Gourevitch! He may be wearing a threadbare pale-blue regulation dressing gown with CT stencilled on its breast, and holding one of the pathetic brown bags new inmates are given to carry their personal effects in, but Claude-with-the-spork makes him. . right away. This is not — no matter what he may’ve told the intake psychiatrist — a man who hears the voices of entities that cannot be seen. Soon enough after making his acquaintance, Claude realises that such is Gourevitch’s colossal self-absorption, he can barely hear the voices of real, live people who’re standing right in front of him. True, he’s wary — his button-black eyes sliding across the faces of his fellow madmen, trying to read them for potential threat — even so Gourevitch heads straight towards easily the most dangerous man in the room, creaks into the rattan chair beside Claude’s glider, and, ignoring the masturbatory creaking and cunnilingual slobbering his new companion makes as he paddles back and forth, sporking shit from my shingle, sets his brown-paper bag down on the low table in the centre of the crazy little colloquy. Soon enough Claude will find out what’s in that brown-paper bag: a blackening banana, a chicken sandwich made for Gourevitch by his still younger and very sexy wife and several packets of Winston — contraband he’s smuggled past the orderlies who searched him and took his street clothes. Not that this will have been difficult: the Hospital’s buildings — which are extensive, and mostly shaped in plan like heavy bombers — are some way out of town, camouflaged by groves of fir and hemlock, although everybody knows they’re here . . This tactic of hiding in plain sight is one that Fairfield has — here Claude relies on the jargon of the oppressor — introjected, so throughout its mad realm everything that should rightly be covert or furtive is instead out front and blatant: the orderlies sock patients right in the kisser, and there’s nothing they can do about it because only other staff are credible witnesses. As for the candy-stripers, since they believe all the male patients have been exiled to sex-free Miltown, they’ve no shame: unbuttoning their uniform dresses to adjust their twisted brassiere straps, lifting their skirts to straighten their nylons right in front of the fools, who, in point of fact, are still drooling — because the patients are also flamboyant extroverts who openly discard such pills, or, if bothering to put them in their mouths, spit them out seconds later in plain view. When served a solution from the dispensary hatch, they sloosh it around and spit it into the dinky paper cup it came in, then drop this into the trash basket with all the rest — so that when the trusty comes along, the frog-legs of his mop scissoring across the impetigo lino, he has to sop up all this slop. — Compelled to watch his former self, Claude experiences considerable irritation: Fairfield Claude is trying to put the hex on Gourevitch with his bug-eyed leer, his frantic gobbling and his jackhammer knee. These are the affectations of a novice . . one who imagines he can experiment with the role of madman, pulling it on and peeling it off. . a sweat-damp leotard lying on the floor of a walk-up in the East Village, goddamnit! In the non-place Claude currently inhabits he’s becoming aware of these annoyances: an old wooden hat-stand with a watch cap speared on one of its curling prongs and an umbrella sheathed in its tacky scabbard. — Oh, and someone yelling at him: Claude! Claude! — Back in Fairfield, Claude snatches Gourevitch’s brown bag and, pulling out the banana, starts with the spieclass="underline" They say they found it, yeah? Found it with one of these, yeah? A midget sub, yeah? This. . this is a midget sub, yeah? Gourevitch shrugs non-committally, Fairfield Claude, wise to him and repelled by the fishy swelling of his throat. . sooner or later gotta carve him a fuckin’ blow-hole!. . continues: This is the H-bomb, yeah? Dropped outta a fuckin’ boodlie-boo B-52, yeah? I know ALL ABOUT IT, MA-AN, ALL ABOUT IT! He splits the banana’s skin with his untrimmed and horny thumbnail and tears it open. You wanna know why I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT? Again, Gourevitch shrugs, and Claude thinks, What a creep, although of what kind — MIS, OSS, Agency or Fed — he cannot be sure. I know all about this STUFF — he picks slimy fibres from the banana peel — about electrical leads that feed through banks of cut-out switches to the proximity fuses buried in this STUFF — he squishes the banana between fingers — AYCH-EE, AYCH-EE arranged in shaped CHARGES — he moulds the pulp into roughly lenticular blobs — fuckin’ LENSES, man, focusing the SHOCKWAVE, making sure that it closes in nice and tight into a CRITICAL MASS. He takes the blobs in his hand, squeezes them into a shaking fist that he extends towards Gourevitch’s face, the bilious pulp oozing from between his fingers. — You wanna know how I know about THE BOMB, yeah? Goo spatters Gourevitch’s dressing gown — he grunts ambiguously. — I know about it because I WAS THERE, MAN, calculating the Godly integral and Satan’s diff erential — that’s how I know to track the ballistic orbs and tridents through the heavens, ma-an. — Fairfield Claude’s glider carries on creaking, his body rocks, someone claims. . there are a thousand million questions about hate and death and war . . But the shouting is becoming a drag: it’s time to go — Claude gulps down his doppelgänger. . introjects him, and falls to ee-lim-in-ating the seditious and the negative with firm strokes of his pen as he sings: Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, Wid de CUDGEL IN HE HAND! — A hand closes over Claude’s, and Busner — who’s now towelled but still dripping — crouches down beside him in the hall and gently withdraws the letter he’s been censoring on his bent knee. Through the wall comes the highly appropriate cry, That’s what the wall of love is for! Busner slaps the wallpaper and shouts, Some bloody quiet please — IT’S FIRST THING IN THE MORNING! though he knows it’s no such thing: there’d been a few too many tins of Worthington’s on stage last night. Sleep had at first been deep — but eventually the heavy ebb of his bladder had drawn him to the lavatory, and when he lay down once more it had been. . full-fathom-five. Be that as it may. . Busner thinks, as he holds the sheet of Basildon Bond up to the light shining through the transom. . there are some advantages to living over the shop. He sees the watermark buried in the notepaper’s weave, he registers de muff-tash on he face: in fact, several thick felt-tipped muff-taches neatly obliterate the address at the top left, the date top right, the salutation, the entire body of the missive, the valediction bottom left and — assuming the writer had continued pro forma — the first element of his or her signature, so all that remains is a single word, a surname presumably: Lincoln, the L with a trailing loop that whips across the page. Busner reconsiders this: It might actually be the place name — or both, in a medievalish sort of way, say, John of Lincoln. . He summons himself to speak levelly and neutrally with the air of someone who both expects an answer and believes he will receive one: Why did you do this, Claude? But Gummidge says nowt, only persists in rocking back and forth rowing to nowhere . . his reassumed neck-gear mangling into his lap as he bends, unmangling as he straightens, his wurzel head rolling about on his stuff ed-up shoulders. — Next, and more infuriatingly, he clicks the dial on his little trannie and turns its and his own volume up: I tellya, man, I was THERE, and what I didn’t know AT THAT TIME I made it my goddamn business to find out AT A LATER STAGE such as. . NOW. Find out how the Godly integral fits in. . Laird & Company must be overcome within ten days if the shipyard is to be saved from closure. This was announced last night following the first meeting of the shipbuilding committee. . on the holy ballistics — a ball of enriched pee-you no bigger ’n a softball and tampered with, naturally, to intensify the reaction and. . make immediate representations to the Minister for Employment and Productivity —.