“Katje.”

“Sshh,” raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Côte d’Azur toward Italy. Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can’t think of anything that’d work. He reaches an arm, without wetting his fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the pain. It hurts even more. He falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone, completely, most of her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a little wax on his fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated fishhook… . She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking, watching him while he slept… until something, he’ll never be asking her what, triggered her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette’s end. He straightens it out, finishes it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a war on… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

“Ordinarily in our behavior, we react not singly, but complexly, to fit the ever present contents of our environment. In old people,” Pavlov was lecturing at the age of 83, “the matter is altogether different. Concentrating on one stimulus we exclude by negative induction other collateral and simultaneous stimuli because they often do not suit the circumstances, are not complementary reactions in the given setting.”

Thus [Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to anyone], reaching for some flower on my table,

I know the cool mosaic of my room

Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve

Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need

That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked

From objects all around, now concentrates

(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.

Whilst there yet, in the room’s hypnotic evening,

The others lurk—the books, the instruments,

The old man’s clothes, an old gorodki stick,

Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,

Or memories I kept of where they were,

Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:

The reach toward the frail and waiting flower…

And so, one of them—pen, or empty glass—

Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll

Beyond the blank frontiers of memory…

Yet this, be clear, is no “senile distraction,”

But concentrating, such as younger men

Can easily and laughing dodge, their world

Presenting too much more than one mean loss—

And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack,

Excitatory processes eased to cinders

By Inhibition’s tweaking, callused fingers,

Each time my room begins its blur I feel

I’ve looked in on some city’s practice blackout

(Such as must come, should Germany keep on

That road of madness). Each light, winking out…

Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom

The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time.

The weekly briefings at “The White Visitation” are all but abandoned. Hardly anyone sees the old Brigadier about these days. There is evidence of a budgetary insecurity begun to filter in among the cherub-crusted halls and nooks of the PISCES facility.

“The old man’s funking,” cries Myron Grunton, none too stable himself these days. The Slothrop group are gathered for their regular meeting in the ARF wing. “He’ll shoot down the whole scheme, all it’ll take is one bad night… .”