broad green leaves.
Except, that is, for Wednesday nights, which in Boston are permitted to be his wife’s Arab Women’s Advanced League tennis
night with the other legation wives and companions at the plush Mount Auburn Club in West Watertown, on which nights she is
not around wordlessly to attend him, since Wednesday is the U.S.A. weekday on which fresh Töblerone hits Boston, Massachusetts
U.S.A.’s Newbury Street’s import-confectioners’ shelves, and the Saudi Minister of Home Entertainment’s inability to control
his appetites for Wednesday Töblerone often requires the medical attaché to remain in personal attendance all evening on the
bulk-rented fourteenth floor of the Back Bay Hilton, juggling tongue-depressors and cotton swabs, nystatin and ibuprofen and
stiptics and antibiotic thrush salves, rehabilitating the mucous membranes of the dyspeptic and distressed and often (but
not always) penitent and appreciative Saudi Prince Q ——— . So on 1 April, Y.D.A.U., when the medical attaché is (it is alleged)
insufficiently deft with a Q-Tip on an ulcerated sinal necrosis and is subjected at just 1800h. to a fit of febrile thrushive
pique from the florally imbalanced Minister of Home Entertainment, and is by high-volume fiat replaced at the royal bedside
by the Prince’s personal physician, who’s summoned by beeper from the Hilton’s sauna, and when the damp personal physician
pats the medical attaché on the shoulder and tells him to pay the pique no mind, that it’s just the yeast talking, but to
just head on home and unwind and for once make a well-deserved early Wednesday evening of it, and but so when the attaché
does get home, at like 1840h., his spacious Boston apartments are empty, the living room lights undimmed, dinner unheated
and the attachable tray still in the dishwasher and — worst — of course no entertainment cartridges have been obtained from
the Boylston St. InterLace outlet where the medical attaché’s wife, like all the veiled wives and companions of the Prince’s
legatees, has a complimentary goodwill account. And even if he weren’t far too exhausted and tightly wound to venture back
into the damp urban night to pick up entertainment cartridges, the medical attaché realizes that his wife has, as always on
Wednesdays, taken the car with the diplomatic-immunity license plates, without which your thinking alien wouldn’t even dream
of trying to park publicly at night in Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.
The medical attaché’s unwinding-options are thus severely constricted. The living room’s lavish TP receives also the spontaneous
disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix, but the procedures for ordering specific spontaneous pulses from
the service are so technologically and cryptographically complex that the attaché has always left the whole business to his
wife. On this Wednesday night, trying buttons and abbreviations almost at random, the attaché is able to summon up only live
U.S.A. professional sports — which he has always found brutish and repellent — Texaco Oil Company–sponsored opera — which
the attaché has seen today more than enough of the human uvula thank you very much — a redisseminated episode of the popular
afternoon InterLace children’s program ‘Mr. Bouncety-Bounce’ — which the attaché thinks for a moment might be a documentary
on bipolar mood disorders until he catches on and thumbs the selection-panel hastily — and a redisseminated session of the
scantily clad variable-impact early-A.M. ‘Fit Forever’ home-aerobics series of the InterLace aerobics-guru Ms. Tawni Kondo,
the scantily clad and splay-limbed immodesty of which threatens the devout medical attaché with the possibility of impure
thoughts.
The only entertainment cartridges anywhere in the apartment, a foul-tempered search reveals, are those which have arrived
in Wednesday’s U.S.A. postal