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coughing bloody phlegm into his fetid mouth and spitting it into the side-dripping wastebasket. If the universe were only an illusion for his benefit, it had suddenly become an unbearable one for everything had disappeared but the sound of the drunk spitting fat greenish oysters from his grayish lips.
    He listened to it, caught fast in the room.
    His mouth spread out into a thin white line. He hated the drunken man. God damn you—die! his mind raged bitterly. He wanted to shout the words at the drunk, stand over him with a gun and fire endless bullets into his stale, reeking body.
    But he couldn’t move to kill. And even the words of hate would not form properly and the fury lashed back into him and shook him. Die, you pig! You gagging horse, you useless, brainless idiot!
    The coughing broke off. Silence spread itself on the slice of his brain. But he still saw the drunken man, thudding back onto his grimy pillow, panting exhaustedly, his drawn, unshaven face half red, half yellow with subsiding apoplexy.
    Erick couldn’t stop it. He broke wind.
    The sound was a gassy rush of air that sounded like a pathetic old man looking up to the heavens and crying—
Ah!
There was no rifle shot quality, no explosive sound. It slid from his body. Without his will. He hadn’t meant to do it. Again it felt as if someone had taken charge of his body and given it the command to break wind. Now his bowels would perform unbidden he thought in teeth-gritted anguish. What good were the bowels if he couldn’t control them?
    The odor reached his nostrils.
    It was sweetish and clinging and he could almost see the air dancing with fetid particles of smell. They glistened green like the backs of fat blow-flies. He closed his eyes and grimaced savagely.
    Duck or you’re a goner!—yelled the whimsical portion of his brain, the portion that enjoyed everything from misery to elation.
    Groggily he looked down at Ava Gardner, feeling somehow embarrassed to have broken wind in her presence. “Sorry,” he said to her and then wondered why it was that people talked to photographs and pet dogs and curly-headed dolls.
    He looked over her swelling bosom, the inward curve of her ribs, the slight prominence of her stomach, her smooth legs, the blue nightgown folds gathering at her navel.
    He looked up at her face. Who are you? he asked. Who am I? Who are any of us? The entire spectacle of the world and its people came over him again and he would rise up and cry—How long has this been going on? Or say like Lynn in a rare moment of self-revelation that night so long ago—
Stop the world, I’m getting off
.
    He looked at her. He wasn’t trying to think. Yet his brain clicked out its endless progressions.
    There you sit frozen in time, he thought to her, showing the people the nice barely veiled teats for ten cents a throw. What’s the point?
    What is the goddamn point may I ask? He closed his eyes. He saw the picture still, meaninglessly. And kept asking pointless questions. There he was paralyzed and he kept asking questions of a photograph on a movie magazine. That was the true callousness of the brain. Its innate viciousness. For, in moments of deepest despair, observation went on, and heedless of the pain it caused, analyzed the current scene, the world in general as if itself were not a functioning part of the body but its own entity, a detached, impartial investigator carrying out its never-ending probe into the meaning of things.
    What made you leave home, he asked. What made you go to that studio? Was it private or was it part of your movie studio? What impelled you to strip naked and then to slide that cool silk nightgown over your dark hair, down over your soft nude body and to sit down in it, posing, shoulders back, breasts outflung to the universe?
    Ava, what?
    He stared at her, eyes opened for the clinching question.
    She didn’t answer him.
    Oddly enough, for a moment, it almost surprised him. Sometimes every proportion became so distorted