“Clear!” shouts the other EMT, and just before they hit him the driver looks back and he sees it’s Duddits’s Mom. Then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, all that white meat shakin on the bone, as Pete would say, and although the Jonesy watching has no body, he feels the electricity just the same, a great big pow that lights up the tree of his nerves like a skyrocket. Praise Jesus and get-down hallelujah.

The part of him on the stretcher jumps like a fish pulled from the water, then lies still. The EMT crouched behind Roberta Cavell looks down at his console and says, “Ah, man, no, flatline, hit him again.” And when the other guy does, the film jumps and Jonesy’s in an operating room.

No, wait, that’s not quite right. Part of him’s in the OR, but the rest of him is behind a piece of glass and looking in. Two other doctors are here, but they show no interest in the surgical team’s efforts to put Jonesy-Dumpty back together again. They are playing cards. Above their heads, wavering in the airflow from a heating-vent, is the dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.

Jonesy has no urge to watch what’s going on behind the glass-he doesn’t like the bloody crater where his hip was, or the bleary gleam of shattered bone nosing out of it. Although he has no stomach to be sick to in his disembodied state, he feels sick to it just the same.

Behind him, one of the card-playing does says, Duddits was how we defined ourselves. Duddits was our finest hour. To which the other replies, You think so? And Jonesy realizes the docs are Henry and Pete.

He turns toward them, and it seems he’s not disembodied after all, because he catches a ghost of his reflection in the window looking into the operating room. He is not Jonesy anymore. Not human anymore. His skin is gray and his eyes are black bulbs staring out of his noseless face. He has become one of them, one of the-

One of the grayboys, he thinks. That’s what they call us, the grayboys. Some of them call us the space-niggers.

He opens his mouth to say some of this, or perhaps to ask his old friends to help him-they have always helped each other, if they could-but then the film jumps again (goddam that editor, drinking on the job) and he’s in bed, a hospital bed in a hospital room, and someone is calling Where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy.

There, he thinks with wretched satisfaction, I always knew it was Jonesy, not Marcy. That’s death calling, or maybe Death, and I must be very quiet if I’m to avoid him, he missed me in the crowd, made a grab for me in the ambulance and missed again, and now here he is in the hospital, masquerading as a patient.

Please stop, crafty old Mr Death groans in that hideous coaxing monotone, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. I'Il just lie here until he stops, Jonesy thinks, I can’t get up anyway, just had two pounds of metal put in my hip and it’ll be days until I’m able to get up, maybe a week.

But to his horror he realizes he is getting up, throwing the covers aside and getting out of bed, and although he can feel the sutures in his hip and across his belly straining and breaking open, spilling what is undoubtedly donated blood down his leg and into his pubic hair, soaking it, he walks across the room without a limp, through a patch of sunlight that casts a brief but very human shadow on the floor (not a grayboy now, there is that to be grateful for, at least, because the grayboys are toast), and to the door. He strolls unseen down a corridor, past a parked gumey with a bedpan on it, past a pair of laughing, talking nurses who are looking at photographs, passing them from hand to hand, and toward that droning voice. He is helpless to,top and understands that he is in the cloud. Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks: I’m what they were looking for, I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because… the cloud doesn’t change me?

Yes, sort of

He passes three open doors. The fourth is closed. On it is a sign which reads COME IN, THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N'Y A PAS D'INFECTION ICI.

You lie, Jonesy thinks. Cruise or Curtis or whatever his name is may be a madman, but he’s right about one thing: there is infection.

Blood is pouring down his legs, the bottom half of his johnny is now a bright scarlet (the claret has really begun to flow, the old boxing announcers used to say), but he feels no pain. Nor does he fear infection. He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him. He opens the door and goes inside.

Is he surprised to see the gray man with the big black eyes lying in the hospital bed? Not even a little bit. When Jonesy turned and discovered this guy standing behind him back at Hole in the Wall, the sucker’s head exploded. That was, all things considered, one hell of an Excedrin headache. It would put anyone in the hospital. The guy’s head looks okay now, though; modem medicine is wonderful.

The room is crepitant with fungus, florid with red-gold growth. It’s growing on the floor, the windowsill, the slats of the venetian blinds; it has bleared its way across the surface of the overhead light fixture and the glucose bottle (Jonesy assumes it’s glucose) on the stand by the bed; little reddish-gold beards dangle from the bathroom doorknob and the crank at the foot of the bed.

As Jonesy approaches the gray thing with the sheet pulled up to its narrow hairless chest, he sees there is a single get-well card on the bedtable. FEEL BETTER SOON! is printed above a cartoon picture of a sad-looking turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. And below the picture: FROM STEVEN SPIELBERG AND ALL YOUR PALS IN HOLLYWOOD.

This is a dream, full of a dream’s tropes and in-jokes, Jonesy thinks, but he knows better. His mind is mixing things, pureeing them, making them easier to swallow, and that is the way of dreams; past, present, and future have all been stirred together, which is also like dreams, but he knows that he’d be wrong to dismiss this as nothing but a fractured fairy-tale from his subconscious. At least some of it is happening.

The bulbous black eyes are watching him. And now the sheet stirs and humps up beside the thing in the bed. What emerges from beneath it is the reddish weasel-thing that got the Beav. It is staring at him with those same glassy black eyes as it propels itself with its tail up the pillow, where it curls itself next to that narrow gray head. It was no wonder McCarthy felt a little indisposed, Jonesy thinks.

Blood continues to pour down Jonesy’s legs, sticky as honey and hot as fever. It patters on to the floor and you’d think it would soon be sprouting its own colony of that reddish mold or fungus or whatever it is, a regular jungle of it, but Jonesy knows better. He is unique. The cloud can carry him, but it cannot change him.

No bounce no play, he thinks, and then, immediately: Shhh, shhh, keep that to yourself

The gray creature raises its hand in a kind of weary greeting. On it are three long fingers ending in rosy-pink nails. Thick yellow pus is oozing from beneath them. More of this stuff gleams loosely in the folds of the guy’s skin, and from the comers of his-its?-eyes.

You’re right, you do need a shot, Jonesy says. Maybe a little Drano or Lysol, something like that. Put you out of your mi-

A terrible thought occurs to him then; for a moment it’s so strong he is unable to resist the force moving him toward the bed. Then his feet begin to move again, leaving big red tracks behind him.