Dance to the Music of Time Third Movement

Lieutenant Bithel takes a sleeping pill after drinking heavily his first night at the whatsit and won‰ЫЄt wake up in the morning with everyone else. Nick Jenkins describes the sleeping Bithel curled up and death-like in his bed:

His body in this position looked like a corpse exhumed intact from some primitive burial ground for display in the showcase of a museum. ‰Ы_ Before going to sleep, Bithel had placed his false teeth in the ashtray. He had removed the set from his mouth bodily, the jaws still clenched on the stub of the cigar. The effect created by this synthesis was extraordinary, macabre, surrealist. Again one thought of an excavated tomb, the fascination aroused in archaeologists of a thousand years hence at finding these fossilized vestiges beside Bithel‰ЫЄs hunched skeleton; the speculations aroused as to the cultural significance of such related objects.