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Mood,” he said, extending his hand. “Elloree, South Carolina.”
    â€œRomie Futch.” We shook. “Hampton.”
    â€œI’ll get right to the skinny,” he said. “Reason I sat down here is because I heard you using some polysyllabic diction, some, uh, I mean, uh, lofty lingo, some, uh, uh, uh, I mean, crusty academese. Do you copy?”
    â€œI certainly do.”
    â€œNow, I’m hip to the confidentiality statement, don’t get me wrong.”
    â€œAs long as we don’t talk directly about the procedure, the, um, agenda, um, um, like, goddammit, modus operandi,” I said, “it’s all good.”
    â€œYour dome feel kind of effervescent, uh, carbonated, uh, uh, I mean, uh, spumous?”
    â€œIf by dome you mean cranium, um, like, you know, brainpan, um, skull, man, then that’s about right. Kind of fizzy.”
    â€œRight on, youngblood. Ought to call it the fizz . Kind of like the mental equivalent of the fuzz. You copy?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œIn addition to the fizz, my brain’s too zippy, too jiggy, but not in a funky way. Can’t think without some Latinate polysyllable, or, uh, I mean, some bone-jacked Chaucerism jumping my dome.”
    â€œHey, Irvin, you’ve hijacked my lexicon, my palaver, um, like, you know, um, um—shit won’t stop. My motherfucking word hoard. Talking real fast is the only way to beat it.”
    â€œDr. Whodunit said a decent night of slumber would mellow the manic logorrhea,” Irvin muttered briskly.
    â€œYeah, but the problem is, how do you achieve, uh, fuck, dormancy, um, um, you know, fucking quiescence, like, alleviation when your brain won’t chill the fuck out?”
    â€œDon’t know,” Irvin said.
    â€œYou didn’t get any, um, like, medicinal, I mean, pharmacological helpers? Shit, I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
    â€œI was psyching you out.” Irvin spoke quickly. “I got the dope.”
    We laughed. We did a high-five gesture but did not slap skin. And then Irvin went to work on his sushi for a minute or two.
    â€œSo,” he said rapidly, “what brings you to this questionable institution?”
    â€œDivorce,” I spat. “Financial difficulties, chronic intoxication.”
    â€œI dig. I dig.”
    â€œHow ’bout you?”
    â€œCredit-card debt, doobie saturation point, my band of a decade folded.”
    â€œYou a musician?”
    â€œTrumpet.”
    â€œThat’s cool. What kind of music you play?”
    â€œFusion, uh, uh, amalgam, uh, I mean, uh, alloy, shit, uh, jazz, jive, bop, boogie-woogie. What the fuck? That’s wacked, man. Didn’t mean to say that cheesy scat.”
    Irvin clutched his cranium and worked his feral eyebrows up and down.
    â€œSee you on the flip side.” Irvin stood up. “Got to take refuge, uh, uh, I mean, abscond, uh, crash in my, my, uh, pad, I mean cubicle, uh, chamber. Damn. So, uh, yeah.”
    Irvin picked up his tray and hustled toward the Rubenesque woman who rinsed off our filthy trays. She toiled in a gloomy room behind a window—plump and swathed in steam. I looked away from her, but the words would not stop. Nurturing, fecund, maternal, fructiferous. Voluptuous, lactiferous, primeval, rich. I could not stop verbally wallowing in her roseate fleshiness, rollicking in her succulence. I longed to slither into the humid room and nestle my head between her mammaries, bask in sensation like an infant, drinking in the synesthetic riot of sight-smell-sound-touch. But I hurried over and dropped off my tray. Averting my gaze, I fled to my room.
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    My room, of course, was no place of refuge. There was Needle, smoking a cigarette, pacing to the final throes of some death-metal paroxysm, packing the tiny space with smoke and his signature odor of rotted leaves and laundry perfume. And there was another weird olfactory undernote, something