At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself with an erect penis. He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin cortex translates into English as “bark,” not to mention the well-known and humorous relation between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and most PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid them, but they are dazzling witticisms compared with jokes out of the mainstream, such as the extraordinary “What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?”). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she’s down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what’s this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl “gam” yes right among these winter-pale clinical halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncarpeted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists… bold Maud, this is incredible, taking the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical as a sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike choking sound, fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her hands up grabbing the loose wool seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating—it’s happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he’s dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past… how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I’m coming. Am I? yes… well… and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a drop… smiling quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to its cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this moment, the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, “Siboney” perhaps, now reaching them down corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals, slime stone battlements, and palm evenings of Cuba… a Victorian pose, her cheek against his leg, his high-veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever, and in the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she’ll begin to blush red as her knees, she’ll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps, but somehow they’re never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace… .

No one to tell. Maud knows something’s up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her. But he can’t tell her… or not everything, not the exact terms of his hope, he’s never, even to himself… it lies ahead in the dark, defined inversely, by horror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death, that dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian’s Progress.