Do y’all know the movie Pillow Talk? I’ve gotten to see it on the big screen once. There’s a movie theater in Glendale (California), the Alex Theatre, where every other month—in other days, anyway—the Alex Film Society screens classic films. My husband and I happened to walk past the theater one Valentine’s Day, and saw on the marquee that Pillow Talk was playing with just enough time left for us to grab a bite to eat first.

I’d seen the movie before; we own it, it’s fun. There’s a part where Doris Day is heartbroken to have been deceived by Rock Hudson, and she has Tony Randall drive her from the would-be love nest in Connecticut back to New York. It’s an intercut sequence—back and forth, showing Doris Day in the car 20 minutes farther down the road each time, crying just as hard at the end of the drive as she was when she got in the car. I’ve never thought of her as a tragedian or anything, but this bit of the movie has always really affected me. She’s just hurting so much.

Then there we were at the Alex, watching it on a full-size movie screen, and each time it cut back to her still crying, there was a bigger laugh from the audience. It had literally never occurred to me that this could be a comedic sequence.

This is all, as you may have figured out by now, a let’s say roundabout way of getting into the point, which is that if not for this here joint read-along, I would have quit this book during A Fistful of Fists. Y’all, I hated this section. It was relentless and horrible and cruel and interminable and disgusting and just an out-and-out misery to experience.

Daryl and Paul have both noted some of the humor in it, and I mean, I guess I can see it. But in the context of all the rest of the just truly outrageous cruelty—I can’t even call it sadism, because there’s no acknowledgment even that the cures’ suffering hurts them—it’s hard even to look at the humorous parts without seeing mean-spiritedness. (Why, for example, does Maya Mehta, who is legitimately unterrible, have to be medically ridiculous even to the point of injuring herself in the middle of our watching her? She’s not a cure, what’s the point of hurting her for us to laugh at?)

There are things to say about this section, of course. My overriding reaction is just plain revulsion, but there’s analysis that can be done too. For instance: I’m less and less convinced that “flesh-and-bone robot” makes any sense. I had been thinking of it as meaning something like a cyborg. But now that we’ve seen how spidge is made, we know that a cure isn’t a mix of machine and organic parts, it’s all meat and bone and fluids. So where does robot come into it? Is it just supposed to refer to their brains, how they’re like little behaviorist computers inside cute warm soft squishy cases? Because Maya’s spycam footage of her cures shows that they feel embarrassment, sympathy, humor, and injustice to go along with the recognition of self that lets them learn from watching her watch the videos of them. Robots don’t feel shame about doing what they’re programmed to do, but a cure will let itself die rather than knowingly be observed pooping.

Ugh, I don’t know. I know there’s more to tease out from all this (such as the very rigid refusal to admit that dosing cures with PerFormulae is plain and simple drugging them for entertainment), but I just feel so grieved by the whole thing. At the very least, cut some of those videos, like the one where the sister was upset because it was supposed to be her turn. That felt like the punch line was written first, then more setup than it could support. Have some mercy, y’know? (As if.)