for want of anything better, resumes: And I can absolutely assure you there was no one called Evenrude serving with the 509th Composite — not that I knew all their names at the time, but I jolly well found them out later, when the true enormity of what they — of what we — had done became clear. — The true enormity . . of the pillow has overwhelmed Michael’s ward: he clutches it to his ears and moans — more feathers leak from its seams to twist in the stale air, a miserable allusion to. . the possibility of flight. Michael relights his pipe and listens as the extinguished match creaks into charcoal. A by-product, Ape . . Pouting a small cloud, Michael thinks, The most substantial thing about me is this smoke. . And then: It doesn’t matter whether the lunatic American was on the A-bomb mission or not, the coincidence of the two of us, here, now, is. . paralysing. Skin angels are roosting on the peak of the suburban roof. He sees them hanging on to the wonky television aerial with their squamous hands. Chris whispers: Please don’t look at me, Uncle Mike, the aerials coming out of your eyes are spearing through the back of my head and out of my eyes, and I haven’t got an I–I said that already, didn’t I? You said that already, Michael confirms. We are, he thinks, lost in the outer space of our own traumas. He squints at the anaglypta snowflakes and the flittering feathers and sees them as. . meteorites. He’s no idea what’s wrong with Christopher, only that it’s absolutely plain: This is no place for him . . although the business of getting up, getting him up, gathering his things together, ordering them a cab, piloting the psychotic child through the city. . is beyond me. Instead, this prosaic concern settles on Michael’s stomach: I’m hungry . . He recalls the kipper, swimming in butter, left on the Pullman’s heavy monogrammed plate and supposes. . there might at least be the makings of a sandwich in the madhouse’s kitchen, where Busner cracks! open the window above the sink. The door of perception, he remarks conversationally, if only it were clean everything would appear to us as it is: infinite. Gourevitch says, Infinitely warped — it’s totally fuckin’ warped, been sopping up the rain all winter. Lesley offers, I’ll strip off that old paint, bung some turps on it and repaint it when —. You die, Busner interjects, and are reincarnated as a useful member of society! — All three guffaw draughts of privet-smelling air into their creaking lungs. The warped windowframe frames the broken window-frame of the garden shed . . Clive’s stuck in it again, chanting, Round and round the garden like a teddy bear. . while Claude pulls at his arms, saying, Damn right, my man, round and round the exercise yard with some goon up in the tower pointing his Remington’s goddamn peter-hole at you. I tellya, you think your loony bins are hard time, they’re a fuckin’ teddy bear’s picnic compared with the secure state hospitals stateside. . — Trapped Clive is running on, his words clambering through Claude’s: One step, two step, tickle you under there! Overhearing all this from the kitchen, Busner sees Claude, shrunken and furry in the guise of a pyjama case lying on a child’s bed, and the child — with her hand stuck up inside him — screaming hysterically because. . no teddy bear, he! Then, hitting a patch of lucidity. . a savage servility slides by on grease . . he intuits: Claude’s untouched! The acid has somehow integrated him . . he isn’t all over the place, but has entered his own — perhaps much larger — lucid patch, a Sargasso of sanity . . where he’s. . becalmed while all around him the ocean roars! Gourevitch scoops up a handful of foam from the sink, its myriad tiny spectroscopic bubbles. . winking in and out of being. He blows into it and speaks through. . the destruction of whole universes: Ma-an, that cat Alpert — Leary’s stooge when they were in Cambridge — when I ran into him he told me, man, when he blew to India he took with him half a fuckin’ mason jar of Sandoz’s finest. . An’ each time he’d track down some naked fuckin’ sadhu standing on one leg in a mountain stream with his other foot shoved up his dhoti. . Well, he’d offer it up an’ it’d make no difference if ’n they took a hit or not. . They were just the same. . Kinda blissed out for sure, but holding it together: boiling up their rice or their tea, yakking their holy stuff. . totally unaff ected — like we are. . — Zack passes Rodge a beautifully clean plate, and Rodge swipes it with a deft flick of his dishcloth before handing it off to Lesley, who flips it equally efficiently into the wall-mounted cabinet. Scrub — rinse — swipe — flip — annagain. Working with the jaunty assurance of dwarves, Zack begins the humming — soon enough they’re all singing the refrain, Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go! and tum-tumming the verse, since none of them know the words: Tum-tum-tum-tum, Tum-tum-tumtum, hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho! — Out in the garden they’ve stopped marching round annaround: Claude sits on an upright kitchen chair while Clive is flat out in a deckchair. Claude is indeed perfectly lucid. You’ve no idea, he says to Clive conspiratorially, quite how vicious the regime is in those big funny farms — I’d got desperate, Dad was still alive then and he thought he’d do the decent paternal thing and cut off my funds — well, what with the sauce, the hop and the bennies, I wound up holding up a liquor store in the Loop with an eggplant in my coat pocket. I know. . I know. . Claude waves away the exclamation Clive hasn’t made — he only sits, inky-pinky-spidering his fingers up the wall of his belly. . it was ridiculously stupid — specially since I’d hung a little paper in the same store the week before. . Anyhoo, with my sheet — VA joints, county lock-ups, private clinics — they ship me off to the state asylum, where, this bein’ the Midwest, all the guards are fat and the inmates are thin, brother, you best b’lieve it — how so? ’Cause Admin. are riding that gravy train for all it’s worth — siphoning off the food-fuckin’-budget and selling off the meds to whomever, whenever. How’d Curious George here figure it out? I’ll tellya: first day in the can THEY PUT ME THROUGH INDUCTION — SAME OLD, SAME OLD, SCATTY CATS SHUFFLIN’ ’BOUT IN THEIR BVDs, SCRATCHIN’ THEIR PITS, BUMMING SMOKES, GETTIN’ SHAVED AND BUZZ-CUT — SEE, THAT’S THE PUREST FORM OF CONTROL THERE IS, RIGHT? STRIP A MAN OF HIS CLOTHES AND HIS HAIR AND YOU STRIP HIM OF HIS DIGNITY — SPECIALLY IF YOU STAND OVER HIM IN A FUCKIN’ UNIFORM. THEN THEY TURN ME OUT IN THE YARD AND I START DOING WHAT I ALWAYS DO IF I’M DE-PRIVED OF MY LIB-ER-TY: CIRCUITS BOODLIE-BAR, BOODLIE-BEE, I BUZZ OVER HERE AND SIP UP SOME WORDS — I BUZZ OVER THERE AN’ DROP A FEW OFF. . BUT PEOPLE AIN’T SAYING TOO MUCH. . LOTTA ’VOIDANCE. BLUE SKY’S BLACK WITH CHAINLINK AND BARBED WIRE — THOSE CATS, MAN — HEAVIEST I BEEN IN WITH. SURE, SOME OF ’EM ARE COPPING A PLEA, I GUESS. . BUT I GET FEARED UP, BOODLIE-BAR, BOODLIE BEE. . LUCKY I KNOW HOW TO KEEP IT WITH MINE — KEEP MOVING, HEAD DOWN. I TELLYA, TIMES LIKE THAT I’M GLAD THERE’S SOMEONE RIDING SHOTGUN. . ANYHOO, THEN I SEE HIM, WHITE AS CASPAR, BACK AGAINST THE WALL, ASS IN THE CRAB GRASS —. Claude stops. The tube train has gone, replaced by Gourevitch, Busner and Lesley, who’re ranged by the back door of the house, aghast as they survey the scene. Zack says, I’ve never heard you so. . well, so lucid, Claude —. Then he stops, because he doesn’t wish to antagonise him, and also because. .