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Posted by James W. Nesspor on December 8, 2007, 9:15 pm
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he had wished it. He had wished that
she and not he should be delivered over to the--
Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A
cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then -- perhaps
it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance
of sound -- a voice was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me--
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his
glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but
more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element
he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin
that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every
morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids
and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been
impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the
bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours
he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen.
From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one
cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished
him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-
looking office in the
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