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‘The Eschaton’s a no-go,’ Pemulis said. ‘The map’s a mess out there.’

‘We’re going to get an announcement about the Quebec kids very soon, I can feel it,’ I said. Tm that highly tuned in this position.’

‘What say let’s skip the sausage-analog and whip down to Steak ‘N Sundae and eat.’

There was an extended pause as I ran a response-tree. Pemulis was zipping and unzipping something with a short zipper. I couldn’t decide. I finally had to choose almost at random. ‘I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with ‘“N” in their name.’

‘Listen.’ I heard his knees creak as he leaned in toward the top of my head. ‘About the tu-savez-quoi —’

‘The Eeday Emmay Eezay. The synthetic bacchanal. That’s definitely off, Mike. Talk about the map being a mess.’

‘That’s part of what we need to interface about, if you’d get off your literally your ass here.’

I spent a minute watching the NASA glass fall and rise. ‘Don’t even start, M.M.’

‘What start?’

‘We’re on hiatus, remember? We’re living like Shi’ite Moslems for the thirty days you miraculously blarneyed the guy into giving us.’

‘Blarney wasn’t why we got it, Inc, is the thing.’

‘And now, what, twenty days to go. We’re going to produce urine like a mullah’s babe, we agreed.’

‘This isn’t—’ Pemulis started.

I farted, but it didn’t produce a noise. I was bored. I couldn’t remember a time when Pemulis had bored me. ‘And I do not need you launching temptation-rhetoric my way,’ I said.

Keith Freer appeared in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his bare arms crossed. He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.

‘Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?’ he said.

‘We’re conversing here,’ Pemulís told him.

I half sat up. ‘Flesh?’

Freer looked down at me. ‘This is nothing to laugh at I don’t think Hal. There’s I swear to fucking God a human strip of forehead-flesh upstairs on the hall window, and what looks like two eyebrows, and bits of nose. And now Tall Paul says down in the lobby Stice was seen coming out of the infirmary wearing something out of Zorro.’

Pemulis was completely vertical, standing again; I could hear his knees as he rose. ‘It’s like a tête-à-tête in here, brother. We’re in here bunkered, mano a—’

‘Stice got stuck to the window,’ I explained, lying all the way back down. ‘Kenkle and Brandt were going to detach him with warm water from a janitorial bucket.’

Pemulis said ‘How do you get stuck to a window?’

‘Well from the looks it looks like they detached half his face from his head,’ Freer said, feeling at his own forehead and shuddering a little.

Kieran McKenna’s little porcine snout appeared in a gap under Freer’s arm. He still wore his stupid full-head gauze wrap for his supposed bruised skull. ‘Did you guys get to see The Darkness? Gopnik said he looks like a piece of cheese pizza where somebody tore the cheese off. Gopnik said Troeltsch is charging two bucks a look.’ He ran off toward the stairwell without waiting for a reply, his pocket jingling madly. Freer looked at Pemulis and opened his mouth, then apparently reconsidered and followed off down the hall. We could hear a couple of sarcastic whistles at Freer’s unitard.