Nelson puts his hand on Skeeter’s orb of hair. His eyes widen, at how far his hand sinks down. He says, “I don’t want to hurt you, Skeeter. I don’t want anybody to hurt anybody.”

“Bless you, boy.” Skeeter in his darkness feels blessing flow down through the hand tingling in his hair like sun burning through a cloud. Mustn’t mock this child. Softly, stealthily, parting vines of craziness, his heart approaches certainty.

Rabbit’s voice explodes. “Shit. It’s just a dirty little war that has to be fought. You can’t make something religious out of it just because you happened to be there.”

Skeeter stands and tries to comprehend this man. “Trouble with you,” he sees, “you still cluttered up with common sense. Common sense is bullshit, man. It gets you through the days all right, but it leaves you alone at night. I keeps you from knowing. You just don’t know, Chuck. You don’t even know that now is all the time there is. What happens to you, is all that happens, right? You are it, right? You. Are. It. I’ve come down”—he points to the ceiling, his finger a brown crayon—“to tell you that, since along these two thousand years somewhere you’ve done gone and forgotten again, right?”

Rabbit says, “Talk sense. Is our being in Vietnam wrong?”

“Wrong? Man, how can it be wrong when that’s the way it is? These poor Benighted States just being themselves, right? Can’t stop bein’ yourself, somebody has to do it for you, right? Nobody that big around. Uncle Sam wakes up one morning, looks down at his belly, sees he’s some cockroach, what can he do? Just keep bein’ his cockroach self, is all. Till he gets stepped on. No such shoe right now, right? Just keep doing his cockroach thing. I’m not one of these white lib-er-als like that cracker Fulldull or that Charlie McCarthy a while back gave all the college queers a hard-on, think Vietnam some sort of mistake, we can fix it up once we get the cave men out of office, it is no mistake, right, any President comes along falls in love with it, it is lib-er-al-ism’s very wang and ding-dong pussy. Those crackers been lickin’ their mother’s ass so long they forgotten what she looks like frontwards. What is lib-er-alism? Bringin’ joy to the world, right? Puttin’ enough sugar on dog-eat-dog so it tastes good all over, right? Well now what could be nicer than Vietnam? We is keepin’ that coast open. Man, what is we all about if it ain’t keepin’ things open? How can money and jizz make their way if we don’t keep a few cunts like that open? Nam is an act of love, right? Compared to Nam, beatin’ Japan was flat-out ugly. We was ugly fuckers then and now we is truly a civilized spot.” The ceiling agitates; he feels the gift of tongues descend to him. “We is the spot. Few old fools like the late Ho may not know it, we is what the world is begging for. Big beat, smack, black cock, big-assed cars and billboards, we is into it. Jesus come down, He come down here. These other countries, just bullshit places, right? We got the ape shit, right? Bring down Kingdom Come, we’ll swamp the world in red-hot real American blue-green ape shit, right?”