this: he and Radio Gourevitch in cahoots, nuzzling up with the hapless Kid under the Bodhi trees bellying and the lotuses looping. . in the veggie light — the three of them participants in. . a perpetual bed-in timed by a broken floral clock. At least Zack could now acknowledge this harsh truth about himself: I was charmed by him, just as I was charmed four years ago by Roger. They both made me feel I was accepted — a younger boy invited to play the big ones’ game. — Another Bakerloo Line train has passed, offloading its freight of silence — and it’s on to this vacuous heap that Busner drops his bombshelclass="underline" What’s in that plastic bag? The three buddysattvas look up at him brazenly, and Lesley conjures the ear of the bag back out of his pocket. . then the whole white rabbit. S’blotters, man, he lisps, I made ’em up with my little dropper —. Yeah, yeah, Radio Gourevitch says, you go from place to place, man — you’re Johnny Acidseed. Oh, I see, LSD, Busner says, and, revolted by his own prefectural tone, he lifts one foot nonchalantly from the itchy coconut matting to scratch it with the big toenail of the other. It’s a super-strong batch, Lesley says, super-strong and super-pure — I got it from this gone spade down at the Hippy Hotel —. I wish, Busner remarks facetiously, that all these gone spades really would be. . gone. At this Gourevitch levitates from the mattress. Upright, he assumes all of his asinine hipster pomposity: he’s fully dressed in a caramel-coloured leather jacket, cavalry twill trousers, cowboy boots with Cuban heels and a thin nylon jumper the obscene colour of crêpe bandages, from the rollneck of which his Adam’s apple. . prolapses while he blathers, Yeah, beautiful day, Zack, totally peachy. We — my good friends here and myself, that is — thought we’d go on a journey to celebrate the vernal return, a sea cruise, maybe — or a plane flight —. He means, the Kid is emboldened to interrupt, we’re gonna take a trip. Radio Gourevitch’s face. . is right in mine. Zack stares deep into the emptiness of Roger’s demonic eyes, while he hears muffled enthusiasm coming from the kitchen: This has been Johnnie Walker playing down the Radio 1 chart for this week, and that was Norman Greenbaum in at num—. I’m numb, Busner thinks, that’s what I am: numb — and powerless to resist all these Johnnies. . — He’s certain Gourevitch has had sex with Podge — he’s a hunch Lesley has too. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d interfered . . with Irene and Eileen as well —. We need, Gourevitch pleads, to have some kind of a showdown round here, kick out the jams, shake up the snow globe — there’re circles within circles, my friend, and it follows, counter-clockwise, there’re repressions within repressions. Y’know how it goes, Zack: Jack and Jill, up that goddamn hill — but what if she don’t wanna get a pail of water, man? What if she feels he’s pressuring her to get it — he makes like it’s a. . a. . mutual decision, but has she ever been given a real choice, maybe she doesn’t dig water? Busner says testily, Yes, yes, I know all this — it’s classic double-bind stuff, so what? Gourevitch rolls his shoulders and yawns eggily in Zack’s face: So what, Zack? So what? You slay me with your so whats — your so whats explode in my face, man, poof! Poofs of indifference, that’s what they are, a poisonous, radioactive indifference that, like, goes off whenever you get too close. . Throughout this speech Busner stares, paralysed, at the radome of Gourevitch’s forehead, even as this loudhailing alerts him that: The predator is already inside — what defences I had are long since breached! . . f’rinstance —. For instance, what? Zack says, and Radio Gourevitch, running both his hands through his igneous locks, turns up his volume: Yesterday, man! In the park — I shoulda never gone after Claude like that, but you made me do it! I coulda majorly freaked him out — traumatised him! He coulda thought he’d been checked back into the goddamn Graybar Hotel! But Rodge, Zack says, Claude was about to. . to pounce on those girls on the pedalo, you must appreciate that we’re already on thin ice here as it is. The Meehans over the road — they’re just itching to call the police on us. Zack says this, and he gives his freshly shaven chin a Socratic stroke before continuing: Are you sure under the circumstances that it’s wise for us —. Yes, Gourevitch spittles, yes! It’s the acme of wisdom, Zack — the antagonism between us is tearing this community to pieces. You and me, you and I. . we gotta stop playing the alpha-male game — we need har-mo-ny, we need to dissolve our fragile egos into a group mind, and we gotta get everyone on the same plane —. Everyone? — Busner doesn’t feel humiliated, standing there in his towel — the Evo-Stik on my balls happened a long time since. He moves to where the window is hidden by still more Bodhisattvas, all of them on the same plane, and, pulling them apart, he opens the catch. Out there, on the broken concrete, Oscar is coincidentally licking his balls. . faithful yet with beast. Busner takes a deep breath and turns back to the trio in the room: When you say everyone, Roger, who exactly has had one of these, um, blotters? Gourevitch looks shifty — and shifts from heel to heel. Well, obviously it ain’t just me ’n’ you, Zack, the bad vibes are ricocheting all round the saloon — the chicks’ve all got it in for Claude, they’d murder him if we — he waves a leafy hand in the bulb-light. . and it spirals down — weren’t here to keep the peace. Ah, yes! Zack thinks, it always circles back to the Creep, whatever else he may be he remains Roger’s baby. — The tale of their meeting was Radio Gourevitch’s foundational myth: the fledgling yogibod was doing his part of the research that led to On Feigning Insanity in Mental Institutions. Zack had of course read the paper — it’d been a cause célèbre — but the list of co-authors’ names took up an entire page in Science, Roger being just one among scores of pseudo-patients. . though probably not the only pseudo-therapist. Playing the giddy ox at some ghastly state institution in Connecticut, the young Doctor Gourevitch had come upon Lieutenant Claude Evenrude, once the target-spotter for the Enola Gay, latterly — or so he had managed to convince Roger — a political prisoner, held in asylums and prisons because of his principled objection to the bomb. That, and also his near-psychotic reaction to the horrors he had not simply witnessed, but actually helped to cause. — Wouldn’t yours! Roger had gripped Zack’s wrist with passionate intensity, and his isotopic eyes had smouldered on the drunken night when he first told him the tale. Wouldn’t your conscience burn, Zack, wouldn’t it? No wonder the poor guy’s so disturbed, out of all those aircrew — and there were scads of ’em, three B-29 s on each mission, more than a hundred men altogether — he’s the only goddamn one to stand up to the Man and say, no, this was bad, this was wrong! Didja know, for the first few years after he was sucked into the system, he was still sending his separation pay to the victims! Sure, it never got there — but when I sprung him from Fairfield I got a stack of these pathetic crinkled-up brown envelopes from Admin. Claude had scrawled For the People of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on ’em, and trusted to the goodness of the US Post Office to do the rest. Poor sap! Poor sap indeed . . but what a beneficent friend he had in Rodge, who secured his release and had only begun to make his dancing bear pay for his keep — by dragging him from TV studio to radio studio to tell of his ordeal — when Evenrude went on the lam. — I couldn’t blame him — he’d been through hell since getting busted in ’52 for a stick-up that was actually a cry for help — I mean, Claude was armed with a zucchini inna sock ferchrissakes. . — Following his own Hippocratic muse and generously funded by his wife’s money — Caroline Gourevitch was some kind of department-store heiress — Gourevitch teleported from New to Olde England in order to undertake analytic training at the Tavistock. Then, a year or so ago, shortly after the Chapter Road houses had been bought, and the two of them were casting around for suitable residents. .