better than mine . . and his up-to-the-minute grasp on what’s transpiring along Highway One. . and across the Mekong River. The Bodhisattvas fly through the prana as the wall hangings waver, and. . jungly modalities shift. Oscar’s head falls back on the pillow. There are voices out in the garden — and presumably bodies associated with them — but to talk with these earthlings would be a terrible risk: he fears their jackal mouths and hippo noses. . it isn’t safe here, he must get upstairs. . to the bathroom, where he keeps sleepers in his spongebag. — It takes Busner a long time to get there: dynasties of insect people arise and fall on every step of the stairs. He kneels down to observe them as they build their dust-devil pyramids in alignment with the mystical marks left by the carpet tacks and stair rails of earlier civilisations. On the very apex of their fluff y edifices they sacrifice mite captives, sending their scented screams up in smoke. . as they sing their savage hymns. At last he stumbles upon someone he presumes to be himself, standing in the bathroom clutching the sink’s exposed hipbones . . and gazing down into its gently glugging hymenial sump, which is being continually strengthened by the dripping taps. The any-old-iron of dried blood rises up from the waste-paper basket but that’s alright, Mama . . so long as he doesn’t make the cardinal error of. . looking in the mirror. Problem is the mirror’s the cabinet door — and his spongebag. . is in the cabinet! He looks and is appalled: first by his skin’s marine-green, next by ever-changing ripples chasing across it and the visible cat’s paws of wind doing the chasing. He grips the sink more tightly, trying to extract certainty from its ceramic finish: Can this really be me? The answer, when it comes, is hardly reassuring: Busner’s dorsal nose detaches from above his lip. Slowly to begin with — soon enough with mounting speed — it travels around his face. Initially the nose-fin does a simple circuit or three, but then whatever buried intelligence motivates it becomes bolder, and it executes a tricky figure-of-eight manoeuvre around Busner’s eyes, swerves up towards his hairline, and, as he opens his mouth to scream, heeling over. . it dives right in! — He made me do it, says the younger of the two kids Chief Brody has hauled out of the water. Busner wonders whether it would be too greedy to creep up the popcorny aisle, then hurry downstairs to get a second box of Maltesers. There’s something about being subjected to successive shocks — albeit contrived ones — that stimulates the appetite. Not that he was fooled by the kids’ fake fin as it ploughed towards the Amity Island bathers. Perversely, once it’s beached he’s disappointed by how well made it is — no amateur fin this, but the workmanship of the same department that’s fashioned the Great White’s polypropylene body. This mismatch between common sense and the mechanics of simulation bothers him far more than the shark. Busner’s beginning to warm to Hooper. What was it that he said? You’re going to ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you on the ass . . The rapidity with which sharkish souvenirs, T-shirts and even a Killer Shark videogame have appeared on the Amity boardwalk in time for the Labor Day crowds might be taken, Busner thinks, as confirmation of the relentless vigour of American capitalism — but he remains scepticaclass="underline" Film, he considers, now dominates our experience of the world purely because of the sheer transparency of its own self-conviction. . seeing, after all, is believing. Yet this too is a throwback: the polypropylene saint paraded before the believers’ eyes before sinking beneath the iconic screen — it’ll cruise round annaround, down there for a time, but eventually it’ll swim up and bite us on our collective ass. — Quint’s Orca heads out into an open sea that leeches the setting sun. The fishing boat’s high wheelhouse, with its fish-bony radio antennae, is caught for a moment in the triangular teeth of a shark’s jaw hung up in a quayside shack. Busner chews everything over as the three protagonists joust with the big prop and each other. — Mark, he’s pleased to note, is on the edge of his seat, his braces bared. It would be a terrible shame, Busner reflects, if all my son were to get out of spending time with his father were further confirmation of the world’s penny-pinching with the truth about. . these great and terrible objects. The shark toy toys with them — charging at the boat, only to dive beneath it at the last moment. Brody, the craven landlubber, is sent up to the crow’s-nest to rock there, rifle in hand, while the noonday sun scatters solitaires across the worn decking. I don’t know, Hooper says, if he’s very smart or very dumb — and Zack queries: Couldn’t he be both? When Quint smashes the radio transmitter with a baseball bat Zack’s. . relieved, because the outside world now no longer exists for them, and he too is freed of the requirement to believe in it. — All it’s about is these. . three archetypes and their. . monstrous delusion. However, when they’re all seated at the cabin table, and Quint and Hooper begin to fence using the unusual yet deeply suggestive weaponry of their own wounds, Zack finds himself unable to pursue. . the Amfortas one, but instead is gripped by the resemblance between the three shark-hunters and another trio of men, who, preyed-upon by their own monstrous delusions, swim out of the aqueous distortion of his own not-so-deep past. His attraction to Hooper is, Zack realises, narcissistic: he’d like to think of his own analytic interventions as precisely such a subversion of neurosis’s paradoxically brute strength: The crackling to pieces of a plastic cup — or a paper tiger . . As for Quint, Zack hadn’t liked him from the off! The way he scratched the blackboard of the community’s anxiety with his fingernails was pettily demonstrative, and there’s plainly nothing he delights s-really-a-sadist’ saviour-who