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Show 153 in reserve for when his inventiveness with the girl with the bangs gave out. Noel had not come in yet, but that didn't surprise him. They were talking about ion transfers, and it was natural to suppose, as Paul had, that this was what Lorin was smiling about, though Lorin in fact had not joined them until he was well into the third entrance, and then had been listening with only half an ear because he was watching the door. The part he heard sounded perfectly plausible in any case. The playwright, it seemed, was undergoing a strange treatment in a clinic in Santa Monica for a pain in his left leg. The leg had been quietly throbbing for a year or more, interfering with sleep, sitting, the act of love, climbing stairs-anything that required a change of position-and then had abruptly worsened, to where even standing in place was excruciating. It felt, he explained, as though a nerve was on fire. A first diagnosis had determined that the medullary sheath cushioning and protecting the sciatic nerve had grown thin-he was a small, scrawny man anyway-and the prescribed treatment had been the ingestion of large doses of yeast, in tablet form, to thicken the deposit of myelin. That having failed, a second diagnosis had determined that the nerve itself rather than the myelin sheath was the culprit, that it suffered from a lack of potassium, and the curious physiotherapy he was now undergoing was intended to supply it. For six weeks now, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoon had found him in the basement of the clinic, face down for an hour on an examining table with a sheet draped over his buttocks, concealed by curtains from other patients undergoing other therapies, while he took the ion-transfer cure. This was administerd by a girl in a starched white dress who liked to talk about her boyfriend as she briskly swabbed the back of his left thigh with oil of wintergreen and wrapped the thigh in chemically heated packs. His left hand was immersed in a salt bath through which a mild electric |