“You say what,” Roger has been screaming for a while.

“I-say,” sez Rózsavölgyi, again.

“You say, ‘I say’? Is that it? Then you should have said, ‘I say, “I say.”’”

“I did.”

“No, no—you said, ‘I say,’ once, is what you—”

“A-ha! But I said it again. I-said it… twice.”

“But that was after I asked you the question—you can’t tell me the two ‘I say’s were both part of the same statement,” unless, “that’s asking me to be unreasonably,” unless it’s really true that, “credulous, and around you that’s a form of,” that we’re the same person, and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that means, “insanity, Rózsavölgyi—”

“My glasses,” snivels Fräulein Müller-Hochleben, now crawling around the room, Mexico scattering the glass splinters with his shoe so that now and then the unfortunate girl will cut a hand or a knee, beginning to trail dark little feathers of blood for inches at a time, eventually—assuming she were to last long enough—dotting in Pointsman’s rug like the train of a Beardsley gown.

“You’re doing fine, Miss Müller-Hochleben!” cries Roger encouragingly, “and as for you, you—” but is stopped on noticing how Rózsavölgyi now is nearly invisible in the shadow, and how the whites of his eyes are actually glowing white, jittering around in the air, winking-out-coming-back… it is costing Rózsavölgyi an effort to stay in this shadow-corner. It is not, at all, his sort of place. For one thing, the rest of the room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a camera. And the walls—they don’t appear to be… well, solid, actually. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standing piece of silk or nylon, the color watery gray but now and then with a surprise island in the flow, some color absolutely foreign to this room: saffron spindles, palm-green ovals, magenta firths running comblike into jagged comicbook-orange chunks of island as the wounded fighter-plane circles, jettisons the tanks, then the silver canopy, sets the flaps to just above a stall, wheels up as the blue (suddenly, such a violent blue!) rushes in just before impact throttle closed uhhnnhh! oh shit the reef, we’re going to smash up on the—oh. Oh, there’s no reef? We-we’re safe? We are! Mangoes, I see mangoes on that tree over there! a-and there’s a girl—there’s a lotta girls! Lookit, they’re all gorgeous, their tits point straight out, and they’re all swingin’ those grass skirts, playin’ ukuleles and singing (though why are the voices so hard and tough, so nasally like the voices of an American chorus line?)—

White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

One taste o’ my pa-paya and y’ll never wanna go a-waaaay!

Moon like a yel-low ba-na-na,

Hangin’ over, my ca-ba-na,

And lotsa hula, hula games to play—

Oh the stars are fallin’ over Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island,

And the lava down the mountain’s runnin’ scrump-shus as a cherry pie—

Even Sweet Leilani in the Little Grass Shack

Loves a coconut monkey and a missionary snack,