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Benway's voice drifts into my consciousness from no particular place... a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street. "Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archi- pelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual, conformist and prosaic. Find yourself in a matriarchy walk don't run to the nearest frontier. If you run, some frustrate latent queer cop will likely shoot you. So some- body wants to establish a beach head of homogeneity in a shambles of potentials like West Europe and U.S.A.? Another fucking matriarchy, Margaret Mead notwith- standing... Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a colleague in the operating room. And my baboon as- sistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces. Baboons always attack the weakest party in an alterca- tion. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious simian heritage. Doc Browbeck was party inna second part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a veterinarian actually) recalled to service during the manpower shortage. Well, Doc had been in the hospital kitchen all morning goosing the nurses and tanking up on coal gas and Klim -- and just before the operation he sneaked a double shot of nutmeg to nerve himself up." (In England and especially in Edinburgh the citizens bubble coal gas through Klim -- a horrible form of pow- dered milk tasting like rancid chalk -- and pick up on the results. They hock everything to pay the gas bill, and when the man comes around to shut it off for the eon- payment, you can hear their screams for miles. When a citizen is sick from needing it he says "I got the klinks" or "That old stove climbing up my back." Nutmeg. I quote from the author's article on nar- cotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction ( see Appendix ): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have re- course to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed with water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and nausea. There are a number of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the Indians of South America. They are usually administered by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. |
