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Show Anting Alone Page 287 her bitterest voice that his reasons for signing the papers to commit Simone were almost irrelevant when one considered the fact that Simone's present physical dissolution could be traced directly back to that single incarceration. The circulation and swelling problems that threatened to smother, even implode Polycarpana's friend and cellmate were all caused, in Simone's intuitive opinion at any rate, by the huge doses of lithium the doctor and nurses had force-fed her. "It was still an experimental drug when they were trying it out on my friend!" Polycarpana shouted into the little man's face. "They were simply improvising the dosages in those days!" She chose not to repeat the joke that dear, good-natured, brave Simone, had made of the whole macabre charade: "Talk about water retention! I used to lie in my hospital bed at night and just feel that lithium cement oozing out and sealing off my sweat glands - er, I should say glow glands. Excuse me, if you please, Miss Pollyana." Simone seemed to share with Dr. Edwine out there the rare, unspeakably strange capacity to laugh with scorn at the disintegration of the flesh. That laughter by no means erased the horror of death, but simply put it in perspective. Somebody pampered like Bopp would be incapable of grasping that idea and would probably cite Simone's joke as evidence that his decision to commit her had not been a form of slow murder after all. "You see?" Polycarpana could hear his slippery contralto hiss. "Simone is laughing it all off already, so how serious could her problems be?" How does a mortal man get so unfathomably smug? How do men like, say, Senator Nimrod, or that leering soft-pornographer Andrew Greeley, develop |