The denseness of the sitting-room furnishings, together with its chocolate brown wallpaper and deep-blue fitted carpet, gave it a premature receptivity to the advancing dusk. Although, at 7:30, it was obvious that there was plenty of light left on the other side of its two tall windows, the texture of the room closed stealthily in on itself. When Marvell spoke his voice wandered out plaintively into the incipient evening.
"Have any of you. have any of you decided which way you want to go yet?"
"I have," said Andy, getting to his feet. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and clapped his hands together. "I want to feel sexed-up, big rigged, violent and strong."
"I imagine," said Marvell, his hands already busy inside his box, "I imagine you feel most of those things most of the time, don't you, Andy?"
"Check. But I want to feel all of them all of the time— all of tonight anyway."
Marvell took a multicolored capsule and split it with an unsettlingly long thumbnail onto a blank sheet of paper. To the pyramid of powder he added sections of two other pills. Andy was now instructed to fold the paper double, forming a channel down which the brew could be poured into his mouth. He asked if he was allowed to wash it down with whiskey and was told that he might. Marvell held up what could have been an eardrop syringe. "Take two drops of this on your tongue."
"What was it?" asked Andy, having done so.
"Adrenalin concentrate." "Casual.”
"You got about a half hour, forty-five minutes. Right. Uh, Celia?"
Celia frowned. "Well, it rather depends on what we're going to do tonight."
"Don't tell me," said Diana drearily, eyes half closed, "another club crawl."
"C'mon, Diana," said Andy, "what in the fuck's wrong with that? I'm feeling pretty. pretty loose already."
"Actually, Diana," Quentin joined in, "I had planned to give our friends a very oblique glimpse of our London nightlife."
"Sounds okay to us," said Marvell, briefly consulting Skip and Roxeanne. "Celia?. How about it?"
Celia sat upright. "Well. Obviously I want to feel a bit speedy — in case we dance. And I wouldn't mind some mescaline, or perhaps. "
"Try to be more specific, Celia, please. Don't talk drugs. Talk feelings, moods."
"Well, I… I just want to have a good time." Celia turned again to Quentin, who warmly met her eye. "And to feel full of love," she said.
The room blushed. Raising his quiff-like eyebrows, Marvell rummaged boredly inside the case, eventually bringing out a single pink pill which he lobbed across the room. "Just a straight High extract," he sighed. "Okay, how about Keith there?"
Whitehead waved a hand negligently in the air. Bootless, he had no intention of performing a miniature waddle across the room, and the request he was steeling himself to make would in any case be for Marvell's ears only. "Haven't quite decided yet. Mind if I sit on it?"
"So what else do you do with it?" drawled Skip, smirking sleepily.
Keith did not see the relevance of that remark. "All right with you, Marvell?" he asked.
Marvell was smiling at Skip, but quickly returned his gaze to little Keith. "Sure — but not too long now, okay? Lucy," said Marvell, some sternness returning to his voice, "how about you."
"Ooh, what a treat," said Lucy. "Isn't Captain Marvell clever to be able to—”
: "Can I have my turn now please."
"Pardon me?"
"Can I have my turn now please."
Giles had spoken with such robotic clarity that everyone turned to him in surprise. He was sitting erectly on the edge of his chair, palms open upward in the air. His face was tenser than it had been all day and his expression changed with unusual rapidity, like a blind man moving down unknown paths.
"Sure," said Marvell.
"Can I have my turn now please."
"Sure, Giles."
"Please. Just stop me. Can't you make my. Only stop me worrying all the time."
"About what?"
"Actually little things."
"About what things, man? I have to know about what?"
Giles relaxed, drunk and battered, into the sofa. His right hand was covered by Lucy's as his left fluttered like a damaged bird. A delta of tears formed slowly on his cheeks.
"Yawn," said Andy. "A crying jag."
"Well," said Marvell grimly, "I can give him a wide-spectrum anxiety calmant, but I…"
Giles's head sank back on his shoulders and his slipped mouth readjusted itself, less sulky in sleep.
"A blackout," said Andy.
"I'd say it would be unwise to give him anything at this moment in time," said Marvell. "I'll lay it on him later. However, Lucy, you were.?"
"Okay, Marv, okay. Here we go. I don't want any sadness tonight. Cast off, skipper, I'm on board. I don't want to worry about anyone but me."
"Autonomous? Self-determinant? Solipsist?"
"That ought to do nicely."
"I got it." Marvell unscrewed the cap of a tube of lozenges, one of which he cautiously immersed in a saucer of crimson ointment. "Great. Now, Diana. What do you want?"
"Nothing," said Diana.
'The fuck, Diana," yawned Andy, "you've got to have
something. Why are you so fuckin' defiant all the time?" "I didn't say it defiantly, just in complete boredom. I want a drug, but I want a drug to stop me feeling anything. And to kill the past. That is, if tonight's going to be as stupid and nasty as it looks like being."
Amused comment rippled through the room. Marvell stirred himself. "That'll be no sweat to fix," he said.
Roxeanne and Skip obligingly opted for the "usual" (sense intensifiers and heartbeat accelerators respectively), while, with considerable pomp, Marvell prepared his own stimulant, setting a match to a combustible powder whose sooty residue he lollipopped onto his forefinger and dipped into his mouth. "It's called a Prospero," he said. "Makes me feel in control. Mm — hey — I forgot: Quent."
Folding his arms, Quentin sat back, his choice musculature extending itself adorably over the sofa. The residual unease that had slowed the atmosphere of the room was instantly chased away by the creamy mellifluousness of his voice.
"A hypothesis," he said. "It occurs to me that one's mannerisms, one's behavioral ticks, are neither quite innate nor quite fortuitous. We project them as mechanisms of defense and appeal, of withdrawal and capitulation; they are means of stylizing our attitude to others and to the world. Forgive me— intolerably ill-put. At any rate, as a profoundly cultivated and therefore profoundly unspontaneous creature I thought it might be interesting if I were shorn of these — my reflexes, my stock responses — so as to become, as it were, socially unclothed. My fetching manner must at times be excessively irritating so I hereby give you the chance to banish it and refurnish me. I throw the matter open: make of me what you will."
"Isn't this all somewhat unspecific?" complained Marvell.
"Not for long," said Quentin.
"To begin with," said Diana, "you could give him a stutter. That at least might make him talk less."
"Bravo, Diana!" roared Quentin. "You've got the idea. Marvell, make me inarticulate."
"Make him gauche and gawky," said Lucy.
"Why not make him rather shy," said Celia perplexedly.
"Make him as horny as a dog," said Roxeanne.
"And make him terrified," said Andy.
Quentin spread his hands and smiled. "Marvelclass="underline" you have your instructions.”
: Ten minutes later, after Quentin had inhaled, sucked, and sniffed various occult compounds, Marvell brushed himself down and regained the dining table alcove. He looked around the room. "That about does it," he said.