(Giles was watching carefully as Keith spoke. He, for one, had never been able to understand the point of all the fuss about little Keith. Whitehead's teeth looked okay to him.)
"Well, what about it?" asked Celia, exuding personal as well as general wariness. "Breakfast?”
"Don't call it that," said Andy sharply. "Just call it food. Food. All right," he said, relenting, "we might as well give it a try."
35: Lagging time
Although the Appleseed Rectory kitchen was a large, square, farmerly apartment, its lowness of ceiling and its habit of containing a lot of vivid sunlight tended to make the room seem oppressively populous when more than four or five persons were gathered between its walls. It began to seem so now. The shuffling Appleseeders — all of whom, except Giles and Whitehead, were engaged in the cautious preparation of orange juice, coffee, and thin toast — were joined by Skip (in very filthy underpants), Marvell (in filthy underpants), Roxe-anne (in underpants), and by Lucy, dressed, lard-skinned, small-eyed, and coughing into the hot light. Between permutations of legs The Mandarin erectly strolled.
"Christ, that cat's bum," said Andy in a critical, almost painterly tone, his eyes on the pink anus revealed by the Persian's high tail. "Can't we do something …?Iknow. I'm going to get a gray magic marker and color its arse over. Aw my HEAD!"
No one was thinking about it, no one was thinking much about anything, when the room suddenly became a miasma of hangovers. Alcohol crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it, and by now the kitchen was a noisome feast for peeled senses. The room appeared to change its shape. Voices scattered into piano mumbles. The cigarette smoke formed a shelf at shoulder height, above which sun-bright faces wafted like mad masks. They plugged in kettles, hawked, ran water, retched; the Americans swung open the fridge, picked with dirty fingernails at a staling loaf, scratched, burped, farted, snorted into the dregs of yesterday's liquor bottles. "This butter's like off chick. Just sugar's safest. My eyes, my eyes. Eggs! The fuck. Gangway! I'm gonna be sick. Water — fight the dehydration. Stop breathing like that. Gag gag gag. I'm flashing! I'm flashing!. What's — the sizes are all wrong. Strange heat, strange heat. Don't be there, just don't BE therel”
I2O
Then came the lagging time. It came abruptly, flopped down like an immense and invisible jelly from the ceiling, swamping the air with marine languor and insect speeds— lagging time, with its numbness and disjunction, its inertia and automatism, its lost past and dead future. It was as if they were wandering through an endless, swarming, rotten, terminal marketplace after a year of unsleeping nights.
Now they were all moving to no effect — just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me, said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.
Quentin forced his way across the room and gripped Giles by the shoulder. Giles looked up, apparently quite unaffected. His face cleared as if emerging from shadow into day. He stood up and opened the door. Time flooded in from the passage. The room stopped, and clicked back. They turned toward him.
"I think that, I think that what we all need is a drink."
They crowded into the corridor. They were out.
"Jesus I" said Andy on the way to the sitting room. "What in the fuck was that?"
"Lagging time," said Quentin.
"Yeah," said Marvell, dabbing his cheeks with a red bandana. "Fuckin' lagging time."
"Jesus. Never had that cocksucker before." Andy halted and turned toward them. "You know, my theory is that it was the food that did it." He started walking again. "To hell with this food gimmick. It's just not on any more, food. Fuck food."
36: the real thing again
Under Giles's sleepy but telling supervision, champagne cocktails went into production—"After all, it's practically eleven o'clock," Andy had said. One-and-a-half-liter bottles of 1979 Moet & Chandon were removed by Quentin and Andy from the semi-deepfreeze in the washroom while crates of reinforcements were shipped in by Skip from the garage. Giles then entrusted Quentin with his doorkeys and commissioned him to go up and enter his room, locate and gain admittance to his drinks cupboard, and detach from it five, perhaps six, liters of Napoleon brandy. By this time people had revisited the bedrooms and had started to appear in less advanced stages of undress; in particular, Marvell and Skip were in their usual jean suits, and Roxeanne was wearing a black midriff stole and a fishnet body stocking.
"Beat me, beat me," enthused Andy as the record player emitted sounds of what might have been a burning menagerie superimposed over a Sunday school choir practice. Windows were thrown open. Quentin marshaled the hash kits and amyl-nitrate poppers. Skip toured the room, his large hands cupping a pyramid of wide-spectrum amphetamines. Marvell issued depressants from the dinette-feature alcove. They were all talking.
"The thing is, actually," broke in Giles, keeping a sensible distance between himself and the waiting rank of champagne bottles, "I've always found that the thing is, actually, is to put a hell of a lot of brandy in them. About four or five times as much as anyone else ever puts in them — ever. At least half and half. At least. If in doubt, make believe the brandy is the champagne and the champagne is the brandy."
"Check," said Andy. "Check."
Celia accepted a tablet from Skip. She held it in the air between finger and thumb and said quizzically, "I don't know, darling, but shouldn't we be taking it a bit easy?"
"Relax, darling," purred Villiers.
"We can't feel any worse," said Diana, to Lucy's pale agreement.
"Hell, it's only a weekend," said Marvell. "The fuck."
"Keith! Get the liquor over here," bawled Andy, " — and I'm talking about now! I mean, what's a court dwarf for if he can't even. Christ, this is more like it, eh? The real thing again."
"Wait!" Giles held up his hands. "Wait a minute. Tell me before you start opening the champagne, okay? All those corks flying about, might catch me one right in the. "
"Is everyone. Look," said Andy, "go and lie down or something, will you, Keith, okay? I can't cope with you in here looking like that. Right, is everyone ready? Then let's go!"
Within a quarter of an hour, things were pretty well back to normal.
37: Those conversations
Those conversations.
"That's what they did. In the seventies. That's what they achieved. They separated emotion and sex."
"Nonsense, Marvell," said Quentin. "They merely showed that they could be separable. In the last analysis, of course, they aren't separable at all."
Marvell looked in appeal toward Roxeanne and Skip, who were abstractedly stroking one another on the floor, then back again. "Let's — let's try seeing it historically." Marvell swallowed his drink. "Things happen faster in the States so perhaps the situation's not clear yet for you people. Sure, there was a kind of reaction to the Other Way in the States a few years ago, but—"