AtDTDA: (12) whatever has happened to my brain? 350

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

     "It is difficult to drink semiprecious stone, but in a stone world, 
     drinking anything else is an expensive luxury." He inverted the 
     glass and out tumbled a handful of amethysts and garnets. 
     When he turned the glass right side up again it had wine in it, 
     which he proceeded to drink. 350

As I'm not an initiate, and in no position to discuss the alchemical 
possibilities of living in a "stone world", I'll leave this scene of 
transmutation to those better educated in these ancient arts than I. As for the 
midget Chinchito, other than a moderately risible exchange of glances, (and 
echos of various forms of weirdness from David Lynch films ) I'm equally lost 
(the two will doubtless turn out turn to be profoundly related, in some 
high-rent metaphysical zip code we'll never have access to.)

Creeping ahead just a schootch to passages that manage to recall Both Raymond 
Chandler and Marcel Proust. Philip Marlowe needs to check up on Dally's 
dalliances, as she's been slipped a "Mickey Finn" right about now, and just 
might be getting us out of standard consensus reality and into one of those 
dislocated and generally scary dope fantasy sequences from one of those 
Chanderesque Who-Done-Its? that emerged in the golden age of Noir.

     Most word books say the origin of "Mickey Finn" is obscure. 
     But Cecil has come across one colorful if not necessarily 
     reliable explanation in Gem of the Prairie, a 1940 history of 
     the Chicago underworld by Herbert Asbury. Asbury claims 
     the original Mickey Finn was a notorious Chicago tavern 
     proprietor in the city's South Loop, then as now a nest of 
     hardened desperadoes. In 1896 Finn opened a dive named 
     the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden, where he fenced 
     stolen goods, supervised pickpockets and B-girls, and 
     engaged in other equally sleazy enterprises.

     Around 1898 Finn obtained a supply of "white stuff" that may 
     have been chloral hydrate. He made this the basis of two 
     knockout drinks, the "Mickey Finn Special," consisting of raw 
     alcohol, water in which snuff had been soaked, and a dollop 
     of white stuff; and "Number Two," beer mixed with a jolt of 
     white plus the aforementioned snuff water. Lone Star 
     patrons who tried either of these concoctions soon found 
     themselves face down in the popcorn. At the end of the 
     night they were dragged into a back room, stripped of their 
     valuables and sometimes even their clothes, then dumped 
     in an alley. When the victims awoke they could remember 
     nothing.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_092.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z423wD7c8g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRxjn46szYk

     Dally did not so much pass out as experience a strange 
     eclipse of time. . . . 350

     I started to get up off the floor. You ought to try it sometime. 
     But have somebody nail the floor down first. This one looped 
     the loop. After a while it steadied a little. I settled for an angle 
     of forty-five degrees. I took hold of myself and started to go 
     somewhere. There was a thing that might have been 
     Napoleon's tomb on the horizon. That was a good enough 
     objective. I started that way. My heart beat fast and thick 
     and I was having trouble opening my lungs. Like after being 
     winded at football. You think you breath will never come back. 
     Never, never, never. 
     Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister pg 149

Yet all this vertigo also contains a perfectly Proustian moment (as Dally is 
steered "toward an elaborate box labled CABINET OF MYSTERY".)

     "Here, quickly, in here." Dally was not the swooning type but 
     this would have done the job all right, because just before the 
     door closed, the air seemed to grow clear and she recognized 
     the very same woman she had seen in Smokefoot's store 
     yesterday, now wearing dancer's tights and a velver cape with 
     spangles a-jitter all over it. And sneaking in by way of Dally's 
     nose, something else, beyond time, before memory or her 
     first baby words, the snoot-subverting frangrance 
     of lillies of the valley. 350

Tying together Dally's return to her Mother with a scent "beyond time, 
before memory or her first baby words", is "the snoot-subverting 
frangrance of lillies of the valley",  a key to a past forever beyond capture,
yet another fork in the road that was not taken.