begun to slash its way across the Maryland landscape to the east) -- "hmmmmm ...."

HENRY: "No, no, son; -- Indochina was not lost to those Commie Buggers in 1969 when Ho Chi Minh died. Their 'Cause' and 'Fight' against us in the West continued on year after year as the soils turned red with blood. It stopped only after victory was gained. -- Keep that in mind after the Jihadists have secreted away the body of Bin Ladin -- only for all to learn that he had miraculously arisen -- alongside Mahomet."

BARRY: (yawning while looking at the wallclock) "Errrr, uhhh, .. I believe I better get a little shut-eye now. I've a long day before me."

HENRY: "Vell, you don't bodder abouts calling me at any hour of the day. You vill finds you have many decisions, should your dreams come true in November. Dis Vorld iz made ups of billions of gallons of oil; --- as well as trillions of gallons of human blood." ....... 'CLICK'

The young senator hangs the phone up & climbs in alongside his well rested, softly snoring wife. As he cuddles a pillow, his lids begin to drop with heaviness as his eyes begin to scan the ceiling which has begun a phantasmagoric transformation from the scarlet flushes of the dawning light.

As Barry drifts into a deeper hallucinatory state, the white circular patterns on the ceiling take on a Maurice Sendakian coda whose animated cartoons soon take on a Worholian 'Soup-Can' aspect of a mountain of human heads & decomposing faces.

Lapsing into the very deepest recessions of the mind, the senator begins to tremble as in his visions he finds himself unable to detect which of the skulls a half-moment ago were Cambodian -- which were Darfurian -- which Rwandan -- which had been number stenciled, as that of the 'Jude' --- which Sunni, Shia or Kurdish ---

90 MINUTES LATER: -- Smiling, arms folded & dressed snappily for a long day on the trail, Shelly stands at the foot of the bed looking at her husband who is snuggled in fetal position sucking his thumb.

SHELLY: (with a proud toothy blinking) -- "Oh, you big baby -- What's the world to do with you?"