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I’ve had an opportunity to anyway.”
    â€œYou will tonight.” Dr. Morrow smirked like a jaded god. “And I ask you to please remember section 2, clause 6.5 of contract 3 if you feel the urge to share your experiences with another subject.”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Sure enough, the cafeteria was buzzing that night, some thirty-odd men grabbing grub or clustering at the laminate tables—crackheads, meth heads, potheads, and speed freaks, pill-popping maniacs and bloated alcoholics, aging heshers and ramshackle players, washed-up men on the down side of life. It was as though Dr. Morrow had snapped his fingers and—behold—a crowd of male human specimens had materialized in the cafeteria, eachone modeling a particular flourish of middle-aged decrepitude. I noted all manner of potbellies, diverse patterns of baldness, various shades and stages of graying hair. Though there were some solid working-class types who must’ve been suffering bad patches, most of the subjects were clearly of the debauched variety.
    Debauched .
    Now, there was a useful word. From the Middle French débaucher , which meant to turn away from one’s duty .
    Debauched creatures lurked in the fluorescent light with their molded plastic trays. Debauched creatures hunched over classic cafeteria food—burgers, fries, corn dogs, tater tots, and victuals of that ilk. Debauched creatures grumbled and brooded. Debauched creatures stared sullenly. Just about all of these debauched creatures (including me) were in withdrawal mode and, hence, not in the best of spirits. They seemed to avoid one another, each withdrawing into his own bubble of personal space and staring out at the world with shell-shocked eyes. I wondered if the Center was providing heavy-duty pharmaceutical assistance to the more drug-addled among them.
    Addled .
    There was another useful word. From the Old English noun adela (liquid filth) , addled was synonymous with spoiled , corrupted , rotten , putrescent .
    Mephitic , loathsome , fetid , foul .
    Tainted , noisome , moldering , putrid .
    I felt vaguely nauseated, as though the words themselves were festering in my head, lodged like parasites in the slimy tissues of my brain. Still, I made it through the grub line, collected a plate of lo mein, and absconded to a remote table at the edge of the room, where I could endure the streams of verbiage in peace.
    Feculent , noxious , rancid , fecal .
    Like the birds in that Hitchcock movie, the words kept coming. I’d be sitting there, eating my noodles, trying to have a normal thought about something. And then blee p —after a mental hiccup, a new word, shiny and strange, would fly into my head. The skinny fucker sitting at the table on my right was lupine, for example, hirsute in the extreme, downright lycanthropic. He was eating french fries with a fork and muttering to himself. Another dude, sulking over a bowl of soup, looked ursine and melancholic. Another had this clammy ecclesiastic quality, plump, pallid, and dank, like he’d been dwelling indoors from day one of his life.
    I couldn’t decide if all these words were helping me think or preventing me from thinking. Maybe they were just hijacking my thoughts, taking them in new directions. According to Dr. Morrow, I wouldn’t retain every single info unit from each download, though it usually took a night or two of sleep to sort it all out. In the meantime, I felt uncomfortable, mentally constipated, like I needed to express ( squeeze out; convey by words or gesture ) something.
    Bespeak , broach , communicate , convey .
    Pontificate . Proclaim . Vent .
    That’s why I was talking to myself, I guess. That’s why this older hepcat with hoary dreadlocks backtracked with his tray of sushi and sat down at my table.
    â€œWhat it is?” he said. “You got the dog, or the dog got you?”
    â€œThe dog’s got me,” I said. “Most definitely.”
    â€œIrvin