“You’re caught in tonality,” screams Gustav. “Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of them are. You’re too old. You’ll never move beyond the game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment.”

“The Row is a game too.” Säure sits grinning with an ivory spoon, shoveling incredible piles of cocaine into his nose, going through his whole repertoire: arm straight out swinging in in a giant curve zoom precisely to the nostril he’s aiming at, then flicking in the lot from two feet away without losing a crystal… then a whole bunch gets tossed up in the air like a piece of popcorn and nose-gobbled ngkok on target, inside where it’s smooth as a Jo block, not a cilium in sight there since the Liebknecht funeral, if not before… hand-to-hand shifts of spoon two or three times, faster than ivory ever moved in air… rails disappearing in a wink without benefit of a tube to guide them. “Sound is a game, if you’re capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary. That’s why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I’m choosing my game, one full of light and kindness. You’re stuck with that stratosphere stuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it ‘enlightenment.’ You don’t know what enlightenment is, Kerl, you’re blinder than I am.”

Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quiet pool.

“Your ‘light and kindness’ are the jigging of the doomed,” sez Gustav. “You can smell mortality in every one of those bouncy little tunes.” Surly, he decapitates a vial of cocaine with his teeth, and spits the red debris in among the shimmering bugs.

Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothrop found are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a visual blues being played by the clear stream. There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like that Rilke prophesied,

And though Earthliness forget you,

To the stilled Earth say: I flow.

To the rushing water speak: I am.

It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the spirits of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning’s segment, Slothrop, just suckin’ on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even know it.

The harp didn’t show up right away. His first days in these mountains, he came across a set of bagpipes, left behind in April by some Highland unit. Slothrop has a knack for doping things out. The Imperial instrument was a cinch. In a week he mastered that dreamy tune Dick Powell sang in the movies, “In the Shadows Let Me Come and Sing to You,” and spent most of his time playing that, WHANGde-diddle de-dee, WHANG de dum—de-doooooo… over and over, on the bagpipes. By and by he began to notice that offerings of food were being left near the lean-to he’d put up. Mangel-wurzels, a basket of cherries, even fresh fish. He never saw who was leaving them. Either he was supposed to be a bagpiper’s ghost, or just purely sound itself, and he knew enough about solitudes and night-voices to figure what was going on. He quit playing the bagpipes, and next day he found the harp. It happens to be the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long ago for him to remember.