Jake began, "What-"

"Means he got drunk outdoors, sug," Susannah told him. She ruffled his hair, then winced and put the hand on her own midsection, instead.

"All right, sai?" Rosalita asked.

"Yes, but if you had somethin with bubbles in it, I surely would drink it."

Rosalita rose, tapping Callahan on the shoulder as she did so. "Go on, Pere, or it'll be two in the morning and the cats tuning up in the badlands before you're done."

"All right," he said. "I drank, that's what it comes down to. I drank every night and raved to anyone who'd listen about Lupe and Rowan and Rowena and the black man who picked me up in Issaquena County and Ruta, who really might have been full of fun but. who sure wasn't a Siamese cat. And finally I'd pass out.

"This went on until I got to Topeka. Late winter of 1982. That was where I hit my bottom. Do you folks know what that means, to hit a bottom?"

There was a long pause, and then they nodded. Jake was thinking of Ms. Avery's English class, and his Final Essay. Susannah was recalling Oxford Mississippi, Eddie the beach by the Western Sea, leaning over the man who had become his dinh, meaning to cut his throat because Roland wouldn't let him go through one of those magic doors and score a little H.

"For me, the bottom came in a jail cell," Callahan said. "It was early morning, and I was actually relatively sober. Also, it was no drunk tank but a cell with a blanket on the cot and an actual seat on the toilet. Compared to some of the places I'd been in, I was farting through satin. The only bothersome things were the name guy… and that song."

The light falling through the cell's small chickenwire-reinforced window is gray, which consequently makes his skin gray. Also his hands are dirty and covered with scratches. The crud under some of his nails is black (dirt) and under some it's maroon (dried blood). He vaguely remembers tussling with someone who kept calling him sir, so he guesses that he might be here on the ever-popular Penal Code 48, Assaulting an Officer. All he wanted -Callahan has a slightly clearer memory of this - was to try on the kid's cap, which was very spiffy. He remembers trying to tell the young cop (from the look of this one, pretty soon they'll be hiring kids who aren't even toilet-trained as police officers, at least in Topeka) that he's always on the lookout for funky new lids, he always wears a cap because he's got the Mark of Cain on his forehead. "Looksh like a crossh," he remembers saying (or trying to say), "but it'sh rilly the Marga-Gain. " Which, in his cups, is about as close as he can come to saying Mark of Cain.

Was really drunk last night, but he doesn't feel so bad as he sits here on the bunk, rubbing a hand through his crazy hair. Mouth doesn't taste so good -sort of like Ruta the Siamese Cat took a dump in it, if you wanted the truth -but his head isn't aching too badly. If only the voices would shut up!Down the hall someone's droning out a seemingly endless list of names in alphabetical order. Closer by, someone is singing his least favorite song: "Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-ife tonight…"

"Nailor!… Naughton!… O'Connor!… O'Shaugnessy!… Oskowski!… Osmer!"

He is just beginning to realize that he is the one singing when the trembling begins in his calves. It works its way up to his knees, then to his thighs, deepening and strengthening as it comes. He can see the big muscles in his legs popping up and down like pistons. What is happening to him?

"Palmer!… Palmgren!"

The trembling hits his crotch and lower belly. His underwear shorts darken as he sprays them with piss. At the same time his feet start snapping out into the air, as if he's trying to punt invisible footballs with both of them at the same time. I'm seizing, he thinks. This is probably it. I'm probably going out. Bye-bye blackbird. He tries to call for help and nothing conies out of his mouth but a low chugging sound. His arms begin to fly up and down. Now he's punting invisible footballs with his feet while his arms shout hallelujah, and the guy down the hall is going to go on until the end of the century, maybe until the next Ice Age.

"Peschier!… Peters!… Pike!… Polovik!… Ranee!… Rancourt!"

Callahan's upper body begins to snap back and forth. Each time it snaps forward he comes closer to losing his balance and falling on the floor. His hands fly up. His feet fly out. There is a sudden spreading pancake of warmth on his ass and he realizes he has just shot the chocolate.

"Ricupero!… Robillard!… Rossi!"

He snaps backward, all the way to the whitewashed concrete wall where someone has scrawled BANGO SKANK and Just had my 19th Nervous Breakdown! Then forward, this time with the full-body enthusiasm of a Muslim at morning prayers. For a moment he's staring at the concrete floor from between his naked knees and then he overbalances and goes down on his face. His jaw, which has somehow healed in spite of the nightly binges, rebreaks in three of the original four places. But, just to bring things back into perfect balance -four's the magic number -this time his nose breaks, too. He lies jerking on the floor like a hooked fish, his body fingerpaintingin the blood, shit, and piss.Yeah, I'm going out, he thinks.

"Ryan!… Sannelli!… Scher!"

But gradually the extravagant grand mal jerks of his body moderate to petit mal, and then to little more than twitches. He thinks someone must come, but no one does, not at first. The twitches fade away and now he's just Donald Frank Callahan, lying on the floor of a jail cell in Topeka, Kansas, where somewhere farther down the hall a man continues working his way through the alphabet.

"Seavey!… Sharrow!… Shatzer!"

Suddenly, for the first time in months, he thinks of how the cavalry came when the Hitler Brothers were getting ready to carve him up there in that deserted laundrymat on East Forty-seventh. And they were really going to do it -the next day or the day after, someone would have found one Donald Frank Callahan, dead as the fabled mackerel and probably wearing his balls for earrings. But then the cavalry came and -

That was no cavalry, he thinks as he lies on the floor, his face swelling up again, meet the new face, same as the old face. That was Voice Number One and Voice Number Two. Only that isn't right, either. That was two men, middle-aged at the least, probably getting a little on the old side. That was Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cock-nifEn Yom, whatever that means. Both of them scared to death. And right to be scared. The Hitler Brothers might not have done a thousand as Lennie had boasted, but they had done plenty and killed some of them, they were a couple of human copperheads, and yes, Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cocknif were absolutely right to be scared. It had turned out all right for them, but it might not have done. And if George and Lennie had turned the tables, what then? Why, instead of finding one dead man in the Turtle Bay Washateria, whoever happened in there first would have found three. That would have made the frontpage of the Post for sure! So those guys had risked their lives, and here was what they'd risked it for, six or eight months on down the line: a dirty emaciated busted up asshole drunk, his underwear drenched with piss on one side and full of shit on the other. A daily drinker and a nightly drunk.

And that is when it happens. Down the hall, the steady slow-chanting voice has reached Sprang, Steward, and Sudby; in this cell up the hall, a man lying on a dirty floor in the long light of dawn finally reaches his bottom, which is, by definition, that point from which you can descend no lower unless you find a shovel and actually start to dig.