“Ah, yes indeed. The mummy’s curse, you idiot. Christ, Christ, I’m ready for D Wing.”

Now D Wing is “The White Visitation” ’s cover, still housing a few genuine patients. Few of the PISCES people go near it. The skeleton of regular hospital staff have their own canteen, W.C.s, sleeping quarters, offices, carrying on as under the old peace, suffering the Other Lot in their midst. Just as, for their part, PISCES staff suffer the garden or peacetime madness of D Wing, only rarely finding opportunity to swap information on therapies or symptoms. Yes, one would expect more of a link. Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out, it’s not. How does one feel legitimist and easy for very long about the transition? From conspiracies so mild, so domestic, from the serpent coiled in the teacup, the hand’s paralysis or eye’s withdrawal at words, words that could frighten that much, to the sort of thing Spectro found every day in his ward, extinguished now… to what Pointsman finds in Dogs Piotr, Natasha, Nikolai, Sergei, Katinka—or Pavel Sergevich, Varvara Nikolaevna, and then their children, and—When it can be read so clearly in the faces of the physicians… Gwenhidwy inside his fluffy beard never as impassive as he might have wished, Spectro hurrying away with a syringe for his Fox, when nothing can really stop the Abreaction of the Lord of the Night unless the Blitz stops, rockets dismantle, the entire film runs backward: faired skin back to sheet steel back to pigs to white incandescence to ore, to Earth. But the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound of arrival, is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process: with each one the Lord further legitimizes his State, and we who cannot find him, even to see, come to think of death no more often, really, than before… and, with no warning when they will come, and no way to bring them down, pretend to carry on as in Blitzless times. When it does happen, we are content to call it “chance.” Or we have been persuaded. There do exist levels where chance is hardly recognized at all. But to the likes of employees such as Roger Mexico it is music, not without its majesty, this power series

terms numbered according to rocketfalls per square, the Poisson dispensation ruling not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per year… .

Pointsman stands by a window, his own vaguely reflected face blown through with the driven snow outside in the darkening day. Far across the downs cries a train whistle, grainy as late fog: a cock-crow— ·—·——, a long whistle, another crow, fire at trackside, a rocket, another rocket, in the woods or valley…

Well… Why not renounce the Book then Ned, give it up that’s all, the obsolescent data, the Master’s isolated moments of poetry, it’s paper that’s all, you don’t need it, the Book and its terrible curse… before it’s too late… . Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous—but before whom? Who’s listening? But he has crossed back to the desk and actually laid hands on it… .