'So there I was flat on my ass with no certificate. Should I turn to another trade? No. Doctoring was in my blood. I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical. Then I met a great guy, Placenta Juan the After Birth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit condition. A calf may not be sold as food until it reaches a minimum age of six weeks. Prior to that time it is classified as a slunk. Slunk trafficking is subject to a heavy penalty.) Well, Juanito controlled a fleet of cargo boats he register under the Abyssinian flag to avoid bothersome restrictions. He gives me a job as ship's doctor on the S.S.
'So somebody wants homogeneity at this juncture. Can do but it costs. Bored with the whole project, me. ...Here we are.... Drag Alley.'
Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open. We step through and the door closes. A long ward gleaming with stainless steel, white tile floors, glass brick walls. Beds along one wall. No one smokes, no one reads, no one talks.
'Come and take a close look,' says Benway. 'You won't embarrass anybody.' I walk over and stand in front of a man who is sitting on his bed. I look at the man's eyes. Nobody, nothing looks back.
'IND's,' says Benway, 'Irreversible Neural Damage. Overliberated, you might say... a drag on the industry.'
I pass a hand in front of the man's eyes.
'Yes,' says Benway, 'they still have reflexes. Watch this.' Benway takes a chocolate bar from his pocket, removes the wrapper and holds it in front of the man's nose. The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers. His stomach rumbles. His whole body writhes in peristalsis. Benway steps back and holds up the chocolate. The man drops to his knees, throws back his head and barks. Benway tosses the chocolate. The man snaps at it, misses, scrambles around on the floor making slobbering noises. 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.' 22
'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 metabolism: 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 withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.
'But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteriorated adrenaline, harmaline can produce an approximate schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psychosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say. ( Interested readers are referred to Appendix.)
'In the terminal stage of schizophrenia the back brain is permanently depressed, and the front brain is almost without content since the front brain is only active in response to back brain stimulation.
