It didn't take long for the room to fill. The rows of prim white chairs were soon in disarray, stained with suits: rumpled, pressed, tailored, off-the-rack. The staff dispassionately watched as their efforts were ruined once again.

Measured cries of professional recognition, the percussion of slapped backs and dry white skin floated in the still air. An errant mote of dust hovered in a slant of filtered morning light.

Bob Marlin, fourth row back, second from the right, almost jotted this down due to his sixth coffee nerves. He capped his pen, swearing absentmindedly. He was saving his ink for more important details. Facts that would smack you in the face. Quotes so juicy his pen would spit as he scrawled them down. He swore again as he uncapped, capped, uncapped his pen once again. Ink stained his fingers.

Bob didn't know why this particular press conference had been called. Nobody knew, least of all the pale official at the podium who wore his ignorance with the comfort of habit. He leaned in slightly, hesitating as his gaze took in the now-silent, anxiously bored vista of press men before him. Enough time for one slow, languid breath to rasp softly through the microphone...

"Gentlemen, the First Lady of the United States of America, Eleanor Roosevelt."

He stepped aside. The curtain parted.

Years later, Bob Marlin, fourth row back, second from the right, numerous writing awards adorning his office wall, fingernails a permanently chewed black-blue, could only describe those next few moments in words unfitting to a newsman in their metaphysical blankness.

"A goddamned inconsolable silence."

What emerged from behind the curtain wore the First Lady's clothes. That was a discrete, observable fact, one of the few that they could later conspire to agree on over whiskey, cigarettes and therapy. But the eye rebelled at taking in the full absurdity of what stood before them. Glossed, uncomprehending eyes, staring awkwardly out from atop a blunt T-shaped head. A clogged moan began to issue forth from the rough maw, gulping skirls of jagged breath. It was an offense to their sanity. It could not be suffered to exist.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a hammerhead shark.

Pandemonium is a poorly used word. It is applied with laziness and little regard for its role as a true indication of the extreme, of the utter, of the complete. It can be defined as "a wild uproar or unrestrained disorder; tumult or chaos." Less often, but more precisely, it has identified "the abode of all the demons."

Both senses of that medieval word would enjoy a renewed relevance that fine day. Later, it would prove impossible to determine just how many were injured, or who exactly delivered the coup de grace to the unholy beast that bled and flopped in Arnold Constable's latest fashions.

It is perhaps for the best that in his official statement, Bob Marlin, fourth row back, second from the right, would only describe, in full, award-winning detail, a single mote of dust, clad in the sensibility of the late morning light.