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Muscles move into place like autonomous parts of a severed insect. Blank stupidity blurs and softens his face: "Yes," he nods and smiles, "we like apple pie and we like each other. It's just as simple as that." He nods and smiles and nods and smiles and -- "Cut1..." screams the Technician. The cured homo- sexual is led out nodding and smiling. "Play it back." The Artistic Adviser shakes his head: "It lacks some- thing. To be specific, it lacks health." Berger (leaps to his feet): "Preposterous! It's health incarnate!..." ARTISTIC ADVISER (primly): "Well if you have any- thing to enlighten me on this subject I'll be very glad to hear it, Doctor Berger.... If you with your brilliant mind can carry the project alone, I don't know why you need an Art Adviser at all." He exits with hand on hip singing softly: "I'll be around when you're gone." TECHNICIAN: "Send in the cured writer.... He's got what? Buddhism?... Oh, he can't talk. Say so at first, whyncha?" He turns to Berger: "The writer can't talk. ...Overliberated, you might say. Of course we can dub him...." BERGER (sharply): "No, that wouldn't do at all.... Send in someone else." TECHNICIAN: "Those two was my white-haired boys. I put in a hundred hours overtime on those kids for which I am not yet compensate...." BERGER: "Apply triplicate.... Form 6090." TECHNICIAN: "You telling me how to apply already? Now look, Doc, you say something once. 'To speak of a healthy homosexual it's like how can a citizen be per- fectly healthy with terminal cirrhosis.' Remember?" BERGER: "Oh yes. Very well put, of course," he snarls viciously. "I don't pretend to be a writer." He spits the word out with such ugly hate that the Technician reels back appalled.... TECHNICIAN (aside): "I can't bear the smell of him. Like old rotten replica cultures.... Like the farts of a maneating plant.... Like Schafer's hurumph" (paro- dies academic manner) "Strange Serpent... What I'm getting at, Doc, is how can you expect a body to be healthy with its brains washed out?... Or put it an- other way. Can a subject be healthy in abstentia by proxy already?" BERGER (leaps up): "I got the health!... All the health! Enough health for the whole world, the whole fuckin world! t I cure everybody!" The Technician looks at him sourly. He mixes a bicarbonate of soda and drinks it and belches into his hand. |
