Ep. 36: The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Part II - Recap

Welcome back to the Gene Wolf Literary Podcast by Clay Temple Media, where we discuss the work of the great science fiction writer Gene Wolf, one story at a time. I'm Brandon Buddha. And I'm Glenn McDorman. This episode, we're continuing our coverage of Wolf's novella, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which was published in 1972. Yeah, we'll be covering in this episode, pages 22 to 36. So far, we've mostly just been introduced to the narrator and his life at the Maison Duchien. And we're going to find out very shortly that what we've covered so far is just the first seven years of his life. We've learned he's returned home after prison, and he's reflecting upon the past for some reason, and we've learned a lot about his childhood. So I don't know, Glenn, I'm excited to learn what we discover about this character in his world in the next 14 or so pages. Yeah, me too. So let's just get right into it. This next section opens with something like a summary of what the narrator has already told us. And this marks the end of his true childhood, or at least, he says, of his infancy. And he indicates this in two ways. First, he becomes more aware of the household. Some evenings now, he peeks through the vine that covers the brother's window in order to watch the women of the brothel with their customers. And he also seems to catch sight of his father and becomes aware that he is referred to by the brothel employees as "matra", that is to say, "master". Our narrator also knows that there is somewhere in the house a fearsome woman called Madame, who really runs the household, but is neither the boy's mother nor their father's wife. This is a great bit of obscuring information that Wolf is doing. He's drawing our attention to two possible types of relationships that men can have with women, though we'll learn that there is another one very shortly and who the Madame is. We're also setting up here another of what we called last time, like the binary systems. There is the the matra and the Madame in the house. One thing we should take note of here is the description of the matra, the father. And he's described as a hatchet-faced man. And this is important because there are many people, as we saw last time, or objects like Mr. Million who look like the father. So these descriptions serve to describe a number of things in the world, and we'll get a few more like that later on in the story. I do have to say just as a note on craft, this summary of the whole first section is just so fantastically done. It's done in like three senses and it just gives you this really quick wrap-up of what we just learned and it really sets up what comes next. Yeah, it's a great narrative technique that reinforces the story as he's telling it and makes it feel like we are living it with the narrator. It is so awesome. The second marker of the end of the narrator's childhood is that he begins to be summoned to his father's library in the middle of the night for bizarre conversations and for experiments. And the next several pages are going to describe the first of these encounters. One night, a human servant wakes the narrator, tells him to get dressed and to comb his hair, and then takes him down into the basement where his father's library is located. And the description of this journey is awesome and I just want to read this clause. Paul writes that they travel through tortuous corridors now emptied of the last patrons. And others musty, filthy with the excrement of rats to which patrons were never admitted. This is another example of these two worlds, like coexisting side-by-side. We have the main house with the illusion of grandeur, of luxury, and then we're also shown here that there is this whole other part of the house that is filthy, that no one looks after, and this is where the father lives. This is where the father's library, his laboratory, is. This is an awakening for our narrator as he realizes that there's real contrast. There might be some real darkness in this household apart from just what he's seeing on the surface. And I have to say that this description sort of rang true to me. This is what academia feels like a lot. There are many academic libraries I've been in where we've had to go through underground tunnels that are not well maintained, certainly not compared to the sort of beautiful entryways of these gorgeous libraries I'm thinking here of, you know, the bodily and at Oxford, for example, among others. Well, when he gets to the library, the narrator is left alone with his father, and his father just sits in a chair and kind of stares at him, really, he's really scrutinizing him. And this goes on for seemingly a long time. The father here is wearing what we saw him in before. And here it's described as a red dressing gown and black scarf. While earlier, we were told that the color was scarlet. And we're going to have scarlet and red show up here as colors a bunch of times in this section. And when we get to our discussion, I think it's going to be suggestive of the nature of this house, of this brothel scarlet and scarlet and other shades of red are certainly a lot of symbolism. And we have seen that color symbolism is something Wolf legs to play with, so I'm excited to get into that. Well, here in the library, his father finally breaks this awkward silence to ask what he should call his son. And the narrator gives his name, and what an awful feeling that must be to realize that your father doesn't even know your name. But his father says that that's not what he means. What he means is that he wants to have a secret name for the narrator that only he will use. He gives the narrator a chance to choose this name himself. But when the narrator hesitates, his father assigns him the designation number five. You know, I've been around long enough to know that being assigned a number has never meant anything good for anyone. And we should point out here too that, you know, the number five is in the title of the story. And of course, in the title of the whole collection. Well, with this name business settled, at least for now, his father wants to play a game. And the game is this. His father is going to show him some pictures. And the narrator will just say whatever comes into his mind. He has to speak the entire time that the pictures are present. And if he stops, then he loses the game. Something that we learn here is that although the narrator hasn't seen his father in years, his father gets video tapes of the boy's lessons with Mr. Million, and he watches them. Now, the game begins. We get a holographic image of a three-year-old boy with a painted wooden soldier almost as large as the narrator. And the narrator's father has to push him into talking at first, but then he gets into the swing of just talking about what he's seen. The scene's changed, but the three-year-old boy remains the central figure and whatever is going on. This goes on for hours before the narrator is taken back to his bed. And when he falls asleep, now he dreams of this little boy, and in his dream state actually confuses the boy with himself and also with his father so that he is observer, observed, and also a third presence that is observing both all at the same time. There are a number of things going on in this section. The first one I want to mention is Wolf's description of holographic imagery. This is something that comes up in Wolf's time and time again, and Wolf as a writer becomes less interested in actually describing holographs maybe after this story. He's just expects his readers to know that that's what he's talking about. So I actually want to read this description that he uses to describe how the holographs appear in the room because whether or not you've read this or you plan on reading Wolf's trailer works, this is something to keep in mind because it is a trick Wolf pulls out more than once. Wolf writes this, "There had appeared in the room as though by magic, a boy considerably younger than I, and a painted wooden soldier almost as large as I was myself, which when I reached out to touch them, proved as insubstantial as air. And I think we can take with certainty whenever we see something insubstantial show up again in Wolf's fiction like this that looks real, that appears real. There's a good chance there's something going on with holographic images." We also learned that he had seen descriptions of this sort of trick of three-dimensional images formed by the interface of two way fronts of light in his physics textbooks. And these were depicted by chessmen, and I just want to highlight the fact that we are getting an association between chess pieces and holographs right now. And I think I'm going to have something to say about that in the discussion. The next thing I want to point out is that the only thing that the narrator tells us as he's doing this pseudo-stream of consciousness narration about this experience is this. He writes this about what he tells his father what he's seeing. He says, "Well, the little boy likes the big soldier, but he wants to knock him down if he can, because the soldier's only a toy, really, but it's bigger than he is. And this is something that the narrator perceives to be real, the boy that he identifies with. And though he likes the artificial thing, he feels a need to destroy it. And I think that because this is the only thing that's being told to us explicitly about this experience. There's something we need to keep in mind about the real and the artificial in this world and the dichotomy between the two. Finally, at the end of this section, we get the first of two dreams mentioned here, and this is important because we're going to see before we reach the end of this section we're covering today that this dream does in fact become true in a real way. And I think Wolf as a writer is training us as readers to pay attention to the dreams of his characters in this story in particular. Yeah, we're getting a real glimpse here of Wolf the Mystic which is awesome because he's going to really lean into this when we get to a book of the news on for sure. And this bit about the holographs is really awesome because you do sort of feel like this is actually the story about Gene Wolf's first experience with holographs that he had read about them probably at university at Houston or maybe at Texas A&M and upon scene one for the first time, you know, I have this real sort of joyous experience. It's great to see that presumably autobiographical detail here. The next night, the servant returns, but now it is not the narrator that he wants, but rather it is David. When the narrator and David finally have a chance to compare notes about their experiences, the narrator, and of course we discover that David has not been given a special designation, right? He's not number six. He's not number four. He's not number anything. He's just David. His nighttime summons has become frequent, if not quite a routine, and they change much about the boy's lives. They no longer stay awake after bedtime, playing with each other and telling stories. It's actually quite a sad part of the narrative. Now instead, they go straight to sleep, knowing that they might be awakened in the middle of the night for experiments. Wolf summarizes this change brilliantly by commenting that David also gradually ceased to make his pan pipes, that is Peter Pan has grown up. It's really heartbreaking to read this section. We also get a sense here because of the dichotomy, because of the differences between David being allowed to use his real name and the narrator being given a designation that there is a test and a control group in some experiment that's going on here and that maybe the father has affection for the real boy, and that number five is somehow artificial, and maybe in that description of the struggle against the boy and the toy soldier, we're seeing the narrator's desire to be seen as real in some way. So there's a lot going on with this imagery. Yeah, and even Mr. Million recognizes the change here, and he treats the boys as if they are more adult. Now he takes them to a park near the house where David practices archery and the narrator enjoys watching ships come up the adjacent canal and Wolf has a beautiful description of these ships that I want to read mostly because everyone deserves some beauty in their lives, but also because I think something interesting is going on with the ships. The narrator describes himself waiting for one of the white ships. White ships with bows as sharp as the scalpel bills of kingfishers and four, five, or even seven masts, which were infrequently towed up from the harbor by 10 or 12 spans of oxen. One thing that I immediately noticed here, or at least that this pass that he evoked in me is the similarity in this description with Tolkien's Elven ships, which have not a kingfisher sort of shaped to them, but a swan sort of shaped to them, and our white. This is something Wolf probably had in mind. I'll be interested in maybe seeing if at some point later this contrast between a kingfisher, which is a sort of predatory bird and a swan, which is a sort of musical and often regarded as peaceful type of bird. But something else that I thought was really interesting about these ships is that the number of masts is very high, anything with four or more masts on earth on our planet is known as a fully rigged ship. And in early modernity, most of the trans-oceanic ships were of this type. You know, so that's what you'd want if you were designing a speculative world meant to evoke the gilded age, which is what Wolf is clearly doing here. But most of the historical ships would have only had four masts, maybe some of them five. As far as I know, there's only ever been one ship that was constructed that had seven masts. And no one's ever gone to eight. This ship was the Thomas Lawson, which was generally regarded as kind of an awful ship to sail on and, you know, sunk and was just, you know, terrible. So I think Wolf here wants us to understand that this planet's oceans and winds are different than the earths, but also that there are good reasons why wooden sailing ships are being used here, even though this planet is part of a space-frame civilization that could presumably construct ships of steel. So I just thought there was a lot of really cool world-building packed into this description. We are going to really dig into these sorts of anachronisms in the discussion. I think there's a lot to be said, a lot that's brought up here, that really does evoke the past. And if we are dealing with a space-faring civilization, we have to ask the question, why is this civilization stuck in time? And why do we have holograms, but then seven-masted ships? Is it just as we're told early on that Port Memeson is just not an important trading port, or is there much more to the story? And I think there's a lot more to this story. We also hear, again, return to the images of birds and ships, which is one of the core images evoked not only by the epigraph of the story, but we're going to return to this image once again at the very end of our section. So maybe it's worth thinking about what Wolf is telling us about the narrator by at least in this section, putting him maybe in the position of the Hermit, who looks out and sees the broken ship that the ancient mariners on. So this narrative is being cast in all these roles in different stories. It's wonderful. Yeah, it's amazing stuff. And I have to say, I just love Kingfisher's. So as soon as you say the word Kingfisher in your book, I'm sold, and I have the Confess Brand in there, the Kingfisher is in fact my official Harry Potter patronus. Oh, that's good. I think everybody needs to know that. Well, we jump ahead quite a few years as we enter the next section. The narrator now is an early adolescent, and as such, the boys are allowed one day to remain at the park after dark. The reason is that there is a fireworks display, presumably some sort of holiday. But David becomes ill from food poisoning, and Mr. Million has to take the boys home. David's going to be fine, but the narrator really wants to see some fireworks and does not passively accept his fate. Instead, he sneaks up to the roof, which is normally forbidden to the boys after dark, and watches the fireworks there. And Wolf has a gorgeous phrase that he uses here to describe the rooftop. He calls it a prohibited world of leaf and shadow, while fireflowers of purple and gold and blazing scarlet overtopped it. Reading this the first time, you get the sense that David is kind of a fragile boy, though we see each of these boys are fragile in their own ways. Once again, in this section, we also see the interchangeability of red and scarlet describing the same thing. And I'm really interested by what's going on here, and I'd really like our listeners to kind of take note of this, if I didn't say it before, and help me to understand what the significance is of this red and scarlet interchangeability and imagery that Wolf is using here. But there is a lot more to come in this kind of rooftop party. Yeah, this is a really exciting and just visually evocative scene. And of course, most of the brothels' customers are up on the roof to watch the fireworks as well, and so are the employees. And one such customer, a very wealthy patron, wants to maintain his privacy as one might in a brothel, so the servants have constructed a sort of private area out of potted trees. And the narrator even helps the servants arrange these so that it will look like he's been allowed up there, right, like that he's helping move the sort of whole brothel up to the roof for this special event, which is very clever. And then he actually hides between these trees, I'm really envious of this sort of misdivis cleverness that the narrator has here. The reason why he's hiding between the trees is to see what his father's customers are doing really. He doesn't have a full understanding, though he can guess at it what's going on in this place that we call a brothel, but it's never called a brothel in the book so far. We're also given a description of the girls who are the father's employees and the costumes that they're wearing. And I want to highlight this because it also points out kind of the types of illusions, the types of games that are being played at this place. So I'm going to read this section. The girls were costumes that displayed their raged breasts and enclosures of twisted wire like bird cages, or gave them the appearance of great height. result only when someone stood very close to them, or gowns whose skirts reflected their wearers' faces and busts as still water does the trees standing near it, so that they appeared in the intermittent colored flashes like the queens of strange suits in a tarot deck. And here we have the first mention of like women being associated with queens in the story and we're given a picture of women who are reflected in that way like tarot card is a weird illusion to make. It's probably more like our playing cards, where the image is reflected on either side of the card. All that's to say is that they don't really look like they have legs. The attention is all drawn to the upper half of the body. And there's skirts must stretch out in some weird way. It's just such great evocative imagery, but it's as if they are above and below the waist kind of the same. It's very strange imagery. And we're gonna see this weird sense of skirts hiding the lower body come up very soon in this story. This patron is also with someone, as we're told, a prostitute. And here we're given two euphemisms for this prostitute. One is protégé, and one is nymph du bois, which is a wooden imp. So I'm gonna have a little bit to say about that when we get to the discussion as well. - Yeah, lots of euphemisms to mask what this is, not just in the household, but in the society at large, right? The term sex slave is never used in the story, though that is what she is, much more than a nymph du bois. - Well, hidden between his potted trees, the narrator feels pretty safe, but after a while, a hand grabs the back of his shirt and pulls him out. The hand belongs to a little gray-haired woman in a black dress that falls straight to the ground. She stares at the narrator for a long while before leading him to the stairs. And crossing the roof, she seems to glide like an onyx chessman on a polished board, which is a grade similarly, if ever, there was one. - This is the second mention of these chessmen in this story were meant to be engaged as readers with this sort of free association of this narrator. This is the technique of unreliable narrators. It's not quite stream of consciousness, but the proximity of ideas next to each other is really meaningful in this style of writing. The woman is also described as a black queen, and here we have this other sense of the word queen use here, both to describe characters of games in some way. - Yeah, and you were just talking about the legs of the prostitutes on the roof, and in this next description here, we're gonna get more about legs. When they get to the steps, this smooth gliding ceases, and the black queen struggles down these stairs, and she bobs like a small boat descending rapids. Another pretty good similarly, I think. But the gliding resumes once they reach an interior corridor. Now they make their way to a seldom used iron corkscrew staircase at the back of the house, and the woman directs the narrator to descend. He obeys and then looks back to see how she is ferrying on these stairs. It's very curious about how she's getting on. And he finds that she is floating in the center of the stairwell, and somehow she's descending. At this, the narrator runs, but she's able to keep pace with him, always presenting her face to the stairs. And the narrator notices now that she looks a lot like his father. At the bottom, he tries to flee, but she swoops down and catches him as easily as a cat takes charge of an errand kitten. Well, now the woman takes him to a room which she unlocks with an old-fashioned brass key. And this is not the first time that keys have been mentioned in the narrative. Now inside, they sit facing each other, and she just stares at him for a moment before asking his name. And of course, this is precisely how the first experiment with the narrator's father began. The narrator gives his name, but the woman wants to know what his father calls him. So this is very creepy now at this point. Number five, he says to which she replies, "That's either far too low or too high." She goes on to say, "Living, there are he and I, and I suppose he's counting the simulator." And then she asks the narrator if he has a sister. - And just after this, we have this association with his brother and the name of his brother right off the bat. And this is really clueling us into what I was just mentioning before, which is the proximity of ideas, the proximity of notions next to each other in this text are really meaningful. When the woman who is his aunt asks him, "Have you a sister?" He immediately thinks of the novel David Copperfield. He thinks of his brother's name. That's one reason why this is mentioned. But then he also thinks that this woman, his aunt, reminds him of David Copperfield's great aunt in the text on Betsy Trotwood, who is a very kind of complex character in that novel, who at first is disappointed that David Copperfield is not a girl, but then rescues him from his life of childhood, labor, and kind of sets him up for success in life. I also want to mention that when the narrator mentions his real name to his aunt, she cocks an eyebrow. And I think when we learn her name here in just a moment, there's going to be a little wordplay here. - Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, Brandon, this woman is his aunt. That's to say that she is his father's sister and she wants the narrator to call him Aunt Janine, which might as well be Jean. - That's absolutely what's going on. And what's funny is if this narrator's name is Jean Wolf and we're dealing with all this weird science stuff, Jean is also playing with his own first name and the notion of jeans as units of biological data. So really kind of fun trickery. - Yeah, it's so good. And we're gonna get some more of that here coming up. But in this passage, really, what we're gonna learn about is the narrator's family. Now, Aunt Janine is interested in hearing about David and wants to know if David looks like the narrator. When she's told that he is almost the exact opposite and Janine supposes that the narrator's father used one of her girls. At this point, Aunt Janine tells the narrator that he and David don't have the same mother. And she even offers to show the narrator a picture of the woman who was his mother. And she instructs a servant to bring that picture. And while they wait for it, the narrator talks about his daily life. He tells us Aunt about his frog dissections and alteration of their chromosomes, his experiments with creating multiple generations of asexual frogs. As much as that's interesting, what he says next gets me super excited. The narrator mentions how much he would love to do a biopsy on one of those abos of Saint Anne if any were still alive because the accounts of the original settlers are so varied that it seems like they aren't describing the same species. And moreover, some settlers even claimed that the abos were shape shifters. - This is going to form kind of the main question of the next section. It's gonna form a large part of what our discussion is going to be about. I think it's important to mention here again, we have this notion of biological birth with David. The aunt suggests that David is born of a woman biologically as if that is a bit of a surprise. She uses this phrase here that we've learned so far as code for speculation, I suppose. And this is jammed right up against this discussion of cloning. So again, Wolf is just using this technique to put these two different ideas right up next to each other to tell us about the characters of the story. Number five being called number five, the fact that there are three of the father in some way already, we know that the simulation is probably Mr. Million. And if she's referring to Mr. Million and the father in one way and she's another one then she is a female version of the father that it is likely that the narrator is potentially some kind of clone. Yes, and the number being too low is something that really intrigues me. I think we're gonna find out more about that in sections to come. Well, right now at this point, Anginine is almost as excited as I am about Abos and she wants to know if our narrator has heard of Veils hypothesis. And we learned that this is the hypothesis that the Abos were shape shifters, that they were in fact mimics and that they were able to perfectly mimic the first human settlers. Veils supposes, keyword again, that when the ships arrived from Earth, the Abos killed all the humans and took their places as well as their spaceships. Now, of course, if this is true, then the narrator, his aunt and everyone we've met except maybe Mr. Million is actually an Abo and not a human. Now, the narrator doesn't think that this matters since if the Abos could perfectly imitate humans, then they would have lost the ability to change shape again and also therefore lost their identity. But here, Anginine corrects him, right? She says that there's no reason that the Abos would have lost their ability to mimic or therefore an understanding of who they are. But she's also quick to dismiss all of this because there is not actually any evidence that the Abos could change shape to begin with. Well, at this point, the discussion of the Abos is interrupted when the photograph of the narrator's mother arrives. This photograph is very old. It's got crumbling edges and a sepia tone. In the picture, there is a girl around 25, very thin but also tall and next to her is a stocky man holding a baby and they're standing in front of a very strange house. It's a long single story home, a ranch house, I guess. But it has a porch that changes its architectural style every 20 or 30 feet. And this gives the impression that It is actually several houses, even though it is just one. The narrator tells us now that since he has left prison, he's looked for this house often but never found it. And I have to say, Brandon, this line changes my impression of the whole narrative. Up to this point, I had thought that we were mere days into the narrator's post-Prison life. But now it sounds like it's been quite a while since he's gotten out of jail. - Well, we know that he's returned home at some point and he began the narrative. He began his memoir shortly after returning home. But something like this requires a lot of reflection and a lot of thought. And I think we're going to see throughout the story that the narrator isn't willing to disclose certain things even to himself. I wanna point out here in this section that another euphemism is used to describe the prostitutes and that is Temi Mondein, which is a word will also bring up in the discussion as well. Roughly translated, it just means a half-world, like somebody who is living in the half-world, but has a very specific connotation. Now, you described this very long wooden house in an interesting way. I mean, it's described interestingly in the text, but we have to remember we're given the code here, again, I suppose, which we're being told explicitly here that the narrator doesn't really know what he's looking at. Now, when he says I suppose he's talking about the technique in which the photograph is taken. But this house and this style of this photo, I mean, in my mind, it just obfokes a woman standing front of her row home with her baby and her husband, sometime in an American city in the recent past. So that's kind of what I'm thinking here is that his mother is explicitly being described as human and that he is part of some generation of maybe asexual reproduction like the frogs. - Yeah, the photograph is very bizarre and I don't know quite what to make of it or of the house. And it's very easy for us, I think, living in Philadelphia, the land of row houses to make that connection with row houses. But he is explicit that it's single story, which might suggest not a row house. And I guess to me being a Midwesterner, this actually didn't seem maybe quite as strange as it might to you being more native to this region. I was actually envisioning the sort of 19th century ranch homes that one finds still in existence in the Chicago suburbs where there are actually there's very long porches that will frequently change in this manner. - Exactly, there's just something meant here meant to evoke the past where the character at this age doesn't understand what connected homes are or look like that are built over a long period of time next to each other. - Yeah, and that's ultimately really the purpose of this photograph is one to show us that it's very old. I mean, we could maybe argue that it's seepia toned because that's a cool Instagram filter in the six months or whatever this photograph was taken. But it's not, it's because the photograph is old that it is seepia toned and that's why it's also crumbling at the edges and it's clearly of earth, which is why the house that's described as strange, it's meant to be like something that was probably meant to be familiar for Wolf. Wolf is almost certainly describing something that really exists that he has seen that the narrator can't make any sense of because it's not what his world looks like. This is, you know, beautiful world building a very clever storytelling. Now, the narrator is also keenly interested in identifying the phenotype of the people and the photograph that is to say he wants to classify their race and ethnicity based on their appearance. And I think this is a big part of the theme of the story. Part of his interest in this is that they look different from the people on his planet, all of whom are descended from a rather small group of colonists and he settles on Celtic and assumes that this family as well, or Scottish, or Irish. Well now, Antgenine has a work to do. So she sends the narrator to his room where he has a strange dream about being an abo. And he tells us this is only the first night of what seems to be a recurring dream or at least a recurring type of dream, but we don't get any more about that now. Again, dreams and mysticism play a huge part in the narrative. Not to mention the fact that the women in the room that Demi Mondain's laugh when he describes the phenotype of his mother and wolf here again draws attention to the legs of these women, which are long gleaming legs crossed before them like the varnished staffs of flags. To me, this immediately evokes the toy soldier imagery, again, the wooden person. So there's just something going on here. I have to thank Mark Hermini for bringing this leg imagery to our attention. And it's a wonderful insight, but this sense of the wooden legs here, really, to me, just evokes the toy soldier earlier on. And I have to ask the question, if the mother is very fair and David is described as very fair, and the narrator says that we are all descended from a relatively small group of colonists, he sees himself as one of the people that are like the other people on the planet. I have to ask question is David really the different one here or is the narrator? And the narrator hasn't really seen his difference. That's a question I have. And I'm really glad he pointed out this dream, the first dream of the abos, because it really does indicate that there are more dreams to come. And right after this section, things really change, and we get to see the fruition of that first dream come true, which should cement for us as readers and listeners that wolf wants us to pay attention to dreams. - Yeah, there are really transitions or section breaks in this narrative, which again, awesome craft. And the break here is that the narrator is awoken from this dream about being an abo. He's awoken again by the servant summoning him to his father's library, which is something that's been a common occurrence here, but tonight his experiences there are going to change. Well, for years, he's had a predictable sequence of conversation, holographs, and free association. But now, tonight, he lies down on a doctor's examining table and his father injects him with a drug. And here's what the narrator says about this. After what seemed a very long time, someone in a distant part of the room began to tell a long and confusingly involved story. My father made notes of what was said and occasionally stopped to ask questions. I found it unnecessary to answer since the storyteller did it for me. And of course, we understand as the narrator himself does later that it is the drug narrator himself who is telling the story. - Right, and we're also told in just a moment that he actually just loses track of his identity while he's in these drug-induced altered states. He no longer cares if it's his own voice or his father's that he hears as if it's the same voice sometimes pitched higher, sometimes pitched lower. So he's really losing track of his sense of self in these sections. And we also see here the return of the imagery of the birds and the ships, which is just the imagery again of the ancient narrator. As he's in this altered state, the peeling leather of the examined nation table vanished under him. And it's now the deck of a ship, now the wing of a bird, a dove, he says, which is the bird of peace. And then we see the return of the image of him thrusting his head through the window at the base of the library dome. The return of this kind of bird overlooking the ships coming into Port Mimison. These images were meant to really pay attention to in this story as well. And I'm still not sure what they have to say to us. But I am now convinced more than ever that the rhyme of the ancient narrator is a very important text in kind of talking about this story. And I'm excited to be able to put that all together when we get to the end of this novella and really try to use Colrich as a lens to read this text. Well, as you already mentioned, Brandon, the narrator's life really changes at this point. He enters a new phase in his relationship with his father. The experiments now proceed much like this last moment, the drugs. So there seem to be different types of drugs that he's exposed to. There are side effects such as painful headaches and lost time. And the lessons that he and David do with Mr. Million don't stop, but now at this point, the lessons are largely directed by the narrator. And they focus on his interest. And when it is time to go to the library or the park, the narrator doesn't go with them. It's just David and Mr. Million now. And the narrator stays in bad reading. He adds here that David is also subjected to these new types of experiments, but less frequently. And he seems to have very little adverse reaction to the drugs. And you know, you had pointed out or asked anyway, when we got the food poisoning bit with David earlier, that perhaps David is the sickly one. But here it seems to be the other way around, which is interesting. Yeah, it is very interesting. And it's not clear to us at this point why David is not really adversely affected by these drug treatments. I guess the natural question to raise is whether he's actually being subjected to them or not. All I can say is that the narrator believes wholeheartedly that David is receiving the same treatment as him at this point in the story. And I say that because we're not getting the kind of language that we get when the narrator is making a supposition. Nowhere in the section does he say, I suppose David also was receiving the treatment. So, this by David's own reports. of them maybe talking over breakfast. He is receiving the same treatments. We also see here where the narrator does another bit of kind of identity questioning where he takes over the role of Mr. Million in the same way. I think that he kind of loses track of his identity when he's with his father. We're seeing him kind of come into his own, but who is becoming is this combination of Mr. Million and his father? The narrator really transforms into a sickly adolescent and begins to really focus his time on dissecting various small animals that Mr. Million supplies him with. This is maybe not a sign of good mental health, and when he isn't doing that, he tries to recall the things that he told his father and his drug state, but he says that this never gets him anywhere. In fact, I want to read what he has to say about this. Neither David nor I could ever remember enough even to build a coherent theory of the nature of the questions asked us, but I still have certain scenes fixed in my memory, which I am sure I have never been held in fact, and I believe these are my visualizations of suggestions whispered while I bobbed and dove through those altered states of consciousness. Because he says this here and we have the return of an image that is told to us earlier in the story, this is the kind of wolfy puzzle that gets raised. We have the image of him with his head thrust through the library window. It's repeated after he goes through this altered state of consciousness before he tells us that some of the things he has seen have never happened in fact, and that maybe what he told us before is really the result of these altered states. This guy's got some work to do to kind of piece himself back together. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is not clear at all that we can trust anything really that we're being told. And there's just one more thing I want to point out before we end the recap tonight, which is just to say that also at this point, the narrator's aunt Anjani now interacts with him when she sees him in the hallway, and he's even able to get her to set up a laboratory for him somewhere else in the house. This seems likely to become important when we continue this story next time. Yeah, this hand is going to come into play in a big way in this story, and we have a lot to talk about with her in this section as well. That's going to do it for this episode. I'm Brennan Buddha, and I'm Glamic Dorman. We'll be back in just a few days with a discussion of this part of the fifth head of Cerberus. And until then, we greet you and say farewell.