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Show Anting Alone Page 327 during the course of a single short bus ride, provided Sam with access to his center of inner equanimity. Sam was able to forgive Zeitl Abraham her fresh widow's petulance even as he felt his two front teeth slowly greying, dying from the roots out. Sam was able simply to sit here and let this good, socially-just "secular homily" of Wagstaff Bopp's wash over his soul even as it washed over his Sony micro-cassette recorder, sloshed down the mikehole, and douched away the surpassingly indiscreet utterances of a sleepy, confused boy in quaint, touching, sergeant-striped peejays, feet swinging bare and boyish from Mama's footstool, soul swinging bare from the corner of his mouth like a string of clear spit. The new Christlike Sam was in the process of recording over Spikewell J. Wamsutter's indiscretions, erasing them for time and all the eternities (as a certain percentage of his fellow Utahns would say) . The new, worried-after, turn-the-other-cheeky Dr. Edwine was passively, liberally relinquishing the sole leverage he possessed over the Nebraskan ostrich. He was even obliterating the little splices of brilliant retorts - the things Sam should have said that night in the dark living room in Kiev - that he had taken the trouble to edit into the micro-cassette solely for his own and posterity's benefit. (The self-absorption of these writers!) He had occupied himself for hours editing this, the only cassette he owned in the clear (they were expensive little fuckers). He'd gone to great lengths to equip himself properly for such a delicate job. He had borrowed Shanny's Army-issue nosehair-pulling tweezers and her Army-issue fake-eyelash glue. (Yes, that's right, there'd be no more Shanny-on-the-beach, |