Well, what it is—is? what’s “is”?—is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taking a shit, right in the street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by—“Hey!” Slothrop wants to shout, “hey lookit that giant ape! or whatever it is. You guys? Hey…” But he doesn’t, luckily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed in May.

Berlin proves to be full of these tricks. There’s a big chromo of Stalin that Slothrop could swear is a girl he used to date at Harvard, the mustache and hair only incidental as makeup, damn if that isn’t what’s her name… but before he can quite hear the gibbering score of little voices—hurry, hurry, get it in place, he’s almost around the corner—here, laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves of bread dough left to rise under clean white cloths—boy, is everybody hungry: the same thought hits them all at once, wow! Raw dough! loaves of bread for that monster back there… oh, no that’s right, that was a building, the Reichstag, so these aren’t bread… by now it’s clear that they’re human bodies, dug from beneath today’s rubble, each inside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an optical mistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we’ll be feeding on by Xmas?

What the notorious Femina is to cigarette-jobbing circles in Berlin, the Chicago is to dopers. But while dealing at the Femina usually gets under way around noon, the Chicago here only starts jiving after the 10:00 curfew. Slothrop, Säure, Trudi and Magda come in a back entrance, out of a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only here and there, like the open country. Inside, M.O.s and corpsmen run hither and thither clutching bottles of fluffy white crystalline substances, small pink pills, clear ampoules the size of pureys. Occupation and Reichsmarks ruffle and flap across the room. Some dealers are all chemical enthusiasm, others all business. Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate the walls. Lights and arguing are kept low, should the military police happen by.

On a wire-backed chair, blunt hair hands picking quietly at a guitar, sits an American sailor with an orangutan look to him. In 3/4 time and shit-kicking style, he is singing:

THE DOPER’S DREAM

Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in

To a bubblin’ hookah so high,

When all of a sudden some Arab jinni

Jump up just a-winkin’ his eye.

“I’m here to obey all your wishes,” he told me,