He waits for the siren and the floodlights but knows this is only unreasoning fear: there won’t be a bed check on the ward until dawn unless one of the crazies starts to demolish a bed or attack another inmate. On these wards such occurrences are not nearly as likely as they were in the old place, the Maximum Security Hospital. Rut the distinction has not made this ward any more bearable. They ought to kill a man rather than put him in a place like that. They do not understand, and their failure to understand is hilariously funny in its way because they are the ones who keep talking about understanding. We want to understand, Duggai, so that we can help you.

You can help me by setting me free of this place. This place is not fit for a human man. Such a place sucks the spirit from a human man. Put me in prison if you want: if I’m guilty by your law then punish me in prison. A man in a prison only needs to close himself off and wait out the time. Prison is not personal, it is just time to be passed. This place, all the picking and prying and understanding, this place with its machines and the needles and the pills and the lunatic inmates-the examinations of my blood, my breath, my urine, my feces-you are like shamans using my waste in a clay pot to foretell things as if I were a goat, you leave a man no dignity.

You are turkey buzzards picking over carrion; you make me into carrion for your pickings. That is not life. That is not what a man can endure. Life is dignity. I come from a line of people who tortured our enemies as a matter of course but we tortured them in good faith and allowed them to die, in the end, with dignity intact. We did not dismantle their insides and poke around their manure while they were still alive to watch us do it.

We want to understand, Calvin. You want to understand by destroying. You put the needle in my arm to draw blood and study it but what you really want to do is put the needle in my brain and study my spirit: you want to draw me out of the skull into your syringe and study it in a laboratory beaker, a curiosity, like something people stare at in a zoo.