Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 26

Jason is walking away from Mary-Anne's apartment, high on life and mesclane/an unknown drug's after effects. After living a PKD grade nightmare for most of the book, he's gotten everything back. He hails a johnnycab to go to Heather Hart's apartment. As the fliterbug flies, Jason reflects on Alys's death (I can't get involved, scandal rags would have a field day) the benefits of status (never having to sweat a police checkpoint) and the unimpeachable identity that 30 million viewers every week gives you. They exist, and thus so does Jason. Ratings ero sum, or something, Jason thinks as he falls asleep. The drugs (to say nothing of not sleeping at all over his two day nightmare) have made him sleepy.

Heather Hart's posh apartment complex is suspended by air jets, which rock to create the sensation of an infant falling asleep. Jason finds Hart is out shopping, but her maid, who he knows well lets him in. He's just gonna crash on the couch and listen to music, Jason says, as he squeezes the maid's firm right boob. "You're horny today" the maid says, pleased, before saying Jason is too tall for her. So, Hart has a top flight record player, and obviously a large collection of LPs, as well as some sort of CD-cassette changer, but for records? The maid said Hart would be back around fiveish, and it is around four pm now. Jason places the gift of Mary-Anne's beautiful pot on the center of the coffee table, then loads up the music player.

Jason comes to much later. He'd fallen asleep again. The apartment is dark, empty, and cold; Jason is amazed that he slept through several hours worth of records. His watch says it is 10:30 PM. Where was Heather?

The door flies open, and in walks an ashen-faced Heather, who has a newspaper. It reads:

TV PERSONALITY SOUGHT IN CONNECTION WITH DEATH OF POLICE GENERAL'S SISTER

and some stuff about how Jason Taverner murdered Alys. Heather asks him first if he murdered Alys, and then gets the Alys-themed part of Jason's adventure, including the discovery of Alys's thousand year old skeleton, while Jason wonders, again, if his good life is just some sort of drug-induced fantasy for losers. Heather wants Jason to turn himself in, because the LAPD is honest, so if you are innocent you have nothing to fear. Jason's two day odyssey makes him wise to what bullshit this is.

Hart wants to know if Jason murdered Alys, and then confesses her affair with Alys, which is a complete surprise to Jason. Reading the article, Jason notices that Herb and Felix back-dated Alys's death a few--

Heather tells him to shut up. And then turn to the back page, where Heather Hart is mentioned, and her affair with Alys is mentioned as possibly the trigger to Taverner's vengeful spree. Which is the first Jason knew of the affair, and, in spite of everything else, deeply confusing. Jason asks if the affair happened, and Hart hits Jason in the face, really, really, hard.

"Hit me back" Hart says. Jason is tempted, but doesn't, saying Hart is lucky. "Yeah I guess, if you killed Alys you could kill me too, huh? Might as well. They will gas you anyway." Hart, who you may understand now is incarnadine with rage, doesn't give a shit if Jason murdered Alys or not, because he's for some reason missing the big picture: Hart's career is over. Taverner's career is over. Hart is flipping between physically attacking Jason and dipping into emotional cryo-freeze.

quote:

"Do whatever you want." Her voice had sunk to a blunted whisper. "I don't care. Just go away. I don't want to have anything more to do with you. I wish you were both dead, you and her. That skinny bitch - all she ever meant to me was trouble. Finally I had to throw her bodily out; she clung to me like a leech."

So it turns out Alys was the one with motive, and to go back to chapter one, it is not a coincidence that Hart and Taverner together on NBC was how this book started, as we will see.

Taverner is looking for his shoes. The fact that he literally just learned about Heather's affair with Alys is having zero impact on Hart. "For you", Jason says, tossing Heather the box with the pot inside. Heather lets it drop to the floor. Fortunately Mary-Ann has a tight packing game, and the pot is undamaged. Heather, despite everything, says the pot is beautiful and thanks Jason for it.

Jason says "What can I do but go?" as Hart puts the pot on her mantle shelf.

Hart suggests turning himself in. Jason calls the operator and tells him to call the police general, it is Jason Taverner.

quote:

"You can dial that direct, sir."

"I want you to do it" Jason said.

"But sir---"

"Please" he said.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapters 23-25

Chapter 23

So Jason has his identity and fame back. Mary and Jason arrive at her apartment, and her living room is arresting in its use of color, and has several vases on display. Turns out Mary is pretty darn talented. Jason immediately starts scheming to get Mary on his show, dreaming up musical-pottery related numbers and whatnot, and drops the vase he is holding as he's so besotted with his dreams of the future.

To break the tension there Mary launches into a story about her mother, who was always saying she was at death's door with kidney problems, and when I die it'll be your fault, etc. Once Mary leaves home she forgets about this. A few years later her mom comes to visit, and it's the same complaining sphiel until she says "I have to go grocery shopping". Once there, her mom confesses her kidnies are done and she's getting an artifical replacement but she may die. So Mary goes to the deli counter and asks for a steak and kidney pie.

This doesn't make much impact on Jason, who is first thinking up lies to promote Mary, and then brushing off her concerns about "truth" because he is the arbiter of all truth. He pays for the vase, and Mary gives him another - one of her best pieces. Jason leaves business cards, but Mary isn't really into the idea of fame.  

Chapter 24

We're back at Alys Buckman, dead in a bathroom. The book plays coy, but I suspect it's a fairly mundane dead body and not a 1000 year old skeleton. Felix is there, with the coroner, who tells Felix she died of an overdose.

Felix is obviously grief-stricken, but with a guy who abstracts his emotions like he does, there's a lot of looking away from that grief. His underling, Herb Maime, suggests arresting Taverner. Both men know Taverner had nothing to do with Alys' OD, but it's something. Felix touches his face and is suprised to discover he is weeping. Felix's instinct is to punish someone: Taverner, the people who made the drug, the people currently operating the phone-sex line...

Herb drives Felix back to the police HQ, and then while alone with Felix, broaches a sensitive subject. The sister fucking is a problem, now that Alys is dead. Some of the Grand Marshalls above Felix really hate him, and will leak to the media about the sister fucking, and say that Alys killed herself to attack General Buckman. A salacious story like this would be damaging to Felix. So, Herb suggests a counter move: order the coroner to find Alys' death a murder. Take control of the narrative by suggesting Alys died to spite Felix's kinder, gentler police oppression. Some of Buckman's Marshall enemies behind it, of course. While Felix can see the show trial and execution of some random patsy, Herb urges an upgrade to the actual murderer: somebody a) famous, b) involved in degeneracy, like those marshalls, especially drugs and phone sex, and c) already entwined with the case. So no prizes guessing who this is.

Felix thinks about it, and realizes Herb is right: the way out of this is to make up a bigger scandal than his enemies can insinuate, and well, sister-fucking is some scandal.

 

Chapter 25

(Coming back to this, one thing I noticed about the previous chapter is that Jason Taverener has recovered his celebrity status according to the police. While it is narrated by the grief-stricken and shattered mind of Police General Felix, who accords Jason the status of a six, that slips into Taverener being the perfect celebrity to hang the crime of Alys's "murder" on.)

General Felix and his aide Herb are attending to the dull details of the conspiracy they hatched to frame Jason for the death of Alys. Then a secretary brings the General the Jason Taverner file.

Of course the whole reason the police and General Felix were interested is that there was no Jason Taverner file.

It contains not only files, but mentions Taverner's hit TV show on NBC. Felix and Herb are baffled. Felix puts a call into the local NBC affiliate and gets a VP to confirm that it is a show, it is three years old and has every Tuesday thirty million viewers. Felix hangs up. Herb has never heard of Jason or his TV show. The General hasn't either, and he apparently watches two hours of TV every night, between 8 and 10, IE when the Jason Taverner show is broadcast. It is just inconceivably weird that previously Jason Taverner was expunged from all police records and having to get false papers in Watts, but at the same time was not only famous, but as famous as celebrities get. Taverner's back catalog goes back nineteen years, for fuck's sake. His latest .45, Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-Up, sold over two million copies. And so on.

Herb is trying to rationalize, and gets about as far as "the computer for reasons unknown was slow in getting back to us." That's logically possible, but the rest of the story sticks out like somebody trying to mash a platypus into a undersized Tupperware container. Fleix's mind does suss a connection - Alys was "fond" of sixes and had an affair with Heather Hart for about six months. Herb takes this bit of info and adds it as motive to the collage of lies they've been gluing together, a motive for the murder. This last detail is not only enough to get Hart and Taverner brought in, it is enough to get Taverner an APB. Ultimately Felix answers the question "why Taverner" with "it has to be somebody." 

Flow My Tears, the Policeman said; Chapter 22

After dropping off the packages, Jason and Mary sit in a nice coffee shop, "a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage." A jukebox (man, when did those stop being a thing) plays music. Mary asks about those records Jason is carrying, "oh, you made these?" when she reads the name on them. They start talking about music; Mary isn't much of a fan of modern, but likes old stuff, like Buffy St. Marie. Jason agrees with that, but rather understandably is obsessing over what happened back at the mansion. Mary can see something is heavily weighing on him, but Jason doesn't say much. Mary reads the bio on the back of the record, and discovers Jason Taverener is apparently big, with a show on NBC. Jason is amused when Mary asks how it feels not to be recognized. Mary then wonders if the jukebox in the corner would have anything by Jason.

Mary goes and returns, saying "Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck Up, it should play next." Jason rushes the "Babylonian Gothic" structure of the jukebox, and selection B4 (lol) is Jason Taverner's latest song. It plays through the cafe. Mary says Jason is a great singer. Jason is numb and reeling a bit, and he and Mary get into a brief conversation about artists and people's reaction to them. Jason says that reactions are no way to judge your worth, since in people generally you can find the opposite of whatever reaction be it positive and negative, and intellectuals and critics are mostly overthinking bullshitters.

Jason then realizes he needs to make a call. He phones General Buckman, getting through by saying it involves Alys, but gets only as far as Herbert Maime. Maime starts winding an interrogation spiel, so Jason hangs up. Jason is once again feeling Phillip K. Dick post drug paranoia, wondering what the hell happened at the mansion: if it was real, if the mescaline was still working on him. He turns to that drug he was given. What if it wasn't mescaline?

Then two kids come over and say "Hey, you're Jason Taverner, aren't you?" They get an autograph, saying they always watch his show on Tuesday nights. Jason sees his reality leaking back, and is naturally wildly elated. His first thought is that he can call Heather Hart now, and she won't hang up on him. Then the paranoia slaps a wet salmon across his face: what if his identity is the result of Alys' drug? He'd been unknowingly taking this fantastic drug, then somehow missed a dose and woke up in reality. Logic riposte this notion with some counter-battery fire: he woke up in reality with a literal gigantic wad of cash, which makes no sense if he's a permanent druggie from Watts. Similarly it makes his total lack of ID, police or otherwise even more baffling, if that were possible.

Paranoia is a mouth that cannot be stuffed with logic, though - the notion that maybe he is part of a legion of mediocrities who are medicated to believe they are astonishingly successful haunts him. While he's spinning all this, Mary just lets him spin. Once he comes out of it, Mary says he's a brown study, so Jason gets her to play his song three more times. This convinces Jason he exists, goddamnit.

Mary, despite being a modest woman in her twenties who makes pots, is clearly concerned for Jason, as he's been acting objectively nuts. So she agrees to take him back to her apartment, as she has an old stereo record-player there.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 21

Jason is coming down and sweating in the police general's sunken living room. He wants to find Alys.

He enters the door Alys went through; it's a long hallway with soft heavy carpet. At the end of the hall is a staircase with a black iron railing. Climbing that, there's another long hallway. The house is silent. He discovers an empty bedroom. Off of that, he spots an antique tub through another door. It is a bathroom.

On the floor is a skeleton.

This skeleton is old, yellowed with age, with any flesh it had returning to dust eons ago. It is, however, dressed in Alys's pre-punk clothing. Jason wonders if this is the mescaline. He touches the clothes, and they feel new.

So that's weird.

Panic hits Jason. Alys is dead somehow. He runs, pausing only to collect the records, putting them in their paper sleeves and jackets in full fight or flight mode. Bursting outside, chest heaving, Jason meets the brown cop. A short conversation happens, which ends with the pol running into the house while shouting "stay there" to Jason. Jason sprints to the quibble, and dumps out Alys' purse/mail carrier. No key. Jason hears a scream from inside the house. Jason starts ransacking the front dash of the quibble for the key. No key.

The cop dashes out of the house, and draws his weapon. Jason runs away as he is shot at. Plunging into the trees at the far side of the lawn, Jason sees the cop turn and sprint back in the house. Jason finds a stone wall, and remembering ALys's comment about the wall having glass shards at the top, runs along it. He soon finds a broken wooden door hanging open in the wall.

Now on the street, Jason spots a woman preoccupied with loading packages into a flipflap. He lopes over to her and tries to spin a lie to get them flying out of here. The woman is a bit "overweight" (though god knows what that means to Jason) with lustrous auburn hair, and is immediately freaked out and suspicious. Somehow, the woman accompanies Jason in the back seat while Jason himself drives. Jason notices that this is an old, economy flipflap. While Jason's mind is still rolling at full speed, the mescaline is mostly gone now, thanks to his Six physiology. Jason and the woman (who's name is Mary Anne Dominic) get to talking, first where the nearest hospital is, and then about General Felix. Jason says that Felix and Alys are twins, which does not make sense. Mary is a potter; all the packages in the flipflap are pots going into the mail for customers.

Jason flies past the hospital, and Mary is terrified again. Somehow Jason starts lecturing her on how you have to face your fear, because fear will keep you from truly being present in the moment, and may make you do worse things than hate or anger. Mary is oddly attentive to these points. Realizing at the same time he's batshit terrifying to Mary, he offers to set down the flipflap, and then, asks if she wants to go to a cafe. He just wants to talk to Mary, as he feels like the tension is winding off of his last tether of sanity as they talk. She agrees, as long as they get her packages to the post office first (afternoon pickup is two PM and I guess it is around noon? Once again, time is vague. Alys picks up Jason at 8 am, flies him to the General's place, and then about four hours passes?) After Jason offers to let her drive, she says Jason should keep flying, as she's kinda nervous right now. To Jason, this feels like a small vote of confidence.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Chapter 20

The mescaline washes over Jason like a wave at the beach. The ceiling became a skybox, colors shift and overlay, Alys' hair writhes like a nest of snakes. Jason feels fear, Alys completely ignores him, talking about Felix and his various goddamn collections. Jason says he can't get away. Alys says it's just the mes, chill.

She then says her collections are in the next room the library, while this is the study. She then gets on how Felix is also a lawyer and capable of doing good things. Apparently, when he was in charge of 1/4th the forced labor camps on terra (back when there were way more 'blacks' in them so they were more death campish) Felix discovers a series of obscure laws that allow him to shut down the camps. Jason sees a hat. Felix also tried to de-escalate things with pols and students when they would come hunting for food as they didn't have any underground. So by studying reports Felix discovered he could ID what campuses were failing, and which were not. The campuses that were failing he'd collaborate with other pols to drive them to destruction through non-violence. The hat is red, Jason says. With the campuses that were succeeding, Felix would arrange for basic supplies; food, water, soap etc, sent to them. For this he was demoted from Police Marshall to General. Despite the hate from other pols and "hard hats" (another sixties political term) Felix remains a general.

Jason says "but what about your incest?" Alys gives up talking until Jason's got his head back. She takes him back to the living room and he manages the difficult operation of lying down. She also mocks him for not being able to hold his mes; she takes five at once.

"But you're vast," jason said. Alys wanders off, down a long, long hallway, to get some thorazine.

Alone, Jason feels alone, and wants to run away from this strange house. Through a hallucinogenic storm, Jason manages to get outside and walk to the quibble. There, he remembers without keys, that quibble not gonna go. Alys's coat and mailbag-sized purse are in the back seat. But so are two Jason Taverner records. He realizes that the proof he is who he is is on these records. He attempts to return to the house. there is a gate. it does not move. there's a button. no. he puts records down and feels for button, he presses it, he picks up the records, the police man is there. Jason asks "is she insane. the brown police says "I'm not in a position to know. front door left open, down to the sunken living room, Alys is she there? careful examination is narrated. ALys is not in this room. Quadphoto is though, behind glass, it slides out with a terrible noise, turn switch to phono, 33 rpm, switch is a knob he twists. Needle touches down, static, hiss, no music.

Still no music, take needle, drops it in the middle, big THUMP. no music?

He takes the other record. It's the same. No music. The records are blank. 

I watch it so you don't have to: the Andromada Strain (1971)

I watched a thing and have thoughts, specifically how knowing the person behind it was a gigantic asshole changes how you view something.

The asshole this time is Michael Crichton, one of the most successful novelists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He was also a drawstring shitbag of a person. You can consult his wiki entry for specifics, but he was a person who basically got cancelled before the term existed entirely by his own efforts. My suspicion is that he was ruined by big success early on in life. By the time he finished his undergrad at Harvard he had accomplished his childhood dream: being a successful author. Dude then went to Harvard medical school, but was so successful by that time he did a residency but never practiced.  Maybe because of this, he seems to have decided personal growth was for other people.

The fact that his BA is in "biological anthropology" which was the name "scientific racism" had been living under likely doesn't help, though it does explain why he stormed off the set of the already questionable movie "Rising Sun", and never returned, when he discovered a white character was being played by Wesley Snipes.

Anyway, I recently saw the old SF movie the Andromeda Strain. It is a good movie, one of the VERY few good SF made between 2001 and Star Wars. The movie was adapted from Crichton's first novel, which was a huge success and established him as a bestselling author. It opens with a dead town in California, where a virus collected from space almost instantly strikes the entire town dead, with the only survivors being an infant and an alcoholic hobo. The government does what they do in a lot of MC novels, activate the best and most privlidged elite personnel they can find to Solve The Problem. So I assume they were all first in their class at harvard and yale, and then, I dunno, did post-doctorate work at places so elite I've never heard of them.

Good things first: this movie was directed by Robert Wise, and he knows what he is doing. The art direction, especially, is strong. The facility, 'Wildfire', is this fantasy take on one of those CDC labs that is capable of safely dealing with lethal infectious agents - I think it even has the same level 1 to 5 structure.  The lab features stainless steel everything, and exists as a five level subterranean donut. It also could be 'Chekov's Gun, the building' as pretty much every detail we're told about becomes part of the plot. The labs also feature really clever devices to make visually interesting very boring things (like for example the changing of a particulate filter) and has some early graphics that are computers in operation and *almost* computer graphics. So if you like a retro design, all of that is a joy. I should also say the central plot is in fact, pretty interesting and well done, being the only time I've seen speculative biochemistry as a major factor in a plot. Also I noticed the "PA/computer page sound" [I think] was sampled by one of my favourite musicians, Yoko Kanno, to create a track for a TV show some thirty years later.

https://youtu.be/UJbzrHf4QGg?t=310

https://youtu.be/DPEo_BB2Kok?t=12

Could be a coincidence, considering it is, after all, just two notes on a piano, but they are a really good, distinctive set of notes.

The characters are kind of a letdown, but then again they are four doctors doing intense research, so there's not a lot of leeway there. One of the doctors is AN FEMALE, and is written to be...exactly like a male doctor in their 50s in deportment and intellect. I forget if in the book Crichton just doesn't gender that character - I read the book as a teen and remember being genuinely surprised that the character was a lady - but this is about as close as Crichton gets for gender equity.

Eventually the Crichton surrogate figures things out and saves the day. This is where we get a whiff of the drawstring shitbag. The Crichton surrogate does this by 1) not comforting a crying baby (even when the female nurse really really wants to) and 2) by catching an omission the female doctor accidentally made. In what's a genuinely interesting plot development, the female doctor has been slowly developing epilepsy. I forget if the female doctor was aware of this - it's a subtle plot development in the book because we see the signs from her perspective, which naturally are fairly subtle and confusing. Once it comes out, another doctor speculates if she hid her condition to keep her position of privilege as a fourth level nesting doll. Still, at one point, thanks to the constant flashing lights and intense screens, they discover what neutralizes the mysterious strain, which is looked over because the female doctor is having a minor seizure. So it's partially the female doctor's fault, and it's the author surrogate's job to correct it.

The basic theme is one Crichton would use throughout his career: "science and technology are bad". [His other basic theme is "people's brains are bad because they want amusement" which is expressed mostly in plots about deadly futuristic theme parks, and I'm not kidding about his views on the brain, as you can check his wiki about how he "didn't trust his own brain."] The reason why science and technology is bad is, well, I'm just going to quote a friend here:

"It was always there - one of the core ideas in the Jurassic Park novel is that science is an unearned power because scientists inherit so much of their knowledge and thus don't respect it. With the specific analogy that science is like buying a Saturday Night Special instead of spending a lifetime mastering a martial art."

Very "while you played games, I studied the sword" if you spend too much time on the internet

You can certainly see this in the Andromeda Strain. The Wildfire facility breaks, as it must, as the entire movie is basically a mechanism for an exciting story. Really, the facility is also more than a little absurd. There's a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the facility, and it's clear that the magic computer system they use to do work is also being used to monitor the scientists, with the facility being able to vaporize itself in a sufficiently compromised situation, which has one scientist feverishly cutting AV feeds when the topic gets too dangerous. There's an extended series of scenes in the middle where the scientists go through ever more invasive decontamination, despite the fact that the scientists still must work in clean rooms etc. The baby spends about 90% of the movie wailing in a room with the semiconscious hobo, and both are transported very slowly through the facility on a very slow moving elevator. I'm guessing Crichton didn't pay much attention to what nurses did.

The real "you manics, you blew it all up" energy comes from the revelation that the virus was brought to earth via a space probe that was sampling stuff to create new bioweapons from. (Crichton is a victim of timing here: the movie came out in 1971, and Nixon had by that time terminated America's bioweapon program, for the extremely rational reason that bioweapons were as serious as nuclear weapons, and thus any situation you'd use them you'd be using nuclear weapons, which were frankly better.) Still, the movie ends with....no solutions whatsoever. That's not surprising if you know Crichton. Fear of science never has any resolution, in no small part because Crichton's books are engines of entertainment, amusement park rides, and so the problem being solved would undermine the whole enterprise.

Anyway, the movie is good, especially if you love yourself some 1970s futurism.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman said, Chapter 19

The quibble lands on a round asphalt spot in front of the General's mansion. This is confusing: the craft lands in the great lawn in front of the house, but then the house is surrounded by a wall, with a fence guarded by a brown-suited private police. So it is really unclear if the quibble landed in a public or private space. Alys waves Jason through. Jason, of course, wants to know how the hell do you know me. Alys as per her character refuses to respond directly, saying she's been a big fan for years. When they reach the house, Alys asks if he recognizes the place. Jason says no, and Alys says "Really? You've been here before." This is another depth charge on Jason's leaky submarine of sanity. Because while he's not at his best, he's really sure he's never been to this house before now.. The house is modern and tastefully appointed, with soft carpets and egregious use of space as a demonstration of luxury.

Finally getting to a sunken living room, Alys offers Jason a cap of mescaline.

I might have shut my eyes and looked away from the book at this point. Aside from one other point we'll get to, this might be the most fucked up part of the entire book, IE that Jason would choose to do some psychedelic drugs, when he's been made an unperson in a way that makes no rational sense, pursued by police for this, almost gulag'd, then thanks to a General of Police is OK, but is now over at the General of Police's house, with his sister, who is also his incest wife, who for no stated reason knows him for who he was. That's a crush-depth level of stress stone sober.

So naturally Jason takes a cap of...something. It comes out of a special box with markings that say it came from Switzerland, when Alys assures him that this was light, high quality stuff that would give him color trails.

Alys declines this drug as she is already spaced. "Since you don't know me I guess you wouldn't be able to tell."

Alys brings Jason along, already past the edge of the desert when the drugs begin to take hold, to a Room, with a big desk in it. Actually, several big desks, antiques. The room is a libriary, with many large, presumably valuble books in shelves, along with glass cases contianing early chess sets, tiny, cups, tarot card decks....

Alys tells Jason to zip it while she fishes out that special stamp Felix gave her. Using a magnifying glass and some philatelic tongs, Alys carefully places the stamp on the edge of the desk. While Alys gushes about its engraving, Jason is unimpressed. Quote Alys: "he gave it to me because he loves me, because he says I'm good in bed." While Jason is a few decades too soon to wonder if the mind can vomit, Alys flips over the stamp and finds a tiny flaw in the back. Alys treats this like Felix got a trick over on her, as he promised a perfect stamp. She immediately decides to open the safe containing Felix's stamp collection. If he has one of these, she'll switch it on him, see if he notices. "Don't mention to Felix, he doesn't know I know the combination." A duplicate of the stamp isn't there, but Alys fumes that he probably has hidden it somewhere. Jason reports he's feeling the mescaline, as he's getting a characteristic leg ache. He manages to find a sofa in this room to flop down in before his legs give way.

Alys is asking him if he'd like to see the General's ornate antique snuffbox collection. Jason asks how nobody else knows who he is. "Because they've never been there." "Where?" No answer. "How did I get here?" Alys is doing some stuff with her face that suggests she's barely paying attention, like the drug has asserted itself with her, too. "I'm not sure I should tell you."

"Why not" Jason manages to shout, as if in a dream.

TL;DR Jason has had a long day thanks to her asshole brother, the police general. Her face is a mask of revulsion when she thinks of Felix. Then she flits from the couch and invites Jason onto that "phone-grid transex network" mentioned briefly at the book's start, which just to refresh your memory is internet porn, except virtual, and people libidos are all amplified to a monstrous degree and can be highly addictive and can cause permanent brain damage. So internet porn.

Amazingly, Jason says no. She offers what I think is music and then food, but Jason wants to know where he is. "Can't you just be happy?" Alys asks.