...of fatigue

At this moment someone Rita can't see shakes the ladder and Kien comes tumbling down like a blown scarecrow, flattened out as a dead seascroll over the shoulders of the crowd immediately below him. Jack Knowles also falls, but from lower down, a mere stumble that makes him disappear down among the bodies of the crowd. Kien is carried like a corpse by six warriors in various garbs from coat of mail to leopard skin to a green hussar's uniform to camouflage battledress to the white armour of the non-existent knight. So he's back, goodoh, thinks Rita irrelevantly. A passage opens in the crowd to let them pass, slowly, as if to a ceremonious funeral march, towards the big glass doors of the hotel. Outside the escort can be seen throwing their thin burden onto the street like so much waste paper. It is picked up by the cops outside and bundled into a paddy wagon, which drives off in a flashing blue light and a giggle of siren.
Dale Kohler, observing the silence, is about to resume his speech, but the silence is not a listening one. It is a fatigued silence, Rita notes. The Gay crowd, by nature the most tolerant of aberration, has merely parted the colourful sea to let it out, but seems also cowed into shame as its own quiet exclusion of it. The innumerable others too, from all ages and areas, are suddenly tired of listening, tired of asserting their existence and being treated as dead matter, crushed into politeness. The police don't even have to push and clamp. Slowly the mass percolates through the various exits, towards the elevators, back into Beverly and Kennedy, up their rooms, back to their panel-sessions, out of the gallery-doors marked NO EXIT, round the gallery towards other elevators, through to the backstairs, into the bar, out into the streets by the front and rear entrances. In fifteen minutes of quiet, murmuring at most, the lobby is empty again.


[Textermination, Brooke-Rose, C.]