everything. I do believe she’s awake, Busner, says the other one. . Marcus? Another Jew-boy, but she remembers him as upright, handsome, correct. . dapper, moreover, always willing to speak to me as if I were a sensible person, notwithstanding that I couldn’t reply. Until now. Marcus puts the cockerel down on the adjustable table that Busner has levelled and leans forward. It is not, Busner thinks, a face I’d like to be confronted with immediately upon waking from a half-century’s nap — that duckbill and those gaping nostrils would hardly console me for the loss of my hair, my life, the world-that-was and everything. . east of Aden. Still, Marcus can at least perform this senior service: to act as a time chamber within which Audrey can rest a while as she’s decompressed by his chat — all that heavy Victoriana, the lead-glass domes sealing off stuffed and supercilious dodos that must stand about on the dusty tallboys and dirtied doilies of her mind. Marcus can sort out all this bric-a-brac and in its place tell her about. . about. . polystyrene — yes, that. And PVC too. He can introduce her to the ringing emptiness of inflatable plastic chairs and Habitat lampshades — and to nets clinking with glass floats strung along the walls of trendy bistros. He can bring her up to speed on the flatulence induced by home-brewed —. Oh, good heavens! Audrey cries, eyes wide open, Who on earth is this old man! Busner, worried that he’s about to get the giggles, abandons himself to his craving: I think I’ll leave the two of you alone for a while so that you can get. . reacquainted. He strolls away down the dormitory, looking in on the right at a Rodin draped in sheets and left in storage: Missus Gross. In sympathy with his overworked staff, Busner’s disappointed to note that her niblet of a husband isn’t about this afternoon — since awakening, Gross’s voracity has become still more excessive: she bullies the nurses, compelling them to bring her whatever they can scrounge, and, terrified that she might. . perhaps, roll over and crush them, they do: worker termites in the service of a tyrannical queen. Outsized plates of chips from the staff canteen, steel basins jumbled with stale éclairs and the big mixing bowls shivering with the jelly she particularly favours — jelly she incorporates into her own wobbly Tupperware with loud slurps and percussive lip-smacks. As a practitioner Busner is disappointed the proper Charlie isn’t about to fetch and carry and cadge, thus taking the pressure of her monstrousness off his staff, — but as a civilised man he is glad: no one person should have to deal with this. Good afternoon, Leticia, he says, attempting a breezy neutrality. She looks up from the mirror of a powder compact with which she’s been examining her face in many tiny eyefuls. I’m delighted, he continues, Angel Delighted to see you take an interest in your appearance — it’s been a long time since you’ve cared. . The indefinite nature of this long time is deliberate on Busner’s part, although of all the post-encephalitics Leticia Gross is the least affected by her time-travel — from hot jazz to teeny bop she hasn’t missed a beat, and the velocity of her internal metronome is immediately evident: she drops the compact into the mess of screwed-up sweet wrappers and gnawed lolly sticks that Busner now notices is shoved between the sheet and her slab thigh. As two flies wobble aloft, she puts her disconcerting sky-blue eyes on him and, splitting her baby pout, buzzes a speech, Idon’tknowabouthatDoctorBusner IonlyknowwhatIdoesrightnowwhenwe’retalkingtogetherwhenI’mthinkingaboutthewaryou’venonotiontherewasnothingtoeatatallnonothingtheydidn’tgiveussomuchastherationwhichwewererightfullyentitledtoshockingehifCharliehadn’t’vecomeupmostdaysIshould’vestarvedhegavemebreadofftherationthat’swhatitwashetellsmenow’courseIdidn’tknowatthetimehalfgoneIwasothersin’eretheygavesomemuckto’emandtheygotawfulsicktheirhairfelloutandeverythingb’lievemeonthisoneit’strueIswear. . that he is able to understand — with difficulty — only because he’s taken the time to sit with her, concentrate and measure the prodigious speed and accuracy of her diction with stopwatch and tape recorder, so discovering that she can reach five hundred words per minute without missing so much as a single syllable. From deep in the core of Leticia Gross — I’dliketoknow exactlywhatitwastheywerefeedingthosepoorsoulssomesortagruelremindedmeofburgoonotthatIhadsuchbutmyfatherservedintheGreat Warandhesaidtheygave’emasortaporridgeofcrackedwheatbutthiswasn’twheatCharliesaysitwascorntheygotfromtheYanks — these waves of healthfulness vigorously radiate, penetrating all the fatty lagging, and in the ten days since the L-DOPA has winched this colossus up Busner has spent as many hours alone with her, entranced by the exactitude of her recollection, If only Marcus could be bothered to pay attention to this: HewentdowntoCarswellStreetwherethey’dopened uparecruitin’officebuttheysent’imback’omesayin’therewasnocalljustthenformarriedmenbesides’isjobwhichwasasafiremanatthattimeonasmallPortAutoritylighterwaswhatd’yousayessentialthat’sithewaswellpaidmindweallus’adshoesan’nicethings, perhaps he would change his tune — after all, could the organic damage really be that extensive if it left this much intact? Moreover, the forced quality of her reminiscence was a phenomenon Leticia Gross was perfectly well aware of: thereIgoagainDocrabbitin’on, so that to follow the insightful thread paid out by this ever-wakeful Penelope was to enter the labyrinthine night-without-end before L-DOPA, so as to experience alongside her its narcolepsies, sleep paralyses and daymares of premature burial. Leticia revealed to him the lowering underworld of the post-encephalitic, wherein the myriad tics, jerks and spasms acted to bore the tunnels and hollow out the burrows required by a multitude of subpersonalities — selflets, which were at once regressively primitive and highly organised. The revolting urges of the aggressive woman-mountain — her hoarding of crumpled rubbish, crusts of bread, her own faeces! were in his eyes only the behavioural counterbalance to her astonishingly lucid overview — it was Leticia who told Busner how she had to match everything, whether in the phenomenal world — one teaspoon aligned with a second, two hairclips with two more — or that of ideas, for, she said, she could not think of anything without picturing it mirrored, yoghurt pot-with-yoghurt pot, pain-with-pain. Alerted to it, Busner then found evidence of this tendency to symmetrise in all the others — although Leticia’s own coinage for it, arithomania, seemed more apt, conjuring up as it did the past she had been torn out of, its newsreels of single figures surging together in Chaplinesque festination to form a silent murmuration of people . .On the third day Busner had given Leticia a Biro and a large stiff-backed exercise book that she could prop against her sugarloaf belly. He had done so — he now accepts — in expectation of some redemption: her purging herself through clarity of expression, eloquence — all the usual rot. Now, opening the marbled covers, he’s overwhelmed to discover the impetuosity of her thought has been replicated in her script. The first few pages are patterned with a dense and incised cuneiform that presses Brailleishly into the verso, the next recto and several more besides — but from leaf-to-leaf this convolvulus throws out suckers, at first to the lines above and below, then further afield. Ten pages on an entry headed with yesterday’s date consists of only four and a half words, Imusthaveanenem— the Latin absence of spacing corresponding to her