Pareti tries to evade the manifestations of Ashton’s Disease

Joe Pareti tries to escape the manifestations of Ashton’s Disease during a visit to East Pyrites, where an intended holiday becomes a contest with objects and surroundings that have acquired an unwanted intimacy. The episode’s decisive turn is not simply that the disease interrupts his pleasure: it makes the material world answer him, and each attempt to get away carries him into another version of the same disturbance.

The escape begins in East Pyrites

Pareti arrives in East Pyrites with a conventional future in mind. He intends to enjoy himself, then buy land topside, find a suitable woman, settle down, and obtain a good position with one of the Companies. That plan gives his visit a particular irony: the city treats pleasure as an organizing duty, while Pareti imagines pleasure as a brief interlude before stability.

East Pyrites lies eighty-seven miles south of the radioactive ghost town formerly called Las Vegas, and three miles below it. Its underground setting and obsessive devotion to vice make it a world organized around sensation. Pareti initially welcomes that atmosphere. He chooses the Round-The-World Combination Hotel, near the Hall of Perversions and across from the Torture Garden, and considers a sequence of meals and entertainments. The disease first breaks into this itinerary not as an illness he can see, but as an unexpected change in the behavior of an ordinary possession.

The jacket marks the onset

Alone in his hotel room, Pareti senses that something else is present. The apparent disturbance is small: a jacket he remembers leaving on a chair is now on the bed. When he reaches for it, it slides away, speaks, and evades his attempts to catch it. Pareti considers possible tricks involving wires, magnets, or hotel staff, but instinctively recognizes that none offers a rational explanation for what he is witnessing.

He pursues the garment around the room and catches a sleeve behind the massage unit. The jacket then curls around to tickle his palm. Pareti giggles involuntarily, throws it away, and hurries out. Descending by dropshaft, he understands this encounter as the true onset of the disease: it has altered his relationship with an article of clothing, an inanimate object. The episode establishes a pattern that will govern his flight. The threat is not confined to a symptom inside his body; apparently harmless things have begun to approach him as if they desired contact.

Flight through the city

Pareti’s next attempt to resume his outing brings him to The Soft Place, a gambling hall whose game Sticklt is played at a counter. As he participates, a woman approaches with an invitation to leave with her. Pareti panics, interpreting the encounter as another manifestation of the disease. He withdraws from the game just as its lights register a loss, and his stake disappears into the board. He avoids looking at the woman because he expects her to be exceptionally attractive and does not want another entanglement. The disease thus disrupts both his recreation and his ability to approach a person on his own terms.

He runs without knowing where he is going. Fear feels like a second self, yet the act of flight briefly calms him and leaves him better able to think. He tries to resist the disease by concentrating, but a newspaper skitters across the street, wraps around his foot, and pleads with him not to reject it. When he shouts for it to go away, he sees it crinkle as it tries to loosen his shoe fastenings. The movement is another escalation from the jacket: the paper does not merely move independently but makes a direct appeal for his attention.

The city offers no reliable refuge. After passing through its entertainment districts, Pareti eventually finds himself back in the park where the newspaper confronted him; he cannot account for how he returned. He has acquired an inexplicable tattoo on his chest, another sign that his passage through the city has not left him untouched. The detours do not resolve the encounter. They add disorientation to his fear and make escape itself feel like an unstable, repetitive ritual.

An environment turned toward him

In the park, the disturbance expands beyond individual objects. Dogwood barks and touches Pareti; Spanish Moss sings; a willow responds with tears. He runs from the trees and plants, which now seem to address him in different ways, while even the sagebrush and poplars acquire voices or moods. These examples turn the disease from a series of uncanny incidents into a changed relation between Pareti and his surroundings.

Pareti understands the spread as an effect of his disease on the environment. He explicitly distinguishes it from contagion among human beings: the danger, as he experiences it, is that the inanimate world is being altered around him. The phrase Typhoid Mary for the inanimate world captures his alarming position—he is the point through which the change seems to travel, but he cannot control what it produces. The environment’s apparent affection is no comfort. Its attention is precisely what he is trying to escape.

The pursuit follows him indoors

Even when Pareti reaches Sex City, the pattern continues. As he opens the door, its knob gives him a playful pat, extending the disease’s manifestations from clothing, paper, and vegetation to the built environment. Inside, a salesman describes a service at the Impulse Implantation Center: clients can be conditioned to desire things they would otherwise not want. The pitch makes desire itself part of East Pyrites’ commercial landscape, but Pareti’s experience has already shown him the opposite problem: he cannot choose or manage the attention directed at him.

The salesman catches Pareti’s sleeve with a tourisnag, a clamp on a telescoping rod used to draw passing tourists toward particular establishments. The gesture places Pareti once more in contact with an object and a system designed to redirect him. His attempted escape has not restored control; it has carried him from a moving jacket to a speaking newspaper, responsive vegetation, a playful door handle, and finally a device that physically catches his clothing. The episode makes the city’s promise of pleasure collide with Pareti’s need for distance, while presenting Ashton’s Disease as a force that unsettles the boundary between the afflicted person and the material world around him.