Shh, shh. A syringe, a number 26 point. Bloods stifling in the brownwood hotel suite. To chase or worry this argument is to become word-enemies, and neither man really wants to. Oneirine theophosphate is one way around the problem. (Tchitcherine: “You mean thiophosphate, don’t you?” Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur…. Wimpe: “I mean theophosphate, Vaslav,” indicating the Presence of God.) They shoot up: Wimpe eying the water-tap nervously, recalling Tchaikovsky, salmonella, a fast medley of whistlable tunes from the Pathétique. But Tchitcherine has eyes only for the point, its German precision, its fine steel grain. Soon he will come to know a circuit of aid stations and field hospitals, as good for postwar nostalgia as a circuit of peacetime spas—army surgeons and dentists will bond and hammer patent steel for life into his suffering flesh, and pick out what has entered it by violence with an electromagnetic device bought between the wars from Schumann of Düsseldorf, with a light bulb and adjustable reflector, 2-axis locking handles and a complete set of weird-shaped Polschuhen, iron pieces to modify the shape of the magnetic field… but there in Russia, that night with Wimpe, was his first taste—his initiation into the bodyhood of steel… no way to separate this from the theophosphate, to separate vessels of steel from the ungodly insane rush….

For 15 minutes the two of them run screaming all over the suite, staggering around in circles, lined up with the rooms’ diagonals. There is in Laszlo Jamf’s celebrated molecule a particular twist, the so-called “Pökler singularity,” occurring in a certain crippled indole ring, which later Oneirinists, academician and working professional alike, are generally agreed is responsible for the hallucinations which are unique to this drug. Not only audiovisual, they touch all senses, equally. And they recur. Certain themes, “mantic archetypes” (as Jollifox of the Cambridge School has named them), will find certain individuals again and again, with a consistency which has been well demonstrated in the laboratory (see Wobb and Whoaton, “Mantic Archetype Distribution Among Middle-Class University Students,” J. Oneir. Psy. Pharm., XXIII, pg. 406–453). Because analogies with the ghost-life exist, this recurrence phenomenon is known, in the jargon, as “haunting.” Whereas other sorts of hallucinations tend to flow by, related in deep ways that aren’t accessible to the casual dopefiend, these Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them “the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology”—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable…. On recognizing that he is being haunted, the subject enters immediately into “phase two,” which, though varying in intensity from subject to subject, is always disagreeable: often sedation (0.6 mg atropine subcut.) will be necessary, even though Oneirine is classified as a CNS depressant.