Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 225
recuperated slowly in a hospital near Brandywine. The man in the next bed
was a French Marquis, Major General de Lafeyette, and he and Seamus had
a great deal to talk about, because each of them was convinced he was a little
bit off his head. Seamus thought he was funny in the upper storey because
he wasn't sure how much to believe of his trip halfway to heaven, or how
James Moon had died and left himself alive, remembering that he once was a
star. The Marquis thought he was suffering some kind of Permanent Brain
Damage because the staff of the hospital did not talk like ordinary
Americans or even like ordinary English people.
The staff of the hospital all talked like characters out of Shakespeare.
The Marquis worried about this a great deal at first. He worried that he
was really in an English hospital and they were all talking that way to drive
him mad, or to make him think he was mad, to punish him for volunteering
to fight for the rebels. He worried that such an extravagant theory indicated
that he really was mad. He worried that they weren't talking that way at all
and he was simply hallucinating all the time.
"And how is thee today?" said a nurse coming to his bedside.
"I am much improved," the Marquis said, controlling his anxiety. "And
how is thee?"
"The Good Lord has been good to this humble servant. But do thee need
anything to read? More blankets, perhaps? We wish thee to be comfortable
here."
That was the way it was every time he talked to one of them. The
Marquis finally got up the courage to discuss it with Colonel Muadhen, the
Irish officer who was raving about having two souls when they brought
him in.
"The mental effects of a wound can be longer-lasting than the physical
effects," Major General Lafayette said cheerfully.
"Oh, aye. I'm not a-fevered anymore, but I still wonder about those two
souls a bit."
"It wears off in time, I suppose, or all old soldiers would be mad."
"That is a cheerful way to be looking at it."
"I've had my own problem, to be frank."
"That I was sure of. You have had a most absent and heartsore expression
at times."
"The truth is," the Marquis said, "everybody here sounds, well, strange."
He took a breath. "They sound like Shakespeare without the poetry."
Seamus laughed, and then looked sympathetic. "Oh, be-Jesus, Shakespeare
is it? You've never read the King James Bible, I suppose?"
"What are you trying to tell me?" The Major General had picked up all his
English in a six-month crash course after deciding to join the American
Revolution. The young and unsure King Louis XVI—"the fat boy,"