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Show Acting Alone a Page 450 in the farmlands east of here, he could easily cop an insanity plea when his agent turned him in for killing the Marine. (Yes, say it again: killing the Marine.) And to be officially certified insane would not necessarily be something to be dreaded. In a state nuthouse, a real asylum for the criminally insane, as opposed to a mere bourgeois psychward/healthspa like the one his mom was lounging around in, think of the fucking book he could write! It would be a real book, with ample precedent to stave off the adverse reaction many reviewers have to something totally new: Rosegarden, Cuckoo's Nes_t, Marat/Sade, and so on. And this real book would be so unavoidably chock-full of the real stuff of human misery and human nobility in the face of unjust incarceration (a downright genre!), that it wouldn't really matter to Sam one whit if such a real, such a good, such an honest book - - ever got published at all! And he realized at that moment that all the wonderful things he stood to be the recipient of, the veritable tons of fame and money and free literary groupie sex and five-night-long appearances on PBS at the feet of mighty Dick Cavett, the promises, in other words, of a national audience and a new, blossoming career in his beloved Letters, were no longer considerations and hadn't been for some time. Sam knew it and he gloried in the knowledge, former monster of ambition that he was. And yet he made and cemented into his few remaining literal, as opposed to figurative, guts the following decision: to write, complete, even polish to the extent possible under these stultifying circumstances, this God-damned book. He took this decision not for his own, but for Sister Polycarpana's sake. Yes, he recognized, for the first time in his whole life it seemed, an |