“Whooping it up for Chatterton. He’s got some kind of crazy-ass notion about acoustics—increase the volume, multiply it and its echo again and again and again, and it’ll somehow agitate his dominoes into motion. The Assos are having a hell of a good time, crowding into his lab and beyond, blatting and bleating and… and…” the more he talked the madder he got, “…drumming and banging.” With swift impetuosity he ripped off his pith helmet and slashed at the butterfly. He missed, which did nothing to defuse his anger. “Goddamn bugs,” he said.

“Why don’t you stop them—Chatterton’s recruits?”

“And lose my hundred grunts? As it is, whenever Chatterton calls a two-minute time out to adjust a mike or a generator or something, they all stand around like statues until it starts up again.”

“There’s a big desert out there. Why not send ’em deep into it?”

“Because my hundred grunts would go with them. They love the noise.” He gulped a Maalox. “It’s a goddamn dilemma,” he said. “Where are you with the BRITs?”

Nowhere, I should have told him. But stalling, I said, “I picked up Lipgloss’s ethnography…”

“Quit stalling,” he said. “What did you find out?”

“I found out he’s got hundred of notebooks, and every one of them is totally illegible.”

“So decipher ’em. Sooner you do, the sooner I’ll put you and your doxy on a plane. With a creepy smile he added, “Just get started, and you’ll be happily surprised at how fast it’ll go.”

THIRTY-THREE
PLOTS AND PLANS

In the early days of my imprisonment I had concocted energetic plots, devised feverish plans of escape. To overpower my jailers was inconceivable but to outfox them was certainly within the realm of possibility. People less self-reliant than I were always managing to do it. They drugged guards and expropriated their uniforms. They masqueraded as corpses or a bowl of sushi—the list was as long as the catalog of B movies. But with all the know-how books I had read and all the television I had seen, I still couldn’t figure out how to evacuate a tenth-rate slammer.

I tried a number of maneuvers; example: bribing a jailer I took to be corruptible with a jar of salted peanuts Chatterton had left behind. The man accepted the lure with an air of entitlement. It never occurred to him that he was being greased, and my attempt to enlighten him was met with stony incomprehension.

Another tack: flattening myself against the wall beside the door and screaming until I was hoarse, steeling myself for the guard flying in to investigate and my flying out to freedom. It was a project that came to nothing, because my howls were totally ignored.