Lee’s expulsion from consciousness and disappearance mark the end of the prison’s comic interlude: a personality whose jokes had been treated as a safety valve becomes a danger to himself and others, is barred from the spot, and then vanishes rather than remain in the darkness around it. The sequence turns on a sharp reversal. Lee expects Ragen to protect him when a practical joke provokes a violent pursuit, but Ragen initially withholds help at Arthur’s urging; later, when Ragen judges the threat too great, he steps in. The eventual banishment is more final than the chase: Lee does not return, and for a long time no one laughs.

Lee’s Role in Lebanon

Lee first took the spot in Lebanon as a comedian, wit, and practical joker. His humor appeared to fit Arthur’s view that laughter could serve as a safety valve, something most inmates appreciated. The teasing that had once frightened Danny and angered Ragen became, in Lee’s hands, a routine way of provoking other prisoners. Ragen had heard about Billy Milligan’s father, a stand-up comic and master of ceremonies who billed himself as half music and half wit; he decided that Lee, too, had a role to play in prison.

Lee’s comedy did not remain verbal. He altered Allen’s cigarettes by scraping sulfur from matches, soaking a matchstick in sugar water, rolling it in sulfur, and hiding the result in Allen’s tobacco. When another inmate asked for a cigarette, Lee could hand over one of these loaded cigarettes and hear the victim’s angry shout farther down the corridor or on leaving the cafeteria. Some exploded in Allen’s face. The prank’s mechanics made its humor dependent on a delayed reaction: Lee could be gone before the target discovered what had happened.

On another occasion, after Arthur left the spot following blood work, Lee found himself with nothing to do and turned to mischief in the laboratory. He opened a jar of onion-oil extract, dipped a swab into it, and lined the eyepiece rims of the microscope. These episodes establish the pattern behind the later crisis: Lee treated the institutional setting and its routines as material for jokes, while the consequences fell on people who had not chosen to participate.

The Flask and the Pursuit

The confrontation developed around Stormy’s illicit liquor business. Stormy told Lee that he made white lightning for sale and offered him a dollar if he would handle a customer in his absence. Lee agreed. Later, Stormy asked Lee to straighten the first-aid cabinet while he took care of something else. As Lee rearranged the supplies, Stormy emptied the alcohol from Flask 11-C, replaced it with water, and lined its rim with bittersweet concentrate. He then left Lee to mind the store.

A prisoner arrived asking for Flask 11-C, saying that he had paid Stormy for two hits and had been told Lee would know where it was. Lee handed it over. The man drank, spat, and gagged at the taste. His anger rapidly became a physical threat: he smashed the flask against a desk, scattering liquid over Lee’s hospital greens, then brandished the jagged glass and threatened to cut him.

Lee backed toward the door and whispered for Ragen. He expected Ragen to come to his defense, but no one appeared. Terrified, Lee ran out of the room and down the hall, with the prisoner in pursuit, shouting for Ragen as he fled. What had begun as Lee’s agreement to help with Stormy’s business had become a chase involving a broken bottle and an attacker who believed he had been cheated. Lee’s usual ability to turn a situation into a joke offered no protection once the other man’s anger became immediate and dangerous.

Ragen’s Delayed Intervention

Ragen started to take the spot, but Arthur stopped him, arguing that Lee needed to be taught a lesson. Ragen objected that he could not let Lee be cut. Arthur’s answer was prospective: without proper restraint, Lee might become a greater danger in the future. Ragen accepted the suggestion and did not intervene as Lee continued down the hall, frightened and calling for him.

The delay makes the scene a conflict not only between Lee and his pursuer but between protection and discipline inside the group. Arthur treats the danger Lee has brought upon himself as a reason to let the pursuit continue; Ragen recognizes that the threat may become intolerable but initially accepts Arthur’s judgment. When Ragen decides Lee has had enough and the situation has become too dangerous, he bumps Lee off the spot and takes control.

Ragen then uses the hospital environment to stop the pursuer. As the man came alongside a gurney, Ragen spun the bed directly into his path. The man fell with it onto the broken flask and cut his arm. Ragen declared the encounter finished, grabbed him, threw him into the X-ray room, and slammed him against the wall. The intervention ends Lee’s immediate exposure to the attacker, but it does not undo the breach of judgment that Arthur and Ragen will later identify in Lee’s behavior.

Banishment and Disappearance

Afterward, Arthur asked Ragen what should happen to Lee and left the decision to him. Ragen called Lee an undesirable. Arthur agreed with that assessment, describing a person whose life consisted of practical jokes as useless. The decision converts the earlier argument about restraint into a ruling about Lee’s place in the inner group: his comic behavior is no longer treated as a useful safety valve but as a reason to exclude him.

Lee was banished. Rather than remain in the limbo of darkness around the spot, unable to face an existence without practical jokes and comic behavior, he made himself disappear completely. The ending distinguishes banishment from disappearance: the group bars Lee from taking the spot, while Lee’s response removes him altogether. The change is registered in the silence that follows. For a long time, no one laughed.

The episode therefore closes the role Ragen had once assigned Lee. The comic personality who could make a cigarette flare in another inmate’s face and turn laboratory equipment into a prank becomes, in the group’s judgment, impossible to contain. His disappearance gives that judgment an irreversible consequence and leaves the prison without the laughter that had seemed to make its pressures bearable.