Culver’s vision of him at this time was always projected against Heaven’s Gate, which was the name--no doubt ironically supplied at first by the enlisted men--of the pleasure-dome ingeniously erected amid a tangle of alluvial swampland, and for officers only. He and Mannix lived in rooms next to each other, in the bachelor quarters upstairs. The entire area was a playground which had all the casual opulence of a Riviera resort and found its focus in the sparkling waters of a swimming pool, set like an oblong sapphire amid flowered walks and a fanciful growth of beach umbrellas. There, at ten minutes past four each day, Mannix could be found, his uniform shed in an instant and a gin fizz in his hand--a sullen, mountainous figure in a lurid sportshirt, across which a squadron of monstrous butterflies floated in luminous, unmilitary files. Both Mannix and Culver hated the place--its factitious luxury, its wanton atmosphere of alcohol and torpid ease and dances, the vacant professional talk of the regular officers and the constant teasing presence of their wives, who were beautiful and spoke in tender drawls and boldly flaunted at the wifeless reserves--in a proprietary, Atlanta-debutante fashion--their lecherous sort of chastity. The place seemed to offer up, like a cornucopia, the fruits of boredom, of footlessness and dissolution. It was, in Mannix’s words, like a prison where you could have anything you wanted except happiness, and once, in a rare midnight moment when he allowed himself to get drunk, he got paper and wood together from his room and announced to Culver in an unsteady but determined voice that he was going to burn the place down. Culver held him off, but it was true: they were bound to the pleasures of the place by necessity--for there was no place to go for a hundred miles, even if they had wanted to go--and therefore out of futility. “Goddam, it’s degrading,” Mannix had said, making use of an adjective which indeed seemed to sum it all up. “It’s like sex now. Or the lack of it. Now maybe it’s all right for a kid to go without sex, but it’s degrading for someone like me almost thirty to go without making love for so long. It’s simply degrading, that’s all. I’d go for one of these regulars’ pigs if it wasn’t for Mimi.... This whole mess is degrading. I know it’s my own fault I stayed in the reserves, Jack, you don’t have to tell me that. I was a nut I didn’t know I was going to get called out for every frigging international incident that came along. But, goddam, it’s degrading”--and with a glum, subdued gesture he’d down the dregs of his drink--“it’s degrading for a man my age to go sniffing around on my belly in the boondocks like a dog. And furthermore--” He looked scornfully about him, at the glitter and chrome, at the terrace by the pool where Japanese lanterns hung like a grove of pastel moons, and a girl’s shrill and empty laugh uncoiled as bright as tinsel through the sluggish coastal dusk.