“Yeahrr,” said Hartman. “The paranoiac isn’t necessarily wrong about things—he just sees too much. Take your hare, for instance. Your hare is a very paranoid animal. Your hare has basically been placed on the planet as food. He doesn’t have a life. When you are an instant meal, you are always on the lookout. So, paranoid. Well, our friend was a lion, which all doctors are, present company included—they’re tin gods from Day One—and, while it may work in America, it doesn’t cut any ice down here; he humiliated this old witch doctor, so there wasn’t any way out. No need to go around asking for trouble in this life, is there? The hare sees too much, the lion not enough—and there’s the difference between happiness and hell, provided you are a real and true lion, not some bloody fool who is misinformed.”

Hartman had the fleshy, broken nose of a pug, and as he spoke he kept brushing at it with his thumb. He sneezed three times in rapid succession.

“The curious thing,” Koestler said, “is that the stupid bleeder died professing belief in science. He had a little slate and a piece of chalk, and when we finally went in to remove the body, I read his last words: Amor fati!’ ‘Love your fate.’ A stubborn bloody fool.”

“Wow,” Indiana said. “What did you do for the guy? Did he just die?”

“Of course he died. ‘Slathered like a mad dog’ is no mere cliché, let me tell you. I was inexperienced back then and had to play it by ear. All you had to do was say the word ‘water’ and he had esophageal spasms. You try to anticipate the symptoms and treat them, but we just aren’t equipped here. The brain swells, you see, and there’s no place for it to go.”

Koestler accidentally bumped his pudding onto the floor with his elbow, and Babbitt quickly stepped forward and scooped it up in neat little handfuls.

Indiana picked up his dessert and tasted another spoonful. “This is good.”

“Good for a case of the shits. Did you boys bring in any paregoric?”

“Lomotil,” Chicago said. “Easier to—”

“Transport,” Hartman said, picking up a greasy deck of cards and dealing them out for bridge.

“Mix it with Dilaudid and it will definitely cure diarrhea,” Koestler said.

“You got some cholera in these parts?” Chicago said. He was beginning to sound like an old hand already.

“No,” Koestler said vacantly. “Just the routine shits.” He picked up his cards and fanned through them.

As Indiana finished his pudding, Johnson padded back out to the gazebo with a bowl of ice, another quart of Canadian Mist, and four cans of Coke Classic.

“I had this patient call me up at three in the morning,” Indiana said.

“Called the doctor, woke him up,” Chicago recited.