In
a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly eleven o'clock
and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the drugstores and the
moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign
that he passes mechanically, "Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton--Chiropractor,"
"McMurphy and Kane's," "The Rossiter," with its pillars that look as if
they had been molded out of marbled soap.
Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron
thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's
funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.
Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and
repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on
a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of
a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law
as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with
a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together
"don't, don't, don't," in the whine of a nasty nurse.
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