The little mirrors in the ceiling and the glinty knobs and bottle ends of the partitions all radiated endlessly in dusty looking-glasses on the walls, so that Wenny felt himself drunkenly spinning through air heavy with beersmells and whisky and old tobacco smoke in the middle of a crazy merrygoround. The men at tables round him were tiny and gesticulating. The cocktail stung his mouth, sent writhing gold haze all through him. The glass was the center of a vortex into which were sucked the cutting edges of light, flickering cones of green and red brightness, the voices and the throbbing rubber faces of the men in the bar. In his mind Fanshaw's voice and his father's voice droning like antiphonal choirs: Leanfaced people of the Renaissance carried away helpless in their vermilion barge through snarling streets shaken with the roar of engines: Stand therefore having your loins girt about with the breastplate of righteousness ... Of course that's what it reminds me of here, looking through the globes in the drugstore window where I used to go to get aspirin for Auntie. "Waiter, another cocktail, please." This cocktail, smooth, smooth, hot tropic beaches, and the leanfaced men in their great barge deepchanting sliding through lagoons of islands of the South Seas (first love, first South Sea island, the great things of life); brown girls girdled with red hybiscus pulling nets full of writhing silver through parrotgreen water.... God! I must pull myself together. I must think, not dream... In the beginning was the word,... And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth... Poor little me, with holes in my stockings, sitting in my bedroom that had the cracked looking glass learning Genesis for Dad: The earth also was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence ... And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt ... corrupt... I must think, not dream putrid dreams. Dreams, the corruption of misery, soggy, thwarted. If I had a clean, sharp knife to cut away dreams. Herb's little gun will do as well. "Hey, another Martini, please." He had no sense of being drunk any more. Things were still, icehard, iceclear all about him. The little neatly painted world of his childhood had been like that, breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps shepherding Noah's animals out of a cardboard ark, all cute and tiny, like through the wrong end of a telescope; and the smell of the enamel scaling off toys, the grain of wood grimed by the fingers, the dark gleam on the floor under the bay window. "Another Martini, please."