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He crawls under the bed, finds the chocolate and crams it into his mouth with both hands. "Jesus! These ID's got no class to them." Benway calls over the attendant who is sitting at one end of the ward reading a book of J. M. Barrie's plays. "Get these fucking ID's outa here. It's a bring down already. Bad for the tourist business." "What should I do with them?" "How in the fuck should I know? I'm a scientist. A pure scientist. Just get them outa here. I don't hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross." "But what? Where?" "Proper channels. Buzz the District Coordinator or whatever he calls himself... new title every week. Doubt if he exists." Doctor Benway pauses at the door and looks back at the IND's. "Our failures," he says. "Well, it's all in the day's work." "Do they ever come back?" "They don't come back, won't come back, once they're gone," Benway sings softly. "Now this ward has some innarest.' The patients stand in groups talking and spitting on the floor. Junk hangs in the air like a grey haze. "A heart-warming sight," says Benway, "those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn't been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are mostly of the schizo physical type. Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn't have it. So who don't got it'? Junkies don't got it. Oh, incidentally, there's an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane folk in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins. Make a study strictly from meta- bolism: diet, use of drugs and alcohol, sex, etc. Who cares what they think? Same nonsense everybody thinks, I daresay. "And why don't junkies got schizophrenia? Don't know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn't fed. No one can ignore heroin with- drawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact. "But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteri- orated adrenaline, harmaline can produce an approxi- mat~ schizophrenia. |
